Phil Garlington, author of Rancho Costa Nada – The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead, talks with us about the circumstances that led to his choosing to call one of the more inhospitable spots on the globe home. It's desert really, the Smoke Tree Valley, “near the Colorado River,” he says, but evidently not near enough, with triple digit temperatures in the summer and “winds that could blow over a boxcar.” As he also says, “It's not for everybody, but it's an option.”

This author managed to build a habitable shelter for not much more than the land cost him, roughly about a month's SUV payment. If you're looking for a dirt cheap way out of the city grind, this is completely do-able. It's a matter of attitude. Read on to see if you've got it. If your curiosity remains truly piqued, send for the book.

Who would look at that kind of living environment as an option?

P.G.: I admit the desert homestead leaped to mind as a solution to my own pressing need for a roof. But now I'm also thinking, altruistically, that the Dirt-Cheap Desert Homestead concept may have more general appeal. Certainly it would to those not incorporated by the Borg, pathetic pensioners, SSI cases, welfare moms, and maybe also to some of the nation's blighted youth.

The applicability of budget cuts to geezers pinching by on Social Security is obvious. But how about the kids? Like for instance the no-talent young mopes who have dropped out of high school, have no marketable skills and very marginal prospects in today's greedy, high tech globalized society.

Hey! Face it kid. You're screwed. Because of the aging population in Samland, in a few years there'll only be three of you actual wage peons to pungle up for every geezer sucking down Social Security benefits. The burger flippers and the car polishers, those poor young mopes working for shit wages, are going to have to carry on their backs the burgeoning population of boomer gummers. You can be damn sure that today's young burger flipper will never collect a dime of Social Security himself. He's been tapped to spend his greasy life paying the tab for the rest of us already on the dole. Nor will Mr. Minimum Wage ever be able to save enough for a dream tract house in Smog Vista Estates, forty miles downwind of Gotham City. He's pretty much doomed to the one-bedroom squalid tenement apartment. I don't know. Maybe the Dirt-Cheap Homestead or something like it…is a way to kick free of this baneful fate. I offer the idea.

And the criminal element might also perk up. I once wrote about the Persian architect who pioneered sandbag houses. I wasn't too surprised to learn that the most enthusiastic audiences for his talks were in state prisons. The jailbird knows he'll never qualify for a mortgage. The only way he'll ever get a house (after the big house) will be by building one himself. One of the homesteaders I ran across on the sun-scorched outskirts of Blythe is a low-profile ex-con now on the straight and narrow. That's what he said. After what he'd done, no bank was ever gonna loan him dough to buy a house. He bought worthless land for a few bucks and built his own place from scratch. Another advantage for him. Living way out in the desert, the con doesn't see much of his parole officer.

All right, we can see the value for those living off the dregs of society. But just how did you get there? What was the impetus that inspired you to move to the desert?

P.G.: I'd just been fired. I was pretty much broke, and I needed a place to live right away. That's the short answer.

In the space of a year I got fired from two separate jobs, both times for bad attitude and insubordination. Seemed almost like either a trend was shaping, or that, psychologically speaking. I had taken a self-destructive stance. Although, gosh darn it, my insubordination didn't amount to much. Measly, really. They wanted me to put a peg in a pegboard to show if I were in or out and what time I'd be back. I set my peg permanently at Out and back at five; unless they saw me sitting at my desk, which meant I was in and look at your watch.

I'd been fired from other jobs over the years, but never two in a row. Usually my MO is to quit in a huff over some principle before they can fire me. Anyway, I'll tell you this. No matter how many times you get fired it still kind of stings. It's hard not to take it personally. The ol' self esteem takes a body blow, despite your condign contempt for the pompous corporate suit delivering the pink slip.

This latest time, for some reason, I really felt loathe to start looking for another job. The other times, after getting frog walked out of an office, I'd eventually start fishing around. But now I was getting older, the bosses younger. I really didn't feel like taking orders from a recent high school graduate. If I'd had a modest competence I could retire to a studio apartment in a geezer ghetto, but I haven't been provident. Never worked any place long enough to get vested in a pension. And my 401 (k) didn't have much k in it.

Anyway, like a lot of other free-spending careless Boomers, I'm looking at the drear prospect of living on Social Security, if it turns out there is any. Fine. Not to be the beaming son of Dr. Pangloss and Pollyanna, but I think I could get along okay on the pittance I'm due from Social Security. If…I didn't have to pay some gouging landlord a lot of rent or a coal-hearted banker a mortgage payment. Because I'm frugal. I don't need a lot of dough. I like to travel, but it can be last class budget and on foot, and I don't mind carrying a tent. These days it's the rent that's the ball buster. It can soak up half the paycheck. After I got canned, I started thinking; all I really need is some modest home base to hang the chapeau when I'm not on the road. Doesn't have to be much. It just has to be rent-free and clear. Now I already owned these ten worthless acres out in bumfuck…yeah, yeah the genesis of the Dirt Cheap Homestead.

You always refer to this land as worthless. So how worthless is worthless?

