Been there….done that.
Here’s two videos from the brothers at americarecycled.org
I made some fun of the folks up in Asheville in yesterday’s post…but this is pretty amazing what these brothers are doing traveling around America and filming what they see.
I’ve talked about what a big world it is…how we need to be able to expand our horizons…and then I make fun of the “commune kids” up in Asheville.
What a hypocrite.
I guess that I just want things to be on solid footings for my family. It’s a different perspective when I feel like I should provide for them.
I really respect what these brothers are doing…some great and interesting filmmaking.
Happy 4th of July! Independence Day!
This kind of stuff used to look appealing.
I used to think that communal living would be pretty great. I was born in 1960…so even if I was just a kid, somehow I identified with all the hippies and that whole 60’s vibe…even if I was too young to understand or join in.
Now it all looks like a bunch of lazy idiots screwing around in a really dirty house.
I guess that’s what a little (emphasis on the “little” part) maturity will do for you. It changes your perspective to have a family and embrace some responsibility.
This is a video that I found while looking for videos on homesteading.
I thought, “What’s this? A video about something called the Montana House posted by somebody in…maybe… Russia? Weird…I’ve got to check this one out…”
It turns out that these guys are a bunch of hipsters living in a house up in Asheville…close to where I live.
They should do a follow-up video and find out how many of these kids have trust funds. There’s a lot of really “creative people” living under the umbrella of “Daddy’s Money” up in Asheville.
Now my daughter is going to start school up at UNC-A in the Fall.
The “A” part is for Asheville.
I hope she doesn’t fall in with a bunch of weirdos like these and move to a “commune” when she gets up there.
I don’t think she would.
The thing about this video that I thought about first when I saw that someone from Russia had posted it was that it’s strange how what’s weird and a “waste of life” in our eyes…becomes “important anthropological information” if you’re looking at it from a world away.
These guys may as well be Indians on the Plains.
(There are some pretty graphic butchering scenes in this video….so just a spoiler if you’re squeamish…they process some road kill meat and the shots are graphic.)
I went to Art School…I had VW buses…I grew my hair when it still grew on top…I thought this lifestyle was kind of “cool” at one point.
Now, I think I’m more interested in Warren Buffett than I’m interested in Abbie Hoffman.
It’s a good thing to grow up.
I think these videos look like they were done by Americans….but appreciated by someone in Russia and posted on YouTube.
It looks like the videos might have been produced for/by americarecycled.org
( Digging a little deeper…these videos are produced by two filmmaker brothers riding bikes around America exploring lifestyle alternatives. So …any thoughts about Russian perspectives, etc. aren’t valid in this case. Do check out the link above…these brothers are pretty cool even if the house up in Asheville seems to be full of goobs.)
A post-script from later in the morning….
Actually, I war against these impulses all the time. My deepest and best hidden motivation, like Pinocchio, is to get myself over to Pleasure Island and start growing some donkey ears as quickly as possible….but I’m trying to be a responsible adult… so I rail against the fun hog tribes who survive without any jobs. Maybe part of me is just jealous, I don’t really know.
I push the part of me that still finds this kind of lifestyle creative and interesting back when I can. I just want a good life for my family…and that seems to take at least a little money from time to time. I like providing for my family…it’s a pleasure.
I have a bunch of places on my mail route where I have to cross a dormant railroad track.
I slow down each time I cross it…look both ways…and then remember that it’s been years since a train has come down them. I guess that safety is a hard habit to break.
They are as brown and rusty on top as any piece of metal unused will get.
They are an unshiny track.
They hold all the promise of movement that a train track provides…they give the illusion of something going somewhere, but they are just a metal line going off into the distance.
It’s just an underlining of something that doesn’t happen anymore.
There are people who have built large homes around the lake that abut the dead track.
My wife and I wonder how appealing the million dollar homes will be if the trains ever start running again.
I guess that’s confidence…they must feel that once it’s all gone down that it’s never coming back again.
We will see.
This track isn’t really dead. I shouldn’t say that. It’s just not being used at the moment.
They haven’t pulled this track yet and sent the steel off to China. It still has a chance of carrying a train again.
Veering off into metaphoric nirvana, I don’t want to be those tracks.
I don’t want to give the illusion of movement…or to be a reminder of what used to be.
I want to have some shine on my surface.
I want people to have to look both ways when they cross me.
I don’t want to be taken for granted.
A friend and I took a road trip across the country when I was in my early 20’s.
I remember sitting on a big dune in the Sand Hills in Nebraska.
