I'm gonna focus on sharing a real, personal, somewhat more than normal, emotional expression of what it felt like to endure and survive and adapt to the most significant rain event since I've been on my land here.
It was considered flash flood, most the consecutive additional extended flash flood warnings coming in through the emergency messaging system.
Luckily, I had been planning for an eventuality of something more extreme like that.
It's beautiful because there's nothing blocking my view of the horizon in all directions so I pretty much have a good sense of how dark the clouds are how many of them there, how dense, how fast they're moving.
I have a relatively keen sense, it's pretty obvious that a storm is coming so start modifying things as necessary and start to go down that checklist of procedures and protocols and pretty much everything is mostly dialed into where there's very few things that I have to adjust.
Mainly, it's about how do I capture as much rainwater as I can and just do a little bit of optimization for that.
But as far as stuff not getting blown away, all that's pretty well taken care of.
I've been getting better and better at not having stuff get blown away, just adapting and adjusting. It’s never a static thing where the water is gonna get into, what direction is gonna be coming from.
I end up with my sort of bamboo tiny home situation sometimes very effectual rainwater roof catchment, and sometimes getting flooded.
But it generally will flood around me, not on me, in a way that I could sleep through a freezing cold night of rain and hail and whatever moisture does make it in, it doesn't tend to be so disruptive that I end up with any of a dripping on me.
However, that's always changing and always adjusting, because you get it fixed one season, and then the next time it rains, all of the, the heat of the summer cracked some of the rubber seals and then there are new leaks.
It's been pretty good the last year or so. But this time was definitely a situation where I actually escalated my strategy, because the lightning strikes were getting close, within less than 50 to a hundred feet.
I decided I was going to not just for the sake of bravado actually leave my little potentially floodable, less secure in terms of lightning strikes situation in this bamboo tiny home.
With the rainwater catching roof, that sort of hut felt like it might blow away.
It's actually very robust in that sense, structurally, I just got the sense intuitively that it was time to take it to a higher level which for, me is actually getting into a truck where where I'm just laying out in the backseat and capitulating to a more modern design of sheltering from the elements in a lightning thunderstorm.
Whether it's folk science or folk lore or true science, there are factors that make it a better decision.
So I was able to just in the nick of time, get everything I needed in there to be self sufficient for probably expecting 12 hours or more, which it was about that duration.
It was an interesting time and place to reflect and actually feel like I was almost in a space shuttle or something compared, to how exposed I normally am to the wind and to the temperature and to the moisture and the sand and everything.
My tiny home hut is intentionally designed to be very open to all those elements and I've adapted and adjusted just fine with that, and I prefer that.
So being inside a totally air controlled cab of a truck, it's great for taking a nap while traveling, of course but it was probably actually the first time in over a year and a half that I experienced dwelling in this wilderness property in a way that would be that buffered from the elements.
So it was like being on a remote space station or being in a remote extreme climate scientific observation facility, or something where you could look out the windows and see epic storms and epic chaos happening around you.
But you would just be observing it in a very secure and dry, comfortable manner.
That was the first experience I've had.
I hadn't gone in there during sandstorms. If it got bad enough, I would have to plan for bugging into a truck extended cab for the duration of what could be apocalyptic sandstorms that last for days, and where you would get dust pneumonia if you even we're outside at all.
So I think about those are probably my two worst case scenarios out here, extended dust storms and and extended rain storms and hail storms.
So this was the first time where it was extreme enough to where I had to act on the intuition that it was time to do that.
This is where it gets emotional, I had in the previous last several sacred, precious, rare rain events had a system that was very fragile, but it was working, capturing rainwater within a giant, dug out pond crater that I have dug by hand with just a shovel.
I've had to use that strategy of digging out craters to keep materials like mulch and compost.
Obviously, earth works for if there is a major sheet flow of water, which it came close this time, but there was not enough of a steady flow to actually create a stream over the stream beds that that do run through the property, and they've been dry ever since I've been here. I don't know if it's been for years or decades, or hundreds of years, or thousands of years.
But they're definitely there, and they're compacted, and I've keyed off of them to build swales and ponds so that when those do flow again, and I'm always praying for that day, then I will see how well my design actually works.
Until that day comes, the strategy is to capture rain water in, buckets and in roof barrels and stuff like that.
It's just absurd how little that gets and how painful it is to watch so much of it not go to waste, because it's doing its natural thing.
It's not running off into a toxic soup somewhere it's actually absorbing into the sand and going very deep and hopefully at some level, recharging aquifers, it's certainly not just immediately being run off, and it's not being evaporated, so it's hydrating the land.
