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.
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He’ll 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 children’s 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!”)
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We come for the scale of it. —Linda Gregerson, “Sleeping Bear”
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These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves—they’re good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on ’em. —Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter
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Her demeanor was on the gruff side—you can’t run a shelter if you’re a pushover—but it was clear from our conversation that she had a big heart and was deeply committed to helping the poor.
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She explained the direct link between the shelter and the off-gridders I was interested in: “You’re living in a slum, and you see an ad about owning five acres for five thousand dollars, and you have a view of Blanca Peak—to them it’s an opportunity, it’s the savage wild, their piece of the rock.” People would come to the valley just to own their own place, free from landlords and utility bills. And free also from being judged: “Sometimes the attitude is, I’d rather live a rough life out there than live in town and be looked down on,” Tona explained.
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So paranoid were some locals that Robert said they would seed their driveway with nails in order to disable visiting inspectors and deter inspections, and build a second entrance that was safe. He said he had gotten several flat tires this way.
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Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. —Zen proverb
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It’s our patriotic duty to see the humanity in people with whom we disagree. —Dave Isay
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Nationwide, the number is probably in the tens of thousands, though again no authoritative numbers exist. Off-grid life seems to be growing in the United States, often in regions with cheap land, like Appalachia; or sunshine, like Hawaii, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida; or frontier appeal, like Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado; or environmental consciousness, like northern California, Oregon, Vermont, and even New York.)
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One metric of a good life, in my book, is the number of interesting situations one can engage in, learn from, hang out with. For several thousand dollars, you might join an African safari, or a journey through the South American rain forest, or spend some time dining really well in France. Or you could, as the newspaper ads from the 1970s put it, own your own ranch and live in what was, to my way of seeing, one of the most beautiful places in the world.
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These doubled as possible locations to retreat when the “shit hit the fan,” as doomsday preppers would say; Matt told me they had stashed enough food at one site to survive for at least six months. And he said they’d be well situated to defend themselves: “With binoculars, from up there I can see almost to Highway 142 some days,” a distance of maybe twenty miles. Like many others, Matt believed that the most likely spark of this doomsday scenario would be urban unrest that spilled over into rural places, with city people both escaping chaos and looking for things to eat, presuming the collapse of the food-distribution system.
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The year before, he had told me that he planned to sell his AK-47 and use the proceeds for a rifle, but recent events had changed his mind. Instead, he said, “I’m buying a second AK! And keeping it in the truck, in case of protestors.” The father of a family visiting from Mississippi said they had packed three firearms for the journey—“it’s just common sense.”
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Gunsmithing was a hobby of his—I’d met several men on the prairie who shared this interest—and he had offered to show us his work. He was driving a small sedan without license plates and explained that he’d just bought it, adding that it had a “clean title.” He popped the hood and reached inside the engine compartment to where he had hidden the first gun—a pistol with a silencer. We oohed and aahed—the silencer was, of course, illegal. “I could get a few years for that, so I hide it,” he explained. He also took out an AK pistol (an AK-47 rifle modified into pistol form) and a Colt revolver. The nurse’s husband joked that around here you need a gun that can fire a lot of rounds in case you run into “a whole herd of mule deer.” “Or a whole herd of protestors,” said Harry. He talked about going back to Oklahoma in a few days to resume work on the machinery used in fracking—“valves, other stuff.” He liked the idea of living in Oklahoma or Missouri because “they’re both open carry,” with no permits required, “and I’ve carried a gun since I was fifteen. The people I’ve gotten to know, I’ve had to.” One night at two a.m., he said, guys he recognized from high school in San Luis broke into his grandpa’s general store in Mesita with the intention to rob it. “But my gun had bullets in it and theirs didn’t.” His shirt was unbuttoned enough to reveal his chest tattoo: two Derringer pistols, crossed like short swords.
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These sad endings were the foil to my romantic love of the land, the sky, and the weather: the prairie had aspects of a rural ghetto. There were folks with outstanding warrants, there was relationship abuse, there was addiction.
