I'm just gonna give a brief after action report on
Tropical Storm Hillary, that hit southern California over the weekend.
I'm going to recap on my response to it.
Being out here in the desert I had some time to read the headlines as it was coming up through Mexico and the southern California cities.
I'm working with this concept of flood sport, because people love sports, and people love to be titillated by danger.
So for me, I get beaten up, and I have to fight for my life as much as I would in a cage fight to put out these tarps in the wind and try not to get pelted by whatever is coming down from the atmosphere, and then be even more worried about sand blasting into my lungs and killing me that way. Fungus getting into my lungs and killing me slowly, particles getting into my eyes.
I've got all the kit, so to me this is a battlefield with me and the elements, so flood sport is an apt analogy.
This was not the first a storm that has shaped me and developed this concept for me but it has been the most violent since I have had my 16 mil, 20 by 20 foot tarp rainwater catchment strategy in place.
The first episode that I did, where I used that term flood sport was right after I spent a whole night in a truck cab backseat which is the most shelter I have and watched my future security and freedom melt away with all of the rain that was pouring down in the most extreme flash flooding waves that occurred again and again throughout the night. I only had some buckets out to catch some drops in some buckets.
It was one of the most heartbreaking and demoralizing experiences of my life.
It felt like watching a pile of money get burned right in front of me, because not having captured that water meant I would have to pay for the peak prices of gasoline to transport and import mass quantities of water in tanks that the water that is poisoned with chemicals to be disinfected.
It's has all kinds of forever chemicals. I have to filter it. It's logistically totally inefficient. Even though the price of the water itself is relatively cheap, you have to add all of the other costs to it, the fuel and the time and the vehicle maintenance, everything.
So it's not sustainable. Most of what is trucked and driven and dependent on fossil fuel is not sustainable.
What is sustainable is digging ponds, if you're in an environment that's conducive or soil type that's conducive to being able to seal that pond naturally, whether in partnership with plants and animals, e.g., pigs wallowing can seal a pond, if there's enough clay in the soil.
Or if you have enough of a temperate climate that will grow enough weeds and grass and other herbaceous plants, you can do what's called a gley where you kind of create a layer of anaerobic digestion and a kind of green sludge that will just gel as it decomposes at the bottom. It will slowly fill the gaps and seal it up.
But for me, I'm in the desert. There's no clay, there's no vegetation that's herbaceous, really. There's hardly any ever. It's gonna take me a long time to graft a forest ecology into the desert so that there would be vegetation to form a gley.
Pigs aren't gonna be happy out here, and there's no mud or clay for them to roll around in to seal a pond.
So that's out of the question. So the optimum solution then is an expensive mineral called bentonite clay.
I would need dump trucks of it to do what I can do for a hundred bucks with a 16 mil tarp.
25x25 ft, that was about the human scale pond size that I could dig. I just put a shovel in the center, put a tied a rope on it and made a compass out of it. Then at the end of that compass, I tied a pickaxe so that I could tether it to that shovel in the center, I could walk the pickaxe like a compass around in a perfect circle, and then that would set the outer perimeter.
I just start digging out a ring about about 3 ft wide, and then tossing it as far as I can to create a mound.
So there ends up being between about four and five concentric circles going down, like a cone but made out of, concentric circles going down concave into the into the earth and those become steps and eventually they kind of erode and it becomes more of just a bowl shape.
If the soil is more like clay than sand, then you would have different properties. But basically, you round off the edges, and the wind and the rain elements will round them off for you.
But these have no catchment potential on their own. The water just infiltrates directly in place through the sand, it does keep the sand moist to some degree.
But basically, there's three options under these circumstances. That would be the ideal option, which is bentonite clay, totally natural, nontoxic, but it's the most expensive, and that's the ultimate solution I will arrive at when I can afford it.
Then the intermediary options are the more preferable in terms of its durability and its designed purpose fit for pond lining, those rubber liners, which I've used before, very effective.
You do need some kind of underlayment, because it, it can be punctured relatively easily, but it is, purpose built for the job.
But it is about five to ten times more expensive than something that will work almost as well.
And even has some additional properties like the the eye holes that you can hook and tie down.
That is just a typical plastic tarp. And unfortunately, they do wear out, so it means that they're higher maintenance.
I have to fold them up and shade them, wrap them in a shade cloth, and tuck them out of the way in between usage.
