Mother Earth News - Mother Earth News 1970

So the air is full of crud, the water tastes funny and the nine-to-five is a drag. Youre tired of the subway, dog crap in the streets, bumper-to-bumper traffic and plastic TV dinners. Maybe the communes - with all that fresh air, sunshine, love and home-baked bread - are really into something.

But how the hell can you do it? T. Learys Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out is a noble sentiment but it doesnt lay down much of a blueprint. Is it actually possible to tell the boss to shove it, square your shoulders, and step out a free man without starving to death?

Sure. Its easy. The global electronic village is now! Just like McLuhan and Theobald and Bucky Fuller keep telling us. Nobody has to live second-hand anymore. The material scarcity world is dead. Long live free energy. Time and space are now plastic and life is exactly what you make it.

Stated most simply, there are two ways of living: Either play the game. Go for the money first and - assuming you get it - buy the kind of life you want. Or, kick out the jams, make your scene right in front, and let the bread take care of itself.

If youve got some money, fine. Your initial choice can be just that much wider. If you dont have bread, dont sweat it. That doesnt cramp your style at all. Besides, you can easily get paid for doing exactly what you want to do anyway. It doesnt matter if good times to you is a back-to-the-land thing or whether you have eyes for, say, touring with a name rock group. Either one is cool and either one is possible. Ive done both and other numbers in between. You can, too.

For example, this back-to-nature bit is very big right now and getting bigger. Lets say you want to get in on the action, but you have little or no money. Well, no matter what they say, it can be done. The land is not all taken.

Stretched across the upper half of this continent, as Bradford Angier notes in his book, How To Go Live In The Woods On $10 A Week, are vast areas of unspoiled and practically uninhabited wilderness. Its country where meat is still free for the hunting, fish for the catching, fruit and vegetables for the picking, fuel for the cutting, and a home for the fun of building. Angier speaks from the first-hand experience of homesteading in British Columbia, Canada.

What about that empty land in Alaska and Canada? Is it really free? Well technically, no. Youre generally supposed to file a homestead or homesite or somesuch claim, pay a fee averaging between $1 and $5 an acre, and enter your name on the tax rolls.

But thats a drag, so why not do what settlers have always done on the frontier: squat. Some homesteaders I talked to in British Columbia recommend it. Just consult an area map so you wont blunder onto land thats already taken, strike off into the bush, pick a spot, and build your cabin. If anybody ever wants to purchase or lease your ground, you - as a squatter - will be given first chance at legal title anyway. Why bother with the red tape now?

By the way, neither Canada nor Alaska is all ice and snow. Less snow falls on the panhandle of Alaska than annually descends on Chicago. Far north gardens are fantastic with washtub-size cabbages, and some wild fruit grows so thickly, its considered a nuisance. The Queen Charlotte Islands off British Columbias coast combine an exceedingly mild climate and a one-deer-a-day-per-person legal limit if your thing is living off the land.

If you want out but not that far, check into the hundreds upon thousands of acres of government land scattered throughout our own western states. You can, in effect, call a chunk of it your own if you have a legitimate reason. Roughly translated, that means you intend to exploit the land in some way.

Okay. Play their silly game. In Arizona, for instance, Ive rambled over mile after mind-boggling mile where you can stake a recognized mining claim by registering with a local office and digging a hole 4-by-6-10 feet deep. Naturally, once youve proved your claim in this manner, youll want to move right onto the property to keep an eye on it. To hold the ground, youre required to put in $100 worth of improvements plus a few dollars tax each year.

Again, if thats too much trouble, just go out in the hills and squat. Thousands of others have.

If youve got your heart set on legal title to fertile land that is close to the action of a thriving city thats possible, too. It wont be completely free, but you can sometimes pick up an abandoned farm for back taxes. It requires some sleuthing and finagling, however, and the easiest way is just to buy a little family farm that an old couple wants to sell. The Strout and United Farm Agency catalogues - regularly advertised in the classified sections of many magazines and newspapers - always list a number of such farms in all parts of the country. Some can be purchased for as little as $400 down. Newly organized communes and hip young couples with eyes for a rural homestead are snapping them up at an increasing rate.

Once youve got your land, what about shelter? Its up to you, so let your imagination soar!

Leary and hundreds of others are into the aborigine thing these days and live in plains Indian tepees. It makes sense because, unlike white mans tents, a properly constructed tepee is warm in winter, cool in summer, and able to withstand windstorms that will flatten a frame house. Reginald and Gladys Laubins The Indian Tipi will steep you in the rich tradition of this practical shelter and teach you how to build one.

If you prefer something more substantial, you can construct a thoroughly modern ranch house dirt cheap by using just that - dirt. Even a definitive instruction manual, Handbook For Building Homes Of Earth, is free from HUD, Division of International Affairs, Washington, D.C. The basic structure will cost you little more than your labor and, possibly, a few dollars for stabilizing agents. It beats the hell out of a 30-year mortgage or monthly rents of $120-plus.

Then again, if youre squatting, chances are theres an abandoned trappers or miners cabin nearby that you can move into or salvage for a new building. If you put your money down on a farm, you probably picked one with a habitable home and serviceable barns.

Or, as a number of drop-outs are proving, you can live in a structure as modern as tomorrow on a very thin shoestring: by spinning free-span domes from tops hacked out of discarded auto bodies, some of the new pioneers in the southwest have combined the best and worst of modern technology into a sheltering mutation.

Because the car tops can be obtained free or for as little as $0.25 each, a 30-foot dome can be thrown up for less than $50.

With land and shelter under your belt, youll probably want to turn your attention to food which is several notches above that polyethylene stuff sold at the supermarket. Fresh air, sunshine, and a garden where fruits and vegetables are free for the picking go together as naturally as ham and eggs from your own homestead. A subscription to Organic Gardening will give you that proverbial green thumb within a year and teach you about the chickens, pigs, and cows, too.