I have an inspiring, fun to look at book called Home work—Handbuilt shelter. It has lots of pictures and diagrams of little, beautiful, and cheap homemade homes.
One of the articles in it, I thought might be of particular interest to some readers, is called “Perpetual Camping.” It’s about a newsletter called Dwelling Portably. Dwelling Portably is written by people who find some unused land and dwell there for awhile or otherwise dwell portably. Doers report on what works and doesn’t, ask questions, and offer advice.
The people who produce it say:
While quite young, Bert and I decided (separately, before we even met) that buying property was foolish. You can’t really own land;the government owns it and can kick you off any time you do something that any of dozens of government agencies disapprove of .
We also noticed that much land, especially in the west was not used or was used infrequently. That inspired us to become perpetual campers: living in a place while it was desirable; moving on when conditions changed.
Issues vary: some have much about vehicular dwellings and little about backpacables or wickiups. Or vice versa. So, for a broad sampling, order several back issues.
Bert and I have built portable dwellings that are as comfortable as houses. In some ways they are more convenient, because they are small and well insulated, our body heat keeps them warm during winters—avoiding the labor, mess, pollution, and hazard of a heating stove.
Dwelling Portably is $1 dollar an issue. add .50 if sending check or M.O. for less then 6 dollars. (Their prices encourage you to order many back issues) 1/$1; 6/$5; 13/$10; 30/$20 Dwelling Portably, POB 190-hwk, Philomath, OR 97370
Or order online from Microcosm Publishing (Thanks, Pig Monkey, for the link)
I don’t know about perpetual camping, but it is quite realistic to be a perpetual traveler (and I don’t mean the libertarian tax evader type which is what that term brings up if you do a google search), even if your income is fairly low. Though your income needs to be in the form of social security or savings rather than working. For example, you could spend Feb-Jun on the AT and other eastern trails, Jul-Oct on the PCT or other western trails, Nov to Jan in hotels in cheap third world countries (Guatemala, Ecuador, Thailand). All you really need is a storage locker at your home base city, to store extra gear. The home base city should have some cheap motels where you can hang out while waiting for UPS deliveries of new gear and/or sewing your own gear. You’d also need a mailbox service plus a prepaid cell phone, and all of these services (storage locker, mailbox, cell phone) should be automatically debited from your bank account so you don’t have to worry about monthly bills.
Dwelling Portably can also be got from Microcosm Publishing in Portland. It’s good stuff!
Thanks Pig Monkey for the link. So much easier to order online.
Frank,
Yeah it’s doable. And it sounds really good till I get tired or sick and then I just want a place to stay and rest for awhile. I also like having a mail box.
Once you get a storage locker, pay for hotels, airfare, mail service and other stuff, it would probably be just as cheap to own a little cheap land some where and make a dwelling on it. Then at least you have someplace to land when you are tired or sick.
I like having some place to come home too. Another hiker and I were talking about this one time. We thought maybe it would be a good idea for a bunch of hikers to buy some cheap land together. Then at least they would have a place to call home when they needed it.
>I like having some place to come home too.
Actually, that’s what I DON’T like. It makes me feel tied down. I don’t mind having a storage locker or mailbox service, but somehow having a permanent apartment gets on my nerves. But it took me a while to get to the state I’m at now. At first, it was jarring having no real home, other than the residential hotel where I checked in each time I returned from a spell of traveling.
I would suggest you’d get sick and tired less frequently if you stop walking those crazy 30 mile days. (There are perhaps 5 days in Southern California where you really need to walk 25 miles/day due to water considerations. There is nowhere you have to walk 30 miles/day, assuming you can carry 7 liters of water. Actually, probably less than 7 liters for you, since that is all I needed and I weigh 165 pounds and so probably drink more than you.) And if you do get sick and tired, what’s wrong with just camping on the trail? I thought we were talking about perpetual camping?
