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Excerpts from:

 

 “Rancho Costa Nada:  The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead”

 

By Phil Garlington

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction   

How desperation, joblessness, a flat wallet, and the sin of pride drove me into the desert like a pariah.  And how I built a modest house for almost nothing and lived more or less comfortably.

            I became a desert homesteader after I got fired from my last job.  Homesteading in the burning waste is a new deal for me, but I’ve been canned many times.  My deportment irks employers.  It’s a kind of hauteur.   A cocky, supercilious, cheeky insolence.  Overweening querulous hubris.  I repeat myself, too, and have a flashy vocabulary.

            Anyway, this time after getting sacked I started turning around the idea that instead of donning somebody else’s livery right away maybe I’d try my luck as a stalwart, self-sufficient modern pioneer who doesn’t need a regular job. 

I already owned some acres in a remote desert valley.  That’s because, a couple of years before, while working as a reporter for a Southern California newspaper, I’d done a story about the annual tax-default land auction in rural Imperial County. 

One of the parcels on the block was ten acres, way out in bumfuck in the Colorado Desert, with an opening bid of $100.  I mean?  To make it short, I chimed in, and wound up getting the ten acres for $325.

            A friend dubbed the property Rancho Costa Nada.  It didn’t really cost nada, but it certainly didn’t cost very mucha.  The property lies in the middle of a monotonous baked-dry alkali basin that’s arid, scrub-covered, amenity-less and way the hell off the paved road.

            Folks do live out there in the valley, though.  True desert homesteaders, such as the Tuke family, holed up in a laager of trailers in the hollow of a barren hillside, where the ingenious son and dad spend their days tinkering with an improvised fleet of Mad Max-style desert carts and buggies.  There’s the irascible, touchy J.R., who finances his set of cannibalized sand rails by illegally salvaging brass casings from the nearby Chocolate Mountain Naval Aerial Gunnery Range.

            Other settlers too, like the Hobo, and the Demented Vet.  Baby Huey, Mystery Woman, and Alba the Dog Lady.  Indian Phil used to live out there too but he’s in prison now for shooting the finger off the deputy.

            Admittedly, it seemed like madness for me to try the homesteading thing.  Nobody encouraged me.  My sister said, “Is this some kind of religious experience?  Are you going to be hawking tracts at the bus station?  Because if that’s it, forget about coming to my house for Christmas.”

I’m a rugged individualist only in theory.  I have none of the practical mechanical or survival skills of the Tuke clan, or J.R, or the Hobo.  Some of the other inhabitants of the valley may be just as misanthropic and anti-social as I am, but they’re also handy and self-reliant.  I’m more a conceptualizer. 

But I’m also a big reader, and before I moseyed out to develop my scatter in the sun-basted beyond, I boned up on the desert pioneers, and visited all the websites catering to homesteaders, survivalists and back-to-the-land romantics.  So at least I took with me a lot of intellectual software.  Although in practice it turned out that most of the cute ideas I lifted from books pretty much flopped.

            Because of my limited tool-wielding abilities, the homestead I wound up with is decidedly low-tech, based on simple ideas that any mope can figure out without much need for luck or skill.  Nor did my modest biding place call for inordinate grunt labor. I’m too lazy for that.  And the real attraction for me, it was dirt cheap.  It had to be, because when I went out there to the Smoke Tree Valley I was pretty much busted.  For building, I used salvaged materials or stuff picked up from garage sales.  No loans, no mortgage.  No permit fees, since I didn’t pull any permits, and (as far as I know) it’s all legal.

            Naturally, not many people are going to follow my example, buying worthless land for almost nothing at an auction, and then building a hogan and compound for a few hundred bucks out of scrounged material.  My sister sees my “encampment” in the waterless Sahara as a nut bar deal suitable only for recluses and cranks that need a quiet place to make letter bombs.  She says that my experiment in simple living is no high-minded Thoreau-like examination of core values but rather the stigmata of a serious character flaw.  That’s her. 

            Most other people, in saying why they wouldn’t be interested, cite a reluctance to suffer hardship.  Rancho Costa Nada is innocent of alternating current, plumbing, tap water, and convenient shopping.  Seventeen miles to pavement, 45 miles to a Kmart.  Personally though, so far, I haven’t experienced any hardship.  Pain, yes, when I hit my thumb with the hammer.  And often boredom.  That’s why I travel a lot.  But nothing in the building or maintenance of the dirt-cheap homestead has been difficult.  Any common mope can do it, as I’ve proved.

            But understandably only a few adventurous freedom-seekers or surly malcontents actually will want to try this.  The following chapters may appeal most to the fantasy life of city-bound wage serfs who dream of shucking the mindless job and the asshole boss, ditching the teeming fellow widgets and the nightmare commute, in favor of what might seem like (and for me, sort of is) a placid life of leisure and self-sufficiency.  These countless yoked minions of the world aren’t any handier than I am, and don’t have a big bank account either.  But, see, it says right here that it’s really possible to get land for practically nothing (as long as it has no water and is basically worthless) and then live on it in a comfortable little shack, with a few cute, inventive but simple amenities, again for almost nothing.  And no cretin taskmaster on your back harping about deadlines.  The stuff of cubicle daydreams.

