Embrace the Chaos

As I mentioned earlier, two gulch stakeholders have come to the property on at least a semi-permanent basis. While M waits for the building permit for HIS secret lair, he and W have helped build a fire under my ass (and provide much-needed capacity for heavier labor) which has gotten MY somewhat-more-secret lair out of the angst-and-gloom phase and into actual construction. This is good, and much appreciated.

Both M and W are familiar enough with the area here to know what they're getting into, but each had reactions ranging from amusement to mild horror at the way I've chosen to live for the past year. Their reactions, and the subsequent discussions, have got me to thinking about mental changes I've made in the past couple of years, particularly the past twelve months. I have basically been, and continue to be, engaged in an experiment of sorts. Some of the circumstances I'm in have been thrust upon me, but mostly it's something I've chosen to do, to learn the answer to a question: How minimal can you make your amenities and infrastructure, how small can you make your metaphorical footprint, and still retain some joy of life? The answer is: Compared to life on the west coast, quite a bit.

One example: I spent last winter balancing my need not to freeze to death with my desire to spend the absolute minimum on heating fuel. This isn't Minnesota, but winter nights here do routinely dip into the mid-teens and may or may not go above freezing during the day - it's cold. But still, with me and three dogs the temperature in the lair rarely fell below freezing, so actual death by hypothermia usually wasn't a worry. I gradually developed a determination that the only thing I really had to worry about keeping warm was my epidermis, and most times this could be accomplished more easily (and much cheaper) by adding a layer or two of clothing rather than cranking up the heat. I literally went days at a time without ever taking off my coat. I was usually quite comfortable, especially since there was no one present to smell me but myself and the dogs, but it did lead to embarrassing moments such as when my landlady came for her monthly visit dressed for a warmer climate, and it never occurred to me to politely start the furnace.

Another example, perhaps taken too far. A person can live more-or-less contentedly on stored beans, rice and flour. A person can take his diet so basic that canned vegetables - or any vegetables at all - start seeming like an unsupportable extravagance. A person can lose all his teeth to scurvy, too - it's really not the way to go long-term, but that's the way I did go for a while. And yes, for the most part I was quite contented with that diet. But it was probably not especially wise.

But someone will say, "Why would you ever want to do that? That would really suck." But that's actually the point: It did not suck. Well, mostly it didn't. And the reason it didn't is because I had embraced the chaos.

City life - that is, most people's lives - is really very rigidly controlled. Heat and cold can be softened and made comfortable with air conditioning and heating. Water runs limitless from the tap, clean and chlorine-scented. The lights always work. Everybody always knows what time it is. The days are divided rationally between week-days belonging to your employer, and weekends belonging to you. It's all very comforting, very controlled. Predators don't challenge your pets and threaten your livestock; rattlesnakes never show up in your yard.

Life in the boonies isn't like that. Life in the boonies can be routine, sure, but the next emergency is always waiting. You can go nuts trying to control everything, because nothing is ever really under control. At best, it's just handled for the moment. And although of course you always want to be ready to handle shit when it happens, there's really no point in worrying about it. In fact most of the time it's kinda fun.

But people who hope and dream of a life in the boonies sometimes have unrealistic expectations. Take, for example, that great mantra of preparedness types: "Off-The-Grid." You think of living off the grid and you think of no longer being dependent on a vast, impersonal utility infrastructure with its arbitrary billing rates, its brown-outs, its cozy relationships with foul government types. All good, right? Fine, but (assuming you actually do it) you're trading all that for dependence on a very, very personal individual infrastructure that's vulnerable to, prone to, certain to exhibit all sorts of failures from the simple to the maddeningly esoteric, and it's all expensive, and it's all happening to you alone, and there's no point in this world waiting for the guy with the wrench to show up and fix it because the guy with the wrench is you. Shit will happen, and it will happen to you, and how you cope with it will in large portion determine how well you do in that retreat you're dreaming of.

The trick is to prepare for shit to happen to the extent consistent with your resources and good sense, deal with it when it happens, be prepared to learn from your mistakes in failing to adequately deal with it, and not let it get you down. A sense of humor helps a lot.

