One Year Later

This is an essay I wrote and posted on The Claire Files (Now The Mental Militia) on November 16, 2007. It commemorated my first year in the desert gulch, and is appropriately entitled "One Year Later."

It’s been almost exactly one year since I joined the ranks of the seriously engulched. Time to sit down and try to type something about it, maybe a few words about Lessons Learned.

The first thing I need to say about it is very simple: I drew the best hand you’ve ever seen. I fell into a situation I don’t in any way deserve, and I’ll always be grateful to the unnamed people who let it happen.

But I could have screwed it all up before the beginning, without ever even knowing I did. Looking back on all the things that led up to it points to the most important lesson of all – be a good neighbor. Enlightened self-interest boils down to a very simple principle: If you want good friends, be a good friend. Look for ways to be of service. Don’t do it because you hope to gain benefit by it, though you will. Do it because it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t always bring you personal benefit, but I guarantee the benefits far outweigh the costs. Everything – every single benefit I have gained has come from obeying this principle. Every single regret I carry comes from having violated it.

I believe that the gulchers who will succeed in the time to come will not be the rugged individualists. Gulches are communities – loose-knit communities maybe, but still. Yes, I know, we’ve all read the books about pioneers and people who carved a living from the wilderness and all that. And there’s an element of that in off-grid living, or at least it seems that way to someone like me, raised in cities. There’s a hell of a lot of work involved, and you do quite a bit of it alone. But I think only a rare sort of person takes pleasure in a daily diet of grinding, solitary labor. And while that old saw about many hands making light work isn’t always true, it’s still often true. Only a few days ago we finished the heavy parts of putting up a big pre-fab barn. This part required people to balance on shaky ladders while trying to line up panels weighing hundreds of pounds, eight or nine feet in the air, which they were more-or-less holding up with their other hands. It was an operation the owner and I had dreaded for weeks, wondering how on earth we were going to get it done. But several people showed up and pitched in with a will, and we got it done almost with ease and a good deal of knee-buckling hilarity. We had a ball getting it done. The two of us could – probably – just barely have done it, but there sure wouldn’t have been much laughter involved.

So, lesson one: Cultivate your neighbors. And be a good neighbor.

Lesson two: Choose your parents carefully, and be born rich. If this is no longer an option, be patient and/or realistic in your building goals.

I know of two building projects near where I live, of humbling beauty and complexity. We’re talking large, artistic homes that involve actual architecture. They’d be anybody’s pride, anywhere. The builders have these things in common: They know what they’re doing, they keep at it steadily … and they’ve both been at it for over seven years. And oh, by the way, neither is anywhere near done. Neither is rich, but they both have steady, well-paying jobs and they have sunk all the proceeds into these decade-long projects. Obviously, with these people the journey itself is part of the destination. I admire them for their energy, their tenacity, their artistry and their skill. But I don’t plan to imitate them.

Unless you already have the aforementioned parents, choose your goals carefully. Be realistic with yourself. If you are content with an RV trailer in the woods, that’s cool.

Er…will your spouse be content with that? If you’re currently single, were you ever planning to have a spouse? Guys, that trailer in the woods is emphatically not a babe magnet. I just totally can’t stress this enough.

Lesson three: Winter is cold. Winter is wet. Winter is not the time to be preparing for winter. Please, learn from my mistakes here.

Lesson four: If you need a conventional, high-paying job that provides your sense of identity, well-being and self-esteem, stay in the fucking city. That’s where they keep those.

I’m being completely serious here. If I had a dime for every wannabe who told me he needs to stay in (Chicago, or LA, or Boston, or wherever) because that’s the only place he can work at his profession, I could afford to pay somebody else to set up my goddamn solar power. Lots of people – maybe most people – gain their sense of identity from what they do professionally. I did, for years and years. It took a long and catastrophic bout of unemployment to finally teach me how much of a trap that is. To break out of that trap requires a truly wrenching change in mindset. But if you’re serious about that gulch in your future, if you’re not just spinning cotton candy castles in your mind, you’re probably going to need to achieve that change.

Granted that I may be an extreme case. Those two big projects I mentioned earlier are being accomplished by people who have, or who have access to other people who have, conventional, high-paying jobs in the city. One of those houses is occupied at present, the other is not and will not be until retirement. But you know what? Those people are not exceptions to the rule. When I get together with those people, they do not talk about their jobs. They don’t get their sense of identity from their jobs. They talk about that casita, or that retaining wall, or that goddamn flow valve that failed again and emptied their cistern again. Their goal is longer-term than mine. But they have the same basic goal, and they are totally focused on it. Even when they’re not here, they are here. The job is just a means of income, it’s not who they are.

Which brings me, at last, to my point. If you’re going to move to Hardyville, you may or may not need to change what you do for a living. But I guarantee you need to change the way you think about it. A job is a means to an end; to get money. Money, in turn, is a means to an end; to supply your gulch. How you do that is completely up to you, but I council flexibility.

What do you love? What do you love to do? That’s where your heart is, and it’s where your mind should be as well. You may – you probably will – need to rent your mind to that cubicle or that factory or whatever for periods of time. But don’t sell your mind to it. Don’t do that.

Of course if you’re one of the happy few whose profession is your passion, and it’s portable enough to take to your gulch, forget I said anything and go for it. But you’re probably not.

Lesson five: Living off-paper is highly overrated as a means to a secure and serenely contented life.

