Extreme Living

[Black Blade]

Death of 'Caveman' ends an era in Idaho

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Known as the "Salmon River Caveman," Richard Zimmerman lived an essentially 19th century lifestyle, a digital-age anachronism who never owned a telephone or a television and lived almost entirely off the land.

"He was in his home at the caves at the end, and it was his wish to die there," said Connie Fitte, who lived across the river. "He was the epitome of the free spirit."

Richard Zimmerman had been in declining health when he died Wednesday.

Few knew him by his given name. To friends and visitors to his jumble of cave-like homes scrabbled from a rocky shoulder of the Salmon River, he was Dugout Dick.

He was the last of Idaho's river-canyon loners that date back to Territorial days. They are a unique group that until the 1980s included canyon contemporaries with names like Beaver Dick, Cougar Dave and Wheelbarrow Annie, "Buckskin Bill" (real name Sylvan Hart) and "Free Press Frances" Wisner. Fiercely independent loners, they lived eccentric lives on their own terms and made the state more interesting just by being here.

Most, like Zimmerman, came from someplace else. Drawn by Idaho's remoteness and wild places removed from social pressures, they came and spent their lives here, leaving only in death.

Some became reluctant celebrities, interviewed about their unusual lifestyles and courted by media heavyweights. Zimmerman was featured in National Geographic magazine and spurned repeated invitations to appear on the "Tonight Show."

"I ride Greyhounds, not airplanes," he said in a 1993 Statesman interview. "Besides, the show isn't in California. The show is here."

Cort Conley, who included Zimmerman in his 1994 book "Idaho Loners", said that "like Thoreau, he often must have smiled at how much he didn't need. É What gave him uncommon grace and dignity for me were his spiritual life, his musical artistry, his unperturbed acceptance of life as it is, and being a WWII veteran who had served his country and harbored no expectations in return."

His metamorphisis to Dugout Dick began when he crossed a wooden bridge over the Salmon River in 1947 and built a makeshift home on the side of a hill. He spent the rest of his life there, fashioning one cavelike dwelling after another, furnishing them with castoff doors, car windows, old tires and other leavings.

"I have everything here," he said. "I got lots of rocks and rubber tires. I have plenty of straw and fruit and vegetables, my dog and my cats and my guitars. I make wine to cook with. There's nothing I really need."

Some of his caves were 60 feet deep. Though he "never meant to build an apartment house," he earned spending money by renting them for $2 a night. Some renters spent one night; others chose the $25 monthly rate and stayed for months or years.

He lived in a cave by choice. Moved by a friend to a care center in Salmon at age 93 because he was in failing health, he walked out and hitchhiked home.

Bruce Long, who rented one of his caves and looked after him, said the care center "had bingo and TV, but things like that held no interest for him. He just wanted to live in his cave.

"People said he was the only person they'd ever known who was absolutely self-sufficient. He didn't work for anybody. He worked for himself."

Born in Indiana in 1916, Zimmerman grew up on farms in Indiana and Michigan, the son of a moonshiner with a mean streak. He rebelled against his domineering father and ran away at a young age, riding the rails west and learning the hobo songs he later would play on a battered guitar for guests at his caves.

He punched cows and worked as a farmhand, settling in Idaho's Lemhi Valley in 1937 and making ends meet by cutting firewood and herding sheep. In 1942, he joined the Army and served as a truck driver in the Pacific during World War II. When his service ended, he returned to Idaho and never left.

He raised goats and chickens, tended a bountiful vegetable garden and orchard and stored what he couldn't eat or sell in a root cellar. A lifelong victim of a quarrelsome stomach, he survived largely on what he could grow or make. Homemade yogurt ranked among his proudest achievements.

He was married once, briefly, to a pen-pal bride from Mexico. The other woman in his life, Bonnie Trositt, tired of life in a cave, left him for a job as a potato sorter and was murdered by her roommate. He claimed to see her spirit in the flickering light of a kerosene lamp on the cave walls.

He rarely went to church, but read and quoted continually from the Bible.

Services are pending. A brother, Raymond Zimmerman, has requested that his remains be sent to Illinois.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/04/23/1164899/death-of-caveman-ends-an-era-in.html#ixzz0lyaoR7Qj


Black Blade: Some interesting self-sufficient people in this country.

[Black Blade]

COULD YOU SURVIVE WITHOUT MONEY?

MEET THE GUY WHO DOES

http://www.messersmith.name/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/daniel_suelo.jpg

In Utah, a modern-day caveman has lived for the better part of a decade on zero dollars a day. People used to think he was crazy

By Christopher Ketcham; Photograph by Mark Heithoff

DANIEL SUELO LIVES IN A CAVE. UNLIKE THE average American-wallowing in credit-card debt, clinging to a mortgage, terrified of the next downsizing at the office-he isn't worried about the economic crisis. That's because he figured out that the best way to stay solvent is to never be solvent in the first place. Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit.

His dwelling, hidden high in a canyon lined with waterfalls, is an hour by foot from the desert town of Moab, Utah, where people who know him are of two minds: He's either a latter-day prophet or an irredeemable hobo. Suelo's blog, which he maintains free at the Moab Public Library, suggests that he's both. "When I lived with money, I was always lacking," he writes. "Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."

On a warm day in early spring, I clamber along a set of red-rock cliffs to the mouth of his cave, where I find a note signed with a smiley face: CHRIS, FEEL FREE TO USE ANYTHING, EAT ANYTHING (NOTHING HERE IS MINE). From the outside, the place looks like a hollowed teardrop, about the size of an Amtrak bathroom, with enough space for a few pots that hang from the ceiling, a stove under a stone eave, big buckets full of beans and rice, a bed of blankets in the dirt, and not much else. Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it.

Night falls, the stars wink, and after an hour, Suelo tramps up the cliff, mimicking a raven's call-his salutation-a guttural, high-pitched caw. He's lanky and tan; yesterday he rebuilt the entrance to his cave, hauling huge rocks to make a staircase. His hands are black with dirt, and his hair, which is going gray, looks like a bird's nest, full of dust and twigs from scrambling in the underbrush on the canyon floor. Grinning, he presents the booty from one of his weekly rituals, scavenging on the streets of Moab: a wool hat and gloves, a winter jacket, and a white nylon belt, still wrapped in plastic, along with Carhartt pants and sandals, which he's wearing. He's also scrounged cans of tuna and turkey Spam and a honeycomb candle. All in all, a nice haul from the waste product of America. "You made it," he says. I hand him a bag of apples and a block of cheese I bought at the supermarket, but the gift suddenly seems meager.

Suelo lights the candle and stokes a fire in the stove, which is an old blackened tin, the kind that Christmas cookies might come in. It's hooked to a chain of soup cans segmented like a caterpillar and fitted to a hole in the rock. Soon smoke billows into the night and the cave is warm. I think of how John the Baptist survived on honey and locusts in the desert. Suelo, who keeps a copy of the Bible for bedtime reading, is satisfied with a few grasshoppers fried in his skillet.

HE WASN'T ALWAYS THIS WAY. SUELO graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology, he thought about becoming a doctor, he held jobs, he had cash and a bank account. In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes. He was charged with monitoring the health of tribespeople in the area, teaching first aid and nutrition, and handing out medicine where needed; his proudest achievement was delivering three babies. The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields-quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils-for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn't need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. "It looked," he says, "like money was impoverishing them."

The experience was transformative, but Suelo needed another decade to fashion his response. He moved to Moab and worked at a women's shelter for five years. He wanted to help people, but getting paid for it seemed dishonest-how real was help that demanded recompense? The answer lay, in part, in the Christianity of his childhood. In Suelo's nascent philosophy, following Jesus meant adopting the hard life prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. "Giving up possessions, living beyond credit and debt," Suelo explains on his blog, "freely giving and freely taking, forgiving all debts, owing nobody a thing, living and walking without guilt . . . grudge [or] judgment." If grace was the goal, Suelo told himself, then it had to be grace in the classical sense, from the Latin gratia, meaning favor-and also, free.

By 1999, he was living in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand-he had saved just enough money for the flight. From there, he made his way to India, where he found himself in good company among the sadhus, the revered ascetics who go penniless for their gods. Numbering as many as 5 million, the sadhus can be found wandering roads and forests across the subcontinent, seeking enlightenment in self-abnegation. "I wanted to be a sadhu," Suelo says. "But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A true test of faith would be to return to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping nations on earth and be a sadhu there. To be a vagabond in America, a bum, and make an art of it-the idea enchanted me."

The morning ritual is simple and slow: a cup of sharp tea brewed from the needles of piñon and juniper trees, a swim in the cold emerald water where the creek pools in the red rock. Then, two naked cavemen lounging under the Utah sun. Around noon, we forage along the banks and under the cliffs, looking for the stuff of a stir-fry dinner. We find mustard plants among the rocks, the raw leaves as satisfying as cauliflower, and down in the cool of the creek-where Suelo gets his water and takes his baths (no soap for him) -we cull watercress in heads as big as supermarket lettuce, and on the bank we spot a lode of wild onions, with bulbs that pop clean from the soil. In leaner times, Suelo's gatherings include ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill. He recently found a deer, freshly run over, and carved it up and boiled it. "The best venison of my life," he says.

I tell him that living without money seems difficult. What about starvation? He's never gone without a meal (friends in Moab sometimes feed him). What about getting deadly ill? It happened once, after eating a cactus he misidentified-he vomited, fell into a delirium, thought he was dying, even wrote a note for those who would find his corpse. But he got better. That it's hard is exactly the point, he says. "Hardship is a good thing. We need the challenge. Our bodies need it. Our immune systems need it. My hardships are simple, right at hand-they're manageable." When I tell him about my rent back in New York-$2,400 a month-he shakes his head. What's left unsaid is that I'm here writing about him to make money, for a magazine that depends for its survival on the advertising revenue of conspicuous consumption. As he prepares a cooking fire, Suelo tells me that years ago he had a neighbor in the canyon, an alcoholic who lived in a cave bigger than his. The old man would pan for gold in the stream and net enough cash each month to buy the beer that kept him drunk. Suelo considers the riches of our own forage. "What if we saw gold for what it is?" he says meditatively. "Gold is pretty but virtually useless. Somebody decided it has worth, and everybody accepted this decision. The natives in the Americas thought Europeans were insane because of their lust for such a useless yellow substance."

He sautés the watercress, mustard leaves, and wild onions, mixing in fresh almonds he picked from a friend's orchard and ghee made from Dumpster-dived butter, and we eat out of his soot-caked pans. From the perch on the cliff, the life of the sadhu seems reasonable. But I don't want to live in a cave. I like indoor plumbing (Suelo squats). I like electricity. Still, there's an obvious beauty in the simplicity of subsistence. It's an un-American notion these days. We don't revere our ascetics, and we dismiss the idea that money could be some kind of consensual delusion. For most of us, it's as real as the next house payment. Suelo doesn't take public assistance or use food stamps, but he does survive in part on our reality, the discarded surfeit of the money system that he denounces-a system, as it happens, that recently looked like it was headed for the cliff.