Owning land in the middle of nowhere might be cheaper than renting a room, but only if you don’t also have to own a car or truck, because that’s a killer expense. It’s pretty easy to find short-term apartments for $450/month utilities-paid where I live. Add another $550/year for the storage locker plus $160/year for a mailbox service. Makes a total of $2060/year of infrastructure costs, based on the assumption of 9 months on the trail, 3 months at home. I doubt you’re beating this by much with your cabin and truck. Your cabin doesn’t solve the mailbox problem while you’re on the trail, though you might be able to make arrangments for free rather than paying $160/year. Your cabin might burn or be broken into, whereas a metal storage locker, with on-site resident manager and security alarams, etc, is very secure. That additional security should be factored into the comparison by giving it a monetary value (what it would cost to replace all your possessions times the probability of losing your possessions).
The airfare or greyhound expenses would exist anyway if you’re hiking at a location far from where you live, so that’s a non-issue.
Yeah, it would be great to give up the truck. I could do it here. There are people out here who live without a vehicle. I think about it all the time. It will be easier to give up my truck once my BC place sells.
I know for sure having 2 cabins is definitely bogging me down.
And you’re right about resting on the trail. And I know I don’t have to hike 30 mile days, I just get into the miles and sometimes it’s easier to do more than less because I get really motivated by doing more. Every year I say, “This time I’m going to hike more sustainably” and then I just start getting into the mileage until by the end of the long hike, I’m beat.
Every possession comes with hidden cost not just in money but in ties and attachments.
A cabin is different than an apartment. The only bill is property taxes. And land usually goes up in value so I can call it an investment. My taxes right now for a cabin and 60 acres are 800 dollars a year. I could put my land in forestry and get that reduced substantially.
My truck insurance is 32 dollars a month when I use it and 5 dollars a month when I don’t. I don’t burn much gas because I don’t use my truck much. So far it runs fine but that could change any minute leaving me with a repair bill.
Right now my utilities are:
a 20 dollar a month phone line and 10.00 a month dial up internet. I turn the phone and internet off when I go away or when I just don’t want it any more, like last year.
I use about 10 gallons of gas a year for my generator to augment my solar system but I don’t have to use the generator. (I could just turn off the computer when the sun doesn’t shine.)
I just bought a cord of wood for 115.00 dollars but I could have cut my own wood off the property.
I pay the city 10 dollars for a permit to take 500 gallons of water from the community spigot but there is a spring on my property that I could probably get running.
I use about 7 gallons of propane a year for cooking at a cost of about 17 dollars a year.
I also like to use a propane heater to help my wood stove get my cabin really warm when it is really cold outside. That is just a luxury but it is so lovely. Last winter I used about 10 tanks of propane for that. That cost about 135.00 but laying in my cabin on a bitterly cold night and being luxuriously warm was heavenly.
I could reduce my utilities to zero and that’s nice to know.
My life is sort of like perpetual camping… I never think of my cabin as a substandard home, I think of it as 5 star camping..
So, pretty cheap considering, I live somewhere that is beautiful, quiet and I’m happy. That’s something I realized, you don’t need much money if you are happy were you are. I get up in my little cabin, build a fire, make some oatmeal and tea, look out at the view, maybe read the book the library mailed me, take a walk, and I’m satisfied.
I bought my cabins because I had the money and money needs to be invested somewhere. Also because it’s what I really wanted. Investing in a beautiful piece of property that you can live on is an investment you receive dividends on from the start but it also comes with ties, worries, and responsibilities.
I don’t have any income and any retirement I’ll get is years away, but I had some cash so that is how I invested it.
More and more I savor and seek solitude so world travel doesn’t have the appeal that it once did for me. I need to be alone and in the wild.
So, this is how you are living? 9 months on the trail? That’s great! Where are you now? Thailand?
Me too Crow, I have become a bit of a hermit. I love living in the forest and have no need to go places. As the enviroment warms up I have often thought of moving to a colder climate, we don’t get much snow here now. But I doubt we would find a place as good as this and if we did we probably could not afford to buy it! So we are staying where we are.
