The thought came to me recently as I have been preparing for my fourth summer here in the desert.
And the thought was that I'm staring down the barrel of the sun.
So bit of a play on words, but it definitely feels like no joke.
Life and death, knowing that the debilitating and crazy making nonstop hell of extreme heat is not too far away.
And beginnings of it during the peak hours, mainly between about 2:00 and 04:00 is when, for some reason, I don't know why I'd have to do more research.
I don't know why the midday sun were the worst directly overhead, which is a little earlier, why that would not be the hottest point of the day, but it's actually a little bit later, I would assume some kind of compounding effect
I just have to adapt to it and it's interesting that I guess technically the temperatures at least the global average temperature record breaking.
I'm still trying to understand the ratio of my being degraded by exposure to the sun continually over the years.
My sun tolerance, is not increasing, but it's decreasing.
It's a sort of a paradox, certain things you develop a tolerance to over time so that you're less affected by it, and you're more adapted and more acclimatized.
And then there seems to be certain things where you would hope that would be happening.
But actually it's so potentially damaging or so stressful on the body that, really, it's like it knocks you it you out so bad that you're just getting weaker and weaker, no matter what, because it's too much exposure.
I think it's some combination of those factors to where I feel like, I don't wanna say it's a losing battle, but I feel like I'm losing the battle.
And I cannot afford, at this time to make multi thousand dollar, even in the tens of thousands of dollars of infrastructure bills, that would give me the ability to keep at least night time body temperature below the ambient temperature surrounding me. That maximum of 85 degrees so that I could sleep properly.
But being unable to move, being immobilized during most of the hours of the day, having a little bit of mobility a couple hours before the sun comes up, couple hours after, or as it's going down.
But your circadian rhythms kick in after dark.
I'm not cheating that with a bunch of artificial lighting. So the hardest part, really, of surviving the night.
It's the torture of not being able to sleep and waking up constantly. Your body does, these really weird things to try to shed heat in the night.
Even when you can fall into a technical sleeping state, it's a very shallow sleep and seems like, I never get hardly any and certainly, nowhere near enough REM sleep. That's what I dread the most, it’s the most difficult to psychologically prepare for, that sleeping factor.
Unfortunately, in this all consuming heat environment, the only options I really have going from least to most expensive, or I'm gonna start with the most expensive and go to the least expensive, because it's like the most ideal to the least ideal.
Bill Mollison said this in one of the pdc's a permaculture design courses, official ones, while he was still alive, talking about desert cooling technologies that are ancient.
And at one point, they went over a whole list of things that you can do to engineer and design to drop cool air to lower points, to have water or to have hot air, cross water and have the water pull some of the heat out of the air.
But after getting through a lot of the surface techniques, he eventually says, or you just go underground, that's what all the animals do.
I wish I could do that safely.
I don't have the tribe to do the collective work to make it even possible by ancient means.
I don't have the funds to safely do it.
With the right equipment and the right air filtration, airflow and security.
A former Green Beret was very adamant against underground survival. And you could say the word bunker, but how about just naturally cooled underground shelter, and just leave it at that.
But, but it’s a tactically disadvantaged position. He said, I could waste you if you're underground and I'm attacking you from aboveground.
It's a totally disadvantageous position from a tactical perspective. I wanna take his word for that.
I suppose the only way it makes sense to be underground is if no one knows where you are, but if you're in a very obvious position like I am, I’m trapped.
My response time, without a lot of robotic or human personnel to defend on the surface. Someone's gotta be on the surface. I guess when robots are cheap enough, I can have robot security, and then I can be underground.
But again, that's a lot of money. So there's no way...the price tag on even the smallest units is too much, let alone the cost of installation, and let alone that sort of breaking my code of low visibility, trying to not attract a lot of attention.
So just so that I can be left alone, really, where you start building, doing any kind of construction at that scale, even if technically it's possible that I wouldn't need to be permitted, it's still gonna make people wonder if you have permits, and that's gonna cause entanglement that I don't need. I'm doing fine with staying here not leaving, technically I can afford to get all my paperwork straight and pay everything, I'm not delinquent on any fees or anything but it's just the bleeding.
If I'm not going out in the world to make money to pay for the cost of being able to go out in the world, I'm trying to just stay at break even after doing a sub $5000 tax return last year that was only possible because I wasn't running around buying expensive inflated food off the shelf and I wasn't paying for gas and insurance and registration and smog.
In terms of the relationship with the state and all of its ways to extract your wealth, whether you're doing right or doing wrong.
