Help Us Sustain our Land in Honor of Our Parents
Donation protected
This year, we lost our mom to leukemia and our (step)dad to an assumed heart attack only four months later. Caring for our beloved mother, her home, and the land she loved in the final years of her life has left us mired in debt, but we’re more committed than ever to preserving her memory by sustaining “Beaver Haven” as a campsite, nature sanctuary, and future learning center. Please consider helping us achieve this dream, and enjoy a complimentary stay at our Hipcamp for any donation over $25! Details below...
OUR VISION FOR THIS FUND
* Commission an inscribed memorial bench and/or stone birdbath to mark the burial site of our mom, (step)dad, and brother. As of now they are adorned with a myriad of sacred objects, but we would love to have something more permanent to honor the people who gave us life, and who meant the world to us.
* Pay off some of the crushing debt from these past two years of dedicated caregiving, land stewardship, and financial hardship.
* Expand our Beaver Haven Hipcamp next spring. Specifically: partner with a former college professor to offer on-site classes in wetland ecology, education on medicinal plants (both wild and cultivated), and regenerative agriculture.
* Increase our Milkweed habitat to support the Monarch butterflies which gracefully pass through our land on their yearly migration.
* Provide local produce, eggs, humanely raised meat, fish, bread, and maple syrup from our land and neighboring organic farms and artisans to our campers.
* Upgrade our simple bucket-style outhouse with a composting toilet or other more efficient set-up for campers.
* Repair our John Deere rider mower.
* Replace the footbridge across the creek to the main camping pasture (ours washed away last year).
* Invite a licensed conservationist to our property to help us designate a portion of it, the beaver habitat, as a protected zone.
* Clear away the burned ruins of our old house. There are traumatic memories in those broken walls, but one day we hope to rebuild a modest, sustainable home where our family can be together on the land again in any season, without having to camp out ourselves :).
* Restore our old VW hippie bus to shelter worthy, if not road-worthy condition.
As of now, we are in the lead for Best Hipcamp to Visit in Wisconsin in 2021!
Even if you are not in a place to donate, it would mean a lot if you would take a minute to sign up with this link and offer us a vote if you feel moved to do so.
FREE SPIRIT LAND: OUR STORY
Our mom, Taryn Power Greendeer, dreamed of having a family farm. She grew up amid glamour and privilege as the daughter of screen idol Tyrone Power and Linda Christian, but had very little stability or guidance. She lost her father at age five, and her early life was spent bouncing around the world from Hollywood to Mexico City, Switzerland, England, and Rome. At the heart of it, all she wanted was to live a simple life close to the land with a loving family.
After falling in love with our stepfather, Bill Greendeer, in the mid-1990’s, she moved our family from Los Angeles to Amish country Wisconsin, a state she previously couldn’t locate on a map. Bill was a member of the Ho Chunk Nation, the indigenous people who have lived in the Driftless Region of the Midwest for countless generations.
It was a culture shock adapting to rural life in an old wood-stove-heated farmhouse in a climate that can plummet to -40°F, but Mom fell deeply in love with the green, rolling hills, and was gratified making a home surrounded by spring water and fertile abundance.
As the deep empath she was, there were a number of newbie mishaps over the years… the time we had a small herd of aggressive male billy goats she saved from a heap of discarded babies at a local farm (they only needed a couple males for breeding). The amount of violent head butting and aggression that transpired without any female goats around was a lesson in hormonal instinct! Also… don’t feed hungry pigs without physical protection. And… an ornery rooster will haunt your dreams and waking life.
Mom would adopt any raggedy stray feline that slinked up to our doorstep, a habit that eventually resulted in tragedy: while there was no heating indoors, on bitterly cold nights Mom would leave an electric heater for the cats on our covered porch. On March 7th, 2008, as mom and our 11-year-old sister Stella slept by the wood stove in the living room, the heater was knocked over outside, catching the house on fire and trapping them inside. They narrowly escaped with their lives through a broken window.
The house was a total loss, all of our family photos, heirlooms, and belongings were destroyed, and because of a meager insurance policy we ended up with only $20,000 to start over. Hardly enough money to rebuild. To this day, the ruins of the house still stand as a reminder of this traumatizing event, as there was no money to clear away the debris.
By this time, Mom and Bill had separated, and Mom thought it best to move to town with Stella, the baby of the family. After bouncing around for a few years, they found a house she knew would be their new home. It was rough around the edges, but she always saw potential in even the ugliest of ducklings. They took a farm loan against the purchase of the house, and we got to work, revealing its Victorian beauty little by little.
