By Mac Slavo
Do you want true freedom?
With the many restrictions imposed by modern life, especially in busy cities, it may take moving out into the wilderness in order to find true peace of mind.
Getting there is the hard part, as most of us are completely intertwined with life on the grid – connected to friends, family and employment and dependent on the food, energy and services made available.
It’s worth keeping mind that all these busy, on-grid problems, while important at the time, are ultimately unimportant.
It is all an illusion. And this man once again proves it by cutting all ties with his former life in the city, and cutting free, away from debt, away from codes and regulations and into the desolation of West Texas.
Everything is so simple here. I was busting my ass seven days a week just to pay all the bills for all the stuff I had. Now it’s pared down to one room; got a huge yard with all this land; you can’t see another house from my property, which is a big plus. There’s no – well, there’s very little stress out here. The only time I get stressed out here is when there’s a big storm, because the storms are scary out here in the desert.
Though there is plenty of beauty in this huge Western expanse, but there is little in the way of resources for growing food, establishing water or building shelter, among other comforts. Stores and even cell service is often quite sparse.
But the cheap land and the very real sense of being left alone by various petty authorities does offer something that is hard to come by.
For pennies on the dollar, he built his own tiny home, off-grid solar and water systems, and other necessities to get by… and actually be free.
Check it out:
According to Kirsten Dirksen on YouTube:
Seven years ago John Wells sold his heavily-mortgaged home in upstate New York and bought 40 acres in West Texas for $8000. The area (Brewster County) is so isolated there are no codes or zoning restrictions so Wells built his own tiny home (in 9 days with $1600) relying on his set-building experience.
Not wanting to rely on outside labor, Wells has continued to build his own services: a solar shower, a basic composting toilet, a bike-powered washing machine, an Airstream guest house, and a huge greenhouse which also houses 4 shipping containers he hopes to convert to housing/office space.
Wells named his homestead (now 40 acres, he bought a second 20 acres for $500) the Field Lab (short for “Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Field Laboratory”) and he likes to experiment with off-grid solutions: one of his latest is a more-powerful solar oven.
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Surveillance cameras are the new must haves.
Smart man. I am jealous of his ability and brains.
I watched several videos on you tube and the ingenuity
of these self-sufficient people is remarkable. Water storage
and solar panels and composting toilets…all essential
for comfort. Nice.
Great idea except for the Texas part. I hate the heat! I’m totally down with the hermit part though!
While watching I thought of a hundred different ways I could do what he’s done better but I suppose you never know until you try. I’d likely spend a few more shekels than he did though.
One well placed tornado and he’s back to square one so my first thought was to build underground not only to escape tornadoes but for the climate control it offers. That would likely require a hill you could build into to avoid those infrequent Texas floods.
When I retired I was 58, single.and had enough money to buy a home anywhere but Manhattan or San Francisco. Fortunately, I had spent a couple of years living as a rustic in the mountains along the Virginia/North Carolina border 15 years earlier and knew what it was like living in the boondocks. I did have electricity from Appalachian Electric Power but it was a long drive to a grocery store and a long distance phone call to order pizza. I worked for Sprint then and while cell phones existed you were better off climbing a telephone pole if you needed to make a phone call and weren’t at home. If I| wanted some booze I| had to drive to another county because the one I lived in was ‘dry’ . If you got sick or hurt the closet real hospital was 90 miles away in Winston Salem. The locals had lived there for generations and ,if not unfriendly, raised cattle if they had an occupation at all and social activity revolved around family and church. There just wasn’t much to do. but hunt ( everyone did) or build contraptions out of scrap. Amazing what some of those uneducated hillbillies could do out of necessity and boredom. One guy built a sawmill using a motors from an old dryer, some pulleys from a junked autos and other odds and ends. The damn thing would even reverse and make another pass once it had cut a plank off a log! To look and listen to the guy talk you were surprised he could even build a pointed stick!.
Still, for someone who grew up in modern America the isolation from civilization and its amenities can be a real shock and, once again, if you need medical care, living in remote communities can be a death sentence.
That’s not enough ammo….
Get a piece of dirt somewhere and get ready while you can.
Propane tank under the counter—Ah, not a good idea. Yeah he’ll probably get away with that but in a high heat environment (gee I wonder if it ever gets hot in west Texas?) the bled off valve on the propane tank if it were to open could quickly fill that small room (house) and either put him to sleep forever or if there is an ignition source it would blow the place sky high. The tank should be situated such that if the bled off valve were to vent gas it would be vented to the outside.