Simple, frugal desert living at Rancho Costa Nada

Rancho Costa Nada:  The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead

By Phil Garlington, with photos by Mike Garlington

Loompanics

(Review)

A how-to book set in California's baked and barren Smoke Tree Valley near the Colorado River.  After getting fired from two jobs in a row (bad attitude, insubordination) an itinerant newspaper reporter tries homesteading ten acres of worthless desert that he'd bought earlier at a land auction for three hundred bucks.  He builds a comfortable hogan out of sandbags and junk.  He also examines the ingenious Mad Max ways of fellow homesteaders who have jumped the tracks and pitched the mortgage, the boss, and the utility bill.

While working for the Orange County Register, veteran newspaper reporter Phil Garlington was assigned to cover a tax defalut land action in rural Imperial Counlty.  One of the parcels on the block was ten acres with a starting bid of a hundred dollar bill.  After some desultory bidding, he picked it up for three and change.  "You'll never find this," said the county clerk as she turned over the deed.  But with GPS you can find anything, and Garlington soon stood on his baronial estate, in the desolate Colorado Desert, 45 miles south of Blythe, California, 17 miles from a paved road, and so close to the Chocolate Mountain Naval Gunnery Range that the concussions from morning bombing runs rattled the coffee cups.

For several years, the Rancho served as a weekend retreat for Garlington and some of the reporters and photographers at the Register who sought a remote venue for discharging firearms.  The gunmen built a rifle and pistol range, a skeet pit, a few shade shacks.  They popped caps during the winter.  During the summer inferno, the land healed, hundreds of spent brass cartridges winking in the sun.

Then Garlington suffered a series of personal reverses.  The Register dismissed him in a newsroom-wide layoff of one.  His overseers cited bad attitude.  He took another post as editor of the Palo Verde Valley Times, but within a mere nine months he got canned there for insubordination.  A trend seemed to be emerging, or perhaps some kind of masochistic self-sabotage.  At any rate, it was then that Garlington asked himself, " Could I live at the Rancho?"

Instead of going through the demeaning hassle of finding another job and of then taking the program from another group of junior widgets, could he instead live cheap and rent-free on his title deed in the sun-basted desert?

By that time he'd found out that other people could.  At first Garlington thought he had the valley to himself, since he never saw anybody during the shooting weekends.  But then in Blythe he met the Hobo, who turned out to be another land baron of ten acres in the Smoke Tree.  He introduced Garlington to half a dozen other year-round homesteaders who manage to thrive in a harsh and waterless climate.  The Tukes family, with their fleet of Mad Max sand rails and carts; the irascible J.R and his feral dogs on breakaway leashes; the elusive Mystery Lady; Alba the Dog Woman, and the ranting Demented Vet.  They all had laagers of trailers with ingenious devices that helped them estivate through the sweltering summer.   The Hobo, for instance, buried his trailer and installed a periscope to watch the wildlife.

Garlington began his homesteading venture pretty much broke.  He had a few hundred cash and the tail end of a credit card.  He had a Geo Metro and a few basic hand tools.  Unlike the other homesteaders in the valley, he had no pioneer skills.  But #### it.  He was through crawling on his belly thorugh Human Resources with his battered resume.  He would have to figure it out. 

You could get it from the Paladin Press Website.  You could get it from Amazon, except they have the title as "Rancho Cost Nada" instead of Costa Nada.  Or, if you don't want to send credit card info into the ether, I'll send you a copy for sixteen bucks even, including postage.  Make your check out to me, Phil Garlington, and send to my mom's house: 

Garlington, P.O. Box 901, Victor, CA 95253.

She'll send a copy Priority Mail.

This is part of a story that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, written by reporter Carl Nolte.

"Smoke Tree Valley, Imperial County -- Phil Garlington is what Huckleberry Finn would have been like had he lived to be 60:  a free spirit and former promising young men whose hair has mostly departed; someone who loves life but hates work, who lives in the middle of nowhere in a desert so barren the military uses it for bombing practice.

