My friends who live in the suburbs always ask me what it’s like to live in a cabin in the woods. I always tell them the same thing: “It’s quiet.” It’s in the middle of nowhere.
The truth is, it’s not completely quiet. It’s actually pretty noisy for being in the middle of nowhere. It’s just different full of different kinds of sounds – the sounds of nature mostly. Because there aren’t many man-made sounds, I can hear the nature sounds against the backdrop of quiet pretty loud and clear: dogs barking, frogs croaking, crickets chirping and, God forbid, the birds. And, of course, the occasionally gun shots. I’m hearing a lot of gun shots in the early morning hours now that we’re in hunting season.
We moved to the woods when we made the decision as a family to worldschool and travel semi-full time. We had this family cabin in South Carolina that we came to occasionally to get away from the city and get some quiet time in the woods. When our family decided to travel, we sold our house in Orlando and moved here. Now we live here when we’re not travelling. We probably live here about half the year.
It’s isolated. We drive an hour and a half to either Savannah or Charleston so my mom can go grocery shopping once a week. We grow our own vegetables. There are no movie theaters or restaurants or anything. We don’t really have neighbors. We have to drive slowly, especially at night because there is a lot of wildlife. There are deer everywhere. We built a fire pit as a family project. When it’s cold, we make smores and hang out by the fire.
There are deer everywhere. We have to be careful driving.
Though it has its perks. One of those perks is that I can do whatever I want, as long as it’s okay with my parents and brother. I get to dirt bike whenever I want as long as I ask my parents and as long as I don’t go into the woods in hunting season. Another perk is that we depend on each other and it’s brought us closer as a family. We go days and sometimes weeks without seeing other people. The only people we see sometimes are the UPS guy or when people come up to our cabin looking for directions because they’re lost in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, we are almost as clueless as they are. The only person that really knows the land and their way around out here is my grandfather. He knows how to get around out here because he has lived here most of his life. His grandmother’s house is right in front of our cabin.
Our Fire Pit
It’s mostly farm land out here. There are peanut fields, which the deer really like. There are also cotton fields, which are really pretty and look like snow.
Cotton fields next to our cabin
One of the down sides about living so far out in the country is that if there is an emergency, we are the only ones around. If we need a hospital, it’s not just around the corner. It’s at least a twenty minute drive away to the small local hospital.
Another challenge for me about living out here is my superstition and imagination because it can get pretty creepy at night. It’s much, much darker here than in the suburbs. There aren’t any street lights or light pollution or lights from other homes or city lights. At night, it’s just dark. The only light is the moonlight and the light of the stars. It is beautiful to be able to see so many stars so clearly. On clear nights, I can see the Milky Way galaxy. My parents seem impervious to fear. I tend to feel a little afraid of the dark because it is full of the unknown. My mom is trying to help me face my fears of the dark by walking outside at night with me or taking my dog our at night with me, but it still gives me the creeps. Whatever. I’m just a child and am just afraid of random things. Mom, I swear there’s a monster in my closet and you can’t make me think otherwise.
Living in the woods does come with a dear price. That price is internet connectivity. Wifi is very limited out here. In Orlando, we had super fast fibre channel internet. Out here, it feels like the dark ages. I like to game and when the wifi is so slow, I can’t talk to my friends. Luckily, my dad bought us mobile hotspot devices call Jetpacks from Verizon to give us a little more data, but we run through all of our data quick. Since we run out of data so frequently, I do a lot more reading these days. One thing I like to do more than game is read. Reading is a passion of mine that I acquired over the summer. I love reading the Harry Potter books and I am on book five of seven right now, The Order of the Phoenix. It is really relaxing to read out in the woods because it is actually so quiet. This is my experience living in the woods.
