{"id":14777,"date":"2012-11-26T11:00:01","date_gmt":"2012-11-26T17:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=14777"},"modified":"2013-02-07T14:20:21","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T20:20:21","slug":"the-wired-woods-how-to-live-in-the-forest-using-only-car-batteries-and-a-composting-toilet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/hardware\/the-wired-woods-how-to-live-in-the-forest-using-only-car-batteries-and-a-composting-toilet\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wired Woods: How To Live In The Forest Using Only Car Batteries And A Composting Toilet"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s July, 1984.<\/p>\n

The miners\u2019 strike in England is getting bloody. The twenty-third summer Olympics in Los Angeles are under way. And Orwell\u2019s iconic totalitarian novel hasn’t come true.<\/p>\n

\"George

George Orwell won’t be appearing in this article.<\/p><\/div>\n

Well, not completely.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

Or rather, I get drunk.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve 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\u2019s geology from 30,000 feet.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Fruit 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s former governor, the actor-turned-president, Ronald Reagan.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Solar<\/a>

One kilowatt of power … unless it’s raining.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\u2019t offer. A small inheritance gave them the means to make the dream real.
\n
\nMy dad recalls a long and, to my ears, tough road trip to find the right piece of land. There was much hitchhiking and sleeping rough, brewing tea by the side of the road over a little portable stove. He went to Ettersburg, Alderpoint, and Whitethorne before finally stumbling across a parcel of land for sale on a disused ranch near Garberville. A meeting was arranged with the land agent for a viewing. My stepmom came up, and together, they went to look at the plot. The land agent was as careful to match the buyers to the land as she was to match the land to the buyers. A deal was struck; deeds were drawn up.<\/p>\n

The parcel is 60 acres of hilly ground, at about 900 feet above sea level, east of the coastal mountains, with mostly mixed old-growth forest — live oak, tan oak, madrone, fir, bay — a couple of streams that have cut deep gullies, and a small but reliable spring. There are some grassy clearings and a meadow of about 10 acres where there are scattered and sparse remnants of a house from maybe the 1930s. Telegraph wire, broken crockery, nails, a porcelain doll\u2019s head. The remains of someone\u2019s life, abandoned for whatever reason. Small but perfectly made flint arrowheads also appear from the ground, evidence of even earlier occupants of the land. Deer, turkeys, skunk, bears, and squirrels are frequent visitors, along with the occasional bobcat and mountain lion. It\u2019s wet in the winter — reliable records show one year with more than 10 feet of rainfall — but tinder dry in the summer.\u00a0Fierce fires are not uncommon in the summertime, and a volunteer fire department exists as the first line of defense.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

“You see that tree over there?”<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The road out to the ranch goes from adequate to atrocious in 10 miles — metaled county road for a while, then poorly maintained logging road up to the ranch entrance, and what could only be described as a dirt track, with boulders and potholes waiting to snag the unwary. ATVs and dirt bikes are the preferred mode of transport. This land itself has no buildings — my dad and stepmom would have to start from scratch, bringing everything with them along that track to create a home in the forest of the Pacific Northwest. The first few months were split between living in a tent and living back on the houseboat. It was, my stepmom tells, an interesting time. She remembers one evening alone with my sister, who was less than a year old, in a tent with one guttering kerosene lamp, the rain pouring down, and no one else around in the forest for miles.<\/p>\n

Clearly, you needed to be somewhat hardy to keep your nerve in those early days. But they weren\u2019t alone in that attitude. A large number of other back-to-the-land migrants from San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, the East coast, and all points in between, were coming to Humboldt County, bringing their ideas and dreams of a better life — a better world — with them. Soon, the other parcels of land on the ranch were bought up, houses were built, and maintenance of the terrible ranch road was placed under a road committee, whose responsibilities included removing the worst of the boulders, grading, and putting gravel down where potholes required it.<\/p>\n

In the broader community, a school, a radio station, a healthcare center, a credit union, and a community center grew up, nurtured by the newcomers. Those who had been here already weren\u2019t always welcoming — the community center was burned down by some locals who resented the influx of hippies, for example. The nascent “Reggae on the River” music festival, held at nearby Benbow, was treated with some suspicion by the locals, until concertgoers\u2019 money started pouring into local businesses. One town councilor famously, and reasonably, spoke up in favor of the festival, saying, “Well, if you don’t like Reggie, just stay at home!”<\/p>\n

It wasn’t just musical differences that caused friction, however. The environmental zeal of the newcomers didn\u2019t always sit well with those whose jobs depended on cutting down the old growth forest, although the local logging companies, almost instinctively, had held to environmentally sustainable practices, such as not clearcutting, for example. That attitude changed when one of the smaller local logging companies was later taken over by a huge asset-stripping conglomerate, and common ground was found between locals and newcomers. What had been antagonism (perhaps more one way than the other) turned to a mutual, if sometimes grudging, respect. The \u201chipneck\u201d — a fusion of hippie and redneck — was born.<\/p>\n

I am blissfully unaware of local politics at this time. As a thin, pale teenager, I’m not good at team sports or running or swimming. I prefer programming my Atari 800 or soldering electronic circuits together or reading. Girls frighten me. Being plonked down in the sweltering mountain wilderness under an unrelenting deep blue sky is as different as it could be from cold, grey, flat England in the summer. I drive an ATV for the first time. With my dad and two neighbors, I go on a two-day hike to an old ghost town (now burnt down under suspicious circumstances) and catch trout in the stream, which we cook in tinfoil with herbs and lemon over a campfire. I\u2019ve never done anything like this before. But I keep my shirt on all the time. Someone takes a photo of me by a nearby lake. Everyone else is relaxed and tanned; I\u2019m buttoned up in a blue polyester shirt, sporting a pudding-basin haircut, the kind that was fashionable with the Beatles 20 years earlier.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

