In the spring of 1987, Cathy Holdorf and her husband, John, drove to the end of a gravel road in Soap Creek, Oregon, a rural community 10 miles north of Corvallis. Here, where the smooth spread of the Willamette Valley begins to buckle against the Coast Range, they’d come to look at a property for sale: 30 acres of oak savanna draped over a south-facing hillside. They parked at the foot of the hill and set out walking. The lower land was intriguing — iron-doored bunkers from a World War II-era training camp cut into the earth and a creek ran nearby — but it wasn’t until they climbed the slope that they knew they’d found what they were looking for.

On a knoll partway up a ridge called Poison Oak Hill, they stood to take in the view: Slender meadows wove through a tumble of foothills. Beyond, wooded ridges stacked deep blue into the distance. Even before starting back down, they’d begun to dream of a home here: a woodshop, a house, a garden.

The property was owned by Robert and Daniel Bunn. Known around town as the Bunn Brothers, these siblings also owned the local landfill, which was dug into the south face of Coffin Butte just across the valley from Poison Oak Hill. Despite its proximity — less than a mile north — the dump didn’t immediately concern the Holdorfs. From where they stood that day, it was out of sight. It was relatively small, locally owned, and, they’d been told, soon to close. Besides, over 100 undeveloped acres, also owned by the Bunns, spanned between the dump and the property for sale. This land, the Bunns assured the Holdorfs, would always serve as a buffer: No trash would ever be placed there.

“We were just so convinced that it was a small dump, that it was being run well and would sunset soon.” Cathy told me recently. “Maybe it was naive, but we didn’t even consider that all of that could change.”

The Holdorfs bought the property and began to build a home for their family. Cathy hand-drew the blueprints. John built nearly everything himself, picking through stacks of lumber at the local mill for the best boards. After the house was finished, the couple bought the adjacent 30 acres of pastureland, which they would later reforest with native pine, ash, cedar and fir. “We thought of it as a legacy home, something we’d pass on to our children,” Cathy said. The place was the embodiment of a dream long held, and the Holdorfs expected to spend the rest of their lives there.

The first decade the family lived in Soap Creek, relations with the landfill were just as they’d been promised. The Bunns regularly tested the Holdorfs’ well water. When the brothers began a composting operation, they gifted the family truckloads of mulch. The Bunns even allowed the Holdorfs to lease the buffer acreage to graze cattle, charging an annual fee of $1.