Before and after:
This home became our sanctuary, especially when Mom was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia on my birthday, December 28, 2018. Stella was in college in New York at the time, but took a leave from her studies to care for Mom, sharing the responsibility with me (I’d left my own life in California), and some of Mom’s dear friends in the community.
After a beautifully tender and heartbreaking 18 months together, Mom finally passed away at home on June 26, 2020, surrounded by her whole family. We were devastated to lose her but it was a deeply sacred experience in many ways, up until the time we buried her at the farm next to our stillborn brother, Willow. You can read a deeply personal account of this experience HERE, with details of her last days and her burial at our farm.
During her illness, the leukemia obliterated her immune system and she was unable to continue working as a teacher. Disability only endowed her with $7 a month. As caregivers, Stella and I only had the most meager income from freelance work when we could spare the time. Even with the generous support of our mom’s sister Romina covering Mom’s food and medical expenses, we fell deeper and deeper into debt, unable to cover the property taxes and mortgage on the home and the farm.
While at the Mayo Clinic, Mom mentioned that she had started hosting campers through the Hipcamp website just prior to her diagnosis. She and Bill always loved sharing the land, and had dreamed of creating a community of like-minded people there; a place to educate people about the wetlands, the medicinal plants Bill knew so much about, and the importance of beaver habitat.
Mom and Bill called the farm “Free Spirit Land,” but Mom cheekily named it “Beaver Haven” on Hipcamp and created a Facebook page called “Save Taryn’s Beaver.” She was obsessed with protecting those furry little architects. The township was disgruntled with the rising waters the beaver dams were creating, and would regularly come onto our land to kill them and destroy their dams. Over the years, the beaver always came back, and these wetlands have become an important breeding ground for local birds, fish, and amphibians, benefiting the entire local ecosystem.
As Mom’s illness progressed, it was clear that we either had to shut the Hipcamp down completely or take the reins, and knowing how much it meant to Mom, Stella and I decided we had to get involved. Indeed, even the day we buried her, there were campers on the other side of the property, wishing her a peaceful transition into the infinite, and thanking her for her generosity in opening up the space for all to enjoy.
It was the thick of the pandemic, and people were desperate for a place to escape into nature. Over the next few months we hosted campers from Chicago, the Twin Cities, Madison, and well as Spain, Norway, New York City, Los Angeles, etc. We even opened it up as a cost-free space for fire refugees from the West Coast.
Bill (who still lived at the farm in a semi-converted barn), Stella, and I set to work clearing dense thickets of prickly ash, hauling rocks from the creek to build a dozen fire pits, chopping countless bundles of firewood, clearing trails and new campsites, cleaning the outhouse, painting signs with reclaimed wood, moving and removing old barbed wire fence lines, etc. We worked ourselves ragged, but it was therapeutic to spend so much time on the land, learning even more about it from Bill, who had never left. We got to visit Mom and Willow on a regular basis. Indeed, many campers went up to the burial site in the Sacred Circle, and some even chose to camp there next to them. Mom always loved a party!
We had an intense season, sometimes hosting 40 campers at once in a very primitive setting on the 200 acre property. The reviews came pouring in: “a slice of nirvana”… “one of the most peaceful and beautiful places I have ever camped”… “Everything about our visit to Beaver Haven was magical.” So many campers mentioned what a gracious and knowledgeable host Bill was, coming to deliver firewood, lend out his binoculars, offer shelter in the rain, information on native plants, etc.
It was a ton of work hosting so many people between the three of us, but in the evenings when we were done chopping wood and getting everyone settled, we would sit with Bill by the fire pit outside the barn to gaze at the Milky Way, watch our resident pair of Sandhill cranes return home, and listen to the coyote and owls come out to play. This was truly his promised land, and he asked that, when his own time came, he be buried next to Mom and Willow.
Meanwhile, Stella and I were also working in parallel to repair the house. So many issues had been deferred during mom's illness, and we wanted to create a safe and comfortable space for her to call home after narrowly graduating just a month before mom passed. We restored the bedrooms downstairs to cultivate a beautiful environment for a future housemate to help with the expenses. Stella herself spent three full days hand scraping carpet glue from the hardwood floors.