Regards, Le loup.
That book looks interesting.
I’ve been trying to collect information about alternate ways of living since I got home from the PCT. The PCT made it very clear to me that I don’t want to live like a “normal” person.
What ties me down most are my parrots. Also, I seem to get trapped in middle class life and I really can’t afford it. Not just in cash but in the life energy it drains from me. I like living with another person, but everybody wants to strive for a middle class life and the person I’m with is no exception. I’m never going to have that kind of money or ambition. The worst thing about middle class life is that you are completely impoverished of all your money because you have to buy things all the time and then you are completely impoverished of all your time because you have to work all day at some soul-killing corporate job where they treat you like crap. I don’t know how people can stand it.
I wouldn’t want to travel the world all the time. I prefer a lifestyle rooted in a place. I’m very place-oriented. I would like to grow a garden and play music with other people and attend classes and be involved in my community. It would be awesome if I had my own land and a house. Have you seen the tiny houses at http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/houses.htm ? I used to live in a tiny apartment and I really liked having a tiny space.
I don’t have any money to buy land or tiny houses though. Another option I have in my back pocket is to be a campground host. There was a host at a campground near where I live and she had about 8 different parrots living with her. I could live perpetually camping and get to keep my parrots. All I need is an RV.
Collecting all the info on different ways to live means that I will have options just in case I end up on my own again. So thank you for sharing that book. I’m going to check it out.
I love living in a little cabin. It’s like living in a playhouse.
I have seen the tiny houses. They are sweet but crazy expensive. I bought my cabin, everything in it and the 60 acres it sits of for a little more than what they sell a 100 sq ft tiny house for.
Cob houses are made with earth and straw and you sculpt them. They are beautiful and cheap. That’s what I want to build if some summer I don’t go hiking.
When I was living in a house and wanted to quit that life, I had a cat. I knew the cat wouldn’t make it in BC and I had to find a home for her. For awhile, I thought my life was going to be deferred for a cat. Finally I had resolved to bring her with me to BC even though I was pretty sure a bear or a cougar would get her. Luckily the guys who made the offer on my house said they wanted the cat to stay. So I was free. Pets are nice but they can take all your money and keep you in situations you don’t want to be in and tie you down. Now one of my rules is: no animals for me.
When I was on the CDT, I got lost first thing and found an old hippie wandering in the desert. He walked me back to his intentional community and showed me his dwellings. He built his dwelling by piling up a big pile of dirt, then he covered the pile of dirt with little rocks, next he put chicken wire over the rock, then he covered it with cement, finally he dug out all the dirt until he hit the little rocks and that was his dwelling.. It was really nice. To become part of the community you hang out for awhile and then you ask to join, if they say yes you pay 1500 dollars to get in and then you can build your little dwelling. Once, I was thinking of doing it. It’s in Columbus, NM So, intentional communities might be something to look into.
The campground host thing sounds good too. When I traveled around rural Oregon paving roads I had a little A-liner I lived in. It looks like a little a-frame and has skylights and lots of windows and a little arched doorway. It traveled flat like a tent trailer and then in 30 seconds you could set it up as a hard sided a-frame. Really, 30 seconds is all it took to set it up. I always found beautiful places in the wilderness to park it and no one ever bothered me or it. The great thing about it is you could get it in places a big RV couldn’t go. And it was really light; I could unhook it from my truck and push it around if I got it into a tight situation.
Here is an article you may be interested in. It’s about a woman who built her own 84sq ft home on wheels. http://www.katu.com/news/local/8499817.html Somewhere on the internet are the free plans on how to build it but I can’t find it right now.
It is getting harder to buy inexpensive land, but good land is clear farm country, no one wants rocks and trees! So that is what I bought.
My first house was an old cottage of weatherboard. I bought it for $300.00 Aust. I pulled it apart and transported it on a small trailer then put it all together again making a few alterations. I am NOT a builder, but I managed it. We livied in that old cottage for 20 years, with no water on tap, no inside toilet or bathroom.