All kinds of new wildlife is coming out. Crazy looking, giant grasshopper, cricket looking things would look like they actually have feathered wings.
I've never seen volunteer plants growing from seeds that I've dropped, like my sesame seeds, where I grind them.
There's gonna be a few that escape, and they're popping up out of the dead, dry sand that just got that rain.
So I see it doing its thing, but was so painful and heartbreaking.
Just how little I was able to capture and store and put to use and for my survival and my food forest.
It was quite a somber moment being in that truck and looking out the window and just being like this is the most rain and I have done almost nothing in this year and a half. Not even with all legitimate excuses, the deadly heat and the bear market and everything, nothing justifies to me as my worst critic, not having been more prepared to have more catchment in place.
The thing that I was looking forward to relying on failed, because it was, a prototype. I talked about it at length before but basically it worked, until it didn't and some frustrating and some delicate circumstances have made it so I've been sort of on on the edge.
Almost praying against the rain after spending so much time praying for the rain, like, oh, please come while I'm ready, when I'm ready.
But then, because I need to fix something, then, boom, it was like, 2" of rain, that just hurt so much, because I'm like, man, it knowing how much I caught before, and feeling like all I wanna do is scale that out and optimize it and make it more secure and robust.
It was definitely a temporary prototype that proved a point, but it needed to be iterated upon.
So now I'm definitely very painfully motivated to not let that happen again.
Now I'm multiplying that capacity, and it's a lot of hard work just digging out yards of sand, just barely having come out of that debilitating summer heat.
Now it's cool enough to where I can actually get a couple few hours of that work done during the day.
It's just a matter of the physical therapy of getting back into being able to sustain that.
It's definitely been a blessing to alternate the shovel work from left to right side of the body, left to right arm, doing the mechanical work of actually digging in.
I had not done that all my life until this last year, when I got turned on to that Japanese mindset of balancing tasks between the hemispheres of the body and not letting your dominant hand exclude the opportunity for the non dominant hand to more correctly, ergonomically and even more correctly, spiritually, energetically, anatomically...Take its turn, so that you're not lopsided in that way.
That could be good for a lot of other things and really affect how the brain works too.
So I've been in that mode, and it has made my back, really come back to life after a lot of excruciating, debilitating agony.
So just learning that, for me personally, what I thought was intractable, chronic back pain may have been partially due to a failure to balance that load and alternate properly and then develop the ability to be as effective in a switch stance sort of shoveling method so I'm very grateful that's evolving.
I have the emotional energy, the emotional content to push me to be like now because of that major loss...when I think about what happened, how I felt, what was happening, when I reflect on it, now I'm like, man, just with the most simple and elegant application of what I have devised out here, which costs nothing, practically nothing to do, except for the time and the energy to dig out these craters.
Because I don't wanna spend a lot of money renting equipment and using machine power.
I wanna do it by hand. That's part of the lifestyle, part of the spiritual practice.
It's not the last time it's ever gonna rain. It was good for me to experience that pain, but it was basically feeling like, man, I better do better next time. And if not next time, it better be the next time, right after that.
But, but any time like that, ever again, if it ever rains like that, it was phasing in and out of real downpour to a sprinkle over the course of many hours.
But if it was overall, 2 " of rain, approximately across the handful of acres that I have.
It wouldn't take that many more of these ponds that I'm digging, if I can seal them, with ever increasingly more robust techniques over time.
And also apply techniques for them to be self healing by the life that lives in them, meaning that there's properties of aquatic ecology that will work over time to seal any kind of cracks and leaks.
Whether it's liners or, or bentonite, or compacted soil, whatever it is that's something that works itself out over time, but you have to bootstrap and kick start that life.
That requires some luck and skill.
But I did feel like I just watched a year's worth of water for me and everything I'm trying to grow wash away.
But it made me realize that, damn, if I really wanted to, if I really focus on this and endure the the crucible of this, then I will be able to, with a very small amount of money, I will be able to create a level of water security that would literally last for years from one rain event.
It's very typical for people in my zoning and rural people to have cisterns above or below ground water tanks where they're storing tens if not hundreds of gallons of water, either from wells, or maybe they're catching rain off of big roofs of big agro structures that they have, or just big farmhouses or whatever.
I don't have any of that. I have no structures, and I don't intend to have any structures.
I've got a tiny home and water truck and ponds.
I really don't intend to build anything other than a forest canopy and maybe some tree houses in that forest canopy. But I don't wanna build anything that's gonna have roof surface area to catch rainwater I feel that's just gonna get blown away, become a hazard, be an eyesore, be expensive, and if I don't need to do that because I'm capturing rain water in seasonally productive aquatic ecosystems. Or maybe when it rains, they get to have a much higher level, but then I just maintain them at a tiny level, just to keep the most important base of it, like the catchment area...