We were shouldering the crushing debt of the home repairs, the dual property taxes and mortgage, and the deferred living expenses of being long-term caregivers, but the income from the Hipcamp was going a long way to helping us cut down that debt, and I knew that if we could just make it to the end of the season, culminating with an estate sale of Mom’s things, we would have a fighting chance of making this a viable, sustainable, and positive business prospect for our family in 2021, and a sustainable pathway to help us keep ownership of the house and the farm we feel so connected to, not to mention a beautiful tribute to Mom’s vision of Beaver Haven.
The week before our big sale, the cold snap subsided and we were suddenly in the 60s again. We received two last-minute bookings checking in on Thursday, November 5th, and we told Bill that we would come out to the farm to greet them and help split more firewood.
When we arrived at the farm Stella went into the barn as I greeted the campers, and discovered that Bill had passed on, likely a couple hours beforehand. He appeared to have been taking a nap on the couch. He had his work boots on and his pant legs were wet, indicating that he had been working in the field just a short time before. He was as strong as an ox, carrying telephone poles on his shoulder when we moved the fence line just a month before he passed.
Bill was a hard-living renegade who cheated death on a regular basis… felling trees, rolling his truck, you name it. So the peacefulness of him passing in his sleep was a surprise to us all. He had recently told Stella that he didn’t think he would live too much longer, and he wanted her to know how much he loved her, but no one, except him, perhaps, thought that it would happen this soon after Mom herself walked on.
Losing Bill is especially devastating for Stella, now 24 years old. There was so little settled, so much to look forward to at the farm, and now so much debt and responsibility to shoulder, not to mention the heavy grief of being without the guidance of parents at a young age.
Of course, we are managing this together as a family, but it is crushing to start one’s adult life from a foundation of financial burden and emotional devastation. We felt like we were cresting the wave of grief and debt, but losing Bill has pulled us back into the undertow.
Luckily, we are blessed with a strong community who are ready and willing to help us with the hard work that needs to be done, and a loving and capable family. We are committed to coming out from under this in order to realize the dreams of our parents to finally create the environmental sanctuary and learning hub they always dreamed of, but we realize now that we can’t do it alone.
OUR SMALL OFFERING TO YOU
We know that many of you come from far and wide, but for any donation over $25 we will provide a transferable code for a complimentary stay at Beaver Haven. It would be an honor to host you! Thank you for your support, from the bottom of our hearts. It’s been a brutal year for us, but we know we’re not the only ones who are facing hardship these days. Onwards and upwards… with love.
Tai + Stella
OUR VISION FOR THIS FUND
* Commission an inscribed memorial bench and/or stone birdbath to mark the burial site of our mom, (step)dad, and brother. As of now they are adorned with a myriad of sacred objects, but we would love to have something more permanent to honor the people who gave us life, and who meant the world to us.
* Pay off some of the crushing debt from these past two years of dedicated caregiving, land stewardship, and financial hardship.
* Expand our Beaver Haven Hipcamp next spring. Specifically: partner with a former college professor to offer on-site classes in wetland ecology, education on medicinal plants (both wild and cultivated), and regenerative agriculture.
* Increase our Milkweed habitat to support the Monarch butterflies which gracefully pass through our land on their yearly migration.
* Provide local produce, eggs, humanely raised meat, fish, bread, and maple syrup from our land and neighboring organic farms and artisans to our campers.
* Upgrade our simple bucket-style outhouse with a composting toilet or other more efficient set-up for campers.
* Repair our John Deere rider mower.
* Replace the footbridge across the creek to the main camping pasture (ours washed away last year).
* Invite a licensed conservationist to our property to help us designate a portion of it, the beaver habitat, as a protected zone.
* Clear away the burned ruins of our old house. There are traumatic memories in those broken walls, but one day we hope to rebuild a modest, sustainable home where our family can be together on the land again in any season, without having to camp out ourselves :).
* Restore our old VW hippie bus to shelter worthy, if not road-worthy condition.
As of now, we are in the lead for Best Hipcamp to Visit in Wisconsin in 2021!
Even if you are not in a place to donate, it would mean a lot if you would take a minute to sign up with this link and offer us a vote if you feel moved to do so.
FREE SPIRIT LAND: OUR STORY
Our mom, Taryn Power Greendeer, dreamed of having a family farm. She grew up amid glamour and privilege as the daughter of screen idol Tyrone Power and Linda Christian, but had very little stability or guidance. She lost her father at age five, and her early life was spent bouncing around the world from Hollywood to Mexico City, Switzerland, England, and Rome. At the heart of it, all she wanted was to live a simple life close to the land with a loving family.