Suelo is 48, and he doesn't exactly have a 401(k). "I'll do what creatures have been doing for millions of years for retirement," he says. "Why is it sad that I die in the canyon and not in the geriatric ward well-insured? I have great faith in the power of natural selection. And one day, I will be selected out." Until then, think of him like the raven, cleaning up the carcasses the rest of us leave behind.

http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_9817&mbid=yhp&npu=1

[Black Blade]

Buffalo Man Lives In Underground Bunker

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Clarence Rounds and his Bunker Home Posted by: Stefan Mychajliw

Believe it or not, there's a guy that's been living in an underground bunker in Buffalo for the past six years. His name is Clarence Rounds. He's 47-years-old. His home is literally down to earth.

2 On Your Side's Stefan Mychajliw: "Why this lifestyle?"

Rounds: "I just wanted something simple, and basic, down to earth."

Mychajliw: "What is it about this lifestyle that suits you?"

Rounds: "I pretty much, am on my own. And I'm my own boss here. I do what I want to do."

The Buffalo man said he was living on Squaw Island and had to leave once the area was cleaned up and turned into a park.

He was walking in the section of the City where he lives now, found a fairly wooded area, and decided to build a bunker as his home.

It took him about two years to dig the roughly 16-by-20 foot underground home. It's close to six-and-a-half feet deep.

Mychajliw: "How did you do it?"

Rounds: "With a bucket and a shovel, day by day. I'd go to the soup kitchen, and then I'd just start digging the hole. The bunker is more energy efficient and loses less heat. I wouldn't be exposed to the wind. And I wouldn't need to build any walls. I'd just use the dirt for the walls. So I'd only need a roof. So it was more economics that I did it for."

Clarence went to the Buffalo Public Library and read engineering books to learn how to make the bunker as structurally sound as possible. The initial fear was that heavy winter snow would cause it to collapse.

"I got books on roof framing, post framing, and things like that, so that I would have the formulas available to calculate the loads properly so the roof wouldn't collapse on me while I was sleeping," added Rounds.

A car battery serves as the main source of power for a small light and clock just above his bed.

That car battery is also connected to a spliced extension cord that powers a radio with speakers inside and outside of the bunker.

There's a fireplace with a vent that serves as a heat source and stove.
And then there's the issue of a bathroom.

Mychajliw: "This is somewhat of an embarrassing question, it's the first thing I thought of: what about a bathroom?"

Rounds: "The bathroom? I use the porta-john that I got from one of the elderly people in the neighborhood. They donated it to me, because they knew I needed that."

It isn't exactly a porta-john.

It's a walker that has a toilet seat positioned over a bucket.

Some canned goods like peanut butter and pork and beans are on a small shelf, as well as a number of books, including a Bible and a paperback copy of "The Black Marble," by Joseph Wambaugh.

Mychajliw: "Do you ever get lonely?"

Rounds: "I don't get lonely. I try to keep myself busy. I've got my drafting. I love to read books. And I always try to learn stuff."

According to Rounds, he didn't know his father and his mother passed away at the age of 29. He grew up in an orphanage, spent time studying at Seneca Vocational High School, and served two years in the Army "during the Carter Administration."

He is Native American, states his family is from the Arapaho tribe.

Mychajliw: "Do you feel as though growing up in an orphanage either led to this or this type of lifestyle?"

Rounds: "It changes you for sure, especially at a young age. I grew up in an institution. I didn't have much family around me. So I didn't have a support network there to help me out with that."

Money for food is earned through a number of odd jobs like landscaping, construction and roofing.

That's how he learned how to put together his bunker.

Mychajliw: "What about the property itself? Anyone ever give you a hard time about being here?"

Rounds: "Nobody has given me a hard time. I've never bothered my neighbors. I
support my neighbors. I keep people away from their fence line."

There's a fire pit outside of the bunker and some touches of home, including a Sabres flag and a "Welcome Friends" mat near the ladder to the bunker.

Mychajliw: "I think a lot of people would think, Clarence, why doesn't the guy just get a house, get an apartment?"

Rounds: "A lot of people have asked me that question. I like it here. I like nature. I like to be in the woods. I grew up as a child; I always wanted a cabin in the woods. Like Michael Landon in Little House On The Prairie."

Mychajliw: "People could think, this guy is nuts?"

Rounds: "I'm not nuts. I'm a clever person. I use clever ideas. I use the materials that are given to me in life and God's talents that are given to me, to make this a possibility. It's not easy hanging here; it's a lot of work."

Mychajliw: "Why not just get an apartment?"

Rounds: "I know. It just seems to me this is a worthwhile thing to do. It's down to earth, and it makes me happy."

Mychajliw: "How happy are you?"

Rounds: "I'm happy. I'm a happy, go lucky guy. Life in general is pretty good. I don't think of my life as being bad. Life is just a continuation of yesterday."

http://www.wgrz.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=48512


Black Blade: When things look bleak and hopeless, you sometimes come across stories like this showing that people can survive anything. Actually this looks more like an adventure and a test of survival skills. But then he's an Arapahoe and that's almost as good as Lakotah in my book.

[Black Blade]

Freegans forage for food, loathe waste

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Sunday 08.09.09
BY NIRVI SHAH AND SIVAN FRASIER

Shoulder-deep in a Coral Springs commercial trash bin, Brian Sprinkle was feeling hot and sweaty -- and lucky.

Dented boxes of spaghetti and containers of croissants, plus potatoes, onions, bananas, plastic-wrapped hunks of watermelon and baby portobello mushrooms were stacked outside the Dumpster, in cardboard boxes he had also found inside.

``This is what happens when you have a consumer society,'' Sprinkle said, pausing for a moment between gloveless dives to the bottom of the metal bin.

``Corn in the husk,'' said Sprinkle, 25, of Fort Lauderdale. ``That's my favorite.''

Meet the ultimate anti-consumer.

Since a time long before double-digit unemployment, widespread foreclosures and the collective closing of American wallets, a sliver of society has gotten by on the rest of society's discards. Sprinkle, his friends and thousands of others across the country are freegans, people who eschew capitalism whenever possible and loathe waste.

``Freeganism is kind of a protest, a boycott against a society that is pretty much run on slavery and genocide,'' said Brian Mulligan, 22, of Coral Springs. He frequents Dumpsters on his own and with Sprinkle. To avoid contributing to a system he dislikes, he doesn't work.

Indeed, the freegan movement is a reaction to the modern global economy, said Janet Kalish of New York-based freegan.info. Many freegans believe that nearly everything produced harms the earth or its creatures in some way.

``We're trying to resist buying and contributing to this system,'' she said. ``We're built on overproduction. We have an economy based on destructiveness. For the big machine of our economy to keep on rolling means we have to be exploitive of our planet.''

Freegan practices can vary from Dumpster diving to backyard gardening, Kalish said. And though freegans get their name from a contraction of the words free and vegan, not all are vegetarian, she said.

``We're just trying to provoke creativity. People can pursue their own way of being apart from the system,'' she said. ``There are people who squat. Or build their own wigwams. There's people who manage to live on very little money. I don't think it matters whether they call themselves freegan or not.''

Ivania Reyes of Pembroke Park doesn't have a label for her daily trips to the back entrance of grocery stores, where she has become a fixture. She just wanted to figure out a way to help people get by in the mobile home park she manages.

She became friendly with store employees, who now supply her with food that is trash-bin bound.

Sympathetic workers have provided her with birthday cakes, mangoes, brownies, pineapples and watermelons. A recent coup: 86 unopened boxes of Danish she distributed door-to-door in the Lake Shore Mobile Home Community.

``I really enjoy helping people,'' said Reyes, 51, who is also motivated to rescue food that would otherwise be thrown out. ``I do it to help a lot of people who don't have jobs. I never did this before'' the economy was so bad.

Leftover food is the biggest single component of American trash, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Americans throw away more than 25 percent of all food prepared -- about 96 billion pounds of waste annually.

And the country spends about $1 billion a year to get rid of it.

Reyes said many of the tenants in the mobile home community where she works can barely afford their rent -- 47 of the nearly 100 tenants are behind on their payments -- and she hopes her contributions of salvaged food will help cut their expenses.

Sprinkle and his friends also pay forward the fruits -- and vegetables -- of their labor.

They cook their finds into curries, soups and stews that they share Friday afternoons in Fort Lauderdale's Stranahan Park with anyone who cares to join them.

Kalish, Sprinkle and other freegans acknowledge that, at the moment, the waste products of the very capitalist economy they dislike fuel their ability to live the way they do.

``A certain amount of capitalism has to prevail or there won't be any free stuff or cheap stuff for the rest of us to find,'' said Anneli Rufus, 50, who published The Scavenger's Manifesto with her husband Kristan Lawson, 48, earlier this year.

The pair don't consider themselves freegans -- they pay for medicines, housing, eyeglasses and some of their food. But they abide by their own philosophy of ``scavenomics.''

``We like to get whatever free that we can get for free,'' Rufus said.

The Berkeley, Calif., residents haven't bought new clothes in at least five years and grow some of their own food using seeds from fruits and vegetables they've eaten or seeds they acquired for free at seed swaps.

``Sometimes all you can do is cut coupons out of the newspaper. Sometimes all you can do is go to yard sales,'' Rufus said.

``Some people are in it for the environment. Some people do it to save money. Some people do it for political reasons.''

Snowbird and businessman Russ Erickson, who winters in Key West, spends nearly nothing on his modest life of thrifting and foraging for food. He lives much of the year in his van, gets his clothes from yard sales or second-hand stores and showers at truck stops.

``Everybody's got too much stuff in their life,'' said Erickson, 67, a former contractor who turned bitter about the American consumer lifestyle.

Now, he is co-owner of a doggy daycare business in North Carolina where he works occasionally. But he is more likely to be found waiting outside buffet-style restaurants until the end of the evening to eat what would otherwise be thrown away.

``People are afraid to take chances and live on the fly because they want their creature comforts and stuff like that. They're spoiled. The whole society is spoiled,'' he said.

``My philosophy in life is that less is more. You can be happy with almost nothing.''

Sprinkle said he and his like-minded friends feel the same way.

They find spending time together as fulfilling as others may find shopping.

``We're not a very materialistic bunch. We don't have the craving to buy lots of things. Our main goal is to have lots of good food and get together,'' he said, although the occasional Dumpster score of discarded books is welcome.

But a lifestyle of finding treasure in others' trash isn't the ultimate goal of freeganism, Kalish said.

``A better vision is that we won't have supermarkets the way we are now. We won't be Dumpster diving. We will have changed the system so we're not exploiting people and habitats and animals. We'll be growing more locally,'' she said.