This is an area that’s different from anywhere I’ve ever been…miles and miles of…well, sand hills for lack of a better description…big dune like hills….with no ocean in sight.
I remember sitting up on the hills eating a bologna sandwich that had gone instantly bone dry in the humidity free air…and seeing a train off in the distance. It was a pretty good ways off, but there was something different about the way we were seeing this train.
We sat there for a moment, watching this train move across the land in front of us…and then both realized at the same time…“I can see the whole train”.
From engine to caboose, we could see the whole train stretched out straight off somewhere in the Nebraska prairie.
We were both from the East…the mythical “East” that’s romanticized so often (kidding)….and the view of a “whole train” wasn’t something that we were used to.
We were used to seeing it bit by bit when it came around a corner…but seeing it “all together and completely” was a new thing for us.
Lately, I’m realizing how little of the “train” I usually can see.
I can look behind me and see as much of where I’ve been as the curve allows.
I can look forward and see as much as I can imagine lies around the next curve.
I don’t see the whole train from where I’m standing.
I guess the secret to it all is to just try to keep the train on the tracks…and try to keep the tracks shiny.
Seeing the whole train is a nice memory, though…maybe I’ll have a chance to try that again someday.
We were kidding around coming home from town the other day.
It was kind of inappropriate, but we were talking about what some people might say to scare people away from our mountain region…
things along the lines of “don’t let the sun go down on you…that’s right, you better run..”
Goofy stuff. Really inappropriate stuff.
By the time the conversation really devolved, I’d said, “That’s right….we’re big Paula Deen fans around here….you better not let the sun go down on….”
From the back of the minivan, I heard my son say, “Yeah…and we’re big fans of Betty Cracker, too.”
I don’t know…I thought that was pretty funny.
“Beautiful enough to cause the Angels to stop in mid-flight.”
That’s a quote from this film about homesteading.
These are my people. This is where my family came from.
It’s funny to listen to this…all the cadences of the voices…the comments and the way some of these people reminisce…it’s all familiar.
The beginning quote was from some promotional information that was used to get Scandinavian settlers to come over to America to homestead in the Dakotas.
I think that the authors of these pamphlets were pretty good salesmen…the reality of life in the New World was pretty different than what was described.
This film is kind of long at about an hour, but there are some amazing stories about the early days of the homesteading movement…so I think it’s worth watching.
Something free sounds pretty good to an 18-year-old manboy.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I went up to Minnesota with a buddy to work for a high-voltage electrical contractor.
The contractor was building power line towers in Minnesota…and Mike’s father had gotten us onto a ground crew in Hinckley.
That was a pretty crazy summer for a young kid. I have lots of stories from that time, but this morning I’m thinking about the bus ride I took from Minneapolis to Spokane, WA when the summer work was over and before school began in the Fall.
(We used to get some of the best cinnamon rolls I’ve ever had at this place when I lived in Hinckley….”Tobies” is what it’s called…funny how many memories swirl around good food)
On the bus ride, I sat next to this college kid who told me about the Homesteading Act up in Alaska. Apparently, if you were able and willing to go up to Alaska and live on a piece of land for a couple of consecutive years, the land was yours. They’d give you the land if you’d homestead it.
Free Land !!
I don’t know why my parents never told me about that.
I don’t think wild adventure is tops on a parent’s list for what they want for their children. From my own perspective as a parent, I think sometimes that safety and predictable achievement is a lot easier to deal with…but I do want the kids to know that it’s a big world out there and that adventure is possible.
Just don’t do anything really crazy on my watch.
What a contradiction…the old “do as I say, not as I do” in action.
Anyway, by the point this guy told me about the free land in Alaska the Homestead Act had been repealed…I guess that happened in 1976…but according to the article I read, homesteading was still allowed until 1986 because of a provision to the repeal.
So if I’d been an orphan and really adventurous, I could have hopped a freight train, chainsaw in hand, hitched a ride with a trucker up the Alaska Highway…then hiked deep into uncharted woods and set up camp. That could have been the plan…although I’ve heard that it’s hard to hitch rides “chainsaw in hand”.
This was about 1978 when I was getting all this good information about Alaska…riding a bus from Minnesota to Washington.
Visions of sugar plums free land definitely filled my head for a long time. You read enough Kerouac and Steinbeck and… and you get kind of infected with thoughts of movement and adventurous life experiences.
Remembering that trip…and how it felt to find out that you could do something like homestead up in Alaska…makes me realize how obsessed I have been with “somewhere else” in my lifetime. Do Norwegians share some gypsy blood? Or is it just part of the “human condition” to want to wander and explore?