I've tried to minimize that all of that, but the trade off is because it, would cost tens of thousands of dollars, many tens of thousands of dollars just to go through, jump through all the hoops, to be able to have a mailbox, even though there's no reason why I don't have one.
I mean, there's no technical reason why, even if there was a fee, just give me a mailbox at the road, I'll pay for it.
But, no, it doesn't work that way.
You have to go through all of the multi, tens of thousands of dollars of compliant infrastructure build-outs that would give you the legal freedom to have a mailbox.
So without that, without leaving I'm blessed to be able to pay my bills without in a paperless manner.
I'm kind of glad that things have gone in that direction.
Pretty much I can manage almost all my affairs paperless. So if my mailbox eventually, they say, hey, you gotta come get this because it's filling up.
If they're as cool as they've been in the past, other places I've lived and had mailboxes, I'll just be able to say to them.
I'll pay the fee for you scan them and email them to me and then can I ask you to just throw out whatever I don't need.
At this point, my mobility is disabled. If I wanna leave here, I can't drive out of here. I have to get a ride out of here, I have to bike out of here, which would be a very dangerous proposition, not only because of the heat for most of the year, but just the politics of leaving here and what I have to get through.
I'm in what I consider to be a very rare space where it's not safe because it's a high property value neighborhood.
It's very wild west. So it's only safe because the bad guys, the tweakers, the gangsters, the people who violently disagree with my politics, they just are far enough away, and most of them would drop dead like zombies in the heat for three to four months out of the year.
So that's one dimension of safety, where the sun is on my side, and they would be staring down the barrel of the sun more than me.
But the other dimension is that those rest of the months of the year, where it's cool enough, I've got pretty much no tactical allies and no defenses, other than my own alertness and my own modest weaponry, all legal of course, and all deployed potentially in only the most perfect self defense scenarios legally speaking.
It's a harrowing experience to be remote and to be cut off from everything, but the Internet, that's why you're hearing from me still.
But that was a whole kind of side note the main reason I don't wanna get caught up in anything with the system is that mainly that forces you to be a slave to your addresses, mailbox, or your P-O box because of what's called service of process which is if they wanna drag you into court proceedings or they wanna find you and keep you on a schedule of paying fines or they wanna investigate you and interrogate you and audit you, or whatever.
Forget about living your off grid, ancient future, wild west fantasy, you're gonna be sleeping on the sidewalk in front of your P-O box in order to satisfy all of the requests by mail and if you're delinquent on them, God help you.
So for all I know, there's all kinds of services process that I've never seen, I've just got a bunch of bench warrants and fines piling up.
But that's why I try to stay compliant, stay out of trouble, and certainly not hoping to be a nuisance to anyone if I ever was, I suppose, when I was vehicle dwelling on the streets, I was compliant with the laws.
I even had maps of where it was legal to sleep in your vehicle, which they did this whole zoning thing in LA, where they said, people live in RVs on the side of the road.
Homeless people, whatever. Car dwellers, you car dwellers have less rights than than carless tent campers.
I've been there. I've lived on the street without a car, like countless nights earlier my life.
I'm glad to say that the last several years before being on the land, I was able to sleep in my car and sleep in a truck and get away with it, and I wasn't making a lot of noise or causing a fuss.
So luckily, I never got cited for vehicle dwelling, even though I just knew, and found places to be where no one will be bothered by me.
And that was a risk trade off as well far as being vulnerable.
If I was going to do whatever, if I was going to seize the opportunity to get vehicles.
One or more road worthy, again, in terms of the legality of it, that window of opportunity is closing rapidly.
If I was gonna try to bike out of here, that window is closing as well.
Because once it's no ins and outs after about mid, june, from mid June, all the way to mid October.
It's not just a three month summer, it's a four month summer.
So that period of time, those months, there's really, no escape, unless it's in a medivac of some kind, which if I'm trying to conserve my financial resources, not trying to be anyone else's problem, and certainly not a medical problem.
That makes another dimension of it being harrowing, because you step on something sharp, or you snag something, or you get some kind of food poisoning...I'm not worried too much about viral infections, but bacterial infections, for sure.
I wish this was a well funded survival experiment where I just yell cut and then a medic comes or yell cut and then the deli tray arrives or whatever on the spectrum of survival shows, apparently there are some that are far more realistic about being cut off from everything, and then ones that are far less realistic and pretty much simulated everything that they could ever want.
