From One Rat to Another / How one man went from living the urban rat race to living like a desert rat
Published 4:00 am, Monday, June 2, 2008
As planned, I met Carl (not his real name) at a bar in a tiny town 100 miles east of Reno. The bar, a ramshackle but clearly well-loved place, was hosting a birthday party. A pool table was loaded with potluck food reminiscent of the 1970s — a cheese log, cream puffs, fried chicken. The birthday boy, a big guy who later confessed to me he was having trouble meeting women out here in the vast desert, careened across the room, clutching a gift bag to his heart.
Carl guided me over to the bar, bought me a Guinness in a can, and we settled down to talk. Carl's hair was long and peeked out from underneath a cowboy hat. It had turned white since the last time I saw him, a year ago in downtown San Francisco.
By most standards, Carl had been a successful urban businessman. He started a small company when he was in his 20s, and it flourished and grew in the dot-com era and beyond. He was happily married, and he and his wife owned their home in the East Bay. Finances had never been a problem.
Now, on the cusp of 40, Carl found himself living in a double-wide trailer and buying cans of beer from a 90-year old bartender in a Podunk Nevada town. And he had never been happier. His eyes were shining in a way I had never seen when he lived in the city.
A year ago, Carl evacuated from San Francisco and moved to the Nevada desert. He sold the business, sold his house, bought some land and relocated his wife and dog to what he calls the "deep desert."
Now he's obsessed with self-reliance and ingenuity, and told me about plans for a windmill that will generate some of the electricity used in the double-wide. As we talked, it became clear that his emigration from city to country had radically changed Carl's perspective on money, and that living in a scrubby wasteland had forever changed his notion of what is valuable.
Rewind to last year. Carl, at work, in San Francisco, miserable. He put in 14 hours a day, wandered around with wads of 20s in his pocket, ready to pay for whatever delight the city had for him. "I used to eat out for every meal. Breakfast, lunch and dinner," Carl said. "Then there's coffee — what does that cost now, $5 a cup?" Then there was gas and drinks — Carl felt like he was constantly buying or consuming something.
These days, Carl's wife cooks their meals, which they eat sitting out on the deck with a view of jagged hills and snow capped peaks. He often takes his four-wheeler out for drives in the desert, usually armed with one of his many guns.
"I am the lord of all I survey," Carl said. He chose the Nevada desert because of its small population and relatively harsh living conditions. "If you want to maximize your freedom, you have to live in a place where no one else wants to live," Carl advised.
As we walked to the car to drive up to the ranch, Carl explained how he sees the desolation of the surrounding scrubby desert as beautiful. "Not to sound all religious," Carl said, "when you spend all your time surrounded by man's works — cement, cars, steel, bridges — it's difficult to imagine a world without man. When you live out in the wilderness, man is a minor part of the world. Man's accomplishments seem a lot smaller."
Carl is taking part in a long-standing American tradition of giving up on the endless drive to earn more money and abandoning a society based on consumption of goods. In the 1840s, there were the transcendentalists and writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who escaped the rat race in Boston to the quiet quarters of Brook Farm. Henry David Thoreau went to live in the woods by Walden Pond. In the 1970s, over 1 million hippies left cities for rural areas in order to grow their own food and live off the land.
These days — with the price of oil topping $130 a barrel, an ever-weakening dollar and food shortages worldwide, moving toward a more self-sufficient lifestyle suddenly seems like a good idea again.
Although there aren't any hard numbers on people like Carl, anecdotal evidence indicates that there may be a consumer backlash in the making. Lynn R. Miller, the founder and publisher of Small Farm Journal, a how-to magazine about running small farms, with a circulation of 20,000, has certainly noticed increased business in recent months.
"We've had a lot of ups and downs over our 32-year time period," Miller said over the phone from his farm in Oregon. "But right now we're getting a lot of new customers." Miller receives 150-300 e-mails a day, many of them from people like Carl, who are worried about living in the city during a financial meltdown, and want to have peace of mind by becoming more self-sufficient.
Miller believes that starting a farm, contrary to popular opinion, doesn't have to involve spending a lot of money. "People who think they need a lot of money to buy the land, buy brand new equipment, hire people to do all the work, are destined for failure," said Miller, who once lived in San Francisco himself before moving to Oregon. "If instead you can embrace the notion that not daring is fatal, and go after the adventure, you will succeed."