It's almost like a scale model, a teachable scale model of a watershed.
Because I dig these things out maybe 20 foot diameter now, and all it needs to be is like 10-15 foot slope to the center point, which is more of the deep bowl.
That can hold hundreds, if not thousands, of gallons in one rain event.
And I can draw that out into storage tanks. Or I could let it grow a bunch of crops until it evaporates, and depending on the year, the time of year, and depending on how much shade cover I can get up naturally or artificially, over that.
I'm gonna start getting into a point of more water than I know what to do with. Some stored in tanks, some used for my personal use, and most of it used for irrigation.
Then just scaling that out, I was thinking of the analogy, sitting in that truck while the sun was starting to go down and it was getting darker, and I'm like, this feels like watching a mountain of money burn.
That's how it feels to me as someone who knows, and not because I even care about making a profit by growing crops and selling them.
That's something that is a bridge I will maybe cross in the future, but I kind of like being retired from commerce at this point for the most part.
The closest analogy was how would it feel to watch a pile of money be burned?
It's not necessarily money that I would be making. It's money that I'm gonna have to spend to go and truck in water and pay for gas to haul water in.
When all that water just went to waste, well I let it go without using. It went to where it's always gone. And that's beautiful, and that's nature. But in terms of my intents and purposes…
I had not been pushing myself and pressurizing myself enough to be prepared for that moment.
I may as well have just withdrawn a bunch of cash from the bank, and burnt it in a barbecue or in a fire pit.
That's pretty much like what it was.
It's a beautiful pain I will say.
It's a beautiful pain because I mean that is a good problem to have.
So much natural value is literally raining down on me that I that I have the magical permaculture skill set alchemy to literally make that into capital, or to make that into a shield of my capital and keep me alive and be healthier.
And I won't have to purify it or get rid of the chemicals in it or filter anything.
Yes, filter it, disinfect it from natural biology, but not from chemical additives that are added to the water supply.
There are just so many reasons why it's absurd how valuable rain is and how disrespected it is.
I feel that in a deep way, there have been legitimate reasons for me to have hesitation and to work incrementally. But something snapped.
Something has forever changed in me. I don't wanna say I'm dead inside, but I will say there's a lot of turmoil.
The positive, constructive thing is that the only way to right that wrong internally, of being that self critic is to be like, never again.
That goes for a lot of things in life, doesn't it?
I'm not gonna beat myself up. I'm gonna express that feeling of wishing, of wanting to beat myself up by actually accelerating the work and pushing myself that much harder, and having that reason to push that much harder.
It's an interesting psychology of being, like, what does it take?
I did this thing back in the day, I organized a group, open source martial arts.
Me and a bunch of friends would get together and each share different elements of styles that we had trained in.
The Krav maga guy, he said, we like to do this for reality street based training in our studio.
He would line us all up and have us do a standard boxing type of hook jab, bob, pattern.
He would call it out and have us line up, and then each approach him and hit the pads and then go back to the line, and then he would change up the moves and whatnot.
I think it's a good analogy to think of now, is like, for every time someone comes up to do the drill, he takes the pads and he just decks you with them in, in the chest, almost knocking you over just to piss you off and to get you motivated to put your all into it.
Don't be feather dusting with this, and don't just be going through the motions, it's good to be thrown off balance and have to dig your feet in and dig your heels in and get those body mechanics and the hip work going from a position of being disoriented.
But that's typically the flinch response, like fighting through that flinch response and just being upset and thrown off balance by that, I thought I was genius. It makes a lot of sense.
So, but whereas before this rain event, I was digging ponds and doing rainwater catchment like someone in a self defense class, I didn't get punched or pushed before they did their drill.
Now I got my little push, my little punch. And I'm putting more effort into this, and there's not too many more inches of rain that I can expect to risk losing out on.
It feels like blood to me. It feels like being bled out watching that rain go by knowing what I know, knowing better.
It wasn't like I was lazy. I wasn't not taking care of all kinds of stuff.
But it was like, still, when push comes to shove, you could have pushed yourself more and you could have prioritized that more, not that you should have, or that you could have known, or that it's like, you don't know, necessarily...
You don't know how painful it's gonna be. Hindsight is 20/20.
It’s not that I should look back and say everything you did that wasn't prepping for rain was BS, and how dare you and shame on you.
It's not so much that, it's just, don't let it happen again, because now you really know how it feels.
It's weird because it's rained numerous times, but it just never rained that much.