The catering table, with everything, all the food you can imagine, and air conditioning and all that.
So now this is the real thing, and there's no nothing.
I mean, I had a couple of friends, kind of make some donations to show support, but I'm not funded.
People have said to me, why don't you use the crowd funding platforms?
I'm not popular enough, intrinsically, I'm not trying to be pessimistic, but I'm not already popular enough to where it would be a likely success.
I just don't have, I don't, I don't have the stomach for comments and replies, even if they're not trolls and they're not know-it-all...you're doing it the wrong way, or you should be doing this way. Just unsolicited advice. I'm doing what I can. The advice that I would like to have is from people who are not keyboard warriors or armchair experts, but people who are in the same boat, really, and are trying to do the same things.
We can talk shop and be friends, that's my goal. That's why I'm doing the membership site and really minimizing the attack surface of social media to nothing, so that I don't have randoms affecting my life.
Why would I want anyone online to have any effect on my life whatsoever?
But the paradox is I do have to publish in order to find those people.
So I've taken measures like disabling comment features and whatnot. But long story short, with that, it's capital intensive, even at the micro scale.
So I get some of the effects that you're looking for to go back to the land. But it at a cost to my health, a cost to my safety, cost to my sanity.
It's worse than cabin fever. It's, in the best case scenario like the romanticism of Walden Pond, at worst, it's more like Evil Dead.
You're trapped and get the worst of what's possible. So I gotta be careful, gotta be safe, gotta plan around things.
I did just have one of my essentially two deliveries of supplies a year.
I've got it figured out so that I have supplies delivered twice a year and then I'm able to consume resources for six months, and then basically have about three to six months in reserve, and just keep rotating through it so I never end up anywhere near zero.
Which would force me out of my position, if that were to happen and land on me in the middle of summer, then it would be game over.
Either I allow myself to starve to death, or...it's not even safe to have anybody come out here, I would not ask anyone.
I don't wanna ask anyone to come out here when the temperatures are that deadly.
Once you're locked into this place, and those temperatures are as high as they are, 24/7, you don't wanna venture off.
You don't wanna be out with the scorpions in a state of a sun drunk stupor that lasts for several months straight.
It's just too dangerous.
So I'm trying to really look at the lessons learned. And if the temperature has gotten worse in my intrinsic natural ability to tolerate it, and the wear and tear on my body and my sanity has gotten worse...I have lived and learned and developed strategies to mitigate it.
But those strategies to mitigate it are not keeping pace with the wear and tear.
But this summer, I have a couple of modifications to and evolutions of what I've been developing over the past few years.
I feel like I have hope and optimism for being able to maybe drop the temperature extremes by five to ten degrees, which doesn't sound like much, isn't usually that much of a big deal, but it is a big deal.
It's a big deal for me. And even if I can only achieve that during parts of the day, that lessens the severity for any amount of time.
That relief goes a long way for morale and for just allowing the slightest bit of the body to be able to do what it wants to do, which is function at an optimal temperature to process all the things it has to process.
It's almost like being stressed all the time, and your body's not growing, it's not detoxing, it's not breaking things down, so you have health problems.
A scientist proved the correlation between stress and disease, and that was mainly psychological stress in this Baboon troop that he studied.
So this is the stress of heat illness, chronic heat illness, for over the course of several months in the year.
So anything that makes the slightest bit of relief, even Bill Mollison said, it doesn't have to be cool, it's all relative. If you can do something to lower the temperature, then even if the temperature is way above what you would normally find to be comfortable...it's almost like, to paraphrase, he's basically saying, the perception of being less hot is actually profound enough that it doesn't have to be cool.
That's how I would rephrase it, since I can't remember the exact quote, but that's the sentiment, and I totally feel that.
So where I left off last year was wrapping cloth around my head and my neck and using computer fans in a clever manner that just sort of evolved, kind of out of nowhere.
I discovered it's just partially the concept of a swamp cooler, but a way more efficient manner.
What Paul Wheaton would say about heating the person, don't heat the room.
There's too much energy wasted in a bunch of air that you don't come into contact.
I've been in scenarios where it was a debilitating financial deal breaker to try to use normal ways of heating a house, because even you realize tiny homes make a lot of sense, because if you were gonna heat the air or cool the air, the larger area that you're dwelling in the more absurdly and ridiculously expensive it is to try to climate control a large amount of space.
So best thing you can do if you're on a budget, or you trying to be minimalistic, to live simply so that others may simply live kind of thing, then it makes sense to spot treat where you need, and not even just your whole body, but where your blood is.
