Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
off the grid
Nick Rosen is a rising authority on living off the grid and has written extensively on the subject for the Times (London), the Guardian, and Reuters. He is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He edits the Web site Off-Grid.net in back of his RV, using a laptop plugged into the cigar lighter (and a wireless modem plugged into the laptop). His hobbies include cooking, diving, and trespassing, and he has a part-time, off-grid home on the island of Majorca.
for Caitlin Jett
Another Way
People are becoming less self-reliant and more dependent than ever before... they cannot really do anything for themselves. They depend utterly on vastly complex organizations, on fantastic machinery, on larger money income....
E. E. Schumacher
Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Sequoia had been both feared and loved by the residents of Greenfield. Her temper was legendary, and yet, according to Mike, who also settled here in the 1970s, She could have had any man on this ranch.
In her heyday and beyond, several mourners told me, she would stride around the back roads wearing nothing but cowboy boots, her flame-red hair reaching down to her ass, a joint hanging from her pouting lips, boyfriend du jour at her side.
And now here she was in the dim light, lying in state on the clubhouse table, dressed in white and cream, like Titania from A Midsummer Nights Dream, surrounded by piles of flowers, her face heavily made up, her long tresses combed straight down.
A cross section of the ranchs 185 residents were busy demolishing her collection of rare tequilas, which she had specifically instructed be drunk at this moment. Older baby boomersher generationwere in the majority at Sequoias wake. But there were others in their thirties and a few kids; Greenfield is multigenerational now. I was dizzy with introductions to builders, writers, pot-growers, healers, scientists, even a winemaker.
A little bit of pot (the local cash crop) was being smoked on the smooth lawn outside the sole community building on the ranch, but mainly it was about drink and food this balmy October evening.
I showed up at mountainous Greenfield Ranch, in Mendocino County, too late to meet Sequoia. In her final e-mail, she had warned me to hurry; shed had a lot to impart. She had wanted to tell me about the politics and the history and the fun of living off the grid in Northern California, outside the system, free of the Man, especially the Meter Man. Sequoia, like hundreds of thousands of others across America, had existed beyond the reach of the power cables and water lines that intersect and delineate the modern worldno peed for meter readings here.
In the hills edging Boone, North Carolina, a young man sits in a tepee. Outside steam is rising from the leafy forest floora combination of last nights rain and this mornings sun. He is an undergraduate at the nearby university. His fathers company sells upholstery to airplane manufacturers, so the son could afford to live in a house. But he prefers the teepee, which is, at least, laid with incredibly hard-wearing aircraft carpet. He and his girlfriend own a large collection of guns, and he tells me that America would be a better, safer place if every household had to own a gun by law. As he cooks our breakfast on a tiny, homemade rocket stove, I nervously loose off a few rounds with his semi-automatic. Its the first time Ive ever fired a gun, and each shot hits the bulls-eye.
The American Legion in Big Bend, Texas, is the only bar for forty miles in any direction. To the south is Terlingua and the Mexican border. At midday the doors open, seven days a week, and the local homesteaders gather in the wooden building for beer and gossip. The Legion is connected to the utilities, but none of its regular customers live in houses with power or water. There are several hundred homes scattered around the areasome of them holiday cabins for northeasterners. The majority are occupied by single guys: veterans, divorcees, desert-lovers, retired widowers, some alcoholics but not manyits too tough out here for heavy drinkers. Fewer women than men want to adjust to the harsh climate and the desolate landscape. There are mountains, says the woman behind the bar, a little too brightly. And its true, there is a mountain range in this part of West Texas, and a national park. Its a place to come if you want to be lonely... and land is very inexpensive compared to most of the locations I visited.
These off-grid locations range from urban houseboats to suburban lots and gardens, from rural houses and communes to cabins, tree houses, converted shipping containers, and even tents and their ethnic variations, such as tepees and yurts. The people living this waythe off-griddersmight be middle-class environmentalists or right-wing survivalists, victims of foreclosure or long-term pot growers, international business travelers with their own islands or groups of friends who decided to start a community. They move around in buses and four-wheel drives, yachts and houseboats, caravans and Winnebagos, as well as more conventional vehicles.
The back-to-the-land movement was having its first flowering when Sequoia settled in Greenfield in 1972. The five-thousand-acre ranch is one of many that the original owners had clear-cut and then partitioned to sell piecemeal, back before solar panels had been invented and before land prices shot up dramatically. And it was harshno roads to speak of, no cell phones, no Internet. It was unthinkable.
Thousands moved in from San Francisco, New York, and everywhere in betweenhippies and yippies, grad students and artists, dreamers, schemers, CIA spies, draft dodgers, and psychos. (Greenfield even spawned a mass murdererLeonard Lake, who was ejected by his fellow residents in 1980, shortly before he began his killing spree.) They built homes from trees felled on the spot. They hauled in five-hundred-gallon tanks to catch the rainwater, powered a few lights with generators or car batteries, grew some pot, and tried to grow food. Anyone still here forty years later has a right to be considered among the most practical, self-sufficient, hardy, and ingenious Americans. The defining characteristics of this diverse off-grid population? A fierce resistance to convention and a pioneering spirit.
Mike Riddell, my guide at Greenfield, was newly divorced with no job and two young daughters in tow when he settled here. First he built a one-room structure, with a kitchen tucked into the corner, on his small plot of land. Once his children had a secure shelter over their heads, he started work on his own bedroom, and its been going like this for almost forty years. Now he has one of the best and biggest spreads on Greenfield, having expanded through the purchase of additional lots completed on favorable terms as laid down in the ranchs bylaws.
Most of the lots are twenty or forty acres, he explained, and cannot be subdivided. Many owners, especially the unmarried ones, find themselves a land partner who may build an additional, semilegal dwelling on the same parcel. But Mike did not need a land partner. He remarried, and now here he was at Sequoias wake, sixty-five years old, with his Mexican wife, Juanita Joy. Hes fit and happyor as happy as one can be at a wakewith a full head of gray ringlets; he looks like a retired rock star. But the rest of the band are beginning to die.
