The Simple Life: An Interview with Dan Price
Everyone pines for ‘the simple life’—but it takes someone fairly brave to actually make the leap and live it. 36 years ago artist, musician and photographer Dan Price did exactly that—swapping the Matrix for a meadow in Oregon and a second-hand tipi.
Since then he’s upgraded to an ingeniously-designed underground abode that he proudly calls a ‘Hobbit-hole’ and has built a sauna, a compost toilet and a manual shower. For the last three decades this unique lifestyle has been documented in an illustrated zine called Moonlight Chronicle which combines Price’s freeform pen drawings with handwritten musings on minimalism and the adventures that come with it.
Luckily one trapping of modern life Price does allow himself is a mobile phone—meaning we could call him up one Tuesday evening to pester him about his stripped-back lifestyle, his humble Shire-esque dwelling and the fine art of freight hopping. Buckle up for a serious dose of sagely wisdom…
For over 30 years you’ve lived in a meadow in Oregon, but how far does this really go back for you? Is this how you’ve always wanted to live?
I always wanted to live in a little Hobbit hole. This goes way back to when I was five years old—I went out to the chicken coop as that wasn’t being used and I thought, “Oh, let's go live in here, this is way better than our house.” So yeah, it was a lifelong thing where I just wanted to have my cozy little nest and be simple, but of course I got married, had a couple kids and became a news photographer for 10 years.
And when I get into something, I tend to go way deep down the rabbit hole. So in that 10 years of being a news photographer, I really went super deep into photography. I created my own photo magazine in 1986 called Shots Magazine, a magazine that was photographs that people would send me and I'd edit them. And out of Shots Magazine grew another magazine called Moonlight Chronicles.
I’ve seen that—that’s the illustrated zine you’ve been making for years, isn’t it?
Yeah—I sold Shots so I could do Moonlight Chronicles. I did that for one year and had the extraordinary happening of getting a shoe company called Simple in California becoming a sponsor of it and basically funding me to just go anywhere around the world. I wanted to draw and make my stories and so I ended up doing that for 20 years.
How did that happen? Was that because they saw you as kind of living the philosophy of the brand, if you get what I mean?
They put an ad out in Rolling Stone with this beautiful desert boot and there was a phone number on there. I called the number and ended up talking to the guy that owns the company because they were doing it in their garage at that time.
I go, “I'm going to walk across Oregon here and I got some really shitty boots. Can you send me a pair of those desert boots?” So he sent me a pair—and every time I found a post office, I was sending little postcards to him and his wife, saying, “Thank you for the boots, they're working great.”
I wrote about them in the Chronicles too—and about six months later they called me and said, “Dude, we really like your little magazine. Can we get together and talk about turning it into a catalog for our shoe company?” They said, “You just keep doing your journal and all your drawings and your stories, and in the back 20 pages, we'll put our little catalog. It was really unusual that it happened.
So you were sort-of sponsored by this shoe company?
Yeah—they printed the magazine. At first I was making a hundred copies, but then when they got involved it went to 50,000 copies. I’d just fill my car full of magazines and put them in coffee shops and just give them away everywhere.
And all the while, you were living the true ‘simple’ life. How did you end up in Oregon in your meadow in the first place?
I had my photo career in Kentucky. But then I came back to Oregon and around that time I got divorced. But I came here to Joseph because I could print my photography magazine here. And that’s when it hit me… I was going to live in a tipi. I was living in this little tiny flophouse hotel room for $80 a month in 1990, and that’s when I started searching for a property to live on. Within six months I found the meadow I’m still in now.
The town of Joseph is named after Chief Joseph—who was a super-famous Nez Pierce chief. This is where the tribe would spend their summers—so when I moved here I started reading about their history, and it really influenced me. One of the big things was that they don’t believe in owning property—and that was how I felt.
Back in Kentucky we’d bought a little house, and buying a mortgage really freaked me out, so when I got up here, I was looking for a simple way to live. I'd read a story about a guy who just talked a farmer into letting him live on part of his two hundred acres in a little shack—and just pay him one hundred dollars a year and clean it up around him. And that was the model that I brought here.
When I found this piece of property on the river, it was just a totally trashed horse pasture. So I went up and talked to the owners here and told them my idea—I’d clean it up, take care of it, live in a tipi and pay them a hundred bucks a year. That was 36 years ago, and I'm still doing that now.