That's why you wear socks and a hat, there are parts of your body that release less heat, and parts of release more.
So you cover those. What’s great about the winter...I never was a fan of the cold, I was always very weak minded, when it came to surviving the cold but over this last winter a real change has happened where I have enough layers that I can pretty much maintain a very comfortable body temperature.
The thing that will rob me of that is just really cold wind chill.
But in terms of the coldest temperatures, even freezing temperatures, I can buffer that just by layering up.
It's amazing how well that works to have this optimum range.
But if you don't have that luxury. The heat you can't hide from, the only thing that you can do to somewhat approximate that effect is to use water.
But that only works if the humidity is low enough where you are for the air to absorb the water off your skin, thus create an evaporative cooling effect on the surface of the skin.
That's why you sweat, but that's why people die in humid areas in the heat, your natural ability to use water to cool you down doesn’t work as well.
If you use misting or dousing or dunking water... for me, the use of that technique allows me to preserve more water internally.
If I can spray myself down with the mist, then I don't have to lose the electrolytes in the water with sweat.
Now I'm gonna get into the strategies across that continuum of price, so underground shelter is the most ideal, though financially, legally, it’s not something that's feasible at this time.
Maybe in the future, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.
Then the next thing from that would be putting in thousands of dollars to have a big enough battery bank and enough solar power to be able to power an an A-C type of unit that could work to just cool a very small area.
Sadly, they're still so energy inefficient. There hasn't been, to my knowledge, any major breakthrough in the energy efficiency of cooling air.
You can do it off grid. I've seen the specs. I've seen people do it where you would have to have a lot more money than I have to work with at this point in order to come close to that.
And if you spend a lot of money and it doesn't work well enough, or it can't go 24/7…
I'm doing it very piecemeal as I can liquidate some assets without totally destroying my potential for wealth over the course of the rest of my lifetime.
Let's just say, I had some gold it's not gold but let's say I had some gold and I could sell some of it.
So do I wanna sell it all at once? That's what I have to live with for the rest of my life.
Or otherwise I gotta go back to work? Or do I wanna sell as little as I can over as long of a period of time as I can, which means grinding down and really being forced to improvise.
So to me, that's really the greatest value of being in this financial circumstance where I'm financially free, but only if I'm extremely frugal.
I will not be financially free if I spend all my minimal micro fortune, I spend all of that capital to have something, but then I have to leave that something to go back to work.
I'm still trying to get to a point where my documenting of this experiment sort of leads to enough remote support that and can be the job, doing permaculture survival in the desert.
But it's what people like us give a couple of bucks a month or whatever they can, just to see me stay alive and make cool stuff and entertain them and educate them like that.
That the dream, because there are people out there doing it, and they're making a killing doing it.
It's absurd obscene how much money can be made.
The signal to noise ratio has got to be pure signal I can't waste any time on noise. Unfortunately it's not free to be on a platform that eats up all your time and destroys your peace because of all the trolling.
I don't wanna sign onto a platform and then just be spammed by a bunch of disgusting, demoralizing, just bad advertising and spam, but all of the crudity and all of the immaturity of people young and old who just have no taste and no decency anymore.
Now I just don't have the stomach for it.
I'm just assessing my options. If it's a trickle of support from the outside, because I don't wanna jump through all the hoops and be a court jester online and be steeped in that mentality, because I'm doing all this because I enjoy my freedom.
I enjoy my peace.
I'm not gonna risk destroying my freedom. Risk destroying my peace in order to sort of recapitalize with the cost of it being my peace of mind.
That's why it's great to have filters on the Internet, where you can have private relationships with people.
I don't wanna have public conversations. I don't want to operate in that manner.
But that middle option of doing some kind of above ground, solar powered AC system that's just not as expensive but still, too expensive and I've made some efforts. I mean an insane, amount of work to build out an earth tube cooling system only to find out that I would have to spend much more money.
The idea is that you push air underground with fans through tubing or pipes, buried at a depth and running for a length, that the air from the surface that gets pushed through it dissipates the heat through that run of piping underground.
Then wherever you pipe it to, you get a temperature as cool as the ground, as the sub soil, which is usually a constant year round temperature that's very much a comfortable room temperature so buffering from extreme cold, buffering from extreme heat if you can.
Pipe that air in then you have an optimal temperature but then again there's infrastructure costs that are beyond me at this point in order to to retain that cool air.
