How We Did and How We Do

A number of Superstruct people have been asking how we arranged Edgeville. For the most part, we made it up as we went along, and we’ve been very lucky. But maybe this outline combining our history with our methods can help other nomads to settle down.

I. Nomading is no way to live

Not in the “Developed World” anyway. Settled people are justifiably suspicious of caravans that appear without warning on the outskirts of town. Everyone is on the edge of failure; wanderers are hungry, they steal, they spread disease. I’d say that we spent a total of two years, non-consecutively, on the road. When we came near a settled area, we set up camp somewhere on the outskirts and began immediately to look for food. We dumpster-dived, we took charity, and we stole. We killed and ate people’s pets.

So we were hoboes. There was a whole population living out there in between the cities and the towns. It was like the Great Depression. A lot of those people are in work camps now, I think. Certainly there weren’t many that we wanted to have any kind of lasting association with, too mean or too pathetic. We kept in touch with a few via email, when we could.

Here are some of the things that made it possible to keep body and soul together while we were travelling:

http://hexayurt.com/

http://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia

http://toolmonger.com/2008/05/08/climb-chain-link-fences-the-easy-way/

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11219554

http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/category/hexayurt

II. Finding a place to live

We tried twice before we settled here. We looked for a place that already had at least one building and no neighbors. There’s more of those than you would think. Places that were built during boom times have been abandoned as the ecomony faltered and infrastructures failed. There are mining and logging towns, industrial parks, strip malls and light commercial zones, all standing empty on the outskirts of towns and cities. We wanted a preexisting building because, while we had hexayurts and generators, we didn’t have the expertise or resources to build safe, relatively comfortable places to live.

There are numerous condo developments and planned communities out there, but we found them unsuitable. They’re impossible to heat without infrastructure, and they tend to be cheaply built. Most of them are rotting quickly. “Homes” in general are built with the assumption that there will be municipal power, sewage, and transportation available. But an industrial park generally has brick and aluminum buildings with large interior spaces, a chainlink fence, decent internal roads, and so on.

III. Turning it into a town.

I can’t really tell you how to find such a place. Keep looking. The one we have is laid out something like this:

It is an industrial park set between an inactive mine–inactive for a hundred years or so, I would say–and a bit of foresty scrubland. There are two access roads leading to rural routes. We’ve erased these access roads as much as we can, digging up and planting them over, and replacing them with a mazy series of curving embankments. This is because we’re paranoid about FEMA cops coming here to “resettle” us.

There are three main buildings and a number of “temporary” buildings–steel shipping containers originally fitted out as storage and office spaces–arranged around a central Yard. The Yard was paved when we came here late last summer, but we’ve ripped up the concrete and we’ve been working on the soil. We grow some vegetables in here, but it’s not very productive right now.

The main warehouse building functions as Big House. We use the same hexayurts inside here that we used to use on the road, just set up inside to compartmentalize the space, create some privacy, and prioritize our heating. The yurts are our bedrooms and living spaces, basically, but they’re fairly communal. The in-between spaces are used for storage and little projects, like Stegman’s “TV rooms”. Stegman hauled a bunch of stationary bikes in here from somewhere and hooked them up to power generators, and hooked up televisions to run off excess power from the generators. The TVs won’t work if you aren’t riding the bikes, generating power. This is his sense of humor in action! Anyway, as a result, no one watches much TV. We also keep the livestock inside here in the winter. It doesn’t smell great but it’s safer and warmer. We have pigs, chickens and goats, because they’re easy to feed and good to eat.

We have a bank of Kamen Slingshot power generator/water purifier systems in the back. These are used for drinking and bathing water, and hook up to outside lines as well. Behind the Slingshots is an unpretty arrangement: the shitbox. Everyone is supposed to do their dirty, sinful business back here. Number ones get processed into the water supply; number twos get processed into fertalizer and fuel. It takes some getting used to.

Across from the Big House is the Box, the two office trailers connected by a covered walkway, where the comm hub is. Pierce is in charge of all this; I just use the stuff. We have meetings in here, make plans, play computer games, conference with friends and family abroad. Pierce is the only guy here with an actual income; he does freelance coding.

Kattycorner between the Big House and the Box is Leona’s Kitchen, a sort of big garage that was a machine shop. We hauled all the machine remnants out and put in various food prep facilities. Leona has some experimental stuff going on in there, hydroponics and mushroom farms, a loom, general Woman’s Work stuff (her words, not mine).

Other trailers/shipping containers are used for storage and living space for people who don’t want to live in the Big House for one reason or another, mostly families and Weird Loners, like Todd, who is writing a novel and doesn’t like eye contact.

Out back of all this is the Farm, and it runs pretty much the way you’d imagine: rows of stuff growing. We’ve got carrots, collard greens, potatoes, tomatoes, and so forth. We built tanks to collect rainwater, and have various water filtration systems that work or don’t work to various degrees. There was a lot of sheet steel and PVC around when we moved in; this is what we did with most of it. Leona, Stegman and I do most of the planning for this. This summer, we started selling excess food to a guy who brings it into the City and sells it to well-heeled folks for, I hear, quite a lot of money. He’s getting rich on our garlic.

Past this is my experimental yard. Most of it is taken up with the mountain of concrete taken out of The Yard, which I’m trying to turn into a terrace farm like they have in Italy. There are also some of my experimental construction and fabrication projects, most failing but some of them kind of interesting. Stegman sneers and calls this “art”. If it’s art, I should be able to sell it to someone! We’ve also got alpacas here, but they’re not doing too well. Stegman traded some old machine parts for them with someone down the road, with the idea that we could make sweaters or something, but we don’t know how to care for them and I predict we’ll eat them all before this winter is out.

Behind that is a sort of big blob of rock where there used to be a mine. There are still big holes in the ground, and I feel like someday we should consider moving some of our operations down there for security and invisibility. Also, if I knew a thing about shepherding, and if we could get sheep, this could be a good place to pasture them. It’s rocky, but there’s a lot of grass.

IV. Where we get stuff

We came together on the road, and we had whatever we had with us: tents, yurts, camp stoves, pickup trucks, utility knives, Spanish-English dictionaries, etc. As we moved we acquired things and we lost things. We came here to edgeville because a friend of mine told me about it, at a time when we were at loose ends, and we found a lot of useful things here. When we needed something we didn’t have and couldn’t scrounge up, we either made it, bought it, or stole it. We’ve tried to stay away from charities, though we’ve taken clothing and food donations from people who don’t ask for receipts.