A quirky how-to book set in California's baked and

barren

Smoke Tree Valley near the Colorado River. After

getting fired from two jobs in a row, an itinerant

newspaper reporter tries homesteading ten acres of

worthless desert that he'd bought earlier at a land

auction for $325. He builds a comfortable house of

sandbags and salvaged junk. He also examines the

ingenious Mad Max ways of fellow homesteaders who have

jumped the tracks, and pitched the mortgage, the boss,

and the utility bill. 

 While working for the Orange County Register, veteran

newspaper reporter Phil Garlington was assigned to

cover a tax-default land auction in rural Imperial

County. One of the parcels on the block was ten desert

acres with a starting bid of $100. What the heck,

over. After some desultory bidding, Garlington nabbed

the property, sight unseen, for $325. “You'll never

find this,” said the county clerk when she turned over

the deed. The clerk apparently didn't know about GPS,

and Garlington soon stood on his baronial estate in

the desolate Smoke Tree Valley, 45 miles south of

Blithe, California, 17 miles off the paved highway,

and so close to the Chocolate Mountain Naval Gunnery

Range that the concussions from morning bombing runs

rattled the coffee cups.

For several years the Rancho served as a weekend

retreat for Garlington and some of the reporters and

photographers at the Register who sought a remote

venue for discharging firearms. The gunmen built a

rifle and pistol range, a skeet shooting pit, a few

shade shacks. They popped caps during the winter.

During the summer inferno, the land healed, hundreds

of spent brass cartridges winking in the sun.

Then Garlington suffered a series of personal

reverses. The Register dismissed him in a

newsroom-wide layoff of one. His overseers cited

attitude (the bad kind). He took another

post, as editor of the Blythe newspaper, the Palo

Verde Valley Times, but within a mere nine months he

got canned there too. Insubordination. A

trend seemed to be emerging, or perhaps some kind of

masochistic self-sabotage. At any rate, it was right

about then that Garlington asked himself. “Could I

live at the Rancho?” Instead of going through the

demeaning hassle of finding another job and of then

taking the program from another set of junior

widgets, could he instead live cheap and rent-free on

his title deed in the sun-basted desert?

By this time he'd found out that some people could. At

first Garlington thought he had the Valley to himself,

because he never saw anybody out there during shooting

weekends. But in Blythe he'd come across the Hobo, who

turned out to be another land baron of 10 acres in the

Smoke Tree. The Hobo already had built a solar powered

Mother Earth News kind of homestead that included a

buried trailer equipped with a periscope. He

introduced Garlington to half a dozen other year-round

homesteaders who manage to thrive in a harsh and

waterless climate. The ingenious Tuke family, with

their fleet of Mad Max sand rails; the irascible J.R;

the truculent Big Huey; the elusive Mystery Lady;

Alba, the Dog Woman (and her 30 cats); and the ranting

Demented Vet. They all had laagers of trailers with

ingenious devices that helped them estivate through

the sweltering summers. 

 Garlington began his homesteading venture pretty much

broke. He had a construction budget of $300 and the

tail end of a credit card. He had a 1993 Geo Metro,

and a few basic hand tools. Unlike the other

homesteaders in the valley, he had no pioneer

abilities. But fuck it. He was through crawling on his

belly through the corridors of Human Resources with

his battered

resume. Garlington bought $100 worth of salvaged

lumber from Wood Charlie, across the river in

Ehrenberg. He picked up four used 100-gallon water

tanks ($10 each) from the Oasis Water Company. He

loaded a bunch of scrap pallets from behind Ace

Hardware. And in a couple of weeks, all by himself, he

built a cute-enough and comfortable Hogan, mostly out

of sandbags. During quality control testing, the sand

walls

stopped a fusillade of .303s from an Enfield.

“I'm no Bolshevik,” Garlington says, “I've always seen

the need for hierarchy and obedience in the workplace.

It's my demeanor: a kind of cocky, supercilious

hubris, or cheeky querulous insolence, or wordy,

repetitious, show-off pretentiousness, which somehow

irks employers.”

Garlington said at first the homesteading rift seemed

madness. “I don't have any practical mechanical or

survival talent. Sure, the other homesteaders are

misanthropic and anti-social too, but they're also

handy and self-reliant. I'm more of a conceptualizer.”

Because of his limited skills Garlington designed and

built a dwelling decidedly low-tech. “It's butt

simple, based on simple ideas than any mope can handle

without ever having to resort to luck or skill.” Nor

did it require inordinate grunt labor. “The most

labor-intensive effort was filling sandbags, which

pretty much any idiot can do,” Garlington said. “And

the real beauty: it was dirt cheap, with the

ingredients either salvaged or taken from the site. No

mortgage. No permit fees.” And Garlington says he's

pretty sure it's all legal.

It's unlikely that many readers will follow

Garlington's example of buying worthless land at an

auction and then building a sandbag house. But the

book may well appeal to those city-bound dreamers who

itch to shuck their boring jobs and the asshole boss,

escape the madding crowd and nightmare commute, and

live a simpler, more bucolic life.

According to Garlington, practical skills and a big

bank account weren't needed. “The reason most people

give for not wanting to try something like this is the

hardship,” Garlington said. “I haven't had any

hardship so far. What really gets you out here is one,

the boxcar wind; and two, boredom. When I get bored I

take a long vacation, using all the money I save by

not paying rent or mortgage.”

In the book, Garlington touches on most of the

practical aspects of desert homesteading. The first

issue of course is water. “A well is out of the

question. Too expensive and the water's salt when you

hit it. Drinking water, at least, must be hauled from

town, 45 miles away. That's what the homesteaders do,

hundreds of

gallons at time, on the back of a truck. Out in the

Smoke Tree, one of the homesteaders will deliver some

highly mineralized well water from his secret source.

“But this water is only suitable for gardening and for

running the settler's homemade evaporative coolers,

provided the filters are cleaned every week.”

Electricity? “The (valley) is off the grid. No power

poles. So I have formed my own private utility. I have

a couple of deep cycle marine batteries on the

floorboard of my Geo. I charge the batteries off the

alternator while I'm driving around. At home I plug my

car into the Hogan, and have plenty of juice to run

lights, TV, fans, and even fountains.”

Violence and vandals? Because the valley is so

isolated, it draws both meth cookers and yahoo vandals

on quads, Garlington says. For this reason, when he

takes one of his frequent vacations, he puts anything

of interest in storage. “There's nothing I leave out

there that couldn't be replaced at a garage sale.” He

says that everybody in the valley is paranoid and

heavily armed, but as for actual violence, it falls

easily under two heads: domestic beef, and deputy vs.

citizen. “Pretty much the same deal everywhere.”

Garlington explains how he gets by without

refrigeration or ice, and how he showers with a

water-filled weed sprayer while standing in a small

plastic wading pool. His evaporative cooler keeps beer

“at pub temperature,” and a solar Thrombe wall warms

the bedroom interior in winter. In one chapter he even

takes on the ticklish subject of sex. “It's like

water. You either bring your own or go to town for

it.”

In all this offbeat and often amusing book will be a

pleasant reverie for wannabe escapists from the rat

race, particularly for the aging spendthrift Boomers

contemplating the alternatives for eking out a pinched

retirement. 

Phil Garlington has worked as a

staff writer for the San Francisco Examiner, the San

Diego Evening Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the

Washington Times, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the

Orange County Register, the National Enquirer, The

Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the Redding

Record-Searchlight, the Clearlake Observer, and the

Calistoga Weekly. 

His son Michael is a fine arts

photographer in San Francisco.