I would be able to do that just by layering fabric. I could do that without that much money.
But the real bottleneck and deal breaker was that the fan power that I have is not sufficient.
So it would take scaling up again, of the solar system, even if it wasn't to power AC to power fans to push air that distance they've got to be industrial fans and they've got to be running at least all of the hours that the sun can power it.
But in order to have the wattage for that, we need a lot more panels.
For now, with a few small panels, the strategy that I've use is computer fans, a sort of macgyverd swamp cooler kind of effect for spot treating the person.
We heat or cool the person, not the room kind of thing.
And the way I was able to do that to really spot treat the cooling was to was to use a metal bowls.
When you think of a dog food bowl, just a thin stainless steel bowl, but larger than most cereal bowls, I was able to take this pattern of taking one of those and putting about a half inch to three quarter inch of water in the bottom and then resting a computer fan.
It would just sit and fit above the water at the top of the bowl.
Just a computer fan going with a really small amount of twelve volt DC power.
It would miraculously have some effect, I can't even explain exactly what the physics are, what's going on there, but it is the idea of creating air flow, the fan it's pushing and moving air around the surface of the water.
What's happening is the water is getting cooled, because apparently the heat of the water is getting pushed out into the air that's moving above it.
So the bottom of the metal bowl gets cold. If I place that on the skin, I feel a bit of cooling.
But that's not adequate. And I don't wanna sit there with the cold metal, it's not even cold at that point, but a cool metal bowl didn't do much. It wasn't that much help. It was kind of a nice thought.
But what really worked was producing that quarter inch of cool water, and then several times, I mean, maybe ten times throughout the day, dunking a wet strip of cloth, one and wrap, dunking it in, and then squeezing it out and having a cool, damp piece of cloth wrapping around my forehead and one around my neck so that my head is kept cool for important reasons for safety.
And my neck, where the main blood vessels are going through, if I wanted to or if I needed to, I could extend that, as I have before, to the crotch and under armpits.
Those are other major highways of blood vessels that, if you spot treat cooling them with cool, damp in rags...
This is also something you learn in first aid techniques for treating heat illness, to wrap cold water, dunked towels or some linens of some kind in those places.
So that is the ultimate spot treating for coolness.
However, it's not a fashionable attire. I haven't built out a sort of outfit that works in that way it's very much laying flat and still which you would in order for you not to counteract those effects.
You wouldn't wanna be up and moving anyway, but sometimes you have to.
So, no, if I have to get up and go outside in the sun and from one tiny point of shade to another, then I'm gonna just keep doing that.
But of course, it's so hot and it's so dry that those rags, they dry out relatively quickly.
So you just have to keep doing it over and over and over again.
But that's how I survived. That's how I maintain slivers of sanity last summer.
That's the lowest cost way to manage and to survive out here.
That's the third option, which is using the solar power that I have, which isn't much, but it's enough to keep tiny fans going all day, not all night, but all day, at least.
If you haven't spent a lot of time in these searing temperatures, you might not know. You might say, oh,why don't you just get normal fans?
Well, at a certain point, I'd say above 95 degrees is my metric that I've arrived at.
Above 95 degrees, when you blow fans on yourself of that temperature, it just makes it worse, because it's like taking a giant blow dryer at the highest temperature, which is not comfortable after a while.
It's certainly not comfortable when the temperature out here is a hundred and 25 degrees.
Then I'm using a fan to blow that right in my face.
My lips are gonna chap down and look like a prune in about 5 minutes.
My eyes are gonna be red and itchy and I'm gonna feel like I'm literally dying in hell.
So it does no good to have fans. The only way that fans become useful is if you have the water to expend to mist air with some form of misting system, which, again, very low budget for me.
I've done that this whole time literally with hand held spray bottles.
I because it allows me to spot treat.
There was a strategy that I had where I tied a bed sheet above me almost like a tapestry and I had a larger fan blasting into that sheet blocking the fan air from directly hitting my skin so it Wasn't blasting me directly, it was hitting the fabric.
I was laying under the fabric and just routinely, every few minutes, dampening it by spraying it, like firing rounds of water, like a squirt gun at it from the spray bottle.
That would cool the air immediately around me. Again, that I evolved from that because that was a big waste of water.
It worked and it was more efficient than some things, but it was still... the amount of water I was consuming doing that was more than what I was comfortable spending.
In that way, it felt very inefficient. So, again, being able to wrap the cool...discovering the ability to cool water with computer fans.