``I would think that we can picture a system where it's about responsible disposal of things, responsible production of things and making things that are built to work -- not built to break.''

http://www.miamiherald.com/business/story/1178386.html


Black Blade: Yep, we call it "Dumpster Diving".

[Osaka]

``This is what happens when you have a consumer society,'' Sprinkle said,

Food only spoils in consumer societies? Fish don't rot in poor countries?




And the country spends about $1 billion a year to get rid of it.



That's a little over $3 per person per year. That doesn't seem like very much.



Meet the ultimate anti-consumer.

Hi. I'm Osaka. You smell like garbage.

[Black Blade]

I live in a van down by Duke University

How do I afford grad school without going into debt? A '94 Econoline, bulk food and creative civil disobedience

http://www.salon.com/life/pinched/2009/12/06/living_in_a_van/md_horiz.jpg

By Ken Ilgunas

Photos by Ken Ilgunas

I was lying on the floor of my van where the middle pilot chairs used to be, trying to hide from view. This is it, I thought. They know. I'm going to get kicked out of Duke.

Moments before, I had been cooking a pot of spaghetti stew on top of a plastic, three-drawer storage container, which held all my food and my few meager possessions. I figured the campus security guard had parked next to me because he spotted the blue flame from my propane stove through the van's tinted windows and shades.

I held my breath as he shut off the engine and opened his door. I was in my boxer shorts, splayed across my stain-speckled carpet like a scarecrow toppled by the wind.

As I listened to what sounded like a pair of Gestapo jackboots approach the driver-side door, I thought about how I'd almost gotten away with it. For two whole months, I had been secretly living in my van on campus.

For some, van-dwelling may conjure images of pop-culture losers forced into desperate measures during troubled times: losers like Uncle Rico from "Napoleon Dynamite," or "Saturday Night Live's" Chris Farley who'd famously exclaim, "I live in a van down by the river!" before crashing through a coffee table, or perhaps the once ubiquitous inhabitants of multicolored VW buses, welcoming strangers with complimentary coke lines and invitations to writhing, hairy, back-seat orgies.

In my van there were no orgies or coke lines, no overweight motivational speakers. To me, the van was what Kon-Tiki was to Heyerdahl, what the GMC van was to the A-Team, what Walden was to Thoreau. It was an adventure.

Living in a van was my grand social experiment. I wanted to see if I could -- in an age of rampant consumerism and fiscal irresponsibility -- afford the unaffordable: an education.

I pledged that I wouldn't take out loans. Nor would I accept money from anybody, especially my mother, who, appalled by my experiment, offered to rent me an apartment each time I called home. My heat would be a sleeping bag; my air conditioning, an open window. I'd shower at the gym, eat the bare minimum and find a job to pay tuition. And -- for fear of being caught -- I wouldn't tell anybody.

Living on the cheap wasn't merely a way to save money and stave off debt; I wanted to live adventurously. I wanted to test my limits. I wanted to find the line between my wants and my needs. I wanted, as Thoreau put it, "to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."

It wouldn't be hard for me to remain frugal. After buying the van and making my first tuition payment, I was only a few dollars away from having to rummage through Dumpsters to find my next meal. I was -- by conventional first-world definitions -- poor. While I faced little risk of malnutrition or disease like the truly poor, I still I didn't own an iPod, and I smelled sometimes.

My experiment began in the spring semester of 2009 when I enrolled in the graduate liberal studies department. Months before, I had just finished paying off $32,000 in undergraduate student loans -- no easy feat for an English major.

To pay off my debt, I'd found jobs that provided free room and board. I moved to Coldfoot, Alaska -- 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 250 from the nearest store -- where I worked as a lodge cleaner, a tour guide and a cook. Later, I worked on a trail crew in Mississippi in an AmeriCorps program. Between jobs I hitchhiked more than 7,000 miles to avoid paying airfare. When I couldn't find work, I moved in with friends. My clothes came from donation bins, I had friends cut my hair, and I'd pick up odd jobs when I could. Nearly every dime I made went into my loans.

I hated my debt more than anything. I dragged it with me wherever I went. While I was still leading an exciting, adventurous life, I knew I could never truly be free until my debt was gone.

I finally got out of the red when I landed a well-paying job with the Park Service as a backcountry ranger. Finally, after two and a half years of work, my debt was gone. I had four grand in the bank that was mine. All mine. It was the first time I had actual money that hadn't been borrowed or given to me since I was a 13-year-old paperboy.

The more money I had borrowed, I came to realize, the more freedom I had surrendered. Yet, I still considered my education -- as costly as it was -- to be priceless. So now, motivated to go back to school yet determined not to go back into debt, I had to think outside the box. Or, as Henry David Thoreau might suggest, inside one.

In "Walden," Thoreau mentioned a 6 foot-by-3 foot box he had seen by the railroad in which laborers locked up their tools at night. A man could live comfortably in one of these boxes, he thought. Nor would he have to borrow money and surrender freedom to afford a "larger and more luxurious box."

And so: I decided to buy a van. Though I had never lived in one, I knew I had the personality for it. I had a penchant for rugged living, a sixth sense for cheapness, and an unequaled tolerance for squalor.

My first order of business upon moving to Duke was to find my "Walden on Wheels." After a two-hour bus ride into the North Carolinian countryside, I caught sight of the '94 Ford Econoline that I had found advertised on Craigslist. Googly-eyed, I sauntered up to it and lovingly trailed fingertips over dents and chipped paint. The classy cabernet sauvignon veneer at the top slowly, sensuously faded downward into lustrous black. I got behind the wheel and revved up the fuel-funneling beast. There was a grumble, a cough, then a smooth and steady mechanical growl. It was big, it was beautiful, and -- best of all -- it was $1,500.

I bought it immediately. So began what I'd call "radical living."

I removed the two middle pilot chairs to create a living space, installed a coat hook, and spent $5 on a sheet of black cloth to hang behind my front and passenger seats so that -- between the sheet, tinted windows, and shades -- no one would be able to see me inside. I neatly folded my clothes into a suitcase, and I hung up my dress shirts and pants on another hook I screwed into the wall.

I at first failed to notice the TV and VCR (that I would never use) placed between the two front chairs. Nor did I know about the 12-disc CD changer hiding under the passenger seat until weeks later.

Just when I thought I had uncovered all the van's secrets, I found a mysterious button toward the back. When I pushed it, the back seat grumbled, vibrated and -- much to my jubilation -- began slowly transforming into a bed. I half-expected to see a disco ball descend from the ceiling and hear '70s porn music blare from the speakers.

Fortuitously, I was assigned a parking lot in a remote area on campus next to a cluster of apartments where I hoped campus security would presume I lived.

Over time, my van felt less like a novelty and more like a home. At night I was whirred to sleep by crescendos of cicadas. In the morning, I awoke to a medley of birdsong so loud and cheery you would have thought my little hermitage was tucked away in a copse of trees. During rainstorms, I listened to millions of raindrops drum against the roof and watched them wiggle like sperm down my windows.

I loved cooking in the van. As an adept backcountry camper, I could easily whip up an assortment of economical and delicious meals on my backpacking stove. For breakfast, cereal with powdered milk and oatmeal with peanut butter became staples; for dinner, spaghetti stew with peanut butter, vegetable stew with peanut butter, and even rice and bean tacos with peanut butter. Without proper refrigeration, I cut out meat, dairy and beer from my diet entirely. I became leaner, got sick less and had more energy than ever before.

http://www.salon.com/news/pinched/2009/12/06/living_in_a_van/story3.jpg

By buying food in bulk I reduced my food bill to $4.34 cents a day. I was meticulous with my expenditures. I saved every receipt and wrote down everything I bought. Not including tuition, I lived (and lived comfortably) on $103 a week, which covered my necessities: food, gas, car insurance, a cellphone and visits to the laundromat.

The idea of "thrift," once an American ideal, now seems almost quaint to many college students, particularly those at elite schools. The typical student today is not so frugal. Few know where the money they're spending is coming from and even fewer know how deep they're in debt. They're detached from the source of their money. That's because there is no source. They're getting paid by their future selves.

My "radical living" experiment convinced me that the things plunging students further into debt -- the iPhones, designer clothes, and even "needs" like heat and air conditioning, for instance -- were by no means "necessary." And I found it easier to "do without" than I ever thought it would be. Easier by far than the jobs I'd been forced to take in order to pay off my loans.

Most undergrads imagine they'll effortlessly pay off their loans when they start getting paid the big bucks; they're living in a state of denial, disregarding the implications of a tough job market and how many extra years of work their spending sprees have sentenced them to. But "facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored," as Aldous Huxley famously said.

I have sympathy for my fellow students. I did many of the same things when I was an undergrad. Plus, escaping student debt -- no matter how frugal they try to be -- is nearly impossible. Even if they do resort to purchasing a large creepy van, most will still have to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt to pay for tuition.

While I found a way to afford graduate school, I by no means had the same financial responsibilities as the average student. I was so poor when I applied that my department took pity on me and significantly reduced the cost of my tuition. I even found a well-paying part-time job working for a government-sponsored program, tutoring inner-city kids.

Governments and financial aid departments normally aren't so helpful. For decades, the government has let legions of college students -- students who wished to better themselves and contribute to society -- go into soul-crippling debt. Schools don't make it any easier with steep hikes in tuition and baffling room and board costs. Students are oftentimes forced to pay for insanely priced meal plans and are barred from moving to cheaper housing off-campus. At Duke, the cheapest on-campus meal plan charges them 3.5 times more a day than it cost to feed me. Their dorm rooms cost 18 times more than my parking permit.

Here, the average undergraduate student who's taken out loans graduates with more than $23,000 in debt -- about the national average. The cost of education at Duke, as at most schools across the country, is disgracefully high. Tuition costs (not factoring in financial aid) more than $37,000 a year. Additionally, students have to pay at least another $10,000 for books, meal plans, fees and dorms.

Duke's egregiously hefty price tag is no anomaly. Nor is it unusual for students to unflinchingly take out massive loans that'll take them years, sometimes decades, to pay off. Willingness to go into debt, of course, isn't just confined to students; we're a nation in debt, collectively and individually. Going into debt today is as American as the 40-hour work week; or the stampede of Wal-Mart warriors on Black Friday; or the hillocks of gifts under a Christmas tree. An army of loan drones we've become, marching from one unpaid-for purchase to the next in quest of a sense of fulfillment that fades long before the bill arrives. We're little different from the Spanish explorers who dedicated their lives to the quest for El Dorado, which was always just around the next bend in the river, yet never there at all.

I refused to join those ranks. I became a deserter, an eccentric, an outsider. At Duke, I felt like an ascetic in the midst of wealth, a heretic in the Church of the Consumer. I had to hide.

