Off the grid . . . on a mountaintop deep in the desert.

Seven a.m. The sun’s barely up, the horizon stretching 360 degrees around the glass walls of this house I’ve woken up in.

My sister and I, on the third day of our cross-country road trip, make our way up the circular stairs to the next level in search of coffee. We find our hostess studying a digital display in the kitchen.

“Power’s off,” she says and heads out the door. “Keep an eye on the porch light. I’ll flick the switch on the power plant.”

Carolyn Marsh, still in her pajamas, strides across the rocky desert floor to the foot of two flights of rock stairs leading up to a sheet-metal shed perched on a rock outcropping overlooking the house. Carolyn’s power house is a utilitarian mess of batteries, wires, tubes and a 1,500-gallon tank of water.

Some of you reading this may know Carolyn, longtime editor of The Camden Herald (and for those years, my boss), who until five years ago lived and worked in Camden.

She’d been traveling back and forth to Bisbee, Arizona, for several years, checking on progress at the mountaintop house that was gradually taking shape. She’d return to show Wally and me photos of rocks cleared away, of walls going up and always of the incredible mountains  and sky on all sides. We never thought we’d actually see it.

And now here I am.  

As she always told us she would, Carolyn has all the amenities of modern life: Running water — hot and cold, electricity, refrigeration, a washer and dryer, flush toilets, Internet and cell. The difference between her mountaintop existence and her in-town Camden life, is that she has to make it happen. She has to be her own handyman (though she has one of those, as well, for stuff she can’t figure out on her own). 

Power out? Trek up to the shed and see what’s going on. Morning shower? Turn on the pump that starts the gravity-fed water coming down from the upper tank. Water low in that tank? Pump more up from the three giant storage tanks under the house. The water is every bit of rain that falls on this mountain, running off the roof and down into the tanks.

Carolyn knows just how many gallons she uses in a year now, and so can monitor day by day what remains. Toilets? VacuFlush marine toilets into an Envirolet system that makes compost that she uses on her young cactus garden. 

Won’t it be lonely up there alone on a mountain in the desert? Wally and I wondered. Well, it certainly isn’t, I found out. On the slopes below are several other dwellings, part of an intentional tiny community that a college friend of Carolyn’s, an architect, built over the past 30 years or so. Hers is the last one he built. 

But don’t picture the finely-crafted, perfectly finished million-dollar homes you see in magazines of that ilk. Think  steam-pump, think recycled, think utilitarian, sheet metal, cement, particle board with huge windows. It’s all about the sky and the mountains, after all.

Todd, Carolyn’s architect friend, built his own place first and must have spent the next 30 years finishing it. It looks a bit like a turtle hunkered on the slope, but inside are stone fireplaces (I lost count), sleeping lofts, staine-glass doors, a trapeze, an enormous greenhouse with tanks of water and huge cactuses you get to through a trapdoor in the living room. All the windows came out of an old school, metal-framed and multi-paned. I wanted to stay in that house forever.

Todd hasn’t. Age and an injured leg has finally made the place too difficult to manage. This mountainside, off-the-grid living is pretty rigorous.   

There’s a solution, though, and it’s brilliant. Share your space with the young. At present there are a number of young (20s? 30s?) people in the process of buying, renting or just staying on the mountain. Several are members of the band St. Cinder. They share meals, feed each other’s pets, do repairs, run errands down in town when needed and in all ways look out for the older ones.

There are so many ways to grow old. I loved seeing my “old” friend (one year older than me, and our birthdays a day apart) so involved in living that she can turn on her power, pump up the water and have friends to laugh with.