Karma Yes, Toilets No

Armed with toolboxes and traveling in dented pickup trucks, they prospect in garbage dumps, abandoned houses, cut-over timberlands, deserted beaches. Their haul seems shabby: driftwood, salvaged lumber, squares of flooring, old banisters, fragments of stained glass. But to the foragers, these gleanings are golden. Months or even years later, their booty reappears in the recycled glory of selfstyled, handmade homes.

Recently these architectural anarchists have been at work putting up hundreds of houses from Oregon to New Mexico. They are most active in the exurbs of the San Francisco Bay Area, where counterculture instincts still bear strange fruit. In Marin County, scores of rebels-cum-saw ignore building codes, hoping that inspectors will ignore them. Attempting to live quietly ever after with their violations, the builders--many of them dropouts from traditional professions--adopt linguistic camouflage. An illegal third story in a tower, for instance, is termed a "storage shelf rather than a bedroom.

While sparring with the authorities, the builders are always on the alert for material to improve their homes or start new ones. "Every time I bring trash to the dump," says one, "I bring home more than I took out there."

Some of the dumpyard creations are startling in their originality. They cling to treetops, hug mountainsides and nestle in wooded ravines. They offer a hodgepodge of winding exterior stairways, overhanging balconies and thatched roofs with soaring pitches. The interiors are equally daring. Polished steam engines serve as stoves; old windshields make unorthodox solariums. In fact, these houses have everything but the basics. The bathroom is often an outhouse. Electricity and central heating are rare. But there is more to life than utilities, or so say the owner-builders, who value the karma of self-expression over the convenience of plumbing. "A hand-hewed home is to a preconstructed one what fresh-baked bread is to a TV dinner," says Lloyd Kahn.

Dumpyard Special. Kahn, 38, is the author of three books on the art of handmade home building. His present house, a redwood-shingled geodesic dome flanked by a three-story watchtower, is a dumpyard special. "I must have washed 10,000 board feet to get off the chicken and horse dung and spilled wine," says Kahn about his castoff supplies. But he has no complaints about the price, just $8,500 for the dome and tower, plus $3,500 for the lot (100 ft. by 100 ft). Nor does he begrudge his eight months of hard labor. "Carpenters have a remarkably low incidence of mental illness," he insists. Reason: the psychological satisfaction of working with one's hands. Kahn's current place--the fourth in a series of handmade homesteads--is hardly a dream house. To ward off chilly breezes inside his cavernous, uninsulated dome, Kahn must tote a small kerosene stove around. But he is light-years ahead of others. His dome not only has indoor plumbing, but electric lights. Jenefer,* 29, a former schoolteacher, is not so lucky. For her hillside treehouse she pumps water from the city main, via a redwood tank on a nearby hill, to a spigot and washbasin on the front porch. For heat she relies on a coal stove once used on a sailing ship. But no matter. Jenefer is a sylvan spirit who lives on simple fare such as grapes, sardines and raw string beans. In fact, her isolation is so great that she worked in the nude while building her two-room redwood shack. Her only complaint is an occasional pang of loneliness: "At times I wish I lived in a rented house in town. People don't come up here much."

Higher Powers. Tom, who lives five miles away, values privacy more; he grows marijuana plants. At 27, Tom is a long-haired business dropout who made a bundle running charter flights, selling dune buggies and speculating in the stock market. Now he meditates in his tiny split-level, made of vertical redwood planks. "I wanted to release some of the higher powers of the mind," he says. His home, which cost $2,000 in materials and furnishings, blends with the green leaves and gray trunks of the surrounding pine and oak trees.

Here Tom lives a monastic life, baking his own bread from sprouted wheat kernels, and cultivating vegetables alongside the marijuana. His daily needs are basic and so, too, is his plumbing--an outhouse that curiously has room for five. His shower is little more than a wooden platform, pipe, and flash heater. No impulsive sort, he spent months contemplating wind, fog and sun patterns on his 2 1/2-acre plot before breaking ground. "If you have to spend time in a house, you might as well live in an environment that expands your mind the most," he explains. In fact, to ensure an expansive vista, he built 23 windows into his two-room home.

Architect Sim Van der Ryn, a contributor to Handmade Houses, A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art (Scrimshaw Press, $12.95) has already coined a phrase for the new style of building: "ecotecture." At a Berkeley conference he once termed the practitioners "outlaw builders." Whatever the label, the craftsmen are individualists who apparently do their best work alone. In one wooded ravine not far from Oakland, a commune of six married couples joined to erect their own cabins. By the time the last nail had been driven, not one of the couples was still together.

* Because they constantly have trouble with local authorities, some of the builders crave anonymity.

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