Because I was so paranoid about campus security finding out about my experiment, I kept myself apart from other students. Whenever I did talk with a fellow classmate, I found myself souring the conversation with preposterous lies -- lies I'd tell to protect myself. Whenever someone asked me where I lived, I'd say "off campus," or I'd make up an address before changing the subject. I found it easier to avoid people altogether.

I worried that if students caught wind of my experiment, a Facebook group would be created for "People who've had a confirmed sighting of the campus van-dweller." Campus security would find out, deem my lodgings illegal and promptly kick me out of the van and into some conventional and unaffordable style of living, wherein I'd have to buy a rug to tie the room together.

Deprived of human companionship, I cloistered myself in my van and in libraries where I was alone with my thoughts and my books. Time for self-reflection, study and solitude was what I thought I'd wanted all along.

But of all the things that I gave up for "radical living," I found it fitting that the one thing I wanted most was that which couldn't be bought. When a trio of laughing males drunkenly stumbled past my van, probably hoisting one another up like injured comrades after battle, I thought of my friends back home. On winter nights, when the windows were coated with a frosty glaze, I'd wish for a woman to share the warmth of my sleeping bag.

While I have plenty of good things to say about simplicity, living in a van wasn't all high-minded idealism in action. Washing dishes became so troublesome I stopped altogether, letting specks of dried spaghetti sauce and globs of peanut butter season the next meal. There was no place to go to the bathroom at night. I never figured out exactly where to put my dirty laundry. Once, when a swarm of ants overtook my storage containers, I tossed and turned all night, imagining them spelunking into my orifices like cave divers while I slept. New, strange, unidentifiable smells greeted me each evening. Upon opening the side doors, a covey of odors would escape from the van like spirits unleashed from a cursed ark.

But no adventure is without bouts of loneliness, discomfort and the ubiquitous threat of food poisoning. I loved my van. Because of it, I could afford grad school. So naturally I was nervous as I listened to the security guard's weapons jingle as he ambled by my windshield.

But he just kept walking.

I was overcome by an odd sense of dissatisfaction. Deep down, I think I wanted him to discover me. I wanted a showdown. I wanted to wave my arms at the dean and cry, "Impound my van? Over my dead body! I'll take you straight to the Supreme Court!" Fellow students would rally behind me. We'd stage car-dwelling protests and after winning back my right to remain voluntarily poor, people would begin to consider me the campus sage. I'd wear loose white clothing, grow my beard, and speak in aphorisms to the underclassmen who journeyed the mile on foot to my sacred parking space where I'd serve them tea.

Today I still live in the van. I haven't taken out loans or borrowed money from anyone. Really, the only thing that's different is that I've set up my laundry area by the passenger seat. Also, after another summer with the Park Service, I have more money than I possibly need. Now, instead of being poor, I am radically frugal.

Sometimes, though, I think it would be nice to have an ironing board, plumbing and a wood stove.

It would be nice. A middle-class family might think it would be nice to have an in-ground swimming pool. A millionaire might think it would be nice to have a yacht. The billionaire, a private jet. Someone, somewhere might think it would be nice to have food to feed her family tonight. Someone, somewhere might think it would be nice to live in a van in order to afford to go to a wonderful school. I could begin satisfying my desires and buying comforts, but I've learned to appreciate what little I have instead of longing for what I do not.

Admittedly, now that I have money I buy the fancy peanut butter from Whole Foods, and I've even purchased an expensive pair of hiking boots. But most things are the same: I still cook spartan meals, I don't have an iPod, and I park in the very same spot. And I still have my secret. Well, that is, until now.

[Black Blade]

Living the outlaw life

Squatter: Living in the woods like it was nobody's business

By Claire Wolfe

When I first saw the battered old camper with a tarp rigged as an awning between it and the nearby trees, I thought it was probably owned by a hunter. It was that time of year.

A couple of days later, when a scrounged and rusty wood stove appeared as part of the temporary "household," I began to wonder. And when camper, stove, tarp, and big black dog were still in the woods in the snows of December, I knew. I'd acquired a new neighbor, a squatter.

I didn't exactly give him a warm welcome. You see, the woods around here all belong to me. Never mind that they're actually owned by dozens of timber companies, large and small. I roam them every day, taking possession in the heart. As a woman who likes to wander alone, I wasn't thrilled at the idea of having some loose-cannon neighbor, about whom I assumed the worst.

I considered going non-linear when he eventually parked his rig, with its four-year-expired registration tags and little heaps of accompanying trash, just beyond the edge of the tiny patch of woods that I actually do own.

I started itching for an excuse to get the cops or the absentee land owner to run him out of there. But as he lived quietly almost within sight of my cabin, keeping to himself, it belatedly dawned on me, "Geez, Claire, he's not doing anything except exactly what you advocate-living free, living as an Outlaw." So I lightened up and quit plotting against him.

Later yet, after he moved onto another of my favorite walking roads, I surrendered to the inevitable and got to know him.

Turns out he's just a guy. Davie. He's 30-something. A musician. A perfectly nice fellow. As soon as Davie had a face and a name and ceased to be The Looming Stranger, I even began to worry about his welfare, rather than how he might affect mine. But he's doing just fine, thanks. Comfortable winter and summer, so he tells me. Takes an occasional shower at a house or business in town. Shaves while looking into the rear-view mirror of his truck cab. Heats the camper with propane. Moves from shade to sun as the days and seasons dictate. His big black dog, Bruno, stays in the camper or under it, depending on the weather. If Georgia-Pacific hassles him, he moves onto Rayonier land. And if Rayonier hassles him, he moves over to a John Hancock holding company parcel. And right now he's found himself a little privately held patch of timberland whose absentee owner has no regular forest patrols or logging operations and might not bother for years to discover that he's there.

Davie even has a job. That makes him one of the working homeless that the media like to tut-tut about. The media and their big-government allies never consider for a minute that the big-spending programs they advocate, and regulations that drive up the cost of housing, are exactly what's created the working homeless in the first place. Young, disabled, or otherwise struggling people are increasingly taxed and priced out of a survivable living.

Davie falls into another category the media don't like to mention. He's a single, able-bodied, non-addicted, working man. Therefore he's not eligible for (or too independent to accept) any of the thousands of varieties of handouts with which the government attempts to buy back what they've stolen-to "give" us, as "benefits," the housing, food, and care we could once provide for ourselves.
Davie's in another category, too: the cruelly misnamed deadbeat dads. He's out there because he owes, and wants to pay, back child support. When he was forced to choose between supporting his child or paying the rent on his apartment-out to the woods he drove with Bruno and his camper.

Once upon a time, a man like Davie could have homesteaded-claimed some government-held land for his own by living on it and developing it. Tens of millions of acres still sit unoccupied and federally mismanaged. But since 1976 when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, homesteading has been a memory. The feds have, on the contrary, begun gobbling up private lands to "return them to nature."

This is one more straw on the backs of honest folks who are struggling to live and take care of themselves. Options grow narrower every day. (And beware of the folks who still advertise that you can "claim" government land for "just $20!" A mining claim is not a homestead.)

What's a "squatter"?

In the strictest definition, Davie isn't really a squatter. A squatter takes possession of land with the intention of permanently claiming it as his own. Davie has no desire to take over anybody else's property.

But if squatter isn't the perfect word, there is no better one. And if Davie has been driven out there by very contemporary American problems, his adaptation continues a great American tradition. He's living as he wishes to live, despite everybody else's rules and restrictions.

This isn't the life for everybody. But it beats the heck out of a lot of urban homeless options. No prowling addicts beat Davie up or roll him for a pint of Mad Dog 20/20. Davie doesn't have to cope with schizo cases, street fights, or the understandably hostile merchants described by sometime Berkeley street person (and semi-famous cartoonist) Ace Backwords in his book Surviving on the Streets: How to Go DOWN Without Going OUT (Loompanics Unlimited, 2001) . The worst that happens to Davie is being run from one timber acreage to another. Even the risk of having his camper broken into while he's at work is reduced-considerably-by the surly presence of Bruno, who's usually home when his master is away. And who wouldn't envy the extreme quiet and rent-free bliss of Davie's life in the woods?

Davie joins some uncounted number-maybe hundreds of thousands-of hidden others in a life that lies mid-way between that of carefree mobile "snowbirds" and the desperate homeless.

Reading the letters column, it's clear that about half this magazine's readers are already country dwellers, dug in for keeps, and half are somewhere between dreaming about a country home and actually moving to one. Maybe Davie's life-or a more rights-respecting variation on it-is one that some urban dwellers might want to consider as they plan a rural future.

You could "squat" in an area where you know you want to live while you look for the right piece of land-or earn the money to afford it.

You could squat (call it freelance camping) in one area after another as you decide whether your eventual backwoods home should be in Kentucky or Oregon, New Hampshire, or Alaska.

You could squat just because you're broke and it's better than living on the streets.
You could squat while you look for a job in your chosen rural haven. Sure, there are challenges to looking for a job when you don't have a permanent address or an easy way to clean up and look pretty for an interview. But a cell phone or an answering service you can access via pay phone gives you a contact number for those hiring agents. Mail Boxes Etc. gives you an address. (A friend or a small-town business that ships and receives UPS might also receive postal mail for you-although it gives the bureaucrats at the USPS fits.) A solar shower will do in a pinch to tidy you up to meet a prospective employer. Or you can do as I did when I lived for a while without hot running water-heat up bowls of wash water on your cook stove. In the meantime, while you're looking for work, you're conserving what money you have left, and you're not panicking because your jobless state might put you on the streets. You already are on the streets-or the country roads-of your choice.

Caretaking vs squatting

I got to wondering whether a squatter's life could be combined with that other dream life of impoverished rural wannabes, caretaking. Would timberland owners-who are plagued by illegal dumping, theft of wood, and other unauthorized and sometimes dangerous activities-be willing to trade space on their lands in exchange for "watchdog" services on the part of someone like Davie?

I called two big, nationally known logging companies and two private land owners-the sort of small-time rich folks who may own a few thousand acres widely scattered over a state-and asked them.

MegaGlobalTimberCorp #1 said they didn't think so. Or rather, a series of secretaries, PR flacks, local forest managers, and other assorted "not my job" people said they didn't think so-but they really didn't know whom you'd ask about such a thing.

MegaGlobalTimberCorp #2 said no and hell no. (They said that they had full-time roving forest patrols and didn't need caretakers-even though the horrendous heaps of construction rubble and old appliances dumped on their lands say they sure need somebody watching out for them.)

LittleLandOwner #1said no, citing unnamed "liability issues." But it was clear she simply didn't like the idea of some homeless stranger living on her property and was looking for any excuse (not that she needed one; it is her land).

LittleLandOwner # 2-Bingo!-said he'd been pondering an arrangement just like that and wondering where he'd find a reliable "squatter." Just as long as somebody supplied his own camper or trailer, disposed of his own waste, didn't smoke (fire hazard), and could provide some evidence of good character, he'd make a deal.