Obviously, those are far less power hungry than a larger fan, more like a box fan, is what I was using.
That was a lot of solar energy to spend and a lot of water wasted to cool air all around me and not just cool my blood.
So it's great that I've evolved to a point of pretty much maximum efficiency computer fans, rather than big fans, spot treating with damp and cool rags on to cool my blood.
That conserves water, and I conserve energy. So that's great.
Now, what I do have this year, now that I'm onto the third option, which is this minimal amount of money as I can spend.
I’ll have extra solar power this year, I'll be able to be less frugal about the power usage.
I also have rain water that I caught, I didn't have before, and I was just depleting supplies of water that I didn't know if I'd be able to replace.
The fact that I was able to prove to myself that I could capture a year's worth of water in a rainy season, which I've done. I've pretty much beyond break even with my rainwater catchment, so I can be a little more daring with how much I spend.
So now, with more power and no fear of a power deficiency, and with lots more water, I'm going to experiment with seeing if I can at least cool more water and perhaps cool more of an ambient range of air around me, not by spraying water into the air, which is the ultimate ideal...to be able to afford to have those misting systems that people have for for backyard parties and whatnot, in the summer, or outdoor dance parties and whatnot.
The misting systems where they've got generator power and IBC totes filled with water, and it's able to do this timed, periodic every couple of minutes, it's gonna spray the mist.
But that goes fast. The water goes fast. And the power to pump that and have enough pressure for the misting to occur. If you don't have enough water pressure, you're gonna have just dripping.
And that does not achieve anywhere near the same effect, it has to be very aerosolized.
Another factor is you aerosolize stored water you're gonna get legionella bacteria if you're not purifying water which is another issue.
So the water that I'm using to cool myself now, that runs through my water filtration system, but I wouldn't wanna burn out those water filters at the rate that it would require in order to have large amounts of water to push through a misting system.
So that's another kind of deal breaker in terms of efficiency, if you are always on guard against the growth of bacteria in your water, your stagnant water storage tankage it would be far more intensive a process to prevent it under these circumstances than to accept that there's a chance that it could always be there.
So you just have to filter it with a strong filter, or really a powerful filter.
It would cost too much energy to boil it. I'm not a hundred percent sold on just allowing UV light to pass through, and that is gonna be enough of a disinfectant.
I would be worried if I was to be bleaching it or disinfecting it by other means, that's gonna be misted and in my eyes on my skin and whatnot.
So trying to keep a minimal the considerations that are, again, budgetary and just the scale and the efficiency of it.
But I do believe that at some point out here that's gonna be the way to do things, the least costly and the most efficient way.
If I did wanna cool a classroom and have any kind of social activities, it's not much of a social activity where it's like, okay, everybody come out and hang out during the summer.
We're all gonna be disgustingly overheated and ill from the heat and barely alive, and we all have to lay still and probably barely even speak to each other.
But we're gonna be laid out like we're in hospital tents, field hospital tents, with barely cooled and rapidly drying, wet rags around our head and neck.
And that's gonna be how we socialize. It only works if you're doing this monastic sabbatical the way I am as an individual, although who knows, maybe I can make a fortune selling that as some kind of detox or some kind of silent meditation.
But I'm not trying to go there because I don't want the liability, and I don't really want a lot of people around, but to have any social interaction out here, any time during those four months, that's gonna be the way to do it.
Not digging underground, not having solar powered AC but having the pumping power and the water and the and the biological filtration capacity to have misting happening.
Even if it's just for an hour a day, it's like, okay, maybe we are doing the silent meditation, heat, torture, meditations, retreat.
And then for an hour a day, we we can throw the mister on, feel comfortable about it being safe, and know that there's enough solar power to run it for part of the day, and enough water to not be worried about wasting water, or I don't wanna say wasting water. I wanna say gifting it back to the atmosphere where it will remain for an average of 5000 years before the molecules ever reach the surface again, and at that point only for a very brief number of hours, maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe months, but certainly not 5000 years.
So we surrender water that we use. It doesn't die with us.
It gets surrendered back into the water cycle. Eventually it'll make its way back up to the heavens.
So that's kind of cute thought, isn't it? The way we temporarily borrow heat, temporarily borrow water.
It's very interesting, humbling. So that's kind of where things are at.
The main thing to be continued is to see when I'm able to achieve with a slight scale up of the cooling water and metal bowls I'll be able to do that with more water and more power and we'll see how scalable it is and whether or not it works at all or noticeably at all to do any kind of cooling of the ambient temperature, in addition to the spot treating. So we'll see how that goes. That'll be the next phase.
