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.

I’ve never met Flaco’s father, but I’ve conferenced with him a couple of times. He’s a CPA in Dallas, with a prison tattoo on his neck and that beefy, taut, lizardy look that genuine tough guys sometimes get as they age.

I first met Flaco and Diego at FEMA Camp Hammer in Mississippi. I had driven two days to get there, only to have my truckload of hexayurts, food, and water filtration systems confiscated, and my person detained in the camp. There were dead people everywhere, dead from exposure, dead from disease, dead from starvation, maybe even dead from fear, surrounded by sand barriers, concertina wire (no joke), and armed guards. Diego approached me when he learned that I was working with Stegman and a few others to depart, ASAP. He and his cousin Milagro, called “Flaco”, had split off from an 18th St squad in order to retrieve their grandmother from Gulfport. They had refused to be parted with her and ended up here, and they could see what was up. If they stayed, they and she would be dead.

Diego was 17, Flaco 14. Anyone could see from their tattoos what they were, and everyone knew that 18th Street was fighting pitched battles with FEMA troops all over the South. If I’m being perfectly honest here, I was not happy about taking a frail old woman with us, but we needed those boys. I ended up carrying Abuela Dominga on my back, sending the boys ahead with Stegman, armed with tent struts which they did not, to my knowledge, have to use. Good thing, too. I imagine we all would have been shot dead.

Dominga died that winter.  She was in sort of a fugue state the whole time at Camp Hammer and she never really recovered. We buried her in a manicured lawn at the edge of a condominium development in Misouri and I think that was where we broke with America. We would bury our dead where we could, eat what we could find or grow, live where we could make ourselves safe, but we wouldn’t ever follow directives from a faceless federal agency again. Those people don’t know shit.

I guess I don’t know why Flaco and Diego didn’t just go home to Dallas then; as far as I know it didn’t occur to them, though we had a conversation about it later, with Flaco’s father. We were nomads then, staying away from towns and cities and National Guard sweeps, mostly by avoiding highways. It’s kind of shocking how much America there is in between the highways, in between the cities. There’s always a road just past the next hill or stand of trees, but no one could cover those local roads effectively. We would camp wherever we felt we would be unnoticed, industrial zones, abandoned mining and logging camps, National Parks. Local people overlooked us a lot of the time, as long as we didn’t interfere with them, but sometimes we didn’t have a choice. Flaco and Diego would disappear for several days and come back with camping gear, hunting rifles, crates of food. Sometimes it was through 18th Street contacts, but just as often its was simple theft. I insisted on leaving firearms alone–the last thing we needed was to be branded insurgents and Wacoed–so they took up archery and came back with fresh meat.

It’s fairly ridiculous, a 43-year-old man having these feelings of hero worship toward a couple of teenagers (though Diego is 21 now), but I look at them and think what I was like at their age. I hadn’t had an easy childhood, but I responded by turning selfish and callow. They’re fairly selfish, too, but in a different way; if they aren’t healthy our edgeville will fail. They’re heroes, protectors and providers. I worry about them, though. A part of me doesn’t believe this experiment is going to work. We’ll get rounded up and relocated, or driven apart by hunger, and what will they do? How am I preparing them to make a life outside of our puny little rebellion? If they’d stayed with their people, wouldn’t they be better off?

We’d been camping near Wichita, but it wasn’t looking good. Too cold, too developed, too flat with nowhere to hide. Flaco brought me in on a call to his father in Dallas where we talked about the boys’ future. Afterwards, Stegman clutched Flaco in a bearhug while Diego held his face and looked him in the eyes, and I took a red-hot spatula out of the fire and burned the 18th Street tattoos off his shoulders and hands.

Specifically, the Leaders play forecasting games of various kinds to manage long range planning. For example, what if a law enforcement agency decides to round up all the squatters? Or, how will climate changes affect various crops? These are typically very dry and technical resource management and realtime strategy games, and I’m not very good at them.

Generally, the Leaders discuss topics of interest, ask for advice, and offer aid and assistence to one another. I’m better at this part.

Membership in the Leaders’ Forum is by invitation only. In theory it is both anonymous and secure, but we assume we’re being spied on most of the time. For the record, we are not planning terrorism or insurrection of any kind.

In the meantime, I’d like to say some things about the GEAS report.

It’s pretty ridiculous.

I’m not saying it’s not based on sound science, or that it shouldn’t be taken seriously, but the idea that 9 billion people (that’s 9,000,000,000 people, people) and all of their children will die in the next 23 years, I’m sorry, it’s ridiculous. It’s not like we’re facing down a giant asteroid here, or a zombie plague, or a global thermonuclear war.