After falling in love with our stepfather, Bill Greendeer, in the mid-1990’s, she moved our family from Los Angeles to Amish country Wisconsin, a state she previously couldn’t locate on a map. Bill was a member of the Ho Chunk Nation, the indigenous people who have lived in the Driftless Region of the Midwest for countless generations.
It was a culture shock adapting to rural life in an old wood-stove-heated farmhouse in a climate that can plummet to -40°F, but Mom fell deeply in love with the green, rolling hills, and was gratified making a home surrounded by spring water and fertile abundance.
As the deep empath she was, there were a number of newbie mishaps over the years… the time we had a small herd of aggressive male billy goats she saved from a heap of discarded babies at a local farm (they only needed a couple males for breeding). The amount of violent head butting and aggression that transpired without any female goats around was a lesson in hormonal instinct! Also… don’t feed hungry pigs without physical protection. And… an ornery rooster will haunt your dreams and waking life.
Mom would adopt any raggedy stray feline that slinked up to our doorstep, a habit that eventually resulted in tragedy: while there was no heating indoors, on bitterly cold nights Mom would leave an electric heater for the cats on our covered porch. On March 7th, 2008, as mom and our 11-year-old sister Stella slept by the wood stove in the living room, the heater was knocked over outside, catching the house on fire and trapping them inside. They narrowly escaped with their lives through a broken window.
The house was a total loss, all of our family photos, heirlooms, and belongings were destroyed, and because of a meager insurance policy we ended up with only $20,000 to start over. Hardly enough money to rebuild. To this day, the ruins of the house still stand as a reminder of this traumatizing event, as there was no money to clear away the debris.
By this time, Mom and Bill had separated, and Mom thought it best to move to town with Stella, the baby of the family. After bouncing around for a few years, they found a house she knew would be their new home. It was rough around the edges, but she always saw potential in even the ugliest of ducklings. They took a farm loan against the purchase of the house, and we got to work, revealing its Victorian beauty little by little.
Before and after:
This home became our sanctuary, especially when Mom was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia on my birthday, December 28, 2018. Stella was in college in New York at the time, but took a leave from her studies to care for Mom, sharing the responsibility with me (I’d left my own life in California), and some of Mom’s dear friends in the community.
After a beautifully tender and heartbreaking 18 months together, Mom finally passed away at home on June 26, 2020, surrounded by her whole family. We were devastated to lose her but it was a deeply sacred experience in many ways, up until the time we buried her at the farm next to our stillborn brother, Willow. You can read a deeply personal account of this experience HERE, with details of her last days and her burial at our farm.
During her illness, the leukemia obliterated her immune system and she was unable to continue working as a teacher. Disability only endowed her with $7 a month. As caregivers, Stella and I only had the most meager income from freelance work when we could spare the time. Even with the generous support of our mom’s sister Romina covering Mom’s food and medical expenses, we fell deeper and deeper into debt, unable to cover the property taxes and mortgage on the home and the farm.
While at the Mayo Clinic, Mom mentioned that she had started hosting campers through the Hipcamp website just prior to her diagnosis. She and Bill always loved sharing the land, and had dreamed of creating a community of like-minded people there; a place to educate people about the wetlands, the medicinal plants Bill knew so much about, and the importance of beaver habitat.
Mom and Bill called the farm “Free Spirit Land,” but Mom cheekily named it “Beaver Haven” on Hipcamp and created a Facebook page called “Save Taryn’s Beaver.” She was obsessed with protecting those furry little architects. The township was disgruntled with the rising waters the beaver dams were creating, and would regularly come onto our land to kill them and destroy their dams. Over the years, the beaver always came back, and these wetlands have become an important breeding ground for local birds, fish, and amphibians, benefiting the entire local ecosystem.
As Mom’s illness progressed, it was clear that we either had to shut the Hipcamp down completely or take the reins, and knowing how much it meant to Mom, Stella and I decided we had to get involved. Indeed, even the day we buried her, there were campers on the other side of the property, wishing her a peaceful transition into the infinite, and thanking her for her generosity in opening up the space for all to enjoy.
It was the thick of the pandemic, and people were desperate for a place to escape into nature. Over the next few months we hosted campers from Chicago, the Twin Cities, Madison, and well as Spain, Norway, New York City, Los Angeles, etc. We even opened it up as a cost-free space for fire refugees from the West Coast.
