Plan B

I don't want to give away anything in case I am wrong, but I am almost certain I am not wrong. I believe I know where the farm is going to be, I visited the property. I made an offer. The only thing I am waiting on, is the seller's acceptance.

The great things about it are the price and the location. It's exactly where I wanted, and cheap. It is almost entirely cleared land, which is not as good as part cleared and part wooded, but a heck of a lot better than having to clear a forest away.

The bad news is that it is hardly a turnkey operation.

There is a dwelling on the premises. It is not habitable and not likely to be. There is a well. It has no pump and hasn't been drawn from in 7 years. I mentioned in a previous post that Plan A was land with a house on it. Plan B was land only. There are structures in this case, some might even be useful structures (I will probably turn at least 1 shed into a greenhouse,) but nowhere to live, no electricity and no running water. So while this is better than some versions of Plan B, it's still Plan B.

So, once the deal closes, I will return to Dallas and commence to convert my van, not to an RV but to a setup where I can camp in it while I am doing the necessary preliminary work on the farm. I will need to put in a 300 watt solar power system to power tools, the phone, a USB heating element for sleeping in cold weather, my zero degree sleeping bag with a pad for underneath, and a laptop. This will be a dry run for putting in a 600 watt system on an RV in the future. I will need a trangia camping stove to heat water for coffee and heat up soups and the like. I will need potable water tote containers. I need no-trespassing signs.

Then I will need to haul a WHOOOLE bunch of rain gutters and associated parts up to the farm and install them. I may yet entrust the watering of the plants to well water or water from the waste ponds, but for myself I want pure, filtered rainwater to drink. There are great roofs on the sheds and they have a lot of area, plenty for a water cistern system, but no rain gutters. I will need to talk to a well company and have them check out the well, test the water in it and get them to set me up with a pump that will run on the amount of solar power I will have available. I need to get the place FENCED, right now it is on the edge of a cow pasture and the cows have the run of the place.

In a perfect world, I would have all that lined up and done in TWO WEEKS after arrival there. Next run up, I would bring the modified 55 gallon food-grade barrels for the rainwater system. Sometime during all this, I would need to find out what my internet options are there - DSL would be nice, but I may have to settle for a cellular plan with unlimited data and a wifi hotspot. So that will be end of online gaming for me. ;) That's okay, I'll have a lot of work to do.

Then I get all my necessary shit moved out of Wildhaven and into self-storage in Glenwood. I might need to rent a proper U-Haul for that. I'll buy an RV and move it up to the farm. I will give the brothers opportunity to peruse what is left in the house and then get everything shut off there and sell Wildhaven. I'll distribute the cash, which by that point I may need myself, and move my cat Mango and myself up to the farm.

And I hope to get all this shit done in time for the 2020 growing season, April or at a minimum early May, which may take some doing. I am going to be one busy guy.

************EDIT************

The buyer agreed to my price. Assuming the title clears, I've bought the farm. ;)

Faith

Sitting here in a motel room in small-town Arkansas, it really hits home that I am potentially about to enter a drastically different world from the world I know. A good world, in some ways, but very very different.

On the way here, parked by the side of a rural state road somewhere between you've-never-heard-of-it and the village of you-don't-know-it, I got out of the car and got presented with... absolute and total silence. Like I have never experienced. There was absolute nothing. No bird cheeped, no insect buzzed, no engine ran. No wind. My tinnitus, which is normally not very noticeable, was the absolute only sound I heard.

In the world I know, if I want a pack of smokes or a 3 Musketeers bar at 3 am, I can have one in my hand within minutes. If I want them at 3:45 AM Christmas Morning, I can have them. Here, unless you want something between 9 and 5, you may be out of luck and you might have to drive 45 minutes to get that.

At home I have high-speed cable internet suitable for gaming. In this motel room, I have internet of some sort available wirelessly. Where I will be living, Lord only knows.

I have high confidence that I am doing the right thing. There are signs that this is what G-d wills. Doesn't mean I ain't skeered. ;) Moving to a rural farm is going to be a drastic departure from my life as usual.

In the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament, there are innumerable examples where G-d tells a prophet that the people need to do this very hard thing, and the prophet tells the people, "Go, slay 10,000 philistines with a soft bristle brush. GO. DO IT NAO.

NAO. GO NAO. DO IT.

