I needed a remote piece of land where anything was possible. I’d spent six years in the city building online communities and now I wanted to build one offline. Specifically, a place for a bunch of friends to be outdoors, somewhere we could be less preoccupied by our professions and more reliant on each other as we practice new skills together. I imagined a landscape nested with shelters we would make ourselves without any previous experience. My search began in upstate New York. I was looking for a place where the locals wouldn’t mind our experiments with architecture, assembling what would surely look like a commune.

Like most people who go upstate, I had previously stayed close to the Hudson, a vital river in the Northeast, which runs down past the leeward side of the Catskill Mountains through a wide valley that reflects New England with its u-pick orchards and colonial towns. It’s pretty, but I couldn’t find land that felt sufficiently wild. I had decided to explore elsewhere. After a year driving wider and wider circles around New York City, I got a tip on a barn and some property for rent in the hills above the majestic Upper Delaware Valley, a part of the state I had never visited before.

A friend and I made the trip in late April, and I knew as soon as we left the highway at Port Jervis that there would not be any gentlemen’s farms here. The hills hemming the Delaware River are densely forested and slope steeply down to the banks, leaving just enough room for a sinuous county road to be carved out, with dilapidated houses serving as milestones. Alongside us, a thick band of fog hovered above the water, and streams trickled down muddy banks into shoulders of ferns. So much had grown back since the late 1700s, when these forests were nearly all clear-cut so that logs could be floated down to Philadelphia to be milled for lumber, or sometimes as masts for British ships (the King of England once laid claim to all large trees within ten miles of a navigable river). Nowadays the trees are cut for firewood, and out-of-towners float down the Delaware with rafts and coolers of beer.

The barn didn’t work out; too many rooms lacked floorboards for the price. But I fell for the area. We stopped for BLTs at a motel restaurant, and I took out my phone to swipe through real estate listings. When I saw the thumbnails on the realtor’s page, I just knew it. Two and a half miles upriver, 50 acres of forest were for sale. The property had a dirt road cutting through a stand of shagbark hickories, leading to a simple shed-style cabin with no electricity or plumbing that sat high above a brook feeding back down to the Delaware. Along the banks of this brook, century-old eastern white pines, known as the sequoias of the East, tilted at gravity-defying angles, their root systems exposed and clinging to the mossy, wet piles of stone left behind by erosion.