A Handmade Life

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Square peg in a round house

Yurt evangelist, 75, still spreads his gospel of self-sufficiency

From The Boston Globe
By Letitia Baldwin, Globe Correspondent
December 8, 2005

BUCKS HARBOR, Maine -- It might seem tempting to think of William Coperthwaite, who has adopted a life and lifestyle in the Maine woods substantially separate from civilization, as a modern-day David Thoreau.

His Walden Pond is Mill Pond and his Concord is Bucks Harbor, a Down East village in Washington County. He lives in a three-story yurt reachable only by the sea or by a half-hour's hike along a woodland footpath bordered by bunchberry and sphagnum moss. Coperthwaite is highly learned -- he earned a doctorate in education from Harvard in 1972 -- and idealistic.

But unlike Thoreau, described by Ralph Waldo Emerson as a somewhat cranky, antisocial ascetic, Coperthwaite is a friendly, open-minded fellow who warmly welcomes visitors to his round house and invites them to finish the organic cantaloupe left over from breakfast. In mind and body, he is boyish, with a lean build, vigor, and curiosity that belie his 75 years.

A runner and pole vaulter as a Bowdoin College undergrad, he gets a daily workout chopping firewood, hauling supplies in his cedar canoe, pulling fir saplings from maple and birch glades, and performing other regular chores. To meet other needs, he splits firewood, collects rainwater, and walks or canoes in and out with the tides by way of Little Kennebec Bay.

Blue eyes twinkling beneath bushy eyebrows, and gray sideburns sticking straight out from his balding head, Coperthwaite exhibits a keen interest and sense of wonder in new technology. He marvels over a newspaper photographer's Canon and digs out the Casio Exilim card camera someone gave him recently to document utilitarian folk art at risk of being lost.

When he bought his 300 acres in this remote hamlet, whose year-round inhabitants number 250, in 1960, it was to embark on an experiment in sustainable living that is still underway. Doing much of the work himself, with friends pitching in from time to time, he built a smaller yurt down by the spruce-lined shore, and completed the main yurt and outbuildings later, in between teaching posts and travels abroad. Today, the outward-curving walls, hand-cut cedar shake roofs, and banks of windows under the eaves of the weathered dwelling blend with the landscape. A blue glass ball atop the cupola sparkles in the sunlight.

He lives in his rustic abode, which rises like a pagoda in a meadow, largely alone, save for the steady stream of visitors and friends; he was married briefly years ago, but the relationship didn't work out. He is untethered in other ways as well. Although a solar panel attached to the chimney provides light, the yurt is off the electric grid, and he has neither plumbing nor a telephone.

Coperthwaite not only lives in a yurt, a housing form conceived by nomadic Mongols on the steppes of Central Asia 2,500 years ago, but he has made it a cornerstone of his working life. He once built and lived in a yurt where the Harvard Graduate School of Education library stands today. He is founder and director of the Yurt Foundation, a nonprofit research institute he operates from his outpost. He has spent much of his time teaching others to construct the circular dwellings, and his pupils have built structures ranging from a public health center in northeastern India to a backyard playhouse at a Montessori school in Austin, Texas. Construction materials have varied widely from bamboo to plywood, depending on climate and setting. He also supplies building plans to those who want to construct the curvilinear structures on their own.