And you know that the people who hear this must be like, "well F0C% my soul right now." But you HAVE to do it. Because you know the story about the scouts who went to scout the Amalekites and peed their pants in fear, and because that the Israelites wandered an extra 40 years in the desert. And that is no bueno. You don't want to be in the desert, you want to be living out the promise. You want to be living out the providence. Not moping around until you die because you were chicken s***.

But faith don't mean you ain't skeered. It means you skeered and you do it anyway. Because He said. Because He promised you the land if you were faithful. In the case of the Israelites and hopefully myself too.

But honestly I know I could never live with myself if I chickened out. I've wanted this pretty much my whole life. Now I need to get it.

The City

Photo by Derek Jensen (Tysto), 2004-April-10

This blog is intended as a journal of sorts of my transition from suburban to rural life.

It has been brought home to me however that I cannot talk about my plans for a fortunate escape from the city, without saying what is wrong with it. What is wrong with the city. And I do feel that there are things very much wrong with it.

When the books of the Tanakh were written, the largest city on Earth probably only had 100,000 people in it. That's less than the population of Killeen, TX or Green Bay, Wisconsin.

In 700 b.c. that city would be Babylon, infamous Babylon, whore Babylon.

And the Tanakh has unkind words for cities, for Babylon, Nineveh, Sodom and Gomorrah, even for Jerusalem which was barely even a city by our standards. But theirs wasn't a world of cities, and theirs wasn't a world of cities with millions of inhabitants each. Some of our problems, are uniquely ours.

And the problem with cities in a nutshell is this: in cities human life is devalued. That's the TL:DR synopsis.

This statement requires unpacking, because I am not saying that cities are more violent or more oppressive than previous forms of organization or forms of settlement in the past. I am saying that it is more dehumanizing.


PART 1: PEOPLE WHO KNOW MY NAME
Even on the plantation, with slaves, at least the master has to SEE the slaves typically. He at least knows their names. This may not make them one iota less oppressed or brutalized. They may be brutalized in ways that modern Western people would find horrifying and incomprehensible. This only means that at least, they are recognized. They are somebody. If the slaves drop dead, the POS massa will at least jot it down as a loss of operating production capacity. The people who worked alongside him, whether they liked him or hated him, they did know him. They may have worked with him for years or decades. And his death will be noted, whether or not he is missed.

We are familiar with the concept of the Stockholm Syndrome. At the core of this, is the idea that to your captor or oppressor, you are at least a SOMEBODY. You're not a nobody. To some people, to be A SOMEBODY to someone else is the next best thing to being loved.

Of course in modern cities, we may have all sorts of people who love us. We may not. But we are immersed in a world of people we do not know and do not love and pass in and out of our lives unheralded and unknown. I drove down a highway to a Whataburger. The people in that Whataburger, I may never see again. This is my one appearance in their lives, and mine in theirs. I drove down a highway with anonymous people in anonymizing cars, I did not even see their faces. That might be the only time in my life that I am ever in close proximity to those individuals, or they to me. The people who love you, are generally with you a minority of the time (excepting sleep,) and the people who are with you, do not love you, know you or acknowledge you except in the most shallow and cursory way.

This is the first form of devaluation: they don't know or love me, and I don't know or love them. I don't even feel enough towards them to hate them. They may not even come from the same place or speak the same language. I have no particular ill-will towards them, but they also do not matter. They are not YOUR people, you are not THEIR people, you are merely bodies in proximity. Community in cities is really a bad joke. You cannot have community with people you don't know and never will.

PART 2: DEHUMANIZING WORK
It should go without saying that you usually don't get to choose who you work with. You're not the boss, you don't get to decide, you take the work that you can. So you don't generally work with those you love. You may indeed come to love them, or you may not. What happens when you stop working for that company, or retire? Like them or not, most likely you will never see them again.

But this is not my main point with dehumanizing work. What is most dehumanizing about it is that you have no control over it. It is not YOUR work, you are EMPLOYED in most cases.

