the last year of my first marriage

Mary Moon's post about her early hippie life living days in a shack with her first husband reminded me of my own little living off the grid attempt. I was 23 in 1973 and many decades have passed since and I found I had a hard time with the timeline. I think it's basically correct. I had to reconstruct it based on the jobs I held, 5 in three years, I know the order in which I held them and the one that came before and the one that came after so the summer trip around the US had to be 1973 though the woman who went with us as far as California thinks it was earlier but I'm pretty sure it was not 1972 just a year after we were married.

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My first husband and I decided we were going to build a yurt in the woods.

something like this

This was back in 1973. The whole yurt thing came about because the summer of '73 we took a car trip around the country and stayed in a fabulous yurt in the woods of New Hampshire for a couple of nights and we just fell in love with the whole idea of a yurt in the woods. At some point my ex got a line on a landlocked acre in East Texas outside Nacogdoches in the piney woods but I'm fuzzy on when we bought it and I don't remember spending any time there in the winter. We had to open a gate and drive through a pasture to get to it (the law required the land owner to give us access). It had been used for hunting and had a shack on it maybe 15' x 30', 20' x 40' (it's been many decades and my memory of the condition of the thing is fuzzy, size is also a guess) that we shored up and made weather proof but no electricity, no generator, no phone, no running water, no well, no septic system, we pooped and peed outdoors. There was a little creek we could take cold baths in. We had acquired some building materials that we took out there and had actual construction plans for the yurt. Apparently it never occurred to us we would need electricity to build the yurt, I guess we thought we were going to cut all those boards with a hand saw. At first we would go up on weekends but nothing was getting done so at some point we decided that my ex would move up there, see about getting a job in Nacogdoches and start building the yurt while I stayed in the city and worked and join him on weekends. Great plan, right? Except my ex being the druggie rat bastard that he was, no job ever got got, no progress was ever made, he had made friends he hung out with in Nacogdoches.

April of 1974, on my birthday he showed up at my door in the city, had a great plan to solve our marital troubles. We needed to get a divorce but still be together because in his mind things started going downhill after we got married, not because he refused to get a job, that he stayed home all day doing drugs and watching TV in bed, that he would not lift a finger to clean the house or cook while I had a full time job, would not even empty his overflowing ashtray, and wanted an open marriage so he could fuck whoever he could get to stay still long enough. And that suggestion opened a door that could not be closed.

He went back to the property, I stayed in Houston working while I considered the whole divorce thing liking the idea more and more (but not the staying together part) and not joining him on weekends until he showed up again about a month later. Divorce was a bad idea, he had changed his mind, he didn't mean it, and convinced me to give us another try which I foolishly did, quit my job, gave up the cute little house I was living in and we moved the bed, the metal kitchen table and chairs, the stove, and as much other furniture as we could cram in that little shack with zero insulation and a dirt floor, got a propane tank for the stove, used an ice chest for a refrigerator. I planted a very small vegetable garden in that dry red dirt, had to carry water up from the creek to water those little plants, which failed almost immediately. But things did not change. He would be gone all day ostensibly looking for a job while I was isolated out there except for the few times I would go in town to visit friends and get a shower.

I don't remember how many weeks I spent out there in the heat and humidity, but one day while he was gone I packed all my clothes and personal items and when he showed up told him I was filing for divorce, got in my car, and left, moving back in with my parents as I had no job, no money, and no place to live. Went back later with a borrowed truck and a friend when I knew he wasn't there and loaded up all the furniture that was mine. The divorce was final in October. By then he had abandoned the acre and everything still there I guess and taken up with another woman in Galveston. The divorce settlement was simple, no children and all I wanted was what I had brought with me into the marriage, he could have everything we acquired as a couple including the debt still owed on the acre. He eventually moved back to Barrington, Illinois outside Chicago where his family lived. He wasn't completely out of my life though until 1981.

In '75 he had a mutual friend try to pump me for information about why I had divorced him which I declined to revisit. When he found out in '76 I was living with another guy (my now husband) he showed up unannounced and uninvited at our house to check him out. When he found out in '77 I was pregnant with my daughter Sarah, I got an indignant nasty phone call, I had never wanted children with him. The last time I heard from him was in '81 when my son was two. He called one evening drunk or drugged or both wanting me to tell him why I had divorced him, that I had ruined his life, that he hadn't been able to form a steady relationship with anyone since. I wasn't about to get into that with a drunk drugged up rat bastard, simply told him if he didn't get it then he wouldn't get it now and hung up.

Years later when my father died in 1996, the woman my ex had shacked up with in Galveston saw the death notice and called to offer her condolences (we had been acquaintances pre divorce). She filled me in on what she knew of my ex. That's when I found out he had moved back to his mother's house in Illinois, went to work at their family electrical engineering company (at his mother's insistence I'm sure) where he was involved in some kind of accident (probably because he was stoned) and got on disability, hooked up with another druggie who inherited a house from her grandmother or aunt which she sold and they moved to Florida somewhere, living in a trailer. Sounded like the perfect life for him, doing drugs all day, on disability, never has to work, druggie girlfriend with money.