Yurts

Some of my friends spend their extra time and money abandoning their comfortable homes to spend weekends in small tents filled with mosquitos and sweaty children. They call this “camping.” The idea of leaving your 60” high-def television behind and  voluntarily hanging out under a piece of cloth draped from a couple of poles always puzzled me, because it didn’t make any “sense.” 

When I asked a few campers why they do it, I got answers like, “Communing with nature lets us bond as a family,” and, “We really enjoy eating pancakes that smell like kerosene.”

OK, I can see that. Also, just about any Urgent Care will give you a group rate on treatment for chiggers. But I still could never get into the idea of making a home, even for a weekend, in one of those drafty little tents.

Then it struck me – I could have it all, just by living in a Yurt!

In a previous column I mentioned Yurts, mostly because the word is basically hysterical. If you don’t wear Birkenstocks and make your own granola, or look up funny-sounding words like I do, there’s a pretty good chance you don’t know much about Yurts. Allow me to fill you in.

A Yurt is a round tent, built of sticks and animal skins. Yurts have been around for thousands of years, providing spacious but portable homes for nomadic people in Kyrgyzstan and other places where vowels are in short supply. Genghis Khan liked to hang out in his Yurt and unwind when he wasn’t out raping and pillaging.

The traditional Yurt was designed to be a complete home, providing comfort and protection against the elements, yet easy to break down and move. This is to accommodate a family’s needs in terms of migrating, vacationing, or fleeing. Mongol nomads could set up their Yurt in about two hours, which is a lot quicker than I can park an RV. 

Modern architects have studied Yurt technology that remained largely unchanged for millennia, then transformed this simple tent made of sticks and animal skins into a kit you can buy for just under $20,000. For that you get the option of installing hardwood parquet, instead of the time-honored nomad flooring made of horse dung mixed with straw and goat vomit. You can power-wash the space-age fabric exterior, instead of rubbing it down with Yak urine.

Sign me up! I do, however, have a few fundamental questions about Yurt living. 

For one thing, the inside of Yurts don’t have any corners. Where are you supposed to lean your hockey stick? How do you hang that 60-inch high-def television on a curved fabric wall? What happens if you’re cooking up some bacon in your Yurt kitchen and suddenly, outdoors, scratching away on the other side of that soft fabric wall, is a bear? Or your wife, who came home early and thought you were going to be making granola?

You also have to think about how large the Yurt should be. Drawing on our high school geometry, the formula we use to calculate the area of a circle is “A = π r²,” which means that once I determine the radius of my Yurt, I still have no idea how much stuff I can fit in there.

I guess I could just get a real big Yurt and hope for the best, or maybe gain some space by going straight up. They make two-story Yurts, and I can prove it: 

If you look carefully, you’ll see that the one pictured here has an upstairs entrance from the outdoor staircase, which means that after the kids move out, you could rent out the second floor as an Air B&Yurt.

Then there’s the issue of what kind of furniture to put in a round house. What style will work best in Yurt rooms? I’m thinking primarily beanbag chairs.

Ok, so there might be some complications to Yurt living, and I’ll bet there are a couple of other issues I haven’t thought of yet. Maybe I need to do a little bit more homework before I pony up the $20K for my Yurt kit.

By the way, for those of you who spent the last eleven paragraphs wondering where Kyrgyzstan is, it’s just north of Tajikistan – where I assume they also have Yurts.

Copyright © 2018 Michael Ball. All rights reserved.