Though he is mostly broke, he lives on 10 acres of his very own land, in a shelter he built himself, a place he calls Rancho Costa Nada.  In the lingo of the desert -- where there are also places like Rancho No Gotta and Rancho Elbow Greaso -- Costa Nada means, "It cost nothing."

Garlington, whose roots are in the Bay Area, believes that places like the Rancho are an option for those temporarily defeated by modern life, people who have lost a battle, but not the war, "somebody who might want to take some time to regroup."

For some in the Bay Area -- and other metropolitan areas, for that matter -- there hsf always been a romantic appeal in making a new life in the wilderness, in Alaska or maybe the California desert, and building your own place, like a pioneer.

Garlington had few pioneering skills -- he barley knew the business end of a hammer -- but he knew how to find land cheap.  He bought the rancho for three hundred dollars, and slapped together what he calls "a hogan," basically a shelter from the wind, for another hundred.

Thee are several disadvantages to this life.  The Rancho is 53 miles from the nearest traffic signal.  It is reached only by traveling more than 17 miles of unpaved road, some of it as rough as washboard, and deep in sand.

"It's basically wasteland," Garlington says.  "Nothing will grow here."  There are snakes, insects, summer heat, and winter winds so fierce they would blow over a boxcar.

The advantage is that one can live like a land baron for practically nothing, like a pioneer, like a homesteader out of the Old West.  Nobody tells you what to do. Free as a bird; free as Huck Finn, drifting on his raft, except this is desert.  All the good rivers have been taken.

"I traded money for leisure," says Garlington, who winters at the Rancho and travels in the summer, when the Smoke Tree Valley is blasted by the sun.  "It's a 120 degrees out here in the summer," he says.  "You have to be crazy to stay."

Garlington is not crazy.  It's just that he's a 19th century man in 21st century world.  The son of a college president, in his youth Garlington was simultaneously student body president at San Francisco State and editor of the college paper.  Glib, witty, literate, admired by women, Garlington lived a life rich in adventure.

What he can't do is hold down a job.  "I am not a good employee," he says."

“Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead” by Phil Garlington

 Reviewed by Wendi Wilkerson for Billy Bob Briggs' web site

Imagine Hunter S. Thompson as an exact cross between Dennis Weaver and Randy Weaver. This is Phil Garlington. At least that’s how I imagine he must be, after reading “Rancho Costa Nada, ” Garlington’s ingenious treatise on his “independent” lifestyle as a desert-dwelling slacker. This short, easy ­to- read how -to book thoroughly examines the financial, psychological, and material logistics of how even a lazy slackass with a bad attitude, no technological capability, and a disarming lack of handiness, can successfully become a desert homesteader.

It starts with cheap land: Garlington paid $325 for his patch of scorched, worthless earth at a tax-default land auction. He paid approximately $300 for building and equipping his desert shoebox, and $179 of that was for a U-haul to drag his stuff to his property. Things really got started because of that last firing. After having been canned from his umpteenth reporter job, Phil Garlington decided to abandon modern society. Not because there was anything particularly wrong with it, but because he had no cash and no income, and he needed a cheap place to crash. Moreover, he was tired of being fired for things like “bad attitude” and “insubordination,” and he was bored eking out a living as a third-rate journalist of the community daily circular variety.

The thought of living like a refugee was less horrifying to him than the thought of facing yet another drone-like occupation that served merely to feed his addiction to modernity. So he fled the daily grind into the sunburned arms of his desert homestead. Setting up camp in the burning waste of Smoke Tree, a settlement in Imperial County, California, may seem like a drastic method of gaining this freedom, but it worked for Garlington. He built a shoebox-shaped shack, or hogan, out of sandbags, tarps and “crapboard” (Garlington’s own invention made of scrap plywood he glues into architecturally valid 4-by-8 panels) along with anything he managed to scrounge together and haul into the mighty desert.