           

           

 

 

 

 

Wallet like a pancake.  Ditto bank account.  Pretty much down to bare metal.   Seeds and stems.  So with the help of the Hobo, I collect some salvage and scrap and haul a truckload of this stuff out to the desert scatter.

            I had a starting construction budget of about $300 cash.  The only flex was in one still-limber credit card that hadn’t quite been maxed.  Obviously, I wouldn’t be shopping for materials at the building supply.  Everything would have to be salvage…or scrounged.

Nowadays when I ride the Californian, the Amtrak train that runs between Bakersfield and Oakland through the Central Valley, I covet the junk I see from the window of the dining car.  The tracks, like train tracks everywhere, parallel countless unkempt backyards and lots littered with the detritus of untidy lives.  On the outskirts of burgs like Fresno and Stockton stretch miles of corporation yards, bursting like an abscess with lots of material I certainly could use out on the Rancho.  Stacks of wooden pallets, rusting metal beams, gutted trailers, splintered, graying lumber, scraps of plywood, jumbles of broken concrete and rebar.  I could put that stuff to use out at the homestead.  Trouble is, of course, the Rancho lies in the remote fastness of the Colorado Desert, and this cornucopia of junk, much of which probably I could snag for a song, inconveniently reposes here, five hundred miles, five hundred miles… farther than the wail of a train whistle on a still night.

            That’s the only drawback I can see to using salvage. Most of it is where the people are, and the cheap desert homestead is gonna be where people aren’t.  Thus the major cost of a salvage operation, and it’s sometimes a considerable cost, is in the transportation, in moving the pretty much worthless junk items from the urban venue to the faraway homestead.  Particularly in my case, since I don’t own a truck.  My only transport is a three-cylinder Geo Metro, which means that when I have to move heavy items, such as salvaged lumber, concrete, and pallets, I have to hire a lift.  My biggest single expense in building the dirt cheap homestead -- $139 -- covered the rental of a U-Haul truck.

           

My homestead is about 45 miles from Blythe, California, a town located on the Colorado River across from Ehrenburg, Arizona.  Blythe’s population is 12,000 un-incarcerated (two state prisons lie within the Gerrymandered city limits), and happily that’s a large enough population to generate the waste and residue that the salvager needs to work with.  I learned all of this about salvaging from the Hobo.

The Hobo is another settler out in the Smoke Tree Valley, residing on a homestead located six or seven miles north of mine.  I think it’s interesting that he spent about a year digging a big hole to bury his trailer.  Makes sense, I guess.  Estivation.  All the animals in the desert burrow below ground to escape the heat.  But the Hobo has put a periscope in his buried trailer so he can watch the animals that snoop around his compound at night.  He puts out kibble for the coyotes.  He’s sitting down there in his trailer like Captain Nemo…

Anyway, the Hobo knows where to score the salvage. He agreed to help round up and load the junk I’d need for my homestead in exchange for a little space on the truck, for water tanks and dog food for the wildlife.

            Big adventure, huh?  Gathering up all the items necessary for building a desert hogan.  I hoped this would mean, finally, cutting the cord with the landlord and the utility company, with a hopeful eye to shrugging off the constraints of the nine-to-five-Monday-through-Friday wage-earning grind, blah blah, and taking command of my own life again.  It’d be just another day in Samland for the other mopes, but for me, umbilical separation day, when I grab the wheel away from the officious chauffeur that Fate assigned and pull off onto an interesting side road.

            The Hobo had pulled off on a side road a long time ago.  In his mid-forties now, he’d had a footloose career of budget wandering all over the globe, before buying his ten acres out in the Smoke Tree Valley.  As a certified world traveler, bargain class, the Hobo had struck Blythe on one of his cross-country sojourns, and saw the potential right off the bat.  Blythe anchors down plenty of nothing.  Stark, scrubby, sun-smitten desert for a hundred miles in any direction.  Hemmed all around by waterless, worthless dirt.  I had stumbled into possession of my baronial estate by sheer chance, but the Hobo picked the Smoke Tree.

I’d first spied the Hobo on a Blythe side street sitting on a curb next to his ancient Volks bug, which had a full-sized sofa strapped to a home-made carrying box carved into the backseat.   He called his car the Clampett-mobile, after the sorry hearse-colored vehicle in the Beverly Hillbillies.  I guess that car had a sofa attached.  In my position then as editor of the local astonisher, I was always on the lookout for feature filler.  At first glance the Hobo seemed the kind of eccentric feature a newspaper always can use.  He wore voluminous clown trousers with one suspender and a plaid shirt buttoned all the way to the top.  And ten-pound ankle weights (he once told me that Kmart offers the best ankle weights, and he’d shopped the world).  Chatting, we soon figured out we owned land in the same valley.   A few months later, after I got canned and made my big decision to homestead, he showed me how to get started in the racket.