Ted Conover - Cheap Land Colorado : Off-Gridders at Americas Edge

I t begins with a moment of contactof driving up to a homestead and trying to introduce yourself.

The prospect is daunting: a lot of people live out here because they do not want to run into other people. They like the solitude. And it is daunting because many of them indicate this preference by closing their driveway with a gate, or by chaining a dog next to their front door, or by posting a sign with a rifle-scope motif that says, if you can read this youre within range!

The local expert on cold-calling is Matt Little, charged by the social service group La Puente with rural outreach. Matt has let me ride around in his pickup with him so that I can see him in action. Distances between households on the open Colorado prairie are great, which gives him time to explain his approach, which he has thought about a lot, as he does this every day and in three months has not gotten shot.

If youre thinking the checklist is short, youre mistaken. Before you ever see the homestead, you need to consider the visual impression youll make. Matt drives a 2009 Ford Ranger with a magnetic la puente sign on the door. It is not fancy. Nor is Matt fancy: he is a forty-nine-year-old veteran of two tours in Iraq, a slightly built man from rural West Virginia with an easy smile. He smokes cigarettes and often he is whiskery. He tells me not to wear a blue shirt, because thats the color worn by Costilla County code enforcement, and you dont want to be mistaken for them. La Puente ordered him a hoodie and a polo shirt in maroon with their insignia, and he usually wears one or the other, along with jeans and boots.

Hell drive by a place, often more than once, before actually stopping, so that he can reconnoiter. Is there an American flag flying? That often suggests a firearm inside. Are there childrens toys? Is there a small greenhouse or area hidden behind a fence that suggests that marijuana is being grown? (Initially I thought that might be a good sign, since cannabis can make people mellow. But Matt emphatically said no. A full-grown plant could be worth a thousand dollars, and people steal em!) More to the point, is anyone even living there? Are there fresh tire tracks? Smoke coming from the chimney? Many prairie settlements have been abandoned or are lived in only during the summer.

Matt had noticed one property with berms constructed inside its perimeter of barbed-wire fence. He saw bullet casings and suspected the owner was a vet with some psychological issues: I thought he was probably playing war games, reenacting things hed been through. He drove by to show methe place was at the end of a dead-end road, which made it kind of hard to pretend you were just passing by. Matt said that the first few times, he paused at the roads end, waved at whoever inside might be watching him, and turned around. He continued in that vein over the next month, waving or honking but not lingering, until one day he saw a man outside the house dressed in camo gear. Matt parked his truck and stepped outside.

Im Matt from La Puente, he said. Ive got a little wood. He gestured at the firewood stacked in the bed of his truck, something useful conceived of by his employer as a calling card, an icebreaker.

The man picked up an AK-47. Youre a persistent son of a bitch, he said. Then: How much is it?

Its free, said Matt.

The guy walked toward the gate. He opened it. He waved Matt in.

Normally, Matt had shown me, you didnt see somebody outside, so the procedure was to stop at the end of their drive and tap the horn. At the first sign of life, hed often step from his truck so they could see him, a (hopefully) unthreatening presence. He might leave them with some firewood, a business card with his cell number, an offer to come back should they find themselves in need of food, help with filling out an application, a ride to town for a doctors appointment, or a pickup of a prescription.

I paid close attention because I was starting to volunteer with La Puente. It seemed like a good way to meet isolated prairie dwellers, and Matt said he could use the help.

I set myself a goal of three new contacts per day. La Puente loaned me a rural outreach sign for the door of my own pickup truck. I chose an area and drove around, as slowly as I could without looking suspicious; I guessed that many of the places I was sizing up were abandoned.

I finally settled on a place with a short driveway, figuring that would make me harder to ignore and easier to evaluate. It was a modest house with various pieces of junk around it, including non-working vehicles, but I could see by tracks in the dusty dirt that someone had been driving in and out. I stopped and beeped the horn. Thats when I realized that the Jeep Wagoneer in front had somebody in it. I rolled down my window. A moment later, he cracked his own window. I climbed out of my truck and, in a show of my confidence and good intentions, walked over to him.