An article in the Juneau Empire tells of Jason Layton, "The Squatter King." He parked on mining company land and simply ignored repeated (but polite and non-threatening) requests to leave. Then one day he was called into the mining company's office-and instead of the ultimate eviction he expected, he got a key to a caretaker's shack. Company managers had simply decided Jason was an asset, not a detriment. Mining companies, even more than timber companies, have a real need for caretakers on their land-to keep kids from falling into mine shafts, prevent pilfering or sabotaging of equipment, and to discourage folks who might be tempted to cart off a pickup load of coal, rock, or whatever it is they're digging.

My neighbor Davie-who scatters garbage and worse waste around his camper-is never going to earn anybody's trust as a caretaker. But if I owned acreage I couldn't watch, I'd be thrilled to find some reliable person who supplied his own "caretaker's shack" in the form of a camper or trailer, and who could discourage poachers, garbage dumpers, and other vandals.

(By the way, "The Squatter King" ultimately became caretaker to a campground for the homeless operated by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Such campgrounds started to become popular in the mid-1990s, after years of homeless activism; but in many places they've fallen victim to the NIMBY syndrome and lack of funds.

When I was young, I lived in campgrounds for a while, too respectful of privacy-or too chicken-to squat. And that's something many people still do. You have to keep moving, as most campgrounds allow only limited stays. It costs more than Davie's lifestyle, but if you have pets or kids, it's cheaper and easier than finding a home or apartment to rent. And-big plus-there's usually a bathroom nearby.)

If squatting-as-caretaking interests you and you're not willing to take Squatter King-type chances, one easy (albeit shot-in-the-darkish) way to look for a legal "squat" is to place an ad promoting your caretaking services. Try a regional newspaper that would be read even by absentee landowners. Or Backwoods Home. Or go to local stores, churches, post offices, and other gathering places and tack up ads on their public bulletin boards. Or for 29 bucks a year you can subscribe to The Caretaker Gazette (P.O. Box 540-M, River Falls, WI 54022-0540, www.caretaker.org/), which matches caretakers and landowners worldwide. While most landowners don't even think about offering caretaking positions if they don't have some sort of building for you to live in, "Have camper, will caretake," might change some minds.

If an ad doesn't bring hordes of landowners begging you to live free on their lands (and don't count on it), you can choose lands that look good to you and start a more personal sales job on their owners.

If you're already in, or can easily get to, your target area, start by scoping out the parcels of land that look as if they "need" you, then go to the county assessor's office to find out who owns them and how to contact those individuals or companies. This is all public record.

Call or write the landowner(s) of your choice. If they're not interested but seem approachable, ask them if they know anyone else who might want a caretaker. Stress the ways you can benefit them, rather than how they can help you. ("I could keep illegal dumpers away and even haul some of the stuff that's already there to the landfill for you." Not, "I'm so desperate I'm going to kill myself" or "I'm lookin' for a place I can party and get wasted, man.") Stress your ability to live without owner-provided utility services and your commitment to live without damaging or trashing up their property.

Get an agreement in writing, if you can, so you'll have proof of your rights in event of a dispute with the landowner or something to show a sheriff's deputy, should one happen along. (Around here, the Sheriff's Department never, but never, patrols the unpopulated woods, not even on the fairly large network of county roads that serve as feeders to the private logging roads. Although if you're in an area where helicopters patrol for marijuana farms, you could be vulnerable to easy discovery, and should be prepared to move quickly or prove your right to be on the land.)

This isn't an easy process, it goes without saying. And you might never find an interested owner. But present yourself as an asset and not as a desperate, marginal person looking for a handout, and you may discover you're the answer to a beleaguered landowner's prayer.

Legalities

We've gotten through this whole article without talking about the morality of squatting on somebody else's private land without getting their prior consent. It's not only a crime, trespassing, but some people would consider it theft, since a squatter is using property that belongs to another. The solution to those problems is really simple. If you fear the potential for legal penalties, don't squat. If you believe it's immoral, don't do it. If you want to do it legally and morally, jump through the hoops of turning your squat into a caretaker's gig. And don't cry if nobody wants your services.

Throughout the world, squatting is usually an urban phenomenon. Drug addicts take over abandoned warehouses. Impoverished rural dwellers flock to tent cities and tin-roof cities on the edges of metropolises in hopes of bettering their lot.
If your idea of bettering your lot is to go in the opposite direction-turning away from the big-city grind for the backwoods home of your dreams, squatting is one easy, if risky, way station on the road.

http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe0211.html

[Black Blade]

The Tunnels of Lost Vegas

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/2651937/The-people-living-in-drains-below-Las-Vegas.html

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LOVEBIRDS Steven and Kathryn share a well-organised home in bustling Las
Vegas.

They have a neat, if compact kitchen, a furnished living area, and a bedroom complete with double bed, wardrobe and bookshelf featuring a wide selection including a Frank Sinatra biography and Spanish phrase book.

And they make their money in some of the biggest casinos in the world.

But their life is far from the ordinary.

Because, along with hundreds of others, the couple are part of a secret community living in the dark and dirty underground flood tunnels below the famous strip.

Rather than working in the bars or kitchens they "credit hustle", prowling the casinos searching the fruit machines for money or credits left by drunken gamblers.

Despite the risks from disease, highly venomous spiders and flooding washing them away, many of the tunnel people have put together elaborate camps with furniture, ornaments and shelves filled with belongings.

Steven and girlfriend Kathryn's base - under Caesar's Palace casino - is one of the most elaborate. They even have a kettle and a makeshift shower fabricated out of an office drinking water dispenser.

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Home comforts ... the couple's kitchen under the famous city

But their bed and many of their belongings are on crates to keep them off the damp floor.

Despite it being hot and dry outside, their tunnel is wet from water being sent down from nearby construction work.

As he gives a guided tour of home, Steven Dommermuth explains: "We use our imagination a lot.

"Our bed came from a skip outside an apartment complex. It's mainly stuff people dump that we pick up. One man's junk is another man's gold.

Gallery

"We get the stuff late at night so people don't see us because it's kind of embarrassing."

He later gives directions to the tunnels' own art gallery, a collection of graffiti by local artists and some by the underground residents.

Steven moved into the tunnels two years ago after he lost his hotel front-desk job due to a heroin problem he claims he kicked in January.

He now works the same hotels credit-hustling, and his life retains other similarities with the one he left behind.

He says: "We work our way down the strip. The most I've ever found is 997 dollars (£609) on one machine. I've found about $500 a few times. But normally $20 or so is enough to call it a night.

"We buy food and supplies like shampoo and soap. Last night I went and watched the new Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds up at the Palms Hotel."

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Going underground ... the entrance to the flood tunnels

Despite his established set-up, Steven claims he eventually wants to leave the tunnels but can't because of two outstanding arrest warrants from drug possession charges two years ago.

It is estimated the population of the underground community could be as many as 700. As well as credit-hustling, they earn their money off the wildly excessive city above by begging and "dumpster diving" - raiding bins and skips.

There are around 350 miles of flood channels running under Las Vegas. Most inhabitants are in the area under the city's strip.

Another couple, Amy and JR, have lived in the tunnels for two years, having moved to Las Vegas in search of work, wealth and a slice of the famous Sin City action.

Putting down the Twilight vampire book she is reading for the third time, Amy, 33, explains: "My husband and I have been down here two years this week.

"We were living with my mom in California but the house was full and we had to leave.

"I heard Las Vegas was a good place for jobs. It's the city that never sleeps, with all the bright lights, and I'd always wanted to come.

"But it was tough and we started living under the staircase outside the MGM casino. Then we met a guy who lived in the tunnels. We've been down here ever since.

"I have my books, my CD player, crossword puzzles, some clothes and my picture of our son Brady, who was killed 11 years ago at four months old. The main dangers are the floods and the Black Widow spiders. But it's not a terrible place to be if you're homeless.

"It's much cooler than on the streets, we get a breeze coming through and the cops don't really bother you. It's quiet and everyone helps each other out down here.

"I hope to get out one day. But I want to stay in Las Vegas - I love it here."

Amy and JR met 13 years ago and even got married in one of the city's popular wedding chapels on Valentine's Day last year.

Their wedding had some similarities with the 110,000 other couples who get hitched in the city each year.

JR, 36, explains: "We got married in the Shalimar Chapel.

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Gloomy ... JR and Amy at home

"We went to watch a show, then to McDonald's for dinner. We got a little bit drunk and did the other normal wedding day things - only we had to come back down here rather than go to a hotel room."

Some of those living there have been forced into the network of tunnels by the recession and difficult job market.

Food

The economic downturn has hit the underground residents in their pockets too.

Amy and JR's neighbour Jamie, showing off a wristband he found that gives him free food all day at a hotel buffet, explains: "I've been down here since May.

"I've worked at a lot of the hotels, mainly in building and construction, but not for a couple of years. The jobs are harder to come by now.

"Now I credit hustle but there are lots more people doing it these days. Hundreds and hundreds. You see little old ladies doing it."

As for other entertainment in the tunnels, the 45-year-old adds: "We're big talk radio fans. And a few of us are accomplished musicians and have
instruments here.

"One guy down here has a full-time job. I don't think gambling is the cause of many people being down here. It's more alcohol and drugs. We all gamble a bit - we're in Vegas."

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Bright lights ... Las Vegas' famous strip

Local writer Matthew O'Brien, who has had a book published about the tunnel people, called Beneath The Neon, has been working with Steven and others to help get people housed. He recently founded the Shine A Light foundation to aid them.

He explains: "I guide social workers into the tunnels, show them the terrain and introduce them to people.

"They offer these people services like health and drug counselling.

"We have got 12 to 15 people into houses in the last six months.

"But a lot of the people are very resistant to help. Many don't want to give up their addictions.

"They like their freedom and that no one is telling them what to do.

"They are scared of what's out there.

"To come out of the tunnel and face the world is intimidating for some of the people. Some are very much entrenched down in that tunnel and comfortable. That's why the charity doesn't like to give out too much food, water and clothing.

"We don't want them to get too comfortable because it is really an illusion. It can be extremely dangerous.

"It doesn't rain much in Nevada but when it does the tunnels can fill very quickly. There have been 20 drownings in the last 20 years and a lot of those were people who were living in the tunnels.

"Steve and Kathryn can say they feel like they have a home. But when it pours down three inches of rain in two hours it's clear it's not a home. It's a flood channel."