You’ve had a few different houses on that land now. Can you talk me through them?
I did two years and two winters in a tipi. It was super cosy—I had a wooden floor and a carpet, and I had electricity because I’d dug underground. And then I had a little hut. And then because I was travelling so much I was getting amazing mountain tents for free from companies like North Face and Sierra Designs—so I’d just live in the same mountain tent when I was at home.
But because I’d get these boxes of the Chronicle printed, I needed some kind of space—so I built this tiny little beach shack—but I didn’t like that ‘cos it was hard to heat and I was used to living in round spaces. And then around that time, somebody broke in. They stole all this camera stuff and I was so bummed.
But before that happened I’d already cut a hole in the back corner of the building and then dug a space out in the hillside behind—and that’s where I’d crawl into to sleep. When the robbery happened I didn’t know what I was going to do—I took the old building down and burnt it—and then when it was gone I looked at this little hole in the hillside. I was already trying to be simple, I loved to be minimalist, so could I be even more simple and just put a door onto that and move into the little bedroom? And that’s how it worked out.
For such a small house, there’s a lot of character there. Most people just live in brick boxes. Was it important to have some individual flair?
Great question. I spent years studying the words hobo, hermit and monk—and basically what I was looking for was someone who was living absolutely within nature—not in some stupid box. I wanted it to be integrated into nature. And I'm all about aesthetics—I've always been that way—I care about how things look. So I was looking at these monks and hermits who had the same vision as me, and I never found one. I’d maybe find a monk—but then he was living in a trailer or something.
They weren’t as ‘monk-like’ as you wanted them to be?
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed. I really wanted to be at one with nature—so the building really has to be like a Hobbit hole. And this might sound silly, but the more I've lived on that land, the more I feel like I'm becoming a part of it. This is a hard thing to explain with words, but when I sit now and sit anywhere on the property and look around and look and get in this frame of mind, I just feel a deep connection with all the things, the trees and rocks and all these things.
Stuff costs so much money and everything is so expensive now—like how do people even afford to build a house now? And not that I expect anyone to live like I do—but guess what… you could! For 35 years I’ve proven that you don’t need hardly anything to live. I think it was in Thoreau’s writing, I came across this idea of 'food, clothing and shelter’—and how to survive as a human being, that’s all you really need.
I really locked onto that. What a revelation for someone who was raised in America in a modern way. That made me realise that even the way I live in the meadow is kind of complicated. I could have come to Joseph 36 years ago, got one of those amazing mountain tents and went up above the lake into the folds of the hills we hike on.
I literally could have gone up there, got rid of my car and just had a bike and just lived in a tent. And you know, no one would have really cared. Isn’t it just amazing that we could just disappear like that? I find when you stretch your imagination that far, it's just fascinating to me because we're so, we're so taught and so driven.
There’s this imaginary framework we rarely look beyond.
You must be successful. You must do this in society, blah, blah, blah… but you know what? No one in this community of 1500 people—this kind of redneck cowboy logger community—in all these years has ever said anything negative to me about what I'm doing. I went up to the city manager once and said, “What do you think about what I'm doing over there?” and he said, “Well, you know, Dan, I’ve got nothing to say about what you're doing because you’re on someone's private property.”
So why don't more people do this? Why are we all hooked on this fairly rigid formula?
I think it’s human nature that the world is so enticing. Who doesn't want to have a big screen TV except me? I used to have a tiny little TV in the tipi and I got rid of that and I haven't had a TV for 25 years.
When I go to my brother's place, when I'm surfing down in San Diego, he has this monster screen on the wall. And not only is it visually overwhelming, but I can only take about 10 or 20 minutes of all these split screens and all the stuff people are trying to sell me. Talk about a stress overload! For Superbowl the other day, I was just reading a book in my Hobbit hole and it was totally quiet—I didn’t have a million pixels coming at me! That’s not healthy.
What’s interesting is that I think we all know what’s good for us… whether that’s being outside or eating fairly simple food… but putting it into practice is easier said than done.