I think it’s entirely possible that what we are facing is the collapse of a global civilization, and that’s kind of okay with me. It was always a bad idea, and postponing it only makes things worse. Maybe there will be a period of generalized social chaos, which would be very bad for those of us who have to live through it, and surely a lot of people would die badly. The antidote to this is work–Work Will Make You Free, they used to say–and self reliance.

People thought the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust by 1980. They thought it was ending during the Reformation in Germany in the 1500s. They thought the plague in Europe was God’s final judgement. Humankind survived all that, and we’ll survive this too if we will just stop worrying all the time and get to work.

If you think you are in a place where you may die, get out. If you need help, look around you for others who need help. If you don’t have food, make food. Work. Pretty simple. In this way, 9 billion people and all their children will not die in the next 23 years.

Our population is currently 172 souls, including children, which to my mind suggests that it’s time for us to split up, but that’s not really my call. We are refugees from hurricanes, wildfires, economic disasters, and a handful like me who simply couldn’t tolerate living in an overcrowded city any more. We don’t pay taxes and we don’t vote, we don’t register our children in schools and we won’t respond to the government census.

We work. We feed ourselves by farming and, lately, sluggishly, by trade. We work together and everything we own we own together. It doesn’t always go smoothly.

We live in a narrow valley between a big lump of exposed bedrock that used to be a mine, and an artificial mini-forest that has become a real mini-forest since it was abandoned. On the other side of the mini-forest is a spooky place, a vale of suburban homes and condominiums whose buyers never materialized. Built during the last real estate boom, its investors have disappeared and now, so far as I can tell, some international investor owns it as collateral on a bad debt but has no idea it exists. It was word of that place that first brought us here, the idea that, while refugees from hurricanes Paula, Quentin, and Renata were dying of exposure in makeshift camps and sports arenas, there were tracts of empty houses like these. But they are not well-built, hard to heat without gas, and awfully exposed. Sometimes we raid them for raw materials.

Instead, we live in an even older abandoned industrial complex. We’ve built a low wall around it, with a ditch inside and outside, and a rusty, patchy fence. Most of us have our yurts pitched inside an immense warehouse with boarded up windows. We keep our livestock, such as it is, inside with us, for warmth. We have a bank of kamen stirling generators, which work from the heat of anything we can burn in them; they give us power and run the water purifiers. We smashed up most of the concrete ground outside, exposing dirt that was packed hard and utterly without nutrients. This is slowly turning into arable soil. The rubble has been carefully stacked to form the foundation of a terrace farm, maximizing the square acrage of our little homestead. I would like to get even more vertical, but we’ll see how the crops we have pan out. This year is our first harvest and I’m optimistic.

We came here late in the summer of 2018, so it’s been just over a year. The first winter was hard. We had MREs and some food stores from before, but we had to augment our diet in a number of unsavory ways. We seem to have been forgiven for this by our nearest neighbors, a struggling small town about 15 miles away. Which is a miracle, I should add.

Before we came here, we weren’t welcome anywhere and we moved a lot. Twice we were taken to refugee camps, but got out as soon as we could. I don’t think anyone is going to bother us here.

It’s delicious, but it could be that effect where any food tastes delicious if you’re hungry enough. The old water purifiers are getting damned rickety, and Stegman and I are hoping to reverse-engineer them and build our own, rather than figuring out how to buy new ones. This involves a lot of bickering, broken up by episodes of hard labor which I am getting too old for (remember the Motto!), but we’re making some progress and actually uncovering some hard truths about our irrigation platform that we might not have found otherwise. Stegman insists on calling me “bossman”, which I don’t like at all. He’s insufferable since the documentary people were here.

Writing later. The smell of “hunter’s stew” was too distracting and I didn’t want to get stew on the keyboard again. On the subject of documentaries, I have to start at least making notes for Brad Pitt’s people. I won’t have them filming here again, it’s too risky, but the Leaders Forum keeps telling me it’s a good idea to explain our methods with a media outlet where we at least have some input, and if we impress Brangelina we stand to gain some serious funding. I agree in principle but I’m uncomfortable with the attention. Anyway, outline:

Four years ago, fell in love with woman other than my wife; instead of engaging in typically decadent ritual of betrayal and melodrama, freaked out, cashed in city life for flatbed truck loaded with yurts, vapor distillers and stirling generators; drove south until I hooked up promising group of hurricane refugees; we’ve been accused of all kinds of outlaw behavior, sometimes factually, and had to resettle three times, but we seem to be in a place now where we can attain real self-sufficiency, even some limited local trade if the alpaca thing works out (not looking good right now). Because of our precarious status here, we don’t want Brangelina’s people broadcasting any information that could prove tactical about our property or our people. We have a charter. Everyone works like hell and we feed our people. We are in communication with nodes of other people attempting to achieve self-sufficiency “off the grid”. We are not loonies. We don’t know what we’re going to do if our people start getting sick.

Get some sleep.