I went on a slow 4-mile run on a coastal trail the other evening. A skunk ambled across, then cottontails, one after the other. These little rabbits seem to have proliferated. I counted 9 of them in all. A young deer stood stock still as I went by, his ears revolving and tracking me like radar antennas. At a hillside pond, swallows were swooping down to skim the water, picking up insects and leaving ripples on the smooth surface.
Driving home along the coast that night, I spotted the wily coyote that I’ve seen before, standing by the side of the road. “Let the Juke Joint Jump” by Koko Taylor was playing on the radio. I backed up so the coyote was about 20 feet from my rolled-down window and turned up the volume. He stayed right there—his first experience with the blues. Fittingly, this song is on Koko’s album titled Force of Nature.
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
