WHO SAID ANYTHING about a hot tub? But building, I soon realized, is about ambition. Flee to the simple life if you want. Your dreams, friends, and family will still have their say. Deebie insisted on relocating the cabin to the highest point, for the view. Beth argued for a lower point, where a large meadow could accommodate the family house she imagined. ("One room?" she whispered accusingly. "What were you thinking?") Amy and Simon urged me to add a second story so I wouldn't have to expand later.

I gave speeches on Thoreauvian self-sufficiency, which were ignored, and then conceded several points. We would build where we were, in the small upper clearing, but expand the floor plan to 850 square feet, making space for a separate bedroom, a larger deck, and other bourgeois sellouts. Each change meant more graph-paper calculations, more wood, more delays, more costs, and more hours of carpentry.

My dream was entering the spiral of geometric expansion, and the design suggestions came pouring in. Amy came back from a rafting detour in Chile and said, hopefully, "I saw these nice railings at the camp there, made from stripped and seasoned saplings."

"Recycled barn doors," my wife suggested.

"Mapuche carvings would look nice," Colin offered.

Walls stuffed with hay bales? Why not a $1,300 propane refrigerator shipped down from California? Green Charley visited the site one morning and waved his hands in the air as he described a passive water heater made from black hoses and old wine bottles, although he admitted he'd never actually seen such a thing. Julito suggested energy-efficient sawdust insulation, until I pointed out that in a forest fire the cabin would go up like a Roman candle. Hadn't I heard about the new double-paned, helium-filled, nano-coated, electricity-generating windows my sister knew about? "You could make a windmill," Amy offered; she'd seen a Peace Corps design on the Internet. I swatted down as many of these ideas as I could, but Team Sawyer continued to fight a quiet insurgency, and one morning I found the stakes for the outhouse moved to a new location.

Necessity is the mother of compromise. A wind turbine was impractical, water power absurd, but in the bright Andean summer months of December through February, I often had 12 hours of sunshine on site. In Afghanistan a few years ago, I'd seen the Special Forces carrying solar panels that folded up like a map. I'd brought one, which charged my cell phone in 45 minutes (I could get a weak signal on the highest bump of my land) and my laptop in an afternoon. Green Charley lent me a car battery, Julito wired up some 12-volt lightbulbs, and suddenly we had illumination. Propane tanks would run a standard kitchen range and even a hot-water tank. For less than a thousand dollars, I soon owned all modern conveniences, though I still had no cabin to put them in.

Water was the issue that made my wife groan in frustration. A Californian, Beth expected to die of thirst on the hillside, given that the trickling stream seemed to be 50 percent cow urine. On an almost daily basis, I scrounged in the supply shops of local towns, until I came up with 420 meters of black hose to bear the water from the stream's source, a spring buried in a cleft of the hill above my land, to the cabin. After 12 days of constant promises, none of the wood for the cabin had yet arrived, so the appearance of a delivery truck carrying the hose, on the day scheduled, was such a shock that everyone pulled out their cameras.

We rolled the coiled hose uphill, to the spring. Julito built an improvised filter, and we jammed the hose into a point where no cow could reach; pure, icy springwater now gushed through the hose at one liter per second. Back home, we'd have run a Ditch Witch down to the cabin, digging a trench to bury the hose. Here, Gaucho Charley turned up at dawn with a pair of bellowing oxen, which dragged an ancient iron plow up the hill and back down, drooling.

Meanwhile, Julito's camp was getting nicer and nicer. He and his three assistants had built an outdoor shower, a barbecue pit, and a huge earthen larder filled with sausages, noodles, and wine. They dammed a bend in my little stream with logs, making a plunge pool for the 90-degree afternoons.

The only things missing were beams, boards, nails, brackets, and a roof.