[Black Blade]

Goodbye Bland Affluence

Peggy Noonan

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB123992073614326997-lMyQjAxMDI5MzE5ODkxMjgwWj.html

A small sign of the times: USA Today this week ran an article about a Michigan family that, under financial pressure, decided to give up credit cards, satellite television, high-tech toys and restaurant dining, to live on a 40-acre farm and become more self-sufficient. The Wojtowicz family-36-year-old Patrick, his wife Melissa, 37, and their 15-year-old daughter Gabrielle-have become, in the words of reporter Judy Keen, "21st century homesteaders," raising pigs and chickens, planning a garden and installing a wood furnace.
[Declarations] AP

Mr. Wojtowicz was a truck driver frustrated by long hauls that kept him away from his family, and worried about a shrinking salary. His wife was self-employed and worked at home. They worked hard and had things but, Mr. Wojtowicz said, there was a "void." "We started analyzing what it was that we were really missing. We were missing being around each other." So he gave up his job and now works the land his father left him near Alma, Mich. His economic plan was pretty simple: "As long as we can keep decreasing our bills we can keep making less money."

The paper weirdly headlined them "economic survivalists," which perhaps reflected an assumption that anyone who leaves a conventional, material-driven life for something more physically rigorous but emotionally coherent is by definition making a political statement. But it didn't look political from the story they told. They didn't look like people trying to figure out how to survive as much as people trying to figure out how to live. The picture that accompanied the article showed a happy family playing Scrabble with a friend.

Their story hit a nerve. There was a lively comment thread on the paper's Web site, with more than 300 people writing in. "They look pretty happy to me," said a commenter. "My husband and I are making some of the same decisions." Another: "I don't know if this is so much survivalism as a return to common sense." Another: "The more stuff you own the harder you have to work to maintain it."

To some degree the Wojtowicz story sounded like the future, or the future as a lot of people are hoping it will be: pared down, more natural, more stable, less full of enervating overstimulation, of what Walker Percy called the "trivial magic" of modern times.

The article offered data suggesting the Wojtowiczes are part of a recent trend. People are gardening more if you go by the sales of vegetable seeds and transplants, up 30% over last year at the country's largest seed company. Sales of canning and preserving products are also up. Companies that make sewing products say more people are learning to sew. I have a friend in Manhattan who took to surfing the Web over the past six months looking for small- and farm towns in which to live. The general manager of a national real-estate company told USA Today that more customers want to "live simply in a less-expensive place."


Some of this-the desire to live less expensively, and perhaps with greater simplicity-seems to key off what I am seeing in Manhattan, a place still generally with more grievances than grief, and with a greater imagination about how badly things are going to go than how bad it is right now. Many think that no matter how much money is sloshing through the system from Washington, creating waves that lead to upticks, the recession is really a depression. We won't "come out of it," as the phrase goes, for five or seven years, because the downturn is systemic, global, and because the old esprit is gone. The baby boomers who for 40 years, from 1968 through 2008, did the grunt work of the great abundance-work was always a long-haul trip for them, they were the first in the office in 1975 and are the last to leave the office to this day-know the era they built is over, that something new is beginning, something more subdued and altogether more mysterious. The old markers of success-money, status, power-will not quite apply as they have. They watch and work as the future emerges.

In New York some signs of that future are obvious: fewer cars, less traffic, less of the old busy hum of the economic beehive. New York will, literally, get dimmer. Its magical bright-light nighttime skyline will glitter less as fewer companies inhabit the skyscrapers and put on the lights that make the city glow.

A prediction: By 2010 the mayor, in a variation on broken-window theory, will quietly enact a bright-light theory, demanding that developers leave the lights on whether there are tenants in the buildings or not, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression no one's here and nobody cares.

The New York of the years 1750 to 2008-a city that existed for money and for all the arts and delights and beauties money brings-is for the first time going to struggle with questions about its reason for being. This will cause profound dislocations. For a good while the young will continue to flock in, for cheaper rents. Artists will still want to gather with artists-you cannot pick up the Metropolitan Museum and put it in Alma, Mich. But there will be a certain diminution in the assumption of superiority on which New York has long run, and been allowed, by America, to run.

More predictions. The cities and suburbs of America are about to get rougher-looking. This will not be all bad. There will be a certain authenticity chic. Storefronts, pristine buildings-all will spend less on upkeep, and gleam less.

So will humans. People will be allowed to grow old again. There will be a certain liberation in this. There will be fewer facelifts and browlifts, less Botox, less dyed hair among both men and women. They will look more like people used to look, before perfection came in. Middle-aged bodies will be thicker and softer, with more maternal and paternal give. There will be fewer gyms and fewer trainers, but more walking. Gym machines produced the pumped and cut look. They won't be so affordable now.

Hollywood will take the cue. During the depression, stars such as Clark Gable were supposed to look like normal men. Physical perfection would have distanced them from their audience. Now leading men are made of megamuscles, exaggerated versions of their audience. That will change.

The new home fashion will be spare. This will be the return of an old WASP style: the good, frayed carpet; dogs that look like dogs and not a hairdo in a teacup, as miniature dogs back from the canine boutique do now.

A friend, noting what has and will continue to happen with car sales, said America will look like Havana-old cars and faded grandeur. It won't. It will look like 1970, only without the bell-bottoms and excessive hirsuteness. More families will have to live together. More people will drink more regularly. Secret smoking will make a comeback as part of a return to simple pleasures. People will slow down. Mainstream religion will come back. Walker Percy again: Bland affluence breeds fundamentalism. Bland affluence is over.

[Occamsrazor]

A community of such people is fun but being alone in a cave for you whole life is depressing...

[SHTF2010]

SHTF IS COMING

and one of the best preps one can have is the right mindset

great thread, Black Blade

[SeekYeFirst]

One of the best threads, Thanks BB. Lots of good stuff here. I found humor in the explanation about Dugout Dick--
" 'I have plenty of straw and fruit and vegetables.... I make wine to cook with.' A lifelong victim of a quarrelsome stomach, he survived largely on what he could grow or make. Homemade yogurt ranked among his proudest achievements." I suspect a lot of these people are victims of quarrelsome stomachs ::), especially the freegans. Did anyone else notice the freegans seemed annoying.
The consumer mindset has definitely become prevalent since WWII. Maybe it existed before but not the easy credit.
My parents tried to give me a van after I lived in it a week at college. I wish I had taken them up on it.

[Book]

Keeping down with the Jones...lol.

:D

[Nomen luni]

Terrific thread. Thanks, BB.

[Phenix Pawn]

Lots of people claim to know the "Hollywood" Mean streets.

TV Babies

RESPECT TO FOLKS THAT CAN THRIVE ON SUCH AN EXISTANCE.

I can't.

Eating garbage is NASTY and will make you SICK eventually.

Trendy objectors are just posers with guilt about having it.

Why?

TOO STUPID TO REALIZE THAT ONLY HE (THE ONE) RENDERS IT!

a gift to them...


enjoy the trash, you noble man.

As for me, I am being served a meal by a nice old lady (that would feed me BECAUSE I ASKED, you F-IN idiots!)

[Black Blade]

HOW TO LIVE WELL WITHOUT A JOB AND WITH (almost) NO MONEY

Possum Living

DOLLY FREED

Do you want to get out of the rat race but not drop out? Do you want to live a life of leisure without worry or guilt? If your answer is yes, Dolly Freed will show you how to live well without a job and without working very hard.

After discussing reasons why you should or shouldn't give up your job, POSSUM LIVING gives you details about the cheapest ways with the best results to buy and maintain your own home, dress well, cope with the law, stay healthy, and keep up a middle-class facade--whether you live in the city, in the suburbs, or in a small town. In a delightful, straightforward style, Dolly Freed explains how to be lazy, proud, miserly, and honest, live well, and enjoy leisure. She shares her knowledge of what you do need--your own home, for example--and what you don't need--such as doctors, lawyers, and insurance. And she has a lot of realistic advice about saving money, as well as practical information about

* buying a house cheaply through a foreclosure or back-tax sale
* raising and slaughtering rabbits
* catching and cooking fish and turtles
* distilling your own moonshine

Mainly, however, through her own example, she hopes to inspire you to do some independent thinking about how economics affects the course of your life now and may do so in the coming "age of shortages."

If you ever wondered what it would be like to be in greater control of your own life, POSSUM LIVING will show you--and help you do it for yourself.

DOLLY FREED and her father have lived outside of Philadelphia in their own house on a half-acre lot for almost five years. They produce their own food and drink and spend about $700 each per year. Dolly is 19 years old and lists her occupation as "chief possum."

Link: http://www.f4.ca/text/possumliving.htm


Black Blade: Interesting to say the least. Even though this is over 30 years old, it's got some good info.

[Occamsrazor]

Outstanding thread!

[hoarder]

A community of such people is fun but being alone in a cave for you whole life is depressing...
I would rather live alone in a cave than in a crowded community of dumb, smelly people. Living alone is not depressing, living with someone who is 20 IQ points your inferior is depressing.
But then it all depends on your personality type. :D

[Occamsrazor]

A community of such people is fun but being alone in a cave for you whole life is depressing...
I would rather live alone in a cave than in a crowded community of dumb, smelly people. Living alone is not depressing, living with someone who is 20 IQ points your inferior is depressing.
But then it all depends on your personality type. :D


I completely agree, I`m mentally self-sufficient.
What I mean by a community is a community of high-IQ non-materialistic people and they shouldn`t smell.

Stalin tried to build something along these lines in a country with 11 time zones...:)

[Black Blade]

After losing homes, families move into tents

http://www.infrastructurist.com/wp-content/uploads/in_the_shadows06_sm.jpg

SHELLEY MAYS / THE TENNESSESAN

Troy and Tammy Renault have been living in tents with their five boys at the Timberline Campground in Lebanon since losing their home.

By Jennifer Brooks and Shelley Mays

It's a sweltering summer afternoon, and the children are hot and miserable in the tent that's been their home since they lost their house last month.

"You feel about as small as you can as a man, trying to take care of your family and watching your children have to go through something like this," said Troy Renault, 39, a homebuilder and father of five boys who lost his job, then his home, when the recession hit the construction industry.

Home these days is a cluster of tents covered by a blue tarp in a back corner of the Timberline Campground in Lebanon. Surrounding them are the tents, campers and recreational vehicles of other families in similar straits, living full time in campgrounds because they can no longer afford to live anywhere else.

No one knows how many people are living in campgrounds in Middle Tennessee. But visit any area campground and it's easy to pick out the permanent residents among the vacationers.

Look for the decks built on to campers with scrap lumber, and gardens planted next to campfire pits. Look for the air-conditioning units hooked up to tents. Look for the children boarding school buses at the front gates, and parents closing up the camper before they head off to work.

The space between a comfortable life, a nice home and a good job and living out of a campground is closer than most people could imagine. Lose a job, fall suddenly ill or end a marriage, and quickly the bills and mortgage payments start piling up high enough to bury an entire family.

"You get to a point where it's: Do you pay your house payment and not have lights and water and everyone sit with no clean clothes and dirty dishes and everything? Or do you keep the lights and water on and forgo the house payment for the time being?" Renault said. "And that's the way it went, until pretty much we wound up having to leave our home."

