Some mornings I awake with strange words and phrases echoing in my brain. They are left over from dreams half remembered. I have no idea the meaning of "Panjori," but toward the end of the dream, I felt compelled to retain it. It sounds like a place name and in the dream, I was travelling in a non-relativistic way making quantum leaps through an infinite maze of alternate realities and universes. I was trying to find my way home wherever that is. I seemed to have landed in a town called Panjori. I thought I'd write it down before I forget it so I can Google it later.
I'm spending the day and tonight at my girlfriend, Aelys', house. She drove up from town and got me. I didn't really want to go, but she promised to return me tomorrow. This is the first time in about a month that I will have had a hot shower, changed clothes, slept in a soft bed, had more than one hour of access to electricity, or had a properly cooked meal. I don't care so much for the first things in that list, but I appreciate good cooking. Despite the fact that I've been preparing most of my own food, I do a terrible job at it. I can't cook. It usually ends up burnt or half raw. Aelys, on the other hand, is a talented cook.
I have been living simply, but I haven't been doing badly; I've kept myself clean and fed. I've been bathing and washing my clothing in icy spring water. I appreciate the fact that icy baths help make you tough and better able to withstand harsh weather. I'm not scurvy or in any way malnourished. I've been eating well enough foraging or edible wild plants and mushrooms and eating pine needles for vitamin C. I've also been hunting (legally and with archery and a sling shot) and fishing for a portion of my food. If I don't harvest enough, I have cans of food and bags of beans and rice.
Aelys wants me to fix her computer, her bicycle, move some furniture (are all females obsessed with rearranging the furniture?). Also, I will deal with my own mail, email and other correspondence, a stack of unread newspapers, check phone messages, etc.
Finally, I'll take advantage of the electricity and internet connectivity here to work on my blog.
When I was a child, I liked Laura Ingalls Wilder's famous "Little House" novels. They were based on her childhood in a pioneer family during the mid to late 1800s on the Great Plains. Another novelist I liked, Willa Cather, wrote about pioneer life as well, and the life described by both of those authors stuck with me. In that era, a pioneer or homesteading family would stake out some land. They had to be almost completely self sufficient. They built a some kind of rudimentary dwelling, often a log cabin or sod house. They tried with varying levels of success to earn a living by farming. They were responsible for providing food for themselves. The risk of malnutrition and starvation was real. But I always saw the risk as worth it. It seemed better to take a chance and live how you chose, enjoying self-sufficiency and living peacefully among beautiful surroundings than to be crowded and stifled by masses of humanity.
Something else struck me more than anything else, even when I was a child reading those books. Alone in the vastness of the open prairie or under the "big sky" of the mountainous American West, settlers had the freedom that comes from independence and privacy, things which I didn't have as a child and mostly still haven't been able to find in my own life. I wanted to live like that. Even at around 8 years old, I wanted to escape the horror story that was my childhood. At that young age, it was the most enticing version of the American Dream I'd read. Cheezy as it might sound, it still is.
I don't have a strong background in history or US government, but my understanding is that several government policies made that way of life possible. One was the Homestead Act which was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862. Almost anybody could now claim 160 acres of Federal Land. The recent war with Mexico had opened up the American West; it allowed access to a lot of land including California, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Not only that, but the federal government, seeing threats from Mexico, Russia, as well as from the Aboriginal peoples who were being forced off that land, wanted Americans to occupy the land to help retain possession of the newly acquired territory.
Thus the government encouraged American settlers to move west. All they had to do was stake a claim, improve it in some manner, by building a dwelling; it could be anything, no matter how crude. They had to farm or otherwise make the land productive for 5 years. Then, if they lasted 5 years, they filed a claim for a deed of possession, and then they owned the land for free.
Until recently, one could still very easily live like that in one way or another. Homesteading was still an option, but it didn't have to be homesteading. For example, as late as the 1960s, land was still very cheap in the United States.
