Pictures from Nevada, and the stories behind them

Sitting here in Omaha for the winter, the past year of my life almost seems like a dream when I think about it. I went and built a road and a house and had all manner of adventures and hardships in the desert. It was a surreal ordeal, but I survived and adapted and can now help others do the same.

Going through my files, I found a bunch that I hadn't organized in any real way. It's as good a place as any to start. And while I'm doing officekeeping on the subject, I think I'm gonna have a division of labor on subjects between weekdays and weekends. I'll keep the dense and wordy theoryposting and historyposting for the weekdays, and blog about the collective and my art on the weekends, to sort of put things in a lower gear for everyone. That said, let's get on with it!

When I was building my house, I was constantly looking for ways to make money. One of the jobs I stumbled on was clearing trash out of rental properties for New York absentee landlord scumsuckers who couldn't be bothered. These bastards failed to notify the cops that I was working on their behalf, and some rightly suspicious neighbors called the cops on my look-like-a-burglar ass, which led to me shaking hands with bacon at the height of the first 'rona wave. I quit in disgust, at which point they failed to pay me a dime for any of my work. It wasn't a total bust though - I took much of the "junk" I'd cleared out of the rental properties back to my land, because it was in usable condition. Among many other things I gathered were two bicycles, a blue one that still needs a new chain, and this pink one. Gender is imaginary capitalist bullshit, and I'm probably going to paint it a different color because I don't like the color pink regardless, but the pink bike is an excellent older bike in good condition. I've ridden it down the road I dug from my house to the main road a couple times, to test out both the bike and the road. It could use a bit of WD-40, but otherwise it's fine.

This is the foundation I dug for my tinyhouse. Digging it was probably the single hardest part. Caliche is basically unformed, unfired clay. It's really easy to dig through weathered caliche, but about a foot down it's usually damp and hard-packed, and digging becomes much slower going. I had initially planned to put the house further underground, but two feet was enough suffering. I'll mound caliche around the sides, and indeed that job was half-done when I left.

It's just so weird looking at this pic. I remember when I first levelled and dug the foundation, thinking that it was a patch of former sagebrush indistinguishable from any other in a mile radius. And now I have things locked inside a structure where this earth once lay bare. It's amazing the things people can change if they just put their minds and their backs into it.

While I was out there, I was told by a local that if I tried to build my house in the summer, I would die in the hundred-degree heat in the desert. He was right about the temperature, wrong about my impending death. I quickly learned that I needed a shady place open to the breeze where I could sit during the noontime heat, and kill time until it was cool enough to do manual labor again. (My van got too hot, and unlike my cat, I couldn't just slink into the shadiest corners of the floor.) So with metal barrels and tires from the rental job, and a sheet of 4'x8' OSB I salvaged from beside a truck stop dumpster, I made this little lean-to thingie. I got a lot of books read under this bad boy: Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra, Michael Parenti's history of Julius Caesar, and Mary Beard's SPQR. I also burned a lot of trees in its shade, which as far as I can tell makes me like every single other Nevadan. BTW, the tires are on top of the OSB, and I kept piling more, because those Nevada desert winds are vicious. I kept thinking that I didn't have enough tires on top of it to keep it blowing away. It didn't blow away though, and the OSB got reused as a part of my tinyhouse's roof.

This was the first real lean-to structure I built on the property I bought, and I built it in the spring. My needs were different back then: it was sheltered from the wind by sagebrush I'd piled around it, and the smaller metal barrel was set near enough to it that I could build a roaring fire and the wind wouldn't steal the heat. Sagebrush burns hot, and this structure kept me warm in the evenings after sunset as I'd cook dinner and then smoke my evening bowl. I didn't sleep in it, but I ended up sticking a lot of stuff around it for relative safekeeping for a while. I dug a hole about as deep as I dug the foundation above, and eventually I hope to level the property to that height and use the dug-up earth to surround it with walls to keep out the bastard wind.

Here are two of the glass window panels with which I built the south-facing greenhouse section of my tinyhouse. I drove up to Boise, six hours away, to get them. If Utah is proudly Mormon country, Idaho is proudly evangelical country. There were plenty of stretches of I-84 where the Jesus stations were the only ones that came in. I have dialectical thoughts about that, but by and large it's for another day. But a nice couple were giving them away: they had inherited a house from their grandpa, who was planning a greenhouse addition, but they decided to turn it into a porch instead and were giving away the glass. So I loaded seven of these things onto my bed in the back in the van, temporarily lost my cat when I drove away, drove back and coaxed her out from under their porch with kitty treats, and then slept in my front seat that night in absolute exhaustion in Jerome, Idaho. It was all absolutely worth it though: for $60 in gas I got a thousand dollars' worth of glass panels. Some of them cracked in the year between my getting them and my installing them, and the cracked ones are being saved for the greenhouse I'll build in the early spring.

My valley between the East Humboldts and the Pequops is the westernmost edge of the broadcast range of the Salt Lake City stations, and 90.9 KRCL, the community radio station there, was my main connection to the outside world while I worked. It's a good station playing a wide variety of music, and I'm listening to its online stream here in Omaha as I type this. Unfortunately it's liberal as hell, with its community affairs program "Radioactive" (clever title) consciously appealing to the "radical middle," which as far as I can tell is wine moms who feel bad about it and shop at Hot Topic, and they repeat snippets from it every single hour. I would consciously take the beginning sounds of those snippets as a cue to go to the bathroom. And at 5:00 PM, when it came on (followed by Democracy Now at 6:00 PM), I would literally switch to a Christian station out of Twin Falls, because preachers telling me about Jesus was actually much less offensive to my communist sensibilities. But I'd switch right back at 7:00 PM, because the music is topnotch. Like right now, on Saturday morning/afternoon, they have a program called "Sagebrush Serenade" done by a dude named John Florence, who can take country, oldies rock, and folk rock, add some sound effects, and make something imaginative and magical. And later today there's a program called "Smile Jamaica," done up by a guy alternately calling himself "Jah Roberts" or "Bobbylon," and he's got an encyclopedic knowledge of reggae and one of the largest reggae libraries in the world. I burned so many goddamn trees to this program, and look forward to burning forests' worth more in the future. And while they don't have my favorite radio program of all time, "Hearts of Space," they do have a locally-produced version of it, "Ethnospheres," that takes the same genres of world and electronic music and does something altogether new with them. Even with the overweening liberalism, I wouldn't give this station up for anything, and I'll listen to it as long as they care to broadcast it.

Final picture, speaking of trees. It still low-key blows my mind that there is nothing illegal whatsoever about this picture. Without a greenhouse to do the job right, I still attempted to grow cannabis this year, and I succeeded. I started three plants in my front seat (that van is my house, and you can grow weed in your house) when I was down south in the Sierra Nevadas in January. It was a tiny little plastic tote holding all three of them, and the soil I started them in was studded with trace gold particles locked in mica, typical of the sediment down there. The stresses of travel turned one plant male, so I yanked it, but the other two gave me a remarkable crop. I've still got a lot of trim waiting for me in the spring, and the trim is actually mids. I learned a lot of grow tips from the locals, who in turn got their knowledge from the guys out in California's Northern Triangle who've been doing this professionally since the bad old days of prohibition. Together with some homebrew wonder seeds, it made for a good crop. Growing your own is definitely the way to go, and I will definitely be doing it again in the spring.

There is so much more to tell, so much more to post. I've got hundreds of pictures from this past year, and each one is a story. It's a story I'll tell over the rest of this winter.