Again—I think it’s human nature. When you talk to young people today, they say that there are so many options they don’t know what to do with their lives. But when I was a kid, there weren't a lot of options—it was pretty simple. You’d call someone for a job interview, and they’d say “Come in on Tuesday.” They wouldn’t just ignore you. It’s a tough world now.
But I think you're exactly right—I’ve kind of proven that if you could slow your life down enough, you could figure out how to eat to the best of your ability, which I do. You can't believe how I eat. My diet is really basic so it's easy for me not to get overweight. And I exercise everyday. I lift weights, I ride my mountain bike. I’m building bike trails and running paths beyond my place along the river.
And it’s easy to do all that and be focused because I’m not running out the door to go to work for someone else. I wrote about this in one of my books—I said that we were put here to make our lives a work of art.
You were saying before about your research into hobos and hermits. I think in England the ‘hobo’ doesn’t really exist—maybe because it’s such a small country—and it often has a slightly negative connotation. But what’s the reality? What’s the history of the hobo?
The hobos were originally called the ‘hoe-boys’. In the 1920s and ‘30s America was going through such a hard time that kids were literally told by their parents, “We can’t feed you, go and jump on that train and find work.” And that’s what they did—they used the freight trains to move around the country.
I studied how to hop freight trains back in the 90s and did it a whole bunch. I never got hurt, I never sat with other riders and I always rode alone. You sit there waiting for a ride because you’ve gotta find the right car—and sometimes you sit there for a day or two—so talk about learning patience!
I also learned once you're on the train, you might sort of know that’s it’s going over there to Portland or it's going down south towards Boise, Idaho—but you never really know where you’re going to end up, because if it's going 60 miles an hour, you're not jumping off. And that’s total freedom—and that’s why I can say that yeah I live simple now, but if I ever had to leave the meadow, I could devise a way to live even simpler.
Because what hobos know, and why it's addictive, is that you get on that train and you sort of don't know where you're going to go. I always called it destinationless traveling, which is really cool—I didn't know where I was going to be able to get off. It’s totally free—you've got some food, you've got a warm blanket, you don't have to be at work at 8 o'clock. That's why you see really old hobos who are still riding the rails, because it's pretty addictive.
And from what I see—people still do it—it’s not some relic of the past that has been lost.
It might have got a little harder to do—but what you find that's really surprising is that the workers in the yard think it's kind of cool that people are riding the trains, and they'll help you—they’ll say, ”Okay, number three track over there, at 3:30 is gonna be coming north, and you can probably get on that one, it'll come slow enough.”
Funnily enough, what I ended up learning was that the best place to ride is in the engine at the back of the train. It's wide open, you go up there and sit in the engineer's seat. I’d go to sleep on the floor, and one time I was in there sleeping, the train stopped in Pocatello, Idaho, and I go, “Oh boy, they're gonna come, they're gonna check.” But they just thought I was an engineer because I was pretty clean cut. I just got off and got on the next one.
Does being clean cut give you a bit of a pass? Like you said before, you don’t get any trouble living the way you do—but is part of that because of the way you present yourself?
Yes, and that's one of the reasons why I haven't become some kind of weirdo here at Joseph. I wasn't gonna go live over on the river and be a stinky kid. I always figured out how to make a rudimentary shower. You’d think with the kind of lifestyle I lead over here I’d be wearing buckskin and have scraggly hair—but I’ve always been really conscious of how I look.
And I’ve been really friendly to the people in Joseph and the people who live up on the road above me. Something that I learned from news photography is to talk to everybody and be really friendly. I’m not really that sociable, but it’s fun to talk to people—and I don’t want them to think I’m some weirdo down here. I'm just a totally normal guy.
That makes sense. You dispel the mystery. If you were shuffling around hiding out then people would conjure up all sorts of ideas in their heads—but if you answer their questions first you get rid of that.
Yeah—I’m not packing a load of booze back here. I was never into that. I’ve always had a sweat lodge down here, but there’s always been a rule of no nudity—because I didn’t want the neighbours looking across and seeing some nude party going on.
Some hippy freak out?
Yeah—I’ve always kept it really conservative.
For a hermit in a Hobbit-hole, you seem pretty friendly and sociable too. It’s not like you’re hiding away.