Wilder's American Dream faded into history as the country grew more populous, land expensive, and there was no longer a Frontier. Finally, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 ended homesteading for good; by that time, federal government policy had shifted from encouraging private ownership to government control of western public lands. The only exception to this new policy was in Alaska, for which the law allowed homesteading until 1986 when it was repealed and homesteading ended for good.
I was too young to move to Alaska and do that, but I would have. I wish I could go back 150 years and live as a pioneering settler. But here I go romanticizing about stealing land from Indians.
With the economic collapse and the fizzled Occupy Movement, I've wondered whether living "the American Dream" in this way is even possible now for my generation and younger "Millennials," especially for those of us who were born into poverty. It certainly was possible and fairly easy for the older Baby Boomers who came of age in this country during a very prosperous era, but times have changed for the worse. Upward mobility is no longer so easy.
Recently, I started wondering if there was another way to "homestead." I could just buy a tract of land, but I'm relatively poor. So lack of money is a problem or rather the expensiveness of living in this country in the present era is the problem. Nowadays, it costs $12000 just to breath. Never mind "owning" property. I put "owning" in quotes because Imminent Domain, property taxes and countless fees, property forfeiture laws, IRS seizures, and mind-boggling land use regulations that requires a legal expert to make any sense of cause me to wonder whether or not American land "owners" are not merely leasing their land from the government.
Anyway, I've learned about an abandoned parcel of land in eastern Oregon. It's exactly 160 acres, and as far as anyone knows, it was obtained under the Homestead Act. It hasn't been lived on or farmed since the 1950s or so. Since then, it hasn't been subdivided, split up, or chipped away. Back east, that is almost never the case with homesteads. On the east coast driving along the I-95 corridor between Boston and Miami, for example, one endures mind-numbing days of the almost uninterrupted and seemingly infinite sprawl of strip malls, Walmarts, parking lots, and suburbs that have paved over what was once primordial forest and idyllic countryside.
The old farm is on edge of the high desert. Part of it is in the valley at the base of a range of mountains where arid scrub-land gives way to upland forest. Even better, the north fence line which is part way up the mountainside directly borders National Forest and a "Wilderness Area" which together extend for 100000s of acres and go some 50 miles across an entire mountain range and into the next valley. That means woodland uninterrupted by human development. And across the south fence line is Open Range land. It sounds close to my ideal, and I've made arrangements to live there.
I'm spending the day and tonight at my girlfriend, Aelys', house. She drove up from town and got me. I didn't really want to go, but she promised to return me tomorrow. This is the first time in about a month that I will have had a hot shower, changed clothes, slept in a soft bed, had more than one hour of access to electricity, or had a properly cooked meal. I don't care so much for the first things in that list, but I appreciate good cooking. Despite the fact that I've been preparing most of my own food, I do a terrible job at it. I can't cook. It usually ends up burnt or half raw. Aelys, on the other hand, is a talented cook.
I have been living simply, but I haven't been doing badly; I've kept myself clean and fed. I've been bathing and washing my clothing in icy spring water. I appreciate the fact that icy baths help make you tough and better able to withstand harsh weather. I'm not scurvy or in any way malnourished. I've been eating well enough foraging or edible wild plants and mushrooms and eating pine needles for vitamin C. I've also been hunting (legally and with archery and a sling shot) and fishing for a portion of my food. If I don't harvest enough, I have cans of food and bags of beans and rice.
Aelys wants me to fix her computer, her bicycle, move some furniture (are all females obsessed with rearranging the furniture?). Also, I will deal with my own mail, email and other correspondence, a stack of unread newspapers, check phone messages, etc.
Finally, I'll take advantage of the electricity and internet connectivity here to work on my blog.
When I was a child, I liked Laura Ingalls Wilder's famous "Little House" novels. They were based on her childhood in a pioneer family during the mid to late 1800s on the Great Plains. Another novelist I liked, Willa Cather, wrote about pioneer life as well, and the life described by both of those authors stuck with me. In that era, a pioneer or homesteading family would stake out some land. They had to be almost completely self sufficient. They built a some kind of rudimentary dwelling, often a log cabin or sod house. They tried with varying levels of success to earn a living by farming. They were responsible for providing food for themselves. The risk of malnutrition and starvation was real. But I always saw the risk as worth it. It seemed better to take a chance and live how you chose, enjoying self-sufficiency and living peacefully among beautiful surroundings than to be crowded and stifled by masses of humanity.