A couple of other factors that I have worked out, and I was almost dead set on giving up on this project after last summer, because I almost died.
And it's no joke. And I've talked about it, I suffered a very life threatening injury and it took away my ability to stand, took away my ability to walk, I was debilitated for two months and I was also losing nutrients and having early signs of scurvy.
It was the kind of thing that would force you to tap out of a reality survival show.
But I was able to make it through with some clever designs on my next supply run. The silver lining was my choices for how to optimize my diet after that, knowing I pushed the limits too far, and then realizing I had to be a little more consumptive of certain micro nutrients in order to do okay and to heal.
Now, I'm on a track where we'll see how well it holds up in the summer, but it's done great for me so far over the cooler months.
That'll be another thing to be reporting on is whether or not my enhanced dietary strategy that I used to heal myself from a life threatening injury, if that strategy holds up very well in the heat, or if I'm again crushed by it and risking all kinds of injury from it.
We'll just have to see.
But last couple of little strategies that I evolved, so I decided I was pretty much dead set on on giving up on this place, and either making it a seasonal, going through the process once the temperatures cool a little bit, I said, I've got to make it so I'm psychologically and logistically prepared to leave here in an emergency.
Or to just scale out of here and say, you know what, it doesn't make sense to suffer and endure out here, I've got to find cooler temperatures.
I'm gonna be a climate refugee from my own land. I did my best. I made it three years, but it's cutting it too close with almost dying again, so I would be a fool to stay here another summer.
As soon as I could walk again, as soon as it was cool enough to do anything again, all I did for several months was just completely reorganize everything here, which isn't much, but just in the heat, even if it's cooler heat, it still slows you down quite a bit.
But it took a long time to get things sorted, to get things secured, so that I could feel comfortable leaving, and not leave a mess, not leave hazards, and not leave anything I wouldn't care to have stolen.
So after all of that, now I'm in a position where I'm far more ready to bug out. Everything that I need, if I were to want to evacuate for short or long duration period of time, is staged, if not already packed, to go.
This is funny, because almost as soon as I got to the point of being totally ready to leave, I decided, and I realized, it's good that I have that done, that needed to happen.
There's no universe where that wasn't the right intelligent thing to do to have done. If I'm gonna have both feet in here, I better have 1 foot sort of leaning, ready to get out of here.
I gotta be leaning out of this place if I'm gonna be here full time, not leaning into it.
Because if I had to extract myself, I think about, there's no way, it took me so long to do all that.
There's no way I could do that in a hurry.
So I'm glad that’s done I did it when it was cool I don't have to when it's hot, I wouldn't be able to do it when it's hot.
But as soon as I got to that point, I realized, you know what? There's a couple of dimensions of things. I've been ways I've been suffering here and enduring that I could optimize and I could transform, and it might drop the cool the temperature down five to ten degrees.
I was hinting at that earlier. So this is the kind of grand finale to talk about what those strategies may be.
But the failed, or the temporarily paused, I wanna say, failed, but the temporarily paused Earth Tube Dome project.
I took the dome at the end of that run of underground pipe, and I said, if I can't cool this, I'm gonna move it closer to me, it was sad, because I had to basically undo a lot of work I did to get that established where it was but if I dismantled it to a degree I could drag it back.
And I could bring it closer to base camp. I realized, too, even that distance of that hundred and 50 ft, it was out there, I don't wanna be staggering around in the summer with scorpions and red ants everywhere, and then risk twisting an ankle. Then I would really be dead. There's no question about it.
Depending on my state, I may or may not be able to crawl back before, within how many minutes I would be literally dying in the heat.
So it made sense for me to pull that dome back in closer.
Now that I have it closer, I realized, okay, you know what this can actually do, it'll be the fourth summer. And for the first one of those four summers, this dome could give me the ability to actually stand up and have that dimension of sanity.
I put shade cloth over it that's that's priceless real estate to have any kind of shade out here. The only way I've had shade out here previously is that I have a tin roof on one truck and a bamboo roof on the other.
And that gives me my bedroom, my pantry, my bathroom, but both of them are such that I cannot stand up within them.
So I'm trapped for all those months without the ability to do any kind of even minimalist calisthenics.
I can do some very minimal moving around. But again, I don't like to hike around in the heat.
Anything could happen. Even if I could physically mechanically crawl back, depending on the time of day that happened, I may not make it back in time.
