Hosting a Silk Road Poetry Festival in my Turkmen yurt (Photo: Emily O'Dell)
Twilight descends on the desert & our yurt
Each of us tries to live in the best way we know how. I want to contribute to the problems of the world as little as possible. I really believe we must find simpler ways to live or society will collapse.
— William Coperthwaite
“You have to meet Bill,” my friend said, when I told her a few years back about my dream of putting a yurt on my family’s farm.
“Bill who?” I asked.
“Bill Coperthwaite,” she replied–telling me all about the man who lived in a hand-made yurt in Maine (without a phone, running water, or electricity). If she hadn’t urged me that day to study his hand-crafted yurts–along with his philosophy and generosity–I never would have had the yurt experience of a lifetime this past summer on the Silk Road.
While living in a yurt this past June in Turkmenistan (where I was doing archaeology and preserving Sufi shrines), I thought of Bill and his yurts every day–and vowed to take one of his yurt workshops next year back home. Sadly, however, I learned yesterday that I won’t have the opportunity–since Bill was killed in a single-car accident a few days ago in Maine.
The author of A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity, Bill practiced what he preached. He cooked his food on a wooden stove, retrieved his water from a brook, and used a small yurt for an outhouse. Everything in his home was hand-made. On his rural 300 acre farm in Maine, he welcomed countless visitors to his home for decades–to share his knowledge on how to build a tapered yurt–and live the “handmade life.” Outside of Maine, he conducted over 300 yurt workshops–including at Harvard, where he got his PhD.
From inside our Turkmen yurt (Photo: Emily O'Dell)
I want to live in a society where people are intoxicated with the joy of making things.
— William Coperthwaite
When I arrived at our dig site this past summer in Turkmenistan, and found an abandoned yurt being used as a storehouse–I thought immediately of Bill, and knew what I had to do. My yurt buddy and I rolled up our sleeves and began cleaning out years of debris, dirt and dust. Our colleagues lent us some rugs to cover the floor, and we found mattresses to use as beds. Since we were in the desert, I didn’t have many materials to spruce the place up–but I managed to find some scarves and candles in the bazaar.
Because I had been aware of Bill’s way of life for several years, I knew that a yurt isn’t just about the objects and decorations inside. So I decided to host a Yurt Poetry Festival–to fill the space up with words of the wise. The guests who stepped inside of our candle-lit yurt that night carried with them original and borrowed poems in Turkmen, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, English and Danish. Verses from poets like Seamus Heaney and Omar Khayyam made better decorations than any ornaments I could have bought or made by hand.
On Saturday, Bill will be buried near his home in a private ceremony, and I’ll be thinking of him and his humble way of life. Though I never got the chance to meet him, he did leave me a gift without knowing it: the inspiration to make my own yurt dreams come true far away from home on the Silk Road–where the yurt itself was born…
Home sweet home in Turkmenistan (Photo: Emily O'Dell)