Something else struck me more than anything else, even when I was a child reading those books. Alone in the vastness of the open prairie or under the "big sky" of the mountainous American West, settlers had the freedom that comes from independence and privacy, things which I didn't have as a child and mostly still haven't been able to find in my own life. I wanted to live like that. Even at around 8 years old, I wanted to escape the horror story that was my childhood. At that young age, it was the most enticing version of the American Dream I'd read. Cheezy as it might sound, it still is.
I don't have a strong background in history or US government, but my understanding is that several government policies made that way of life possible. One was the Homestead Act which was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862. Almost anybody could now claim 160 acres of Federal Land. The recent war with Mexico had opened up the American West; it allowed access to a lot of land including California, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Not only that, but the federal government, seeing threats from Mexico, Russia, as well as from the Aboriginal peoples who were being forced off that land, wanted Americans to occupy the land to help retain possession of the newly acquired territory.
Thus the government encouraged American settlers to move west. All they had to do was stake a claim, improve it in some manner, by building a dwelling; it could be anything, no matter how crude. They had to farm or otherwise make the land productive for 5 years. Then, if they lasted 5 years, they filed a claim for a deed of possession, and then they owned the land for free.
Until recently, one could still very easily live like that in one way or another. Homesteading was still an option, but it didn't have to be homesteading. For example, as late as the 1960s, land was still very cheap in the United States.
Wilder's American Dream faded into history as the country grew more populous, land expensive, and there was no longer a Frontier. Finally, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 ended homesteading for good; by that time, federal government policy had shifted from encouraging private ownership to government control of western public lands. The only exception to this new policy was in Alaska, for which the law allowed homesteading until 1986 when it was repealed and homesteading ended for good.
I was too young to move to Alaska and do that, but I would have. I wish I could go back 150 years and live as a pioneering settler. But here I go romanticizing about stealing land from Indians.
With the economic collapse and the fizzled Occupy Movement, I've wondered whether living "the American Dream" in this way is even possible now for my generation and younger "Millennials," especially for those of us who were born into poverty. It certainly was possible and fairly easy for the older Baby Boomers who came of age in this country during a very prosperous era, but times have changed for the worse. Upward mobility is no longer so easy.
Recently, I started wondering if there was another way to "homestead." I could just buy a tract of land, but I'm relatively poor. So lack of money is a problem or rather the expensiveness of living in this country in the present era is the problem. Nowadays, it costs $12000 just to breath. Never mind "owning" property. I put "owning" in quotes because Imminent Domain, property taxes and countless fees, property forfeiture laws, IRS seizures, and mind-boggling land use regulations that requires a legal expert to make any sense of cause me to wonder whether or not American land "owners" are not merely leasing their land from the government.
Anyway, I've learned about an abandoned parcel of land in eastern Oregon. It's exactly 160 acres, and as far as anyone knows, it was obtained under the Homestead Act. It hasn't been lived on or farmed since the 1950s or so. Since then, it hasn't been subdivided, split up, or chipped away. Back east, that is almost never the case with homesteads. On the east coast driving along the I-95 corridor between Boston and Miami, for example, one endures mind-numbing days of the almost uninterrupted and seemingly infinite sprawl of strip malls, Walmarts, parking lots, and suburbs that have paved over what was once primordial forest and idyllic countryside.
The old farm is on edge of the high desert. Part of it is in the valley at the base of a range of mountains where arid scrub-land gives way to upland forest. Even better, the north fence line which is part way up the mountainside directly borders National Forest and a "Wilderness Area" which together extend for 100000s of acres and go some 50 miles across an entire mountain range and into the next valley. That means woodland uninterrupted by human development. And across the south fence line is Open Range land. It sounds close to my ideal, and I've made arrangements to live there.