This is a terribly important lesson and you should learn it before you take action, not the way I did. I didn’t make a principled decision to abandon the slave number and all that it entails. I fumbled and mumbled and stumbled my way into it. Basically, in the wake of some bad stuff that happened I just got tired and hostile, and stopped filling out forms. You know, like tax forms. After a few years of that it sort of became important not to use the number. For anything.

Now, I know some people who have done the same thing, in a more principled and thoughtful way than I did. I’ve nothing against it, of course. I honor their decision. But before you make the same choice, understand what you’re getting yourself into.

No social security number generally means no driver’s license. I’m told that there are a (very) few states that won’t make an issue of this if you claim it’s against your religion. Haven’t tried it. No driver’s license means no auto insurance, and no vehicle registration. Enjoy your next sight of a cop in your rear-view mirror. I know I do. It means no “government-issued photo ID”, which means … oh, an ungodly number of things. Ever try to cash a paycheck without one? It adds layers of interest to your life.

Technically, no social security number means no employment. At all. In more informal employment situations, you can get around this by giving a false number and nobody’s going to check. These situations tend to be quite low-paying. They’re also drying up as one state after another succumbs to the anti-immigrant frenzy and starts leaning on employers in a concentrated and systematic way to verify “legal status.”

I’ve heard that social security cards no longer carry the little disclaimer about how they’re not to be used for identification. Just as well, I’m afraid.

Bottom line: If it weren’t for the help of friends who still have their papers in order, I’d be sunk. I’d starve. That’s a pretty precarious way to live, and I’m not content with it. Sooner or later I’ll have to take steps to get me one of those photo IDs somehow.

Lesson six: If you are finalizing plans for your gulch … no, long before you finalize your plans, shut up about it!

This is hard, because it’s an exciting time. It’s a new toy, and you want to tell the world. That’s great. Feel free to blather on about it to your gulchmates; they’ll understand. But it is strictly need-to-know information, and very few people need to know. Choose your gulchmates carefully and communicate with them fully. But it’s none of the business of the rest of the world. This may not seem important now; it may not be important now. But remember the wise old saying: You can’t unring a bell. The only substantial security is obscurity. Every uninvolved person you tell about it, knows about it. Your security in the future is that much diminished.

If I need to know where you live, tell me in a secure form. PGP is your friend. If I don’t need to know, then I shouldn’t know. Because I’m your friend, I don’t want to know.

Think security. If that feels silly to you, get used to it. You’ll thank yourself later.

Lesson seven: Domestic animals are your friends. Wild animals are not.

And great flying spaghetti monster, are there ever a lot of them! I’m talking about rats. Did you know they come in several varieties? But they all have this in common: They welcome humans as a massive and bounteous source of delicious food.

I haven’t found a single global solution to the rat problem. My closest neighbors have a pair of cats that are working on it for us, but observation of other neighbors indicates that this success is unusual. Predatory cats are only about halfway up the local food chain and unfortunately tend to end up as food themselves. Also, most domestic cats aren’t particularly enthusiastic predators. They’d much rather lay around all day and have you feed them, so the only way to ensure they’ll do their thing is to exile them to the barn and refuse to feed them regularly. That’s pretty heartless in my opinion, but many disagree. My friends’ cats just happen to really enjoy killing rats, and they are protected in turn by a bunch of large noisy dogs that the local top-tier predators don’t choose to deal with, and that enjoy eating the rats that the cats enjoy killing. So it works out for them. But like I said, unusual.

Rats can chew through damned near anything, and will. Galvanized metal seems to stop them, but don’t think your food is secure just because it’s put away in a cabinet. That assumption can give you quite an unpleasant surprise.

Lesson eight is a corollary of lessons one, five and six. It’s likely that your gulch will be situated near a small town. It’s possible that you’ll work in that town, at least from time to time. It’s certain that you’ll need services from it. Be nice to the townies. If you’re used to cities, chances are that you’re really not experienced with living in a community. What I mean is, you are used to being surrounded by your co-workers, your family, a few close friends or acquaintances, and millions of irrelevant strangers. In a small town, that’s not the way it works. The economy is likely to be service-based: That is, you do stuff for them, and they do stuff for you. If you’re competent at it, and if you go about it with a pleasant attitude, word will get around. If you don’t, well, word will get around. Either way, this will affect the quantity of business and the quality of service that you receive from others. It’s like being nice to the nurses in a hospital: They can make your life easier, or they can make it hell. It absolutely won’t pay you to gain a reputation as an asshole.

In a small community, other peoples’ peccadilloes are always a spectator sport, and sometimes a participatory one. I’m serious here. If you’re an asshole and somebody finds out you’re doing something illegal, they will turn your ass in just for laughs. Or if they decide you’re a nice guy they will cover your ass, just for laughs. Hey, it beats romance novels.

I didn’t mean to turn this into a manifesto, so I’ll wrap it up with lesson nine: Take the time to enjoy yourself.

Between your livelihood, your building projects and maintenance, it’s easy to turn gulching life into a grind. But that’s not the point of the exercise. Hike your territory. Smell the flowers. Feed the hummingbirds. Read a good book in the bright sunshine. Bask in the beauty of your surroundings, and become a part of them. Love life. In the end it’s all you have, and there are so many rewards.

That’s all I’ve got to say. Anybody else want to add to the list, or beat up on some part of it?