Challenges occur, and the conventional ways of responding to those challenges don't always make a lot of sense under the circumstances. I give you, as example, this:
This is the foundation for my new cabin, and you'll notice right away that the ground it's on doesn't seem especially level, and that the piers the floor will sit on are all different lengths. The conventional means of dealing with an uneven build site is to even it out, to level it and compact it and make it conform to the needs of the building to be constructed there. And that's a very fine way to deal with it - if you happen to have access to heavy equipment and a construction crew. Or...you can embrace the chaos. If you're building on piers, the only important thing is that the tops of the piers be level with one another. The actual length of each pier is completely immaterial. So spend a summer leveling and compacting the ground with hand tools, or spend a couple of days setting and leveling the piers and be done with it. The result looks chaotic but it will work, and it can be done with hand tools and manual labor, and much more quickly, and it costs a lot less.

Next winter, with the Secret Lair habitable, the economics of staying warm should change dramatically. Last winter I was dependent on propane and kerosene, all of which had to be purchased with very scarce money and transported with a nonexistent truck. The Interim Lair has its charms, but it's very poorly insulated: Burning fuel just causes heat to pour out through the cracks. The Lair will be insulated like a refrigerator, and principally heated with wood. Junipers die standing up, and seasoned juniper wood is everywhere around me. It's a pain in the ass to collect because it's hard and full of dirt. But it burns sweet and long, and it's already here, and it's free.

The trick, as I said, is to make your plans consistent with your resources and good sense, that is to say consistent with the environment you're in; not the environment you imagine or want. Years ago when I lived in Southern California, I was involved with a preparedness group that wanted a plan for "bugging out" in the event that something might happen that would render life in Orange County even more problematic than it already was. Their approach up to that time had been a bit militaristic: They all had weapons and a thousand rounds of ammo and three days worth of portable food and water, and that was as far as they had taken it. Their plan, such as it was, was to use these resources to make it up past the San Gabriels and worry about it then. I studied the problem and decided that this plan was completely wrong-headed. The coastal plain west of the mountains is a trap: if you can't get out in a few hours by car, and you wouldn't be able to if the S hit the F, you wouldn't be able to get out in weeks. You wouldn't be able to get out at all. Therefore any attempt to "bug out" would only make your situation much, much worse. The rational choices, which I made the mistake of preaching to this group, were to either be gone before the disaster struck, or make plans to "bug in"; to concentrate their plans on surviving right where they were. This suggestion did not go over well with the group, and pretty much immediately ended my relationship with them. After all everyone knows that if you live in a city, survival preparedness involves bugging out, not in. Questions of impossibility don't enter into it: you simply force reality to conform to your desires. I thought this was rather silly, said so, and found myself in the outer dark where my weeping and wailing and the gnashing of my teeth would be after the apocalypse. 'Kay.

Of course my experience with preparedness groups is far from extensive and may not be representative. My friend M is affiliated with a group that does real-world feasibility exercises like: On the signal, throw your house's main breaker and spend the next 48 hours living on back-up power and emergency supplies. Take notes of successes and failures, then at the conclusion of the exercise get together on IM and discuss results. I quite like this idea: It will help you keep your planning more realistic and armor you against unpleasant surprises when/if it gets real. Two days isn't a true real-world experiment, but as a first exposure I'd imagine it could be quite eye-opening and I truly like the idea of a bunch of families doing it at the same time and then comparing notes.

Look, I'm not suggesting that anybody live in a dilapidated trailer, bum water from neighbors forever, and make a spectator sport of counting their remaining teeth. Of course you want to prepare ahead of time, and of course you should include what amenities are possible in your planning. If you really can transplant a bit of suburbia to the boondocks and live at your accustomed level of comfort and security, blessed be you. And it's not all one thing or the other; adopting my minimalist cedar-rat approach certainly isn't the only available alternative. There are lots of perfectly viable points along the gradient.

All I'm saying is that to keep it real, you need to understand that life outside the grid is going to have its daily dose of chaos. You can fight the chaos, resist it, rage against it - or you can relax and embrace it. You can, as the old A.A. cliche goes, have the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference. That way, in my experience, lies joy of life in the boondocks.