Things like this aren't supposed to happen to people like the Renaults, who work hard, go to church, take care of one another and look after their neighbors. Renault was making a good living as an assistant project manager for Goodall Homes, which was building a pair of subdivisions in Lebanon. He and his wife, Tammy, and the boys - who range in age from teenagers to a 2-year-old - lived in a three-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot home in a subdivision he helped to build.

Then the construction boom went bust. The company laid him off. He started his own small business, Renault Construction, specializing in home renovations, home construction and deck building. But the market was glutted with other builders trying to do the same thing.

"It really hurts, but I know I'm not the only person out there that's going through this," he said.

'This really is a community'

Down the winding dirt road that curves toward the back of the campground is a vintage one-bedroom Airstream trailer that was home to six people for the better part of a year.

The Bowen family lost its home on Mother's Day 2008, when a storm sent a tree through the roof. It was the last stroke in a string of bad luck that left Larry and Laurie Bowen, their two daughters and two young grandsons with nowhere else to live.

The family had moved up from Florida that March when Larry's construction job was transferred north. A month later, the company laid him off, along with many of his co-workers. Laurie and her older daughter, Jennifer, had left steady jobs in Florida and still hadn't found work. Then the storm hit.

"This is our home now," said Laurie Bowen, looking around in resigned amusement at the interior of the cramped camper that her younger daughter, 15-year-old Christina, has dubbed the Silver Pill.

At first, the Bowens lived in an old canvas Boy Scout tent someone donated to them. Eventually, Larry and Jennifer found work and the family was able to buy the old Airstream.

Jennifer and her boys, 4-year-old Damiyan Clark and 3-year-old Glenn Clark, have moved out into a camper of their own down the lane. For months, the family was forced to share the Silver Pill - Jennifer and the boys in the tiny bedroom, Christina sleeping in a sailor-style bunk in the camper's only closet, and Laurie and Larry on a futon in the front living area.

On this day, the temperature outside was 89 degrees. The temperature inside the camper was 98. The air conditioner was broken, and Laurie was at a loss over where they would find the money to replace it. She has multiple sclerosis, and the heat tends to aggravate her illness.

Campground residents will tell you they aren't homeless. They have roofs over their heads - even if some of the roofs are canvas - and they pay rent just like everyone else. A month's stay at the campgrounds around Lebanon runs about $300.

"We're not going to get anywhere else we could live for that price, not with utilities included," said Laurie Bowen, who pays $325 a month for her berth at Timberline Campground.

For that price, you get communal shower and bathroom facilities, a well-maintained pool and a close-knit community of others who are in exactly the same situation.
"This really is a community," said Bowen, whose front yard is crowded with plants her husband brought home from his job at a garden store. She pots them and shares them with the neighbors. The rafters and windows of the Airstream are strung with drying herbs to sweeten the air.

"I can go for a walk at 1 a.m. here and not have to worry," said Bowen, who has been taking courses and hopes to start work as a preschool aide in the fall.
'I'm not homeless'

Relaxing by the pool next to her motorized scooter is Kathy Newton, a disabled Navy veteran undergoing daily chemotherapy treatments for her leukemia. She lives in a tent.

"It's really not bad," she said, stretching out a leg fitted with a temporary cast for her broken ankle. She also has limited mobility and congestive heart failure.

The tent, she figures, is wheelchair-accessible and she's comfortable enough on the air mattress. She sets trays of ice in front of fans to try to keep cool and spends a lot of time soaking in the pool. She'd like to fit her tent with an air conditioner, but she's behind in her payments on the storage locker and the owner won't let her in to retrieve the one she owns.

"I've got a roof over my head. I'm not homeless," she said. "I take it one day at a time. I sleep good, I watch my DVDs. You'd be surprised what you can live without."

Living at campgrounds is nothing new. The campground managers say they've always had some long-term residents. Not everyone who lives at the campgrounds is there because of the economy, and not everyone is there involuntarily.

But there seem to be a lot more people living this way than there used to be, and a lot more families. More than 260 students in Lebanon and Wilson County schools are homeless.

Campground parents who enroll their children in local schools are pained to see them classified as "transients" on the school rosters.

'Lord put us here for a reason'

Over and over again, you hear the same stories. People who had homes and jobs, now living in the tents and trailers they bought for relaxing family vacations.
Ron Hoover used to work as a bill collector.

"I would just end (collection) calls and shake my head at all these people living
paycheck to paycheck," he said.

And then he became one of those people.

It started when his employer, MBNA bank, offered him a buyout, with a severance package that seemed too good to pass up. But he didn't expect to have such a hard time finding another job, or that his wife would lose her job and then fall ill.
The medical bills and mortgage payments started piling up. Hoover was registered at five temp agencies and still couldn't make ends meet. He took classes and got certified as a long-haul trucker, only to have his wages and hours cut back as the economy took a dive and gas prices started skyrocketing.

Eventually, the Hoovers lost their home and moved from Ohio to Tennessee to be closer to family.

Their son co-signed a loan for a large, comfortable trailer that's now their full-time home. It has air conditioning, a shower, comfortable furniture and even a tiny fake fireplace. Hoover, who can build almost anything, added a deck and recently built a picnic table out of scrap lumber he salvaged from a Dumpster at Lowe's.

"The way I see it, the good Lord put us here for a reason," Hoover said. "I figure, I married my wife, I didn't marry the house or the big yard."

He's been sidelined by gall bladder surgery that left him on disability for six weeks, but he is a man who likes to plan, and his goal is to be out of the campground within two years.

"As long as you have your health, your goals and the guidance of God, you have everything."

'Things could … be worse'

Faith and family help many campground families bear what could be unbearable.
"There are days when it's a struggle," Renault said. "Do I still have days when I feel like, 'What is going on and why is this happening?' Absolutely. I'm human."
Some people who hear about his situation judge him, he said, figuring he must have spent wildly and irresponsibly.

"We weren't living above our means," he said. "We didn't have anything fancy, we didn't own big-screen TVs, just the necessities. … I've had people say to me, 'You need to get your family into a home.' It's real easy to say these things when you're not walking in it."

He's hoping to move his family back into a proper house soon. In the meantime, he gets through his days by working, taking care of his family and trying to help out others in even worse straits. He volunteered to unclog the septic system in one neighbor's trailer. He gave a refrigerator to a neighbor who needed one.

"I try to look at the bright side of things and realize things could always be worse," he said. "You have to trust in what God's plan is and it's not always what your plan is. We're making our way through."

http://tennessean.com/article/20090712/NEWS01/907120364/After+losing+homes++families+move+into+tents


Black Blade: For many people like those in the article above, it is too late to prepare and time has simply run out. What a grim existence these people will have now as this Greater Depression will very likely last for several years. I suspect that this one will be much worse than the 1930s Depression and it is only starting now as the new administration works to force Socialism upon us as our new form of government. The economy is destined to spin out of control into a "death spiral" and the nation's money becomes worthless swept away in a tsunami of hyperinflated dollars fresh off the printing presses. If you haven't prepared by now by getting out of debt, stashing several months worth of cash for household expenses, accumulated silver and gold for wealth preservation and financial survival, and socked away a few years worth of nonperisbale food, then it's likely to late for you. I'm sorry but that's the way it is. Good luck!

[Book]

Their son co-signed a loan for a large, comfortable trailer that's now their full-time home. It has air conditioning, a shower, comfortable furniture and even a tiny fake fireplace.



Darwin will sort this out soon.

:oo-->

[Black Blade]

More Homeless Americans Living in Cars and Campers

http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2010/1002/homeless_cars_la_0205.jpg

By KEVIN O'LEARY / LOS ANGELES Kevin O'leary / Los Angeles Sat Feb 13, 11:00 am ET

Tim Barker never thought he'd have to live in his truck. Four months ago, the plumber was in a one-bedroom apartment in California's San Fernando Valley, with a pool and a Jacuzzi. Then, on his birthday in October, he and 199 other plumbers were laid off by their union, Local 761 in Burbank. Now Barker's son sleeps on the sofa of his cousin's one-bedroom Hollywood apartment, and Barker sleeps on the roof of the apartment building - or in his 2003 Ford Ranger pickup. "I'm 47, and I've never lived in my car," says Barker, a husky 220-lb. single father with sandy hair and a rapid-fire voice. In January, as torrential rains pelted the streets of Southern California, father and son were sleeping in the truck in San Pedro, next to the Los Angeles Harbor. "We were able to spend four nights in the Vagabond Motel, but for two nights we slept in the car," says Barker. "It was raining, cold, and the cat was jumping on us. We both got sick."

For people who cannot afford rent, a car is the last rung of dignity and sanity above the despair of the streets. A home on wheels is a classic American affair, from the wagon train to the RV. Now, for some formerly upwardly mobile Americans, the economic storm has turned the backseat or the rear of the van into the bedroom. "We found six people sleeping in their cars on an overnight police ride-along in December," says John Edmund, chief of staff to Long Beach councilman Dee Andrews. "One was a widow living in a four-door sedan. She and her husband had been Air Force veterans. She did not know about the agencies that could help her. I had tears in my eyes afterwards."

"Cars are the new homeless shelters," says Joel John Roberts, CEO of PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) Partners, the largest provider of services for the homeless in Los Angeles County, which had nearly 50,000 people homeless in 2009. Of these, experts estimate that up to 10% live in vehicles - even though doing so is illegal in most of the county. A similar situation is true for many other regions across the nation, especially in the Sun Belt. A woman lives in her BMW in Marina Del Rey, a swank L.A. address on the coast. PATH outreach workers Jorge Guzman and Tomasz Babiszkiewicz say she was an executive recruiter until the Great Recession. "She was self-employed for 36 years," says Guzman. "Now she sits in the car with a blanket and reads. She has not told her daughter."

Barker, the out-of-work plumber, has checked out shelters, motels and homeless-assistance programs throughout the Los Angeles area as he scrambles to find a roof for his son and him to sleep under. "We went down to a shelter in downtown, but it was bad - heroin, crack, smells. Randy looked at me and said, 'Dad, get me out of here. It's spooky.' Now I am trying to get assistance to get into an apartment in San Pedro so Randy can get back in school." PATH outreach workers are talking to Barker about his possible eligibility for federal assistance with rent and utilities under the new federal homelessness-prevention program.

One problem Barker has discovered with living in a pickup truck is keeping track of things. "My cousin is our ace in the hole," Barker says as he stands in a crowded one-bedroom apartment that has seen better days. On his cousin's cluttered coffee table sits a worn yellow briefcase covered with union stickers; it's stuffed with unemployment forms, birth certificates, old utility bills and school application papers for Randy, a skinny 12-year-old who loves basketball.

