Alissa was in love the first time she heard Avi Askey’s voice.
She’d seen an ad in the paper that he was hiring help at his plant nursery. She was on her way to a job in Canada teaching kids how to survive in nature, the whole bit, but she needed quicker cash than a trip to the depths of the Canadian wild could yield. So she called him.
Avi didn’t answer. But there was something in his tone and his candor, even on the machine, that she couldn’t resist.
“I heard his voice and I was just like I. Love. You. I hung up the phone and was like I am going to marry this man!” she says. “I went and wrote a banjo song about him and I was just obsessed.”
He returned her call days later, and this time she missed it. He left her a message asking her to come in for an interview.
“I played that message like a hundred times. I’d be at a party and go into the back of my van, and I’d crouch down real low and listen.”
Arriving in Vonore, Tennessee the day before her interview, she drove around and past the nursery, searching for signs of a man she already knew she loved.
When she met Avi finally the next day, he wasn’t exactly what she’d expected.
“But his voice and the way he walked, it was just like I was hooked,” she says.
She was immediately hired upon interviewing. They made an arrangement that she’d stay in the barn loft on his verdant holler property, but she never spent a night without him. Just as soon as she’d committed to working his land, they were talking marriage and children. Three weeks later, she was pregnant with their first boy, Jonas.
Life quickly changed for all of them.
“It was quick, it really was, and it was a heck of a way to meet somebody, but we’ve done alright,” she says.
Avi was drawn to Tellico Plains through similarly supernatural means.
He felt drawn to go South from Pennsylvania, and he trusted his gut as he wound through mountain roads without direction. He knew he wanted land. He knew somewhere down here he’d find it. He turned left when he felt he had to. He turned right as his instincts instructed. He found land for sale on Citico Road; he made a bid, and he bought it.
Avi Askey was far from the first person to discover this fertile Eden. It was a mecca of Cherokee history. They flocked to the land after being displaced in every direction by 18th century European settlers, only to be forced onward again years later.
Alissa’s own Cherokee heritage is in Tennessee, a place she never imagined herself (and a fact she didn’t know) until she was there. Her great, great grandad was the Raven of Choctaw. Now she finds arrowheads and remnants of Cherokee pottery every time they till.
In his first two years of living on the land he called Overhill Gardens, Avi lived in a teepee. He wasn’t unaccustomed to living less-than-conventionally. His parents are self-described “back-to-earthers.”
“You wouldn’t call them hippies, because politically they weren’t hippies at all,” Alissa says, “but they were into that whole back to the roots kind of thing, you know?”
His mom is the kind of woman who made cheese everyday from scratch. His parents raised cattle and grew their food. They bought a dilapidated farm house and made it their own. They believed in knowing where their food came from long before it was a thing to do.
“[Avi’s mom] is a hard woman to live up to,” she says. “This woman is getting double knee replacements, and she’s working 50 hours a week here in the nursery squatting and doing all kinds of stuff -- she will not complain at all, and if she ever does complain, you need to be looking at ERs or something. If she’s like, ‘yeah i’m not feeling that great,’ I’m like ‘we’re going to the hospital.’”
Avi’s parents joined them on the rolling Overhill property, first in a trailer and now in a home that sits just up the dirt road from their children and grandchildren.
In the face of whatever intimidation Alissa is confronted with, she continues to move forward. Together, she and Avi envision more for their family and their property. The two are intertwined.
In time, she’d like to create more space for other people to stay, in renovated airstreams, teepees and a cabin that has its foundation already laid.
“Sit for a second and dream with me,” she says, tucked into the booth of the bright red Shasta airstream that sits on the pathway from her house to the woods. Her boys play sweetly in the loft. “Everybody thinks this is a dream,” she says, “but you have to beat back the land all the time.”
The work at Overhill is ceaseless; that’s the catch of a “simplified” life. With no one to rely on but yourselves, there’s a big, less-than-glamorous difference between simple and easy; the Askies know that first hand.
“Avi’s work is non-stop -- he works until he goes to bed,” she says. “It’s so exhausting and there’s no money in it. You have to love the lifestyle or you’ll just go crazy.”
And for where there is challenge, there is sincerity. The Askies do what they do because they believe in it, not because they think someone might be looking or maybe because fate had a hand in it.
When Alissa and Avi met, she’d been an adventurer, traversing from her home in Florida to the Pacific Northwest, searching for anything but permanence. She’d grown lavender and raised alpacas, biked the coastline into Canada and traveled to island farms by sailboat.
When she heard Avi’s voice for the first time, she wrote down her dreams: that she’d live on a farm, raise children and love the man on the other side of the line.
After she came to the holler, she never left.
Now she’s surrounded by three growing boys, Jonas (age 6), Asa (age 4) and Callum (age 2), and a husband she loves, respects and admires. They fill her life with purpose and beauty that can’t be described but only experienced. She and Avi aren’t sure what they want for their boys -- whether one or all of them will take the land as their own, or even if they want them to.
"Our kids spend May through October foraging for wild foods (many of them in our yard),” Avi says. “And it’s one of our biggest joys as parents – to have them grow up with that being the norm."
Believe it or not, there’s a school bus that makes its way out to Overhill Gardens. Alissa cried when she watched her oldest boy step onto the bus as it pulled him away with dust swelling in its stead.
Story & photographs by Jodi Cash