I've been teased and bullied and pushed around by all of these pseudo rain events on the forecast of the weather.
I would see the clouds, and I look and I wait and wait and wait, and then only a couple of drops would come down. It takes a lot of effort to get these things in place, and a lot of effort against the wind to do it.
It's that feeling where you hear a drop, a couple of drops, and it's getting dark, or it's too hot, or it's too cold, or you're just not feeling it, you're not in the mood, and you gotta push yourself out and get out there and get them snapped in.
That's where I go into beast mode. Because for me, it is thousands of dollars fiat currency liquidity that I have at risk if I fail to capture that rain, because I will otherwise have to go buy it.
It also is a force divider in terms of my freedom.
The more rain I catch, the less I have to go back to civilization, and the freer I am.
It's a simple formula. So rain equals freedom, rain equals cost savings, and rain equals protection of my investable wealth and illiquid assets that I can not dip into in order to buy water that I could have caught for free from the sky.
So it's an absurd relationship. Money doesn't grow on trees, but it's close enough. If you're an orchardist, or you do agro forestry, you create products that people will buy.
Yes, money does grow on trees, almost literally, and you know what else?
Money falls from the sky in the form of rain. If you can use that rain to avoid the logistics of having to buy water when it's not available to you.
For me, off grid, off road, that is the name of the game. That is flood sport. So when the last major flash flood event occurred, I had only barely started to dig one of these.
The first of these 25 foot diameter, multi, concentric circle, level down pond liner holders, until the bentonite is it can be afforded.
It was the most regrettable thing, watching all that rain not go to waste, because it's refilling aquifers, and it allowed a lot of wild flowers to grow and a lot of wildlife to flourish.
I just didn't get any value from it, other than the beauty of the wild flowers growing.
The agony of the cost, the opportunity cost of missing out on it. So fast forward, or flash forward if you want to, almost a year later, a little bit less from that previous flash flood, where I wasn't prepared and I should have had those tops here, already, bought those tops already.
But I started out with two because they're over a hundred bucks each and I wanted to test them.
I don't wanna have ten of them and find out that they just completely get torn apart, and don't even hold up for one storm.
I wasn't sure if how they would hold up, or if my way of anchoring them into the sand with paracord would work.
That cordage has held up, then I had pretty light duty carabiners, and some of them got totally bent out of shape and failed.
So I'm gonna upgrade to a thicker gauge of carabiner but those are just anchored into posts of just old splintered scavenged corpse of the old house pieces of 2x2s mostly that I made into a T shape the inverted the t shape, buried the base of it so just the very top of that about twelve to 16 " submerged, the very tip would come up and then I I drilled a hole through it, put some thick gauge wire through it, then coiled at the end of it so that I could tie the paracord to it, and then have this paracord carabiner string coming up from the corners that were measured out carefully for the 20 foot by 20 foot square tarp.
I can now rapid deploy the tarp, fold it out, try to get the wind to work with me and not against me.
So it just unfolds, the force of the wind unfolds it in the direction I want it to then I chase it, clip it down with the carabiner.
If I do it fast enough, it'll stay in place.
Then once it really does start to rain, which it's only been one time previous to this, where I got a little bit of a tiny puddle, basically, to hold me out and give me about a month's worth of water for crops.
But this time, the flood finally came. Thank you. Tropical Storm Hillary, you are the best thing that's ever happened to me on this land.
And that is a stark contrast for the people whose lives and livelihoods were devastated by it.
I'm in an impoverished, dangerous, undesirable for most people, life circumstance, living alone, off grid, off road, in a scorching desert with all kinds of hazards that could kill me, including not the least of which, all the debris from the house that I cleared the wreckage of and where the nails and splinters and broken glass are still scattered everywhere.
It's not a cozy place in a lot of ways but it just so happens that this lifestyle of rebuilding, rehabilitating waste land with permaculture and this flood sport that I'm doing, one person's curse is another's blessing.
So if we were to design cities to be less impervious to storm water flows with more mulch and compost and soil that is permeable, landscapes that are permeable, then we wouldn't have sewage pipes backing up and toxic waste coming…
Every problem that storm water causes can be solved by things like carving notches out of the curb so that you can irrigate basins that grow fruit trees for the community.
That's something that was guerrilla gardening and totally illegal.
Then it was done legally in certain jurisdictions to where finally the city and the civil engineers caught on to the genius of it, and then they allowed it to be permitted.
