Squatters Wanted -- 2 August 08 -- Sometimes you read about super-homesteaders, like
Sylvan Hart or
Dick Proenneke, who go alone into primitive land and build a cabin and thrive. Those people are the equivalent of NBA all-stars or Olympic sprinters. The difference is, it's cheap to play basketball or run, and learn first hand how much your ability falls short of your imagination, while a good piece of land is so expensive and hard to find that we can all believe that if we only had land, we'd be spending joyful 16 hour days cutting wood and growing food and tracking deer and building heaven on Earth. About one in ten million of us are right.
The rest of us need to be a member of a group -- either a very large group like industrial civilization, or a smaller group like a 100 person community or a ten person household. One advantage of being with a group is that people motivate each other. Everything is easier if you're doing it to help other people than if you're doing it just for yourself. Also you can specialize in what you enjoy doing. One fatal flaw of self-sufficiency is that if you do
everything yourself, sooner or later you're going to run into stuff that you're either really bad at or just hate doing.
Actually, if you look at the history of communes and back-to-the-land schemes, even groups almost always fail -- or you could say they succeed by trying something different and learning what they can and can't get away with. Anyway, I've reached the limit of what I can do alone up there. I go once a week and tend the bushes and trees I've planted, and if I have some spare energy, I go through the woods pruning the dead lower branches. I've lost all interest in building, the isolation isn't fun anymore, I hate being dependent on a car, and I no longer believe that we'll get such a hard crash that I'll need the land to survive. If I go back to Seattle, and can find a way to get housing without a bad job, that would be a better life than I'm living now.
So what do I do with the land? If I sold it, I could make a big profit off what I paid for it, but this would be the worst possible time to trade land with year-round drinking water for American dollars. We're not going to see cannibalistic urban hordes, but I would not be at all surprised to see $50,000 loaves of bread. And in any case I've built enough of a connection to the land that I would only sell it to a friend who would keep it mostly wild and let me visit.
I could also turn it into a land trust and recruit some other members, and I'll look into that, but almost everyone with the right values has better options than moving to a remote canyon with long hard winters and dry summers in a region with no culture. I suppose we could all be absentee members who make occasional visits.
If I remain sole owner, the only real issue is how to keep my plants alive if I stop going up there in the summer. And for that, all I need is one or more squatters or caretakers. So here's the pitch: You can stay there free as long as you want, there's a spring and a primitive toilet, and all I ask is that you take care of the plants if I'm not up there, which includes some watering, especially of the new ones, and some spraying of deer repellent. You're welcome to plant more stuff, grow a garden, build a hut, and even cut down some smaller trees. But there are reasons you might not like it: there's a bear that comes through every few months, the nearest food store is 17 miles away, deer will eat your garden if you don't build a seven foot fence, the mosquitoes are bad in May and June, the yellow jackets are bad in August and September, there's a strict fire ban almost every summer, and the winters are so cold and snowy that I wouldn't recommend staying even with a good cabin.
If you're interested, I have to write my email address this way to hide from the spambots: it's my name as one word, just like in the website URL, at gmail.
Huckleberries -- 14 July 08 -- I have a lot of wood to saw, but I really couldn't get into it on this trip, especially in the heat. I'm hoping in a year or two I'll be able to get some clean synthetic fuel or biofuel that will make it tolerable for me to bring out the chainsaw. I enjoy hand sawing much more than chainsawing, but thirty minutes of chainsawing would be better than thirty hours of hand sawing.
So I did some writing and relaxed, and when it started to cool off, I went up the west hill with the pruner and lopper to re-clear the trail that angles up from the spring to the southwest corner. That sounded like a fun job. And I found this -- a nice patch of black huckleberries! These berries aren't ripe yet, but in previous years there were no berries at all. I think the cold, wet spring was bad for some of the plants -- I'm only going to get one cherry this year -- but good for the huckleberries.
A lot of plants have such unremarkable leaves that you really can't identify them from a picture of a leaf in a book. You either need a flower or fruit, or firsthand experience with that plant in that habitat. I had neither, but now that I know this plant is black huck, I'm seeing it all over. There's another big patch right by the outhouse.
