Advances in alternative energy technology over the last four decades have made it both easier and cheaper to live off-grid. This series provides a personal perspective on the pluses and minuses of living with technology in the forests of Northern California.
It’s July, 1984.
The miners’ strike in England is getting bloody. The twenty-third summer Olympics in Los Angeles are under way. And Orwell’s iconic totalitarian novel hasn’t come true.
George Orwell won’t be appearing in this article.
Well, not completely.
Reaganomics is in full swing, and the mad economic roller coaster ride that will characterize the next three decades is gathering speed. Good luck trying to hold on to your hat, your wallet, your job, your home. And when the ride is going to be too fast and bumpy to get off, maybe it’s wiser not get on it in the first place.
I’m fifteen-and-three-quarters and traveling from England to Humboldt County to visit my dad and stepmom for the first time. I haven’t traveled much up to this point: a short holiday with mum and stepdad to Ibiza while it was still a largely sleepy island, where fishing for anchovies was the main source of income; a few day trips to Calais; and a school trip to Paris and Rouen. I’ve only flown once before, to Ibiza, so the 11-hour flight from London Heathrow to San Francisco is an experience from which I plan to wring every nuance.
Or rather, I get drunk.
British Airways has upgraded me to business class. For the first time, I have access to alcohol, at 1984 airline prices and amounts, which is to say, free and unlimited. None of the nice stewardesses bother asking me how old I am or whether I have any ID. I spend the first half of the flight chatting with the guy next to me, who turns out to be an engineer working on improving the purity of silicon crystals, which is something my uncle in Denmark had worked on so I know enough to surprise the guy. By the halfway mark, I’ve had one too many gin and tonics, so the rest of the trip is lost in a comfortable fog of sleep and dehydration, with the occasional vague memory of the incredible view of the USA’s geology from 30,000 feet.
My dad, stepmom, and three-year-old half sister meet me at San Francisco airport. I have the beginnings of a stunning hangover, leavened slightly by the cinnamon apple tea my well-meaning aunt serves me when we arrive at her seaside house. Fruit tea is a novel thing to someone used to PG Tips brewed so strong you could stand a spoon up in it. Jet lag is another new and unwelcome experience. After a couple of days of recuperating down in Carmel, we set off for Humboldt County.
It’s a drive of about four hours North on Highway 101 from San Francisco, but you could be traveling back in time by 150 years. After you pass the town of Santa Rosa, the countryside, already coyly hinting at amazing vistas, even through the semi-industrial and suburban sprawls of Marin County, relents its teasing and opens up into forests, hills, and rivers, and the road has to twist and swoop to dodge them. The country is vast and rugged. The hills are steeply scarped, with frequent signs warning of landslides, common in the rainy season. Wide and gravelly riverbeds snake around the base of the hills. Spawning salmon and trout used to crowd the autumn rivers in their millions, now reduced to a handful by clearcutting and overfishing. There are stretches of 30, 40 miles where the only sign of human habitation is a faint glimmer of light up in the hills after dark. The towns themselves have a feel of the frontier about them, some of them no more than a gas station and a grocery store. You wouldn’t be surprised to see a hitching post and a horse trough.
Redwoods rise impossibly tall and straight, a few feet from the highway, shading the road in an odd and massively deep green-black darkness. This is the Pacific Northwest, and it stays in character for nearly a thousand miles, all the way through Northern California, Oregon, Washington, up to Vancouver, and beyond. White settlers first came here to trap fur in the early 1800s, mine gold in the mid 1800s, log redwoods in the 1900s, and, by the 1970s and 1980s, a new wave was coming to escape the materialistic, individualistic policies of California’s former governor, the actor-turned-president, Ronald Reagan.
They were mostly disillusioned hippies from the Bay Area who had felt that there could be a turning point after Vietnam and Watergate but instead, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote, saw the wave finally break and roll back. Many endured, staying in San Francisco, trying to keep the magic alive. Some became distracted from the idea of changing the world through peace and love by the copious drugs, and many a fine political mind of that generation was undone by one too many tabs of acid, instead raving naked along Haight Street. Some of those disillusioned transplants decided to take a different road and, inspired by pioneers like Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog, figured that it might be possible to create a parallel life, away from the madness. Such were my dad and stepmom.
One kilowatt of power … unless it’s raining.
For them, it started close to San Francisco, on a houseboat moored off of Sausalito, which itself had been a compromise. With their rented apartment in Fairfax being sold by the owner, and without enough money to buy a property, my father and stepmother instead decided to buy a boat with what capital they had. It was a 60 feet ex-tug boat, originally built in Washington State, and now retired after a long life working the Bay. They were, coincidentally, living almost next door to Brand, and my dad has stories of helping their famous neighbor to restore his boat, the Mirene. These two experimented with a wind power generator, purchased from Brand’s catalog, and were the first among their cohorts with solar power. They imagined a similar life on land where they were beholden to no one and had room to expand, which the houseboat didn’t offer. A small inheritance gave them the means to make the dream real.
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