There are things like this that you could get grants for, first they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then they assimilate you.
So I'm proud to say my after action report is quite simply that I successfully implemented my design tactics and strategy, which was to not ever again lose the opportunity.
Never again will I miss the opportunity to get out into the storm, hopefully a little bit ahead of it. Deploy these very cheap and easy to implement tarp catchment depressions in a landscape, because building structures with roof surface square footage area is not realistic in a location where most likely they would get ripped off and blown away.
Part of this after action report is that there is a giant, approximately five foot wide, 20 foot long, corrugated steel roof panel that has been stalking me for months as it rips through the sky, as it gets picked up and thrown closer and closer to me.
I thought I weighted it down significantly and sufficiently with a bunch of boulders that I could barely pick up.
And lo and behold, during that tropical storm, my worst fear came to life, and it flew closer and closer towards me, at least two or three different lift offs coming directly towards me, and where it ended up. I had to sit there and wonder if I was gonna be turning to sushi. I had gotten back into the same point of shelter, which is the backseat of my truck.
The tarps have been out for a few days, anticipating there had been a little bit of rain over the course a few days, I've been watching the weather. Then that storm was a gift, because the tarps were already deployed.
It wasn't a surprise flash flood, where I had to be in the among the lightning strikes, thunderbolt, or the thunderclaps and lightning bolts and everything that's happened before, where I've had to be out there and be doing this.
So luckily, I had deployed them in a calmer time, and they were out there, so they were ready for this. So this time I was fulfilling my mission, my prophecy, to never again miss out on the opportunity.
I got to be there in the safety of that truck cab, which is the safest shelter I have, whether from sandstorms or flash flooding, and look out the window and feel very safe and buffered.
I'm enjoying the sight of my tarp liner ponds filling up, I hear that unmistakable sound of ripping, train wreck, metal sound of that giant roof panel being lifted by the air.
It's just the most menacing, metallic, tearing, ripping sound. It shed those boulders that I placed strategically throughout its surface, it shrugged them off like styrofoam and caught, I don't know 10 ft or so of air. I don't know how many feet it moved at once, but I had to sit there, and it was staring right at me right through the window where it landed, and I just was straining my neck to keep an eye on it.
I had to think to myself, I should have buried it and put flags and stakes up around the edges so that me and no one else would ever stub their toe on it, and just hope that the storms didn't just blow the sand away that was bearing it.
It was insufficient to put those rocks on it.
Now I gotta think of some other way to deal with it.
Maybe I gotta chop it up in the smaller pieces and hope I don't get chopped up in the process.
But this is some of the most dangerous material to ever work with, that's already serrated and already jagged and already got just horrific wounding potential to it.
I have two options now either, accept the fact that it could be thrown at me and hope and pray that it would only be a tiny percent chance, that it would shatter the window exactly where I am.
And that a jagged piece of it could be formed in such a way that it could literally decapitate me from the small cab window, which is not a full size window, but most likely, I would say, statistical probability would be that if it did hit the truck I had…
I will be lucky if it smashes the windshield and breaks the glass and takes the paint off and dents and maybe slashes a tire, but hopefully not roll all the way across the top, but just smack against the side, and then get stuck there until the gust dies down, then just fall flat.
The other option, I thought for a split second was, what if I go out there now in the wind and rain with goggles and boots and gloves and whatever else kit on, and go try to put more rocks on to try to bury it.
And then I remembered, wait a minute, there was a time when there was no wind and no indication of any storm, no clouds whatsoever, and a tiny little gust made a old plywood splintered and nail and staple filled sheet of plywood fly at me and smash dead flat against my shoulder almost knocking me over. And it was like trying to stand up against the force of a wave. Luckily, none of those staples were facing me. They would have gone right into me.
But my I blocked it like Street Fighter 2 kind of a block, and I survived it.
There was another time when a long thin piece of metal flew into the cab of my truck and lodged itself right in front of my face, having gotten caught in the 1" of gap between the door window that was cracked about an inch and the top of the door, it flew in like a dart or an arrow.
And it was a jagged, sharp, gnarly long, thin piece of metal.
That's what I mean, this is awasteland. It's like being in a blender of wasteland, sharp, lethal objects when there's even the slightest gust, not even a storm.
