"Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead," by Phil Garlington. Loompanics, 2003, 122 pages.

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Living on the Fringe

by R.W. Bradford

The first time I visited the Mojave Desert, I came upon a small abandoned town, found a bit of shade, stopped my car, and started to make a sandwich. It was an edifying experience: by the time I had slapped my food together, the bread had dried to the point where the thing was only marginally edible.

I had read about how hot and dry the Mojave is. During my childhood in Michigan I had experienced occasional summer temperatures as hot as the Mojave was that day. But I hadn't imagined just how dry it is. Nor, for that matter, had I really appreciated just how hellishly brilliant the Mojave can be wherever the shade gives out. And there isn't much shade: except in the lee of an occasional abandoned building, there's practically no vegetation and what little exists is small.

There's little wonder that practically no one lives in the scorching ultra-dry southern Californian desert except in tiny artificial oases like Blythe and Needles, where water and electricity are available. But some people do live elsewhere in that immense and wonderful and terrifying place, and if you look closely, you'll see signs of them: tire tracks heading off the roads which, if you follow, lead to weird-looking shacks showing signs of habitation.

Of course, most of us don't see these signs. We simply cross the desert on modern expressways, and in a few hours, we're through it, unless we get adventurous and take an occasional side road, or, feeling especially adventurous, venture a ways off road in our air-conditioned SUVs.

The same is true of the less scorching deserts of Nevada and Oregon, where wild temperature swings and extreme cold make conditions for human life as inhospitable as they are in the Mojave and Colorado deserts to the south.

While I've probably seen more than most "normal" folk of the very marginal lives of people clinging to the fringes of civilization, I realize that I really know virtually nothing about them. I've driven the desert tracks and seen their shacks in the distance. But I have never approached them or their habitations. I respect their privacy, I tell myself. And besides, I am a little afraid of them: there's a good chance they came out here because they found it difficult to function in ordinary society and, well, they might just take a shot at me. That, at least, is what I imagine.

So when a copy of "Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead" crossed my path, I was interested. Its cover features a photograph of one of those desert shacks, up close and personal. Constructed, it appears, of salvaged scrap wood, it has a hand-lettered sign warning "Occupied Home: Careful Pard." It looks a lot like how I imagined the shacks I had seen only at a distance must look up close. The actual image was intense.

Here, I thought, is a book that will give me an idea of how people live in roasting land that no one wants, without the benefit of such trivial conveniences as electricity, plumbing and water, at least in the sense that we know them. And I was right.

"Rancho Costa Nada" is about equal parts memoir and handbook. Its author, Phil Garlington, is one of those people who have trouble getting along with others. He moved to the desert after being fired from a long series of jobs ("My deportment irks employers. I guess it's a kind of hauteur. Kind of cocky, supercilious, cheek, insolence, or an overweening and querulous hubris.") A few years earlier, while working as a reporter for the Orange County Register, he had attended a public auction of land whose owners failed to pay taxes. On a lark, he bought himself ten acres of "alluvial wash dotted with smoke tree, Palo Verde, barrel cactus and scrub" in the Colorado desert. The price was $325. "My deed says ten acres. It might well be 1,000. I have no cheek-by-jowl neighbors, and three miles to the nearest. [I live] in a lonely, out-of-the-way valley surrounded by hundreds of square miles of bone-dry landscape. The inhabitants are a handful of seldom-seen desert rats and homesteaders, their presence only revealed by a faraway triangular column of dust thrown up by their rattle-trap pickups."

After locating his estate with a cheap GPS device, Garlington and his buddies pitched their tents and used the land for "drinking, shooting, and rocketry." They quickly discovered that tents were not a practical shelter in a place with so much wind. So they built a long table for bench shooting and a shade shack, closed to the wind and sun on three sides. To this he added a "bum box" for sleeping: "a plywood box 8' long by 4' high, raised on stilts, open on the eastern side . . . It had a curtain like a berth in a Pullman . . . Snakes and scorpions couldn't get you, and the bum box offered protection against the desert gusts."

So when Garlington lost his job, he decided to move to his desert property, which by now was "basically a shooting gallery, empty brass glittering in the sun, with a couple of rude sheds for shade. Not promising, perhaps, but it was my land, bought and paid for."

There he set about living by his own "rock-bound principles": "Find a stretch of the world filled with worthless desert. Pay a rock-bottom price for a piece of it. Then build a tight little nature-proof and comfortable homestead that's cheap, simple, and easy, in a couple of weeks or a month. Plant the proud banner of personal independence, and uncap a beer."

"Rancho Costa Nada" is an account of how Garlington implemented these principles. He tells how he constructed a more elaborate hogan from salvaged and improvised materials, how he dealt with the problems of water and power, and how he dealt with the problem of his outhouse blowing down in a storm. (The solution involved taking a walk in the desert away from his hogan and kicking a hole in the ground.) Living on the fringe of civilization requires earning a few hundred dollars a year for incidentals like food and water, so he tells how he found occasional casual labor to fill his need for cash.

Because "Rancho" is billed as a "how-to" book, Garlington provides a lot of specific information, including detailed advice regarding technologies he considers inappropriate (e.g. trailers), too complicated for him to attempt, or attempted with only limited success, like making a swamp cooler from salvaged auto parts.

How did he deal with building permits and codes? "I'm in denial on code," he writes. "I don't believe for one second that a building inspector — a sleek, pampered bureaucrat working for the county — will put himself to the bother of driving 17 miles on backbreaking washboard to see what some disgruntled, and perhaps demented and heavily-armed hermit is doing out in the middle of God-forsaken nowhere." This approach seems to have worked.

Unlike Garlington, who spends his summers in public campgrounds in the Pacific Northwest, his neighbors ("the Hobo, the Demented Vet, Baby Huey, Mystery Woman, and Alba the Dog Lady") live in the desert year-round. They are colorful, to say the least. In some ways, they adapted better than Garlington, but they seem a little crazier, too — a fact that might not be unrelated to their year-round tenure.

"Rancho" is addressed to people who harbor fantasies about going to the desert and living as a hermit, fantasies that many libertarians latch onto at some point in their lives. For the reader who has no such daydreams, or has outgrown them, it offers a colorful memoir of someone who found a way to live on that eerie planet that we call "desert" and a vivid portrait of other humans who have found themselves still more at home on terra extraterrestris.

Garlington concludes with a chapter that puts forward perhaps his most sage advice: "Don't Do It," in which he reminds those with fantasies about getting away from civilization and living an isolated, nearly self-sufficient, life that they just may "start sounding like the Demented Vet."

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