Bill (who still lived at the farm in a semi-converted barn), Stella, and I set to work clearing dense thickets of prickly ash, hauling rocks from the creek to build a dozen fire pits, chopping countless bundles of firewood, clearing trails and new campsites, cleaning the outhouse, painting signs with reclaimed wood, moving and removing old barbed wire fence lines, etc. We worked ourselves ragged, but it was therapeutic to spend so much time on the land, learning even more about it from Bill, who had never left. We got to visit Mom and Willow on a regular basis. Indeed, many campers went up to the burial site in the Sacred Circle, and some even chose to camp there next to them. Mom always loved a party!
We had an intense season, sometimes hosting 40 campers at once in a very primitive setting on the 200 acre property. The reviews came pouring in: “a slice of nirvana”… “one of the most peaceful and beautiful places I have ever camped”… “Everything about our visit to Beaver Haven was magical.” So many campers mentioned what a gracious and knowledgeable host Bill was, coming to deliver firewood, lend out his binoculars, offer shelter in the rain, information on native plants, etc.
It was a ton of work hosting so many people between the three of us, but in the evenings when we were done chopping wood and getting everyone settled, we would sit with Bill by the fire pit outside the barn to gaze at the Milky Way, watch our resident pair of Sandhill cranes return home, and listen to the coyote and owls come out to play. This was truly his promised land, and he asked that, when his own time came, he be buried next to Mom and Willow.
Meanwhile, Stella and I were also working in parallel to repair the house. So many issues had been deferred during mom's illness, and we wanted to create a safe and comfortable space for her to call home after narrowly graduating just a month before mom passed. We restored the bedrooms downstairs to cultivate a beautiful environment for a future housemate to help with the expenses. Stella herself spent three full days hand scraping carpet glue from the hardwood floors.
We were shouldering the crushing debt of the home repairs, the dual property taxes and mortgage, and the deferred living expenses of being long-term caregivers, but the income from the Hipcamp was going a long way to helping us cut down that debt, and I knew that if we could just make it to the end of the season, culminating with an estate sale of Mom’s things, we would have a fighting chance of making this a viable, sustainable, and positive business prospect for our family in 2021, and a sustainable pathway to help us keep ownership of the house and the farm we feel so connected to, not to mention a beautiful tribute to Mom’s vision of Beaver Haven.
The week before our big sale, the cold snap subsided and we were suddenly in the 60s again. We received two last-minute bookings checking in on Thursday, November 5th, and we told Bill that we would come out to the farm to greet them and help split more firewood.
When we arrived at the farm Stella went into the barn as I greeted the campers, and discovered that Bill had passed on, likely a couple hours beforehand. He appeared to have been taking a nap on the couch. He had his work boots on and his pant legs were wet, indicating that he had been working in the field just a short time before. He was as strong as an ox, carrying telephone poles on his shoulder when we moved the fence line just a month before he passed.
Bill was a hard-living renegade who cheated death on a regular basis… felling trees, rolling his truck, you name it. So the peacefulness of him passing in his sleep was a surprise to us all. He had recently told Stella that he didn’t think he would live too much longer, and he wanted her to know how much he loved her, but no one, except him, perhaps, thought that it would happen this soon after Mom herself walked on.
Losing Bill is especially devastating for Stella, now 24 years old. There was so little settled, so much to look forward to at the farm, and now so much debt and responsibility to shoulder, not to mention the heavy grief of being without the guidance of parents at a young age.
Of course, we are managing this together as a family, but it is crushing to start one’s adult life from a foundation of financial burden and emotional devastation. We felt like we were cresting the wave of grief and debt, but losing Bill has pulled us back into the undertow.
Luckily, we are blessed with a strong community who are ready and willing to help us with the hard work that needs to be done, and a loving and capable family. We are committed to coming out from under this in order to realize the dreams of our parents to finally create the environmental sanctuary and learning hub they always dreamed of, but we realize now that we can’t do it alone.
OUR SMALL OFFERING TO YOU
We know that many of you come from far and wide, but for any donation over $25 we will provide a transferable code for a complimentary stay at Beaver Haven. It would be an honor to host you! Thank you for your support, from the bottom of our hearts. It’s been a brutal year for us, but we know we’re not the only ones who are facing hardship these days. Onwards and upwards… with love.
Tai + Stella
Organizer
Tai Power Seeff
Organizer
Cashton, WI