P.G.: While working for the Orange County Register, a newspaper in Southern California, I was assigned to do a story about the annual tax-default land auction in rural Imperial County. The starting bid for what-became-my ten-acre baronial estate, way out in the Colorado Desert, in the middle of a sun baked alkali basin, arid, scrub-covered, lacking in amenities, 17 miles off the paved road, 45 miles from the town of Blythe, and 45 minutes from the nearest Kmart was $100. It became mine for $325.

“You'll never find this,” said the county clerk. Thanks to modern technology and a couple of friends with GPS, I did.

Sounds like it must be quiet.

P.G.: I'm so close to the Chocolate Mountain Naval Gunnery Range that the concussions from morning bomb runs rattles the coffee cups.

For the most part it still sounds isolated, like you had the whole place to yourself.

P.G.: At first I thought I did. For several years the Rancho served as a weekend retreat for me and some of the reporters and photographers from the Register. Just a few guys seeking a remote venue for discharging firearms. We built a rifle and pistol range, a skeet shooting pit, a few shade shacks. We popped caps during the winter. During the summer inferno, the land healed, hundreds of spent brass cartridges winking in the sun.

I never saw anybody out there during shooting weekends. Then I came across the Hobo in Blythe, who turned out to have his own 10 acres in the Smoke Tree. The Hobo already had built a solar powered Mother Earth News kind of homestead that included a buried trailer equipped with a periscope.

He introduced me to half a dozen other year-round homesteaders who manage to live quite well in that harsh and waterless climate. There was the totally ingenious Tuke family, with their fleet of Mad Max sand rails; the irascible J.R; Big Huey; the Mystery Lady; Alba, the Dog Woman (and her 30 cats); and the ranting Demented Vet.

They all have caravans of trailers with ingenious devices that help them get through the sweltering summers.

Well, okay. What then?

P.G.: The lightning bolt from heaven had already struck. Get by on less money. Of course, one does that by owning your own acre and house outright. I had my land. The house I built cost less than one month's payment for an SUV. Short on dough to buy land? Pick up some worthless dirt where the water table is a thousand feet toward China. But own it. Ditto for car. It's a piece of flowing beater shit, but it's yours, no payments. Only two items on the check list so far, and already you're two-thirds of the way to being a free person. Strike the rent/mortgage and the car payment from the budget and bingo, the spread sheet looks brighter. Third, reign in the appetites. Do I really need all this shit that I'm buying? Monster TV? Fifty cubic feet of freezer? DVD Stereo? Of course not. So what does one need? Utilities? Be your own utility (I'll show you how). Garbage collection and water? It's free, for a little effort. Grub? Gotta have it, but the truth is America is one of the cheapest places in the world to get food if you snag bargains, haunt the commodity giveaways, and buy staples in bulk. Medical?

Now here's the deal breaker on the road to freedom.

It's no good saying that fifty years ago only 15 percent of Americans had health insurance. Or that a hundred years ago nobody had it. Right, you say, and life expectancy was 47. You couldn't get codeine from an HMO and you begged to die at 40. Fine. Never mind that the best possible health insurance is to tuck away three healthy squares, snooze for eight, brush and floss, and get in a walk. Nobody wants to hear that kind of moralizing. They want to be covered. And it's very expensive to buy into an HMO like Kaiser on your own. I don't know the answer. In my own case, like many of my fellow desert dwellers (except the hobo), I'm covered by the VA. I offered up a portion of my youth on the alter of my county and got a couple of free trips out of it too. Here's the deal. Since I wasn't wounded while in the shadow of the flag, I don't get any special breaks, but the VA still offers a good package. An office visit, for any reason, fifty bucks. Clean ear wax? Fifty. In-office amputation of a finger? Fifty. A sojourn at the VA hospital, same principal, one low fixed rate whether it's a coronary bypass or removal of a planter's wart. Yes, it's true; VA standards are not highly regarded in some circles. It's a sovereign cure for hypochondrias to be sitting in a VA waiting room with guys who got no legs.

Anyway, my own VA experiences-limited to dermatology-have been positive. I wouldn't hesitate to go to them for trauma, too, if the Geo rolls and I'm still of the world. As for long term care of catastrophic coverage following the drool-inducing cerebral hemorrhage…Health plan of the .38.

What about folks taking pot shots at your place when you're traveling? Or walking off with all your stuff?

P.G.: Violence and vandals? Because the valley is so isolated, it's a draw for meth cookers and yahoo vandals on quads. For this reason, when I do take off, I leave nothing there that couldn't be replaced in a yard sale. Anything of interest goes into storage. Everybody in the valley is paranoid and heavily armed, but as for actual violence, it falls easily under two heads: domestic beef and deputy vs citizen, which is pretty much the same everywhere.

Even those of us who love what we do, have those restless moments when we contemplate escape. RANCHO COSTA NADA: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead is a good book to read when those moments hit. You can breathe easier knowing there is a way out the back door even though the reality is that it leads to a couple of deep cycle marine batteries on the floorboard of a Geo Metro.

As a newspaper reporter, Phil Garlington has worked for the San Francisco Examiner, the San Diego evening Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and the National Enquirer.

 

Loompanics Unlimited Online Catalog
Order Toll-Free 1-800-380-2230, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week YOUR ORDER IS SHIPPED WITHIN 24 HOURS OF RECEIPT!
(Monday Through Friday, 8am to 4 pm)