I never experienced it in that way and part of it is that the first several rains didn't have that effect on me. I didn't have any rainwater catchment, almost none.
I was very risk averse about travel, about financial activities, and was trying to basically maintain my position with the water that I had brought in, and just not take any risks at that point.
Now I look back and go, maybe you should have taken that risk, but it's not the end of the world.
The funny thing is, what gave me this appetite, this passion for catching rainwater, is how successful that first prototype was.
If you never fall in love, you wouldn't know what it feels like.
You wouldn't how much a heartbreak could hurt until you fall in love.
So I fell in love with that prototype because I knew it was the most tangible path to freedom I've ever experienced in my life, and the highest leverage not over the system, but a way to be freed from the system and to be banking on the Earth bank and living within the cycles of nature like never before.
It worked, until it didn't and in the time from when it didn't work, until this major rain event, that's when I should have pushed myself more but again, I'm not gonna go in circles with this if there's any value in this besides just making a record.
A captain’s log of these experiences.
It was just a form of procrastination, pretty high stakes.
There are very mundane, simple things, but it could be very pivotal, pivotal things, how are you gonna get out of a second story window in a fire?
That extendable ladder in your shopping cart for years, and you forgot about it.
And meanwhile, you've bought all kinds of other things.
It's like, damn and I'm pretty good at this point about redundancy and backing things up and having excessive amounts of food security and medical supplies and whatnot.
Good problems to have. If I'm already doing alright, and I'm thinking about, how can I secure the future better and more?
Because my present situation is well stocked and well supplied.
That's a very positive pressure, very positive direction, positive outlook.
So spend a little more time thinking about how bad you would feel if you were not proactive ahead of a potential circumstance, and how good it would feel to be proactive and meditate on that, and how bad it would feel to not be prepared.
I have the best of both worlds now, because I'm motivated by the pain of missing out on securing those years in the future of water security.
But I have the other good feeling that I have successes that I built on.
Next time I'm gonna get it right. And if I don't, I'm gonna keep iterating and really being on alert for any forms of backsliding and procrastinating and prioritizing, deep, prioritizing that makes sure that is done because you don't know what it feels like to get your heart broken if you've never been in love.
So now I know I'm in love with this process.
Now, after saying all this, I don't feel like it's inappropriate to use a term that I don't even know if it already exists or not.
But to me, in all seriousness, I do feel like it is a life and death, high stakes danger and romance.
And I will call this flood sport.
That's what I'm doing now with my life.
That is a play on blood sport. One of my favorite movies, and a sense of like this is full contact with lightning and hail and torrential rains, and not letting that destroy your habitat, and having it work for you to benefit you, to provide epic years and decades and lifetimes of ecological food and water security.
I'm not gonna give any advice to the places that are being flooded right now, where people are dying, because that's a terrible tragedy.
In a lot of ways and a lot of circumstances that can't be avoided and it's just pure tragedy, but it does beg the question…of better design.
In terms of the siting of where I where I'm at. Part of that was very intentional, and part of it was very serendipious.
There’s the civil engineering flood sport that I'm practicing at a micro scale, where the stakes for me are not as life and death compared to many other places.
My survival experiment really only affects me. These civil engineers, these architects, these urban planners, public health officials, all the people who govern and administer, all these systems, who are seeing over massive disease outbreaks in flooded areas.
There's a lot that permaculture has to teach about mitigating extreme weather events of all types through design and through vegetation planting in certain patterns, and, of course, most importantly, over engineering of hydrology.
Design to slow, sink and spread rain events and actually reduce the extremes within any given site’s extreme conditions.
That's all within reach, and it's all relatively low cost, and it's all organic, and it's all partnering with biomimicry and with nature.
No hubris and no cynicism, when I say for me, life is now about what I would call this flood sport.
I've got to have a develop an art form.
What can be extreme rain events, that's probably the most destructive, and sandstorms. There could be a sandstorm that completely buries everything I've ever planted or will ever plant.
That's theoretically possible, but what's more probable is what just happened.
There again comes the argument for permaculture gardening at a human scale. Because if every living human being cared for their own kitchen garden, then there would be no centralized crop fields to be destroyed by hail.
That's the whole point. You can secure your survival garden with some materials. You can do a lot to secure your survival garden, though not much to secure exposed plantings, broad acre plantings, to whatever pestilence and plague and apocalyptic events.
If you're bio diverse enough and you design properly, then there should be a lot of opportunity that's created for survivors to take up niches, and that's just a matter of not being mono crop ag and being poly culture.
There are people, day after day, drowning to death and being pummeled by debris in massive floods around the world, and where the survivors are dying of horrible, curable, grotesque epidemics of disease.
