Good question!

At times, we’ve wondered the same thing. We certainly didn’t expect to become the stewards of twelve acres by the Oregon coast, but life often has other plans than we do.

We’re two families, drawn together first by common interests and orientation and then by the strange and clarifying experience of navigating the world of pandemic lockdown together. We quickly learned that working together towards common goals and practicing the most radical honesty we could yielded larger rewards than we could have anticipated.

One rainy Fall day in 2021, we received an unexpected message from some friends of friends: “There’s a piece of land here that’s suddenly available. You guys should try to buy it.” 

Coincidentally, we all happened to be out at the coast anyway. Just twenty minutes later, we set foot on Sweet Root Hollow for the very first time. That’s when we first heard the call: You have business with this place, and it with you.

At first, it felt completely unrealistic, even irresponsible. None of us had managed (or even lived in) an environment like this—a temperate rainforest—ever before. In drier environments, forests can feel both permanent and ageless. Here, where the land receives roughly 88 inches of rain a year, the woods are more like a single vast, heaving organism. In the wetter months plants, fungi, limbs and lichen are constantly dropping, only to be subsumed into the rich forest floor.

This place is very much alive, and it demands that we drop our notions of time, productivity, and other human markers of value and meaning. We love it very much, and we’re thrilled to be able to share it with you.