If I could give my children the Wanderlust…that would be a good thing, I think.
It’s good to explore.
I woke up this morning and realized that it was the beginning of another 6-day cycle.
I woke up this morning and was rooted to the bed after remembering that this was the day that starts the whole thing over again.
I love my job…but the constancy of it all brought me down.
For a moment, the constancy of it paralyzed me. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to stay in bed and ponder my “fate”. I knew what it all meant and expected nothing but more of the same.
In my mind, “more of the same” was a bad thing… for a moment.
And then I realized that I was awake again.
I was awake and my expectations were the only thing that had any bearing on what this day could bring.
It was time to bust out my inner Pollyanna and be the “leaf on the wind” I was born to be.
It’s funny how a quick turnaround in attitude can affect my physical being. Up until the time I rallied, I was dead to the world…by choice.
I knew that this day had the potential to be the worst day I’d ever had….or at least, a magnificently mediocre one.
Of course, this is a pretty normal reaction when somebody first wakes up. I guess that it’s normal to rue “not dreaming” anymore…it’s normal to have a hard time making the transition from limitless possibility to earth-bound reality. It’s normal to wake up blurry-eyed and confused.
I’m always glad when it’s a fast transition….and when I don’t stay stuck in the bad expectation zone.
I guess that I did title this blog “the physiology…” so I better talk about that a little.
So many of the books I’ve read mention that one of the techniques of achieving a positive outcome is to act “as if”…to act like the positive outcome is already achieved and your physiology will follow the mental process.
Your physiology…how you feel physically…is controlled by your emotions. That’s a pretty heavy thought…it’s kind of a drag to take responsibility for that sometimes…but I think it’s true.
How we respond to the events around us is the only real power we have in any situation.
It’s all we really have control over. We don’t control the weather. We certainly don’t control other people. There isn’t much that we have any control over…except our perceptions of what we think our world is all about.
I woke up this morning and for a moment I was lost.
I wasn’t in pain…I’d had a nice nights sleep…I should have been feeling good about things…but for a moment, I was caught up in some marginally negative thoughts. I was convinced that I was still on the treadmill….and I could picture a brighter world on the other…unreachable…side of the fence.
Then, somehow, I rallied. It was an instantaneous combustion of positive energy at 4:57 in the morning…and like a phoenix, I rose from the ashes of my negative self talk and was reborn…ready to face the day again.
Of course, it could have been the coffee that helped me arrive at that renewed paradigm, too.
It is a blessing that I can say that “the constancy” of my job is a hard thing. That’s a good thing these days. It’s good to be able to expect more of the same when that’s what’s paying the bills.
I read that the acronym for FEAR is “False Expectations Appearing Real”.
That’s so great. What haven’t I destroyed with worry and doubt? What good things have I missed because I was afraid to disturb the “constancy”…no matter how unsatisfying “more of the same” can seem?
I guess that until the piano, like in all those old cartoons, drops on my head…I’ll work at expecting the best this world has to offer.
What other positive option do I have?
image from here
This is a video about a guy named Heimo Korth who lives a backwoods life up in Alaska.
I’d read a book about him a while back called “The Final Frontiersman: Heimo Korth and His Family, Alone in Alaska’s Artic Wilderness” by James Campbell.
He’s a fascinating character. The video is long…and was produced and copyrighted by Vice magazine…but it’s worth getting to know this guy. He is the “real deal”.
I see these videos and it just cements something that I always knew…
it’s a big world out there.
Looking for a video to include in the blog this morning, I thought that it was kind of funny now that I could look up any information or videos on “simple living”. It’s a new world now…as long as I have the bandwidth and a reasonably fast computer, I can look up videos about how to live simply.
That’s kind of hilarious…if I’m up to date with the complex technology, I can learn to live simply. If I’m deep into the world of technology, I can enjoy watching other people pursue the simple life.
These guys talk about minimal needs…but I guess they do mention a computer as being something they can run with a simple, off-grid power system….so maybe I don’t need to worry about needing to be a total Luddite.
These folks seem to have a pretty good handle on minimal technology to get the job done on their floating house.
When I watch these videos it makes it pretty apparent that it really is having the willingness to just go out and do it….you don’t get all your ducks in a row first, you don’t wait until you’re an expert on the “right way” to do anything before you make the leap.
Maybe you become an expert after a lifetime of surviving your mistakes?
Maybe you just remain a guy who keeps making a lot of mistakes.
I don’t really know…(I say that a lot..I don’t know why).
Here’s another short film…a documentary by Nicholas Stuart…