I'm not saying that what I'm doing is a solution for them, but I am saying that I can feel, I do think about them, I care about them and I think about how what it’s gonna take when are we gonna learn our lesson in our relationship with these elements with fire, and wind and rain and then of course, the critters and the pests. The insects that become pests when we design wrong, basically.
But when are we gonna, when are we gonna learn a lesson? There are definitely people, like I said before, where it's a pure tragedy, where they're just humble people doing their best living the way they have sustainably for thousands of years.
And this is just pure tragedy, but because of the urbanization, industrialization, the depopulation of the of villages.
I would dare say that a lot of the horror is happening in very poorly designed urban environments.
Let's spend time thinking about what forces of nature could be destructive, and let's figure out how to design with that energy and with that input of resource, to be in a way that benefits a design.
The ultimate paradise on Earth would be where we design cities like the old Mexico city, chinampas, where instead of any paved, impermeable surfaces, rather, all of our logistical connectivity is done through water ways, and we're all commuting in water vessels that do not pollute and are human powered.
I've seen documentaries of Hong Kong where entire generations almost never even step set foot on the land, because they're living in this ecology of fisheries and trading. That's paradise on Earth. That's the most elegant existence you could possibly have, a hybrid of those dynamics.
Until we are in a relationship with water where, if we wanna be densely urbanized, which I do not want, and I don't look forward to that, but if that's what people want, there's a way to do that in a houseboat that's redesigned for all types of weather situations.
Providing sustenance and nutrient cycling and that's been well developed.
I know some sea steader people who are genius architects of those. If they're being designed to function in very violent oceanic climate areas and storm prone areas...
There's a lot more resources that we have to build that kind of stuff in today's world, more than our ancestors had.
How do you maximize the utility and the duty of that water that you can harvest in those cycles, seasonal and hundred year floods and all that kind of understanding, that and tapping into and maximizing it versus being destroyed by it, or over relying on it to where you're then extincted by a drought period.
Drunk on prosperity in the times of plenty.
I watched my investment portfolio and digital assets drop by however many orders of magnitude over the last several months. I literally did not feel any of that at all.
All I felt was the anxiousness to be optimized to catch rainwater. And the way that I felt, the impact of that sort of displaced, sublimated, or the transference of investment portfolio trauma, the transference into this stakes rainwater catchment...
Maybe I do really need to have enough water to survive a multi year recession bear market, where the cost of trucking in water and the cost of the risk of anything happening to the truck and repairs and all that.
That's where it really starts to feel like. It's not like burning money that you could have made from the rainwater.
It's that rainwater could have protected your capital, protected your truck from undue unnecessary wear and tear and possible breaking down.
How devastating would be to have to repair it and pull money out of a trade at a low point in a bear market.
That is still somewhat abstract, but even all of that does not compare to just the very visceral feeling of watching and feeling, knowing that, like never before in life, what did I have?
The ownership of land, and therefore the ownership of this pride and duty to maximize the survivability of the land and extend and value every photon of sunlight that hits this land within the perimeter of it, every photon, every drop of rain, every carbon molecule of life that I can compost and circulate.
Feeling that in a profound way, it's a beautiful pain. I did ask myself why don't you feel this way about all the sunlight that you're not capturing in leaves and solar panels and whatnot?
The difference is that shows up every day and rain only comes a few days a year.
If I didn't catch all the photons today, I'll be able to catch them tomorrow and the next day and the next day.
But with rain and this climate, it's a different story.
There are climates where it's the opposite, where you got tons of rain and not a lot of sun, so you gotta hustle when you get that sunlight.
That's the beautiful pain, that is the flood sport, that is a relationship with the economies of the elements.
I feel that I have a positive and constructive, empowered relationship personally, with my dance with these forces, far more than I do with chip manufacturing, petrochemicals, crude oil.
Keeping up with what's trending on social media, that stuff is beyond my control.
Is building upon that feeling of next time when it starts storming like that, lightning is striking right next to me, and the hail and rain is coming down, I see where it's starting to pool up in places that it's going to pool up into my ponds.
Then when the sun shines the next day, and I come out of my secure backup shelter, then there will be sunshine glimmering off of what looks like a mirage, though it’s actually an oasis.
An ever increasing array of these ponds. And having more of that rainwater in one event, then I know what to do with, that I can possibly store.
I just spoil trees and spoil plants and have a watering hole for all the wildlife.
Until they're replenished naturally because of growing shade canopy over them and having them be deep enough, and having enough floating plants to keep the evaporation down, and having one feed into the next.
That's the dream that I'm trying to live out here.