So on the grander scale, there was that thing, that giant beast, coming at me, it did move a few more times, and I woke up in the morning to see where its final resting place, and I'm gonna post that later, but that that's my report.
I'm not doing the exact math on it, but I'm gonna guess at least a couple hundred. between two and 400 gallons of water, between those two tarps.
I'll have a better idea with how much tankage it actually fills.
I gotta hustle to do that right now, the suns coming up scorpions are tucking themselves back in the earth, I gotta get some green tea in me with some cacao and stevia, have some breakfast, a light breakfast with some good dense nutrients.
And get out there and start scooping up this water, and getting it into some tankage.
These tarps held up. The tarps have not ripped or punctured, even on the sand and the rocks.
There's no underlayment, but they're doing fine. The water is not draining out.
The water is holding up in there. And I don't know how long they're they will last, but they've proven to me that they're worth their weight in gold.
And I would replace them. If I had to replace them several times a year.
But I'm not probably gonna have to, because I don't just leave them out to torn up by coyotes, get totally shredded by the sun, I fold them up.
Then worst that happens is that they get a little bit of stress at those fold points, but they're still, they're holding up well.
I'm very thrilled about that. It means I can continue to scale out. So, building on this success, I've dug about five of these ponds already. I have the tarps for 2 of them and I will be getting more.
Looking at what I just captured from this storm, it looks like about six months worth of hydration and hygiene and sanitation for me, and the same amount of time for irrigation of crops and topping off the fish pond.
That's money saved. That's opportunity cost averted. And that's only two of those tarps.
This pattern of design is proving itself to work very well.
I will be God damned if I ever end up in the soup line or in the breadline, because I failed to learn how and to successfully grow my own food and capture my own rainwater and nurse my own wounds within reason. But I should be the last person who begs for anything from the government or from charitable organizations.
I should allow the people who truly are debilitated and really need those things to have that access.
I should take my still not fully crippled, able grown man self, and live by the prime directive of permaculture, and take responsibility for my survival.
So when flooding happens and it's an inconvenience to you, or it's a cause for more dangerous driving conditions, or worst, it ends up ruining your home and your livelihood and derailing your life, then all I will say now is that, I’m not in a perfect paradise where I'm a million times safer and there's no risk to confronting these forces of nature...
But I will say that I'm working to partner with and harmonize with and be humbled by these forces, such that I design my subsistence strategy around the the majestic, beautiful, mystical, enchanting powers of nature, so that I can derive a tiny cut, a little commission.
And if I can survive it and dance with it and make a sport out of it, then I can have a more enriched life.
Right now, I'm having the time of my life, and there isn't much that can compare to it.
This form of ecological security and freedom, where I get my need for the thrill of confronting danger and feeling alive and having adrenaline, I get that from confronting the elements, not from being accosted by crazy tweaker zombies at the gas station, who try to close in on me and get on top of my X. I don't need to be stimulating my adrenaline with that. I don't need my man card to be earned by having to deal with cops pulling me over and threatening my life.
I don't need to get my fix of adrenaline by dealing with zombies and I don't need to be doing any other kind of really wasteful and expensive type of sporting activity that puts me in peril with the elements of nature. No offense intended towards people who do extreme sports for their own gratification, but I like the idea of taking that the need for speed and wanting to have your hair blown back and being an adrenaline junkie and applying that to regenerative agriculture, permaculture, these ecological arts that are gonna yield thousands of years of abundance.
There's a lot of character and soul building and body building that happens for me where I'm at now, it's flood sport.
If one of the seasons of my life drama takes me to Alaska, it'll be snow sport. It'll be something else. It'll be figuring out the ways to take sunlight and get snow melt, to irrigate crops so that I can have year round nursery that's solar heated and hydrated by snow melt water.
That'll be snow sport, or ice sport, or whatever.
We'll see when we get there. But for now, I'm in the desert. It floods, and I'm glad to be here. I would not wanna be in a city because it would be even more heartbreaking, because I would see that water go by, and it would be filled with human waste and oil slicks and pharmaceuticals and dog and pet waste and everything else, toxic sludge going into the ocean and killing off...making a massive dead zone around where it all washes out to and so that's depressing.
I hope that you don't have that experience. I hope join the revolution get serious with this.
Get serious about permaculture. If it's not something you've heard of before, or it doesn't sound that compelling, well, sports fans, I'm giving you flood sports, so stay tuned, and I'll check you later.