I built an ash can outhouse and a shower in an upsidedown water tank with a doorway cut in it. The shower itself was one of those canvas bags which I rigged on a pulley.
We still have that cottage, but we live in a larger house now just down the hill a bit from the cottage. We have tank water on tap and two inside composting toilets and a shower. Hot water & cooking supplid by wood stove and we have wood heating and 240 volt solar power. Grey water goes into trenches beneath the vegie gardens.
Le loup.
Yeah, that is what I bought too. Trees and big beautiful rocks.
Well, I’ll keep working on The Man and see if I can’t disabuse him of the idea he needs to amass three million dollars in order to have his retirement of name-brand medications, SUVs and whatever other crap they sell to him on the TV every night.
Hey look, the words I have to type into the captcha box are fallacy and $1.7-billion. How appropriate!
No, I’m back in the states now. And I wasn’t able to spend but about 4 months on the trail this past year because I had an opportunity to make some money, probably the last decent money I’ll ever be able to make. My skills are out-of-date, my motivation for relearning is gone, I’m tired of working and the job market stinks. I think I’m fully retired at this point.
A few years back though, after my initial involuntary early retirement with lousy job prospects post dot-bomb, I did spend 10 months/year traveling overseas. The countries I mentioned were the nicest of the cheap ones I visited (Europe is great but not cheap). But then I got tired of staying in hotels and wanted to try hiking. It took me a while to figure out all the gear, but now I’m pretty sure I prefer hiking to third-world travel and so I expect to spend 8 months on the trail in the future (mid-Feb to mid-Oct). 9 months is probably stretching it, since I have to do my taxes in early February and the Sierras can be pretty cold by mid-October so that I’m ready to call it quits by then.
Right now, I figure I can spend about $1000/mo for the rest of my life (inflation-adjusted) assuming I start collecting social security at age 72 (I’m anticipating they might raise the retirement age from 67). Actually social security is promising me more than $1000/mo, but I also expect them to cap the benefits. That is about 20 years off and I figure I have enough saved for the $1000/mo until then. $1000/mo actually is plenty of money if you don’t have to pay rent. I can even travel in Europe on that amount, assuming I camp mostly rather than using hotels, and it is a kingly amount of money down in Guatemala or most of Thailand. But rent is the big problem here in the US, so I’m very interested in those numbers you were throwing out. Basically, you’re under $1000/year for 4 months a year and just slightly about that for 12 months, whereas I’m at about $2500/year for just 4 months in town. Of course, you had to sink a bunch of money into the land first. Then again, you can always sell the land later if necessary. And you get to live in the middle of nature rather than in the city. So I can see a lot of advantages to the situation you have, though I’d probably want to be close to one of the trails (either the PCT or the AT) so as to only make two long trips a year rather than four (do a yo-yo on the trail near me, then fly to and from the other trail). Then again, I don’t think I want to deliberately seek out a piece of land to buy, since I think I’d tend to get into mission-mode and buy just to get the mission over with, then immediately want to sell in order to get free again. Rather, if I ever buy a place, it would have to be a matter of serendipitously happening on a place for sale at a good price. Maybe I wander towards town for supplies and strike up conversationn with someone along the way and he mentions he is selling–that sort of thing. Or like how you met that guy at the intentional community.
Thanks both of you for mentioning that bit about rocks and trees being cheaper than flat land. I’ll keep that in mind. I like the idea of being where no one else wants to be.
Interestingly, I also made an attachment with a cat since I moved in here last year. She was living on the property when I moved in and goes to live with the other strays when I go off on trips. Though she prefers living with me when I’m here and even sleeps indoors when it is very cold out. I’m not worried about leaving her (though I am becoming attached to her) since there are at least 3 food bowls on the property and none of the strays around here look malnourished. In fact, most of them turn up their nose at anything but the premium cat foods.
Came across this video on one of the survival blogs, thought you might find it of some interest regarding housing/self-sufficiency etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvn79E40VSc
Regards, Le loup.