Migration: Baja-bound December 18, 2010

It’s snowing outside the trailer, the want of winter having fully descended upon our desert home. There is a muffled serenity outside on this chill early morning. The world is small. Horizons are hemmed in by weather. Mountains and cliffs have vanished. My senses seem to also draw inward this time of year – the cold, the clouds, the whiteness, all buffering my myriad connections to the colorful world I inhabit.

Winter, for me, is traditionally a time of introspection, reevaluation, a time of mind instead of one of body. The colder months are a meander to clarity, which blooms into action as the temperatures rise. This winter will be different, however. On January 1^st, we are following the distant, southerly sun down to Baja. This winter, we migrate.

Living the Debt-free Dream December 5, 2010

Yesterday, we visited friends south of town. Friends who recently built their own house. Friends who once lived in a school bus, and before that, an Econoline van. Friends who managed to live our dream.

But timing and circumstance were on their side.

The couple moved to Moab in 1998, before it was so difficult to live in nontraditional housing. They camped in their van for long stretches along the Colorado River. Back then, few of the campgrounds along the river were developed, and there was even a squatters’ tent camp in the canyon where many of the town’s service industry workers lived. But that’s all been cleaned up now, campgrounds have been installed, and regular patrols ensure that people don’t stay along the riverway for longer than 14 days at a time.

When the camping climate along the river began to change, our friends moved into their converted school bus where they lived for seven years. This they parked on state land south of town amongst a small camp of trailers and busses. No one seemed to care. When the state land section was eventually leased by a man running a children’s summer camp, he simply asked that the bus residents watch over the property when it wasn’t in use. He let them stay for free.