For the majority of the time human beings have existed, people may have had dire needs pressing upon them, more dire than most modern city residents will ever experience. But you were essentially in control of your own time. If you hunted that day, or farmed, that was your concern. You may well die if you don't chop the wood today or bring down a deer, but you are still in control of that and the advantages to you of a certain course of action could not be more clear or direct. Prehistoric man did not need goading to hunt when he was hungry or drink when he was thirsty. It was immediately and self-evidently meaningful. Every man was in charge in some sense of his own narrative, he was not a cog in someone else's machine. As the computer in Colossus: The Forbin Project says, it is not oppressive circumstances that are a problem as much as it is oppression by other men. Difficulty, discomfort, pain, are not evil or unjust in themselves: it is when someone does it to you that it is evil and unjust. And the vast majority of us in cities are done unto, even if our physical circumstances are much easier. We don't own the means of our production, nor would we under communism either. In primitive capitalism people did have some control over their own production, their own work, but not everyone even then. And this kind of eighteenth-century capitalism is long gone in the age of virtually omnipotent and omnipresent corporations.

Let me make overt what many of us are only willing to admit covertly: to the corporation we are tools, we are raw materials, that is all we are. The corporate propaganda about "our company family" only heightens the nausea among those willing to see clearly. The corporation is a mere machine that has gained power and a kind of sentience, and to it we are also only a mere machine. A tool for a use, a tool for their profit.

So we are required to serve something we ought to hate with every fiber of our being. An anti-family, anti-community, anti-holy, anti-human world order.

And I do hate it. With every particle of my existence. I completely honestly utterly transparently hate it.

PART 3: DEHUMANIZING RECREATION
What we seek in recreation is a reflection of our atomized, despiritualized existence, which the city did not invent but which is accelerated in every possible way by the city. Our recreation is often the slow suicide of an unhealthy zoo animal who only wants out of its cage and will beat its head into the bars if this gives it even the illusion of escape. We drink, we do drugs. Our movies and video games are violent, or seek to give us experiences that our physical condition and prudence forbid us in real life. Our entertainment is the medium of our spiritual destruction and often our physical destruction as well.

Our illness is not in the physical condition of our bodies, it is in the condition of our lives and souls. A tiger in a cage may be given means to fulfil every physical need, but it is still a sick pathological creature deprived of the one thing it truly needs: physical and spiritual freedom. The tiger may at least want to leave its cage, but in our modern urban analogy, most of the animals in our urban cage are unable to formulate the truth of their condition. They are unable to reach the internal freedom that I have.

THIS CITY IS A CAGE

I AM ITS PRISONER

I HATE MY CAGE AND DEMAND TO BE FREE WHATEVER THE COST.

If every single person in the cities were to embrace this knowledge, things would change. Maybe we wouldn't solve our problems, but things would change forever. But we cannot, because that would require a courage that has been trained and bred out of us.

So we take the course of least resistance. We won't resist the whole insane world. We'll just escape, into drugs, into alcohol, into games, into movies, into whatever thing it is that makes our truthful reality go away for a bit. Our entertainment falls in line with this, ultimately self-destructive, ambition.

This is our condition.

I am convinced that it is impossible to obtain freedom from that condition without G-d. He frees us, as He did the Israelites from Egypt. But then we must walk out onto the Sinai in faith, and not pine for the waters of Egypt. There is no good reason why I should be in a position to set my foot outside Egypt. I am nobody and have done nothing. The only things I have are an understanding mind and a resolute will to hate everything that G-d hates. And He does, he hates this. I believe He hates this more than I could ever understand.

But He won't free us from Egypt if we want to be Egyptians.

The Ark

I got the van to carry my stuff in last week: I had been without a motor vehicle for five years: partly because I couldn't afford one and riding a bike would be better for me, and partly because it would be better for the atmosphere if I didn't have one. Well this is a heck of an adjustment: from bicycle (or rather cargo tricycle) to behemoth of a van.

I give all my transportation machines nicknames: this is the Ark. While the Ark is going to be great for moving my stuff, and I am also going to need it to carry supplies from the hardware store to build raised beds and fencing and stuff, after that I probably won't need it much. But I may need it for my Plan B:

Plan A: get ~2 acres with a small house or hunters cabin already on it. That is going to be much easier on me, and I am as I said 61 years old.

Plan B: Get ~2 acres WITHOUT a small house or cabin on it. Build a house.

Plan B is far less desirable, though it has its advantages. I can build to my needs rather than adopt a house designed for other people's needs (my needs are definitely different from most.) But I honestly would rather not spend 6 months building a house essentially by myself; that is a labor I can do without. The main factor in whether I get Plan A or settle for Plan B is cost: I want to get the land with the house if possible for under $50k. That could be a tall order.

