What exactly is the purpose of the Beta Site? Is it the next step in my life where I eschew living in town and move to an ‘off grid’ lifestyle of careful energy usage, wood chopping, always worrying about well pumps and water…or is it an ‘in case of emergency’ sort of ‘acceptable’ shelter that while not having ‘all the comforts of home’ does provide orders of magnitude of safety over being homeless?

In short, is it a lifestyle or a lifeboat? Well, kinda sorta both…but not at the same time.

At the moment, and for the immediate future, it’s a lifeboat. A secondary location to pick up and run to in case, for whatever reason, living where I live now becomes untenable. As a lifeboat, it doesn’t need to look like something out of ‘Country Living Magazine’. It just needs to keep me warm, fed, safe, and secure. That can look like just a glorified campsite, it can look like a tweaked out garden shed, it can look like a small trailer, that can look like…well…any weatherproof box with a roof and some accommodations.

But the end goal is for it to be more than that. The end goal is for it to be a comfortable, functional, ‘homey’ place where I can snowmobile in on Dec 1, turn on the lights, fire up the woodstove, put on some quiet Spotify Christmas music, put my feet up, and watch the snow fall outside without seeing another human being until Jan 1. Thats the idealized and romanticized version, of course. I’m fully aware that its going to take a good bit of time (and money, unfortunately) to get to that.

So lifeboat vs lifestyle…for the next year, maybe two, its definitely just a place that I can run off to if need be. It’ll have some very(!) basic features but it will still give me more options than if I didn’t have the place at all. And over the next year or two, it’ll morph into something more than just a ‘bare bones’ destination. The final goal is something that is on par, in terms of convenience and appointments, with where I live now…flush toilet, hot water, heat and lighting, etc, etc. all hidden away at the end of a road no one really wants to drive down.

My birthday is in the summer, so Im thinkng that at my next milestone birthday in 2027 I’d like to have the overwhelming majority of things done, if not entirely done. We’ll see how it goes.