Carl is up for the adventure — and as for spending money, his budget is very low. One of his inspirations was the book "Rancho Costa Nada," by Philip Garlington. The book tells the story of a newspaper reporter who purchased a few acres of land in the California desert with $400, and then "retired" to his hand-made hogan where he lived off nothing, using various scrapper techniques.
Carl, however, had greater resources than Garlington, and bought 55 acres with $100,000 he pulled out of his home's equity. Although $100,000 for that many acres — with a spring-fed well that meets all their water needs — seems like a bargain, Carl has some regrets. "I probably paid three times too much," he said, "Because I didn't understand how to buy land in the West, which is, the rancher will look at you and calculate how much you're worth. I should have befriended the older people out here and got their help. Maybe they would have negotiated on my behalf."
Slowly over a period of nine years, Carl and his wife added buildings to the property while he continued to work in the city. "I bought this 1970s double-wide for $1,600," Carl said proudly when he later gave me a tour of the property.
When Carl and his wife were finally ready to move out to the ranch for good last year, they had to sell their house. In the softening housing market, this was no easy task. With help from his real estate agent, Carl called upon everyone he knew to sell his home in the East Bay. Eventually he found a friend of a friend who was interested. A few months after the deal was sealed, the cracks in the housing market became craters. Carl had gotten out just in time.
Once he and his wife moved to the ranch full-time, they realized the desert economy was vastly different from an urban one. Money will get you anything in the city, but Carl said, "Because there's no store, no place to shop, the money doesn't do you any good here. You need things to barter. You work trade on someone else's ranch." He had some farm equipment he had bought but ended up not needing, and bartered it for two generators, something he really needed for his ranch, which is totally off the electrical grid.
Carl noted that as he learned about bartering in the desert, he noticed that it served a social function too. "Bartering is a way for them to make sure you're OK. It's socialization, a way to examine you." As newcomers, Carl and his wife had to be vetted by the locals — by participating in the local economy, they were deemed socially acceptable. Soon, they found themselves accepted into the circle of ranchers.
Carl and his wife's "commute" to work involves walking down their trailer's stairs and following a pebbly path for 200 feet to a work trailer next door, where they run an Internet book and toy business. The warehouse, an airy Quonset hut, is right on the grounds of their property.
"Imagine how much that would cost in San Francisco — owning a warehouse outright!" Carl said while we wandered around his property. UPS makes regular trips out to the desolate desert to pick up pallets of boxes to ship all over the world.
Carl then showed me his garden, which is mostly fruit trees watered by drip irrigation from his natural spring, and a small vegetable plot protected from wind and critters by a large fence. He buys eggs from a neighbor who keeps chickens nearby.
One reason Carl wants to grow his own food is a matter of being self-reliant. "We are far more helpless in the city. In urban society, everyone does specialized jobs. In the situation now, it's suddenly in the interest of corn farmers to not feed you and sell it to the fuel companies. That's a massive social weakness."
Energy is the same in Carl's mind. Solar panels provide most of his energy needs. On a minimal budget, but with a steep learning curve, Carl managed to cobble together enough panels to power the couple's lights, computers and television (a main source of entertainment for them is cable television shows on DVD). He said he cut costs by buying panels used, on eBay, or at RV stores.
I ask Carl what he'll do if the price of gas becomes too expensive for UPS to take his packages. "When things go badly, the urban person says: 'This isn't fair,'" Carl said. "In a rural area, you say: 'Of course things go wrong'. Things usually break out here, and when they do, you fix it. It's a bad thing about fuel prices, but I'm sure we can come up with an individualized solution for our problems."
Looking back on his life in the city, Carl is not ambivalent. "It's wasteful. Living off grid is the ultimate education," he said. He knows exactly where his water comes from, how his television is powered. This knowledge makes him less likely to waste power or water. He wishes that more people would try to become self-sufficient. "I always dreamed of the ideal of the self-sufficient individual — I had to live that way. Otherwise, I would be just a person dreaming."
A citizen of Oakland, Novella Carpenter reports on food, farming and culture. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, Salon.com, Edible San Francisco and other publications. Her memoir about urban farming is forthcoming from Penguin Press. She keeps a blog about city farming at www.novellacarpenter.com