This makes a total of six food-grade berries that grow on the land by themselves, the others being wild strawberry and thimbleberry (lots of leaves but few berries), serviceberry (even fewer berries), oregon grape (sour), and blackcap raspberry (thorny and invasive). Huckleberry has the potential to be a big tasty crop, so now I've found a project that's both enjoyable and useful. I spent the rest of Saturday evening and Sunday morning going through both patches and pulling out all competing plants: snowberry, baldhip rose, ocean spray, mallow ninebark, and oregon grape, from which I saved the roots to make medicinal tincture. And at the end I made a soup of water and compost and rock dust and beneficial fungal spores and poured it over the lower patch.
By the way, the two apple trees that looked worst off are looking good now, especially the Ashmead's, which has put up a nice bush from its two foot stump where the snow broke it. I'm seeing this pattern a lot: a tree struggles, and then the whole top either gets broken off or dies, but new sprouts from the bottom thrive. I think the top of a tree has to die sometimes to let the roots catch up.
Crossbow and Hammock -- 5 July 08 -- I was looking forward to trying out my new crossbow. One of the accessories I did not buy was a target, because how hard can it be to make one? It turns out to be a non-trivial task. My first experiment was to just shoot a bolt into the end of a giant chunk of cedar and see how hard it was to pull it out. It only went in a couple inches, but the only way I could get it out was to get a mallet and a wedge and split the wood! Next I rigged up a cardboard box I brought along, 20x20x10 inches, which already had a couple inches of styrofoam and several layers of cardboard I'd stuffed inside. I tried filling the remaining space with sand, but it made it too heavy to move, so I tried bark chips instead. I set it in front of a log, measured a line at ten yards, and shot. The bolt went through the box and stuck so hard in the log that I could barely pull it out. But it went through a gap between the pieces of styrofoam, so I pushed them together with more bark, and tried again. Same result. After three shots, the bolt was already very slightly bent.
Now I've done some research and can't find any commercial targets that get good reviews. For homemade targets, people suggest stuffing a bag with old clothes, densely layering cardboard, filling a box with spray-foam insulation, and my favorite idea, making a frame for layers of old carpets, which for most of us are much easier to find than straw bales.
This was my first overnight stay on the land, and I brought along a Hennessy Expedition hammock that Nat generously donated, so I could practice using it and see how I like it. A good camping hammock keeps rain off like a tent, and keeps you off the ground like a mattress pad, while being roughly the size and weight of a mattress pad alone, so it's a great thing to have if you need to make an emergency trip without a car in an area with trees. It took me a couple hours to learn how to put it up. I was guessing the trees needed to be 6-9 feet apart, but for this one the range is more like 9-14 feet, the recommended knot is hard to describe, and the tension needs to be tighter than I was thinking.
Some people love sleeping in hammocks. I didn't. Because the surface is not flat, it's hard to find a comfortable position. And the biggest disadvantage is something I've never read and never would have guessed. It has to do with the fact that sound drops off by the square of distance, and in any place with trees, there are going to be mosquitos. In a hammock, the mosquitos trying to get in through the mesh are ten times closer to your head than they are in a tent, and therefore,
one hundred times louder. Also you have to be careful not to have any part of your body touching the mesh or they'll bite you through it. Halfway through the night there was a freak thunderstorm, and I hadn't put up the rain fly, so I took the hammock down and moved to the leaned-back driver's seat of the car, where I slept much better. In fact, this year, unless I get visitors, I don't think I'll even put up a tent -- I'll just sleep in the car. And maybe in a couple years SUV's will be so cheap that I can buy one to park up there as a dwelling.
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So I did some writing and relaxed, and when it started to cool off, I went up the west hill with the pruner and lopper to re-clear the trail that angles up from the spring to the southwest corner. That sounded like a fun job. And I found this -- a nice patch of black huckleberries! These berries aren't ripe yet, but in previous years there were no berries at all. I think the cold, wet spring was bad for some of the plants -- I'm only going to get one cherry this year -- but good for the huckleberries.