People who fall into homelessness say it feels like a spiral. A layoff, a medical emergency or a domestic quarrel sets off a chain reaction of bad luck. And the risk of falling into the economic abyss has increased, even in better times. Writing before the housing bubble burst and Wall Street collapsed, Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker showed that the big difference between 30 years ago and today is the dramatic growth in income volatility. American family incomes now rise and fall much more sharply from year to year, and this is happening at the same time that public and private safety nets have eroded.

Some of the floating economic refugees, especially those from the middle and working classes, "do not think of themselves as homeless," says Susan Price, director of homeless services in Long Beach. "They think, 'I'm not that. I am just living in my car.' " In fact, living in your car counts as being homeless, according to the Federal Government. Peggy, 58, who lives in a small RV on a quiet Hollywood side street, says, "If I had known how hard it is to be homeless and how hard it is to escape, I would have called all my friends to ask for help. But I was embarrassed." She was laid off from her telemarketing job in January 2009. "It was the same day that 76,000 people were laid off. I did not feel alone. I liked my job. It was within walking distance of my apartment." Her mother gave her the nearly 20-year-old RV that houses Peggy and her dog Fluffy. Wearing tennis shoes and a leather jacket, Peggy says she misses her apartment but enjoys still being in the neighborhood. "I sweep the sidewalk and pick up the trash," she says. "There is a real sense of community here."

"I know I am homeless," says Agnes Cooper, 58, who parks her silver 2006 Chevy HHR hatchback at a local gym in Phoenix. "If [the managers of the gym] know, they haven't said, and I have not asked permission. When I first slept in my car, I was parking at a Burger King, but the young kids made fun of me, and I am not accustomed to children being disrespectful." Cooper says her passenger seat folds down flat and she sleeps well. She works out and showers every morning and says the gym is "the best thing that ever happened to my body." A series of physical ailments to her back, legs and wrists caused her to stop working as a registered nurse; that, coupled with the death of her husband, forced her from her apartment.

Cooper says she faces a choice. She receives $909 a month in Social Security. After her bills, she has $289 left, plus the $100 she now pays for storage. She could spend that money to move into subsidized housing, but if she did, then she would be nearly broke: little money for food, no money to give at Sunday services, no money to buy her grandchildren gifts and no money to give to others in need - things she does on a regular basis. Now that her health has improved and her back is stronger, she hopes she can go back to work, at least part time.

Cooper's situation will be stable until she loses her car. Price says, "When people can no longer can afford to register their car and the police tow it, then people are on the street. That is the last rung. The towing and impounding charges are steep, and frequently people lose everything." Rudy Salinas, who directs the PATH outreach team in Los Angeles, says, "Allowing people to park on the street is a short-term solution. It is great for tonight, but not for next year."

"It's no fun living in your car," says Mike, a lighting specialist in the Los Angeles entertainment industry who has been out of work for a year. One of his last jobs was the Academy Awards show. "I don't have a job right now, in part because of my situation. Did you know that 50% of people who are homeless and living in their cars have jobs?" He keeps his vehicle registration current and parks his van on side streets on L.A.'s west side and in the San Fernando Valley. "You want to park where it is safe and inconspicuous. Not a busy street where someone might plow into you, and not a place where the bums will bother you," Mike says. "If the police hassle you, they'll impound your car and you'll lose everything. I don't want to find out."

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1963454,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-full-nation-related

Black Blade: I suspect that this is only the beginning and these people will have a head start on survival in the new economy. At least they will have learned the basic urban suvival skills before the next wave of unemployed follow.

[Nomen luni]

Living in our Vans - USA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3OFWYb4GWk

[Occamsrazor]

Troy and Tammy Renault can help their situation by making 5 more kids.

[Nomen luni]

Homeless couple living in garage

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45707000/jpg/_45707228_garagecopy.jpg

A Kent couple who both lost their jobs and then their home when they could no longer afford their mortgage have been living rough in a garage.

Paula Lacey and Michael Ward were found living in the tiny lock-up in Sittingbourne by the owner.

They had been renting the garage, which has no electricity or water, to store possessions but moved them outside 10 days ago when they became homeless.

Swale Borough Council said it had found them somewhere to stay temporarily.

In a statement on Monday it said: "We advised them how to make an application for homelessness and will now look more closely at their application.

"We will weigh up the information provided and decide in due course whether the council has a duty to house them permanently."

Pub meal

The couple had been renting the garage for £10 a week but were forced to make it their home as they had "nowhere to go".

Ms Lacey said they spent their days walking around the town and used the local swimming baths to take showers.

"If we've got the money we go to a local pub we know that do really nice meals for £1.50," she said.

Despite the size of the garage the couple said it was better than living on the streets while they tried to find work.

Video available at source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/8021251.stm

[Nomen luni]

Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa

I think this one was posted on GIM. Well worth a re-post for those who haven't seen it.

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/off_the_grid_life_on_the_mesa/

[Black Blade]

Homeless Executive Lives Off of Rewards Points

On Friday March 12, 2010, 11:34 am EST

Here's proof that all those frequent-flier miles and rewards points you've racked up are good for more than a subscription to Golf Digest.

Jim Kennedy, a 46-year-old executive in Southern California, went from six figures to homeless in less than two years after he lost his job as a corporate-development manager, had to file for bankruptcy and then lost his Newport Beach condo to foreclosure, the OC Register reports.

Now, he's using the more than one million frequent-flier miles and rewards points he accrued in his career to survive and help stretch the few dollars he has.

He's not your typical homeless guy: He drives around in a leased BMW, but hops from hotel to hotel, including a stay at the Motel 6, and tries to keep his food budget to $5 a day. He looks for places with free Internet to to facilitate his job search.

He's found that mixing cash and points gives you the best value. This week, he's at a Holiday Inn in San Clemente Calif., paying $25 a night, after cashing in 5,000 United Airlines (NASDAQ: UAUA) miles. Bonus: Free breakfast!

You can cash in miles for more than hotels and magazines - you can use them to buy food (be it at a restaurant or Kmart), drugstore items, clothing, gasoline - even a haircut!

Kennedy estimates his million miles will stretch about five months, according to other reports.

Call it the Platinum Homeless-Rewards Program: Never leave home without it!

You can follow Kennedy on Twitter at @HomelessThomOC.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Homeless-Executive-Lives-Off-cnbc-841648532.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=5&asset=&ccode=


Black Blade: Survival is survival. You use what reources are at your disposal.

[Black Blade]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ-JvJyshIg&feature=player_embedded

Living in tents, vans and trailors

[mick silver]

thanks bb and other a great insight that could happen to anyone at any time

[MNeagle]

Doomsday safe-haven offered under Mojave Desert

BARSTOW, Calif. – A company with a doomsday plan is taking money for what it promises will be a comfortable, nuke-proof bunker under the Mojave Desert, with an atrium, gym and jail, and sloppy joes and pearl potatoes on the menu.

Robert Vicino, who runs the Del Mar-based company called Vivos, has collected deposits on half the 132 spaces planned in the 13,000-square-foot bunker in Barstow.

The facility is among several popping up across the country as fears of doomsday have been fueled recently by strong earthquakes, terrorism and predictions of the world's end in 2012 when the ancient Mayan calendar is said to end.

"I'm careful not to promote fear. But sooner or later, I believe you're going to need to seek shelter," said Vicino, a real estate salesman whose career started with advertising and moved on to timeshares.

The political climate now in some ways reflects the Cold War era, when many Americans dug backyard fallout shelters, said Jeffrey Knopf, an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

"There's a lot of free-floating anxiety out there about the dangers that terrorists will get nuclear weapons and it multiplies," he said.

Facilities such as Vicino's are attracting interest in other states such as Oregon and Kansas, where one engineer is developing underground survival condos for $1.75 million.

In Barstow, $50,000 will get a bunk in a four-person room. Vicino is still taking reservations: $5,000 for adults and $2,500 for kids. Pets are free.

He said the Portland, Ore., company that owns the Barstow property, TSG Investments, gave him permission to convert it. The land once belonged to AT&T and was originally used as an emergency government communications center during the Cold War.

The Los Angeles Times toured the bunker, promising not to reveal the location because Vicino said he didn't want freeloaders trying to get in if disaster strikes.

The Times found a giant open area with anemic blue walls and a 3,000-pound door. Vicino said he hasn't raised enough money to start renovating but claims the place is already protected from electromagnetic pulses that could destroy electrical equipment.

Steve Kramer, a 55-year-old respiratory therapist from San Pedro, said he paid $12,500 to reserve spots for him and his family. He's stocking up on dried food and teaching his 12-year-old son to ride a dirt bike in case they have to go off-road to get to the desert bunker.

"We're not crazy people, but these are fearful times," Kramer said.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100517/ap_on_re_us/us_doomsday_bunkers

[Nomen luni]

Off the Grid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwRTpqNPsw&feature=related

This is part 1 of 7. The rest is available through youtube.

[Nomen luni]

Jobless and Living in my Truck
By Trooper Dan

I have been waiting for sometime to share information I know. I have been living in my truck for about 6 months now due to a job loss in Ohio where I'm from, I have since moved to South Florida and am now living In my BOV, As an outdoor enthusiast this is easy for me to do, but I think this is a sign of things to come and seeing people living in tents and vehicles everywhere ( remember "hoover towns"?). The "mobile homelessness" is so bad that the cops dont even stop people from doing it anymore.
I am a professional at what I do, I do not look homeless, I'm just an average guy that has fallen victim to the current economic downturn. Basically I feel like I am camping and I do not consider myself homeless, its a sad fact that I have seen entire families living out of a vehicle who are ill equipped and not accustomed to such inconveniences.

http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn318/wahooone/IMG_0160-1.jpg

http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn318/wahooone/007-1.jpg

The story continues here: http://whenshtf.com/showthread.php?8419-Jobless-and-living-in-my-truck...-%28with-Pics%29

[Nomen luni]

Dude Lives in Missile Silo

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/rawfile/2009/10/missile_base_7a.jpg

ABILENE, Texas — How does a former social worker from Chicago wind up living in an abandoned nuclear missile silo in Texas?

The Johnny Carson show.

Bruce Townsley was up late one night in the mid-’80s when he saw an unusual guest take a seat on Johnny’s set: a nuclear missile base real estate mogul named Ed Peden. Peden lives in an abandoned missile base in Kansas and was invited on the show to tell Johnny all about his underground lifestyle. Townsley was hooked.

Using the pre-Google research librarians at the public library outside of Chicago where he then lived, Townsley tracked Peden down. And though it wasn’t until 1997 that Townsley secured his current property, the idea blossomed in his head over the years. After completing his fair share of conventional home remodels in the Chicago area, Townlsey wanted a challenge to keep him busy for the rest of his life. So far, his silo property has perfectly fit the bill.

Read on to tour Townsley’s subterranean lair in our second installment of missile base homes.

Full story here:
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2009/10/missile-base-2/all/1