Garlington even has a second hobo residence. He has a small trailer closer to the town of Blythe, so that when he does need the occasional crap job, he doesn’t have to go the 40-plus miles back to Smoke Tree. He lives the same kind of refugee life in the trailer as in the desert. And he’s pretty content, though he admits that it’s hard to convince the ladies to come out to his deep desert Bedouin bachelor pad. Like most of the other desert folk, Garlington works crap jobs for a few months out of the year, socking away a few grand for necessities, etc. The rest of the time he either sits around the homestead reading novels and writing the occasional freelance piece, or he travels. He usually travels during the summer, thus avoiding the 120-degree misery of the summertime desert. Because he lives a Spartan existence without air conditioning, a refrigerator, a big entertainment system, or even a phone line, Garlington doesn’t have to worry about any of the occasional urban yahoos who vandalize the desert stealing things while he’s gone. There’s just nothing worth stealing. The question is, why would anyone want to live like this? Yeah, Garlington is a soul maverick, a lone wolf, an asocial geek. It makes sense that he’d do this.

But why us? The key idea is freedom: no landlords, no major debts, no pollution, no blaring media, no traffic, no cubicle slavery, no structured responsibilities beyond what you owe solely to you. Sure, there are bosses, but the bosses of the crappy chimp jobs don’t really count, because there are always other chimp jobs you can get if the first one does not agree with you. However, in exchange, you must give up nearly every modern convenience, the large-scale company of others, and every idea about personal freedom that our greedy media culture has ingrained in you. It takes a massive deconstruction of the psyche to pull this off and survive it.

Most of us couldn’t. Garlington thrives in his desolate world because he’s always been asocial, and the next logical progression in his evolution is hermitity. This isn’t to say that he shuns the company of other humans. He has a few colorful and intriguing neighbors living only a few miles from him, the most interesting of which is the man he calls The Demented Vet. The Demented Vet makes six brief monologue intrusions into the text. He’s a severely disgruntled vet who spews wild tangents at anyone who comes to visit, not unlike the Ancient Mariner haranguing the wedding guest. One of the greatest words ever invented comes from this Demented Vet: Sapismo, or, “the infinite capacity of the narcoleptic middle class to absorb a financial drubbing from corporations and the government.” Do you worry about the 401k, health insurance, dividends on tiny stock portfolios, and the relative largeness of your car, home or bank account? If so, then you’re sapismo, just like me. Garlington includes these monologues as entertainment for his readers and as a cautionary tale for himself. He realized not too long ago that one of the unforeseen dangers of living in the desert too long, “You start sounding like the Demented Vet.” It changes you.

And that is the thing with this book. The truth behind this is that it isn’t really a how-to book. It’s “A Year in Provence” written by a painfully literate desert “redneck.” He has a fine appreciation of his desert, and a definite affection for his strange, independent neighbors, and a slight sense of delighted astonishment at their, not to mention his own, ingenuity and creativity in building fulfilling desert lives.

This is a practical, illustrated, methodical chronicle of individual evolution. Pretty surprising stuff coming from a lazy slackass with a bad attitude, no technological capability, and a disarming lack of handiness. I give it three stars, and the Greenpeace Grant for Excellence in Gonzo How-To Authorship. Of course, no review of a Loompanics Unlimited book would be complete without a rundown of the “coming attractions” pages. Some of you will be interested to note the featured books of the month: “How To Live Without Electricity and Like It,” “Surviving on the Streets: How to Go DOWN without Going OUT,” “Travel-Trailer Homesteading for under 5k,” and “How to Develop A Low Cost Family Food Storage System.” This is all recommended reading for new members of the Witness Protection Program. Ordering books is easy, if you follow the directions on the full-page Loompanics catalogue ad on the last page. While you’re at it, you can read the testimonials. The best is from WC in California: “As our liberty slowly disappears, your books hold a ray of light in our American Age of Media Misinformation and stupidity. My TV stays off and the pages from your unique books stay open.” Sounds like the Demented Vet, and he’s obviously a Loompanics maniac! How can you go wrong here? Five stars for the advertising.

Loompanics Unlimited, 2003, $14.95 ISBN: 1559502363

Photo page has a bunch of other snaps