When I left home at 18, I was totally unsocialized. I got an apartment in Portland, Oregon and started building houses there, and I didn’t know how to talk to anybody. I’d go home, and sit in my little room and be afraid to go out the door. But I had to overcome it—because when I became a news photographer, this guy handed me a camera for my first job, and said, “Okay, go to the college ice cream social, Dan, and get us some pictures.” I was in a strange town—I’d just moved to Kansas, and I had to go to this social, walk up to these college kids, and get some kind of photograph, and talk to them, and write down their names. I came close to having a nervous breakdown because it was so stressful.
But guess what that job taught me? It taught me to be the person I am now. I can just walk up and talk to anybody. It doesn't matter what class you are in, that doesn't register in my head, I'll go up, and I will treat everybody exactly the same when I'm talking to them—I don't care if you're homeless or the richest guy in town, it's all interesting to me. I learned that by being a photographer, and what a gift that was.
After living this way for so long—do you have a kind of overarching philosophy you’ve learned?
That's so easy. It's three words and you've heard it a million times—less is more. And more is less. That's so true from my experience. I don’t mean to bag on my daughter—she’s just living a regular life with a beautiful house, so I don’t mean to give her shit—but you know what I hate most about her house, and you’re just going to laugh…
Go on…
The sinks! Sinks are just so disgusting. I don't have any sinks. I just have a rock floor in my wash house and when I'm brushing my teeth, I just spit on like three feet deep of rock and pour the water on that. It just goes down on the ground. I don't have to clean some nasty sink. I've had to clean the drains out of my ex's sinks or crawl under her house trying to fix plumbing and stupid electrical stuff.
I want to say one more thing. My ex bought a house 30 years ago that was built in the ‘20s and that meant that all this infrastructure was falling apart and I always had to crawl under there and try to fix things, but guess what? This is where I'm going to call bullshit on real estate; that old house with all the old wood and stuff—now instead of it being worth the $60,000 she bought it for, you’re telling me now it's worth $300,000?
I think that's the fallacy of the world that everything is supposedly gaining in value but it's still the same old crappy wooden box. It makes no sense to me.
It feels like it’s just speculation and imaginary numbers after a certain point. But then you’ve proven you can side-step that and enjoy the reality. Not everything is about value.
I’d rather be around trees and rocks and grass and sky. I’ve not removed all the BS from my life, but I’m a very happy and contented person—and I don’t think a lot of 69 year olds can say that. And I’ve got no regrets, and I can say that because I followed my own heart. I believe we were actually born, each one of us uniquely, with what we were supposed to do in life… but guess what? You come out of the hospital and you’re thrown into a house and suddenly you’re in a modern day environment—and you don’t really have a chance of anything different unless something really horrific happens which wakes you up.
That’s what happened to me. When I got my divorce in 1990 it was so devastating to me—and when I came up here to Joseph I basically went crazy. And by crazy, I mean I just said, “Fuck it! I’m not going to do that stuff I’ve been doing, I’m gonna find a little corner, I don’t care where it is, and I’m gonna live in a tipi.” Now that’s pretty crazy, but according to the Buddhists, you have to come to a point like that—you have to come to that point at the edge of the cliff if you’re going to jump off. When you come to the cliff, and you have the guts to jump off, you will be caught before you hit the ground. That’s kind of preachy, but I believe it.
I suppose what’s funny or weird maybe is that your lifestyle is seen as ‘weird’ or ‘crazy’ but maybe it’s more grounded in humanity than what’s ‘the normal’ way to live.
When I wrote my book Radical Simplicity, I was studying primitive man, and guess what I discovered? If you go to the building in a city, and you consider the thickness of the paint on the top compared to the height of the building, that’s how long human beings have been living in this modern world. Before that, we were hunter gatherers. We think, “This is the way it’s always been,” when we look at cars—but no, for most of human history we were hunter gatherers, and apparently more healthy than we are now. Go figure!
It cracks me up when people are surprised how much they enjoy swimming or going for a walk or something—these things are hard-wired into us—of course they’ll be better than a night scrolling on your phone.
When we were kids, we’d come up to the mountains here for a week with backpacks on. I remember after the week, we’d go, “Okay, time to backpack out and go home,” and all the way out I used to think, “I don’t want to go back, it’s so cool out here just living out my backpack.” And that obviously stuck with me. It’s all about simplicity.
Find out more about Dan here.
Interview by Sam Waller.