One part of the original dodecahedral cabin can be seen in the center.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

My dad and stepmom had been busy in the three years since they\u2019d bought the land. There was a house, built as two side-by-side dodecahedrons, where one part was the combined living room and kitchen while the other was their bedroom. A roughly rectangular section joined the two, with the bathroom to one side and a tiny alcove to the other, which was nominally my sister\u2019s bedroom, but which I commandeered for the summer. A 1,500-foot length of plastic pipe ran from the spring, at the top of the land, down to the house. The bathroom could best be described as interesting; to keep both costs and water usage low, the toilet was a composting one, where the waste, mixed with sawdust, is decanted, for want of a better word, into plastic barrels with airholes in them, which are turned periodically to keep airflow even. Aerobic bacteria breaks down the matter, rendering it into something like dark brown soil over several months. When it\u2019s opened, there\u2019s just a musty smell, like compost, and the intense heat produced during the decay has sterilized it. There\u2019s a load of nitrogenous nutrients for your vegetable garden, and no risk of infection or illness. It’s free fertilizer; it\u2019s like magic. The only downside, of course, is that you have to have space to store your rotting poop for a few months.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The electrical system powered by a couple of car batteries in parallel, with lighting provided by 12-volt bulbs is strung throughout. A simple charge circuit, driven by an array of solar panels up in the meadow on the hillside, keeps the batteries charged, and there’s a small hand-start generator for backup. With judicious use of power in the summer, so long as you topped up the car batteries with distilled water occasionally, you would probably have enough power to read by for a few hours each night without using the generator. In the rainy winter and spring months, a micro-hydro unit would provide sufficient top-up charge. There is no TV — only a radio, tuned to KHUM, and a CB radio, so that some warning could be had of fire outbreaks. There’s no phone. All of the power-related items — the charge circuit, the fuse boxes, the meters, the generator — are housed in a nearby shed resembling an outhouse, covered with redwood shingles.<\/p>\n

Some of the neighbors had built their homes to include a more complex power system, complete with an inverter and 110 VAC sockets. One of these enterprising folks ran a software label from his house, and there I meet my first IBM PC, falling in love with the flight simulator. But this neighbor’s pride and joy is an Apple Lisa. I remember my dad painstakingly drawing on the Lisa one night when it crashed with the annoying bomb icon and, perplexed, exclaiming, “I didn’t draw that!”<\/p>\n

I’m standing outside at night in the perfect darkness, in a clearing next to the house, up by the solar panels, craning my neck upwards and marveling at the Milky Way overhead, planets, satellites, meteors. I\u2019ve hardly ever had the opportunity to see these things before in light-polluted suburban England. The summer crickets and cicadas are loud and alien to my ears. All around in the forest, things rustle and squeak and snort, eyes occasionally reflecting back at me in blue, red, or green when I fitfully shine my flashlight at them.<\/p>\n

\"Northern<\/a>

The amazing night sky as seen from the forest … unless it’s raining<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Solar power (or, more precisely, photovoltaic power) was a relatively recent commercial product in 1984, made possible by the same semiconductors that powered my beloved computers. A local entrepreneur, David Katz, had started Alternative Energy Engineering five years before, and my dad was working there part time. Katz, a former Department of Defense employee, was also a back-to-the-land migrant in the late 70s. At the 1980 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Katz came across a guy in a booth selling solar-powered toys. More interested in the solar panels than the toys, he persuaded the bemused booth owner to sell him 100 panels right there. Back in Northern California, Katz sold them all in two days. It was fascinating to me that the energy was, apart from the cost of the solar panels themselves, free.<\/p>\n

I go back to England at the end of the summer, not to return to Humboldt County again for 14 years. In the meantime, the house in the forest gains several extensions, on two levels, and a beautiful J\u00f8tul wood-burning stove. The power system grows more complex, with an Outback inverter and charge controller, and more solar panels. A phone line is installed with 3,000 feet of armored cable rolled out from the neighbor’s house, where the phone company junction box sits. A new bathroom is added in time for a family reunion in 2000. A studio is built for my dad at the bottom of the driveway. Propane heaters go in. Then, a propane tank, and an 8.5 kilowatt Kohler generator to replace the little hand-started one. Three 2,500 gallon storage tanks are added to keep water flowing in the dry summer months and provide water in the event of fire. A cabin is built next to the house in 2005, insulation is added throughout, and the whole thing gets a snazzy burgundy and blue paint job. A covered carport goes up shortly after that.<\/p>\n

When I moved from Paris to live in California in 2009, the house I came to was very different to the little cabin I first saw 25 years earlier. I spent a few months there, before getting a job in San Francisco writing software for a medical device company. \u00a0I visited occasionally, but it wasn\u2019t until July 2012 that I became a permanent resident out in the Wired Woods.<\/p>\n

A difference of opinion at work leads me to a practical appreciation of the difference between European and American employer\/employee relations, a new career as a telecommuting consultant beckons, and I set my mind to inventing technology for off-grid seniors in the next gripping installment.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s July, 1984. The miners\u2019 strike in England is getting bloody. The twenty-third summer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":14845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[905,31,908],"tags":[3626,3624,2738,3621,3625,2046,3542],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14777"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14777"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16399,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14777\/revisions\/16399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}