IF Plan B winds up being the case, what I will do is get all my stuff loaded into storage near where the land is, and then come back to Dallas and convert my van into an RV of sorts. Put on solar panels, get water containers, get some very basic cooking equipment, futon and sleeping bag. It still needs to be readily convertible back to a cargo carrier once I have my structure built, and I will need to carry cargo in it while living in it too, so it will be very bare bones. More like camping in a van with a few amenities than a true RV.

I really don't want to go with Plan B and maybe I won't have to. There is no denying that it would be tough on me, a truly arduous undertaking. But I am prepared to go there if need be. This is not just some optional lifestyle change for me, it is something close to a mission. My land, and my dwelling on that land, will be my Ark in whatever future awaits.

Why?

I am about to turn 61 years old in a few days and I have spent my entire life in a city. Why at this age would I change everything about my way of life and the place I am living in, and uproot myself into a rural county of an entirely different state? That is going to be a very challenging undertaking, physically and emotionally, simply to move there, not to mention all the things that would come next. Why do it?

I have dreamed of moving to a small farm or homestead since long before I clearly understood why or had a clear reason to. I have childhood memories of my grandmother's relatively humble homestead, that have loomed far larger than the actual amount of time I spent there. The smell of animals, the taste of fresh mint that grew under what used to be a chicken coop. The smell of breeze through the pines.

I have all sorts of reasons NOW for wanting to move to the country, but before that it was primal and emotional. Dallas was always my home, but Far East Texas was a place that felt like home in a way that Dallas never did. It was my Eden. I always breathed easier once I crossed the invisible border that separated the piney woods from my part of Texas. I was coming home. I got that same feeling crossing the State border from Oklahoma into Western Arkansas, the Ouachita country. Lakes like East Texas, but prettier ones. Same pines, but with larger hills rather than the softly rolling hills of East Texas. A whole national park at the doorstep. Like East Texas, but better.

Having established my emotional reasons, what are my practical reasons?

I remember living through the recession of the Seventies and the 2008 crash. I know that jobs could change or become unavailable, prices could change, money could devalue. I know that such events can endanger not just people's prosperity but their actual survival. Even those who could be able to physically survive through the worst aspects of such upheavals, often don't survive for other reasons. There is a huge opiate problem in this country for a reason, and people die from it. The reason is that when people don't have anything enduring and they perhaps don't have the one and only true Rock that is the Lord, their sense of personal worth is destroyed and they just want the pain numbed. Many lives are based on the false values of this society, and their trust in those values lets them down.

What are real values? The Lord, the land, what you need, those close to you. What did Adam have in the garden? The Lord, the Garden (the land,) Eve, that was it. Nor did he need more.

I also know that the way that humans have been treating the land is dead wrong. We pave it over, fill land and waters and sky with poison. We use coal ripped from living mountains to power our stuff. People talk about "save the rainforest" and they should, but the most damaging thing we do to the land is industrialized agriculture. I don't want to have to eat anymore from a way of farming that destroys the world. It's bad for the land: it's also probably bad food too.

I can't change government policies: what I CAN do is change the way I live. Both because that is the morally right thing to do and as an example. If I can do it, an old man, almost no one can say they CAN'T. I haven't done it yet though, I am just about to start looking for land. A few things to tie up here in Dallas first.

I am also much aware of the great overarching story of the Exodus in the Bible. Finding the land that G-d will give me. Leaving Egypt, a place where false gods hold sway. False gods hold sway in our cities no less than Egypt. I am also very aware of the price that you pay if you turn back from the Promised Land, pine for the cucumbers and fish of Egypt. As it says in Numbers:

"Your carcasses will fall, in this wilderness."

This is repeated 5 times in a row in the Book of Numbers. The price of turning back from the Promise. Of not trusting G-d.

And yes, I think the modern world generally IS Egypt. Cities are Egypt. America is Egypt. And like Egypt, curses will fall on them sooner or later. I'd rather be out in the country eating from the produce of my own hand and G-d's providence when that happens. Sleeping in a house I own, on land I own. Able to provide food, warmth, power and even water for myself, without depending on a human system.

I am also mindful of what 2 Cor. paraphrased from Isaiah 52:11 and Jeremiah 15:17:

"Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord.

Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you."

Well, postmodern urban life is unclean in more ways than I can take note of here. I am checking out of it.

Make Haste from Babylon.

I will be going land-shopping probably next month, I will keep this blog updated about that as I am able.