So I don't venture off except for the cool months. I have the freedom to really roam and do projects and do work all around the property.
But when it gets to the heat, I've got to stay tight into base camp and not venture off at all.
So to bring that dome all the way back in gives me now for the first time, I have this potential to have a shaded area where I can stand up and I realized that not having a shaded area where I could hang out in at all, one of the trucks set ups is far less ventilated. It's still extremely ventilated. But it is walled enough to wear it just bakes me like a potato.
And of course, the metal roof conducts the heat. And I'm literally broiling myself, and I've realized, I've just got to have a policy where I can only be in the broiler when the sun is down, when the sun is up.
I can't hang out here. I had been adding at least ten degrees of heat to myself, by blocking the breeze, which is just the most foolish thing, maybe I don't even need to burn that energy on the fans if I can be outside. And so I'm dying to know now, or I'm living to know now...
I cannot wait to find out if I was exposing myself to a minimum ten degrees higher temperatures than necessary by being in a more enclosed space because of the fact that that's where my bedding is, and that's where I have shade.
But I have, it's like the most absurd, foolish irony that the most comfortable place is the most uncomfortable place.
Now, I thought I was supposed to be smarter than that, as a permaculture designer, supposed to understand some of these things.
So now I'm furnishing myself to be able to spend the hottest times of the day, of the hottest times of the year in a well shaded, hyper ventilated, raised dome above the ground, where these are five foot domes. I've got two of them, one of them's for the garden that I slip into like a ninja because I can't stand up in it.
A little door in the wire mesh that I used to keep the critters out of the garden.
I have to slide through that,because I didn't have the materials to lift it up.
Luckily scavenging and harvesting salvaged lumber from the ghost towns in the wasteland...I did that this winter, and I resupplied a whole bunch of very dilapidated and almost barely usable, two by fours, but I got enough of them to be able to create an elegant system to elevate one of the five foot domes by 2 ft above the ground, anchoring the two by fours with a sort of cross piece underground.
So it's an inverted T shape, the letter T.
And they’re anchored in with 12" underground two by fours, with a little cross piece at the bottom as an anchor, like a foot.
That's locks it in under the sand, and then 2 ft exactly above the sand, which gives me a level, sort of platform to fasten and attach the dome to.
So the dome is secured, it can have the canopy on it without blowing away, and it's 2 ft raised up. So what does that give me? That gives me the ability to stand, so I can move my limbs.
I can stretch. I can do yoga. I can do martial arts, and I can really have a meditation environment where I can do tai chi I can do movement and I can probably avoid a lot of the atrophy and sickness and sort of degradation that was leading to my demise over these last three years of being laid up in the heat.
Maybe that was just something that I adapted to and took for granted, but just wasn't thinking out of the box literally.
So now I'm thinking out of the box. I'm thinking into the dome.
That wasn't possible before, because it was just a sort of incomplete project that I abandoned but bringing that dome closer in now I'm excited I'm hopeful and I'm thinking that it's not gonna be cool. But if I can drop the temperature of the blood with the cool rags, and I can have way more airflow in the shade, and standing up isn't gonna make me cool, but it's going to allow me a little bit of movement to where I've just got more optimized circulation.
More optimized, lymph flow, more optimized spiritual, energetic factors, and even a better view.
So all the elements of resilience, the morale, the spirits, the psychological, the physical, the chemical, all these factors are gonna be optimized.
I think I may be able to raise the summer desert survival up a couple notches of optimization, and that's gonna be a big deal.
I'm looking forward to that. I'm not gonna bet the farm on it, but I am kind of hopeful that if I discover that what I thought was just the most insane trade off to live out here during the summer, if I discover that it's tolerable biologically and even the slightest bit safer to be out here, because I made that design modification of introducing those dimensions for surviving the summer, that are gonna be both psychologically and physically, mathematically optimized and just the slightest bit more...that tips the scales for me to say, I get to stay here.
I want to stay, I've wanted to stay here. I'm not being forced out of my position. I'm not giving up.
I can do it in a way that's safer than it has been this whole time, and I can have more confidence.
That compounds the value of all of the work I've done. I learned the lessons I needed to learn.
The main lesson was, this is possible. You know, I don't wanna give up on it. This is a Mission Impossible. I wanna make it through. I wanna get to a point where, if I can make it out here and get to the event horizon point that I'm hoping for, which is no more plastic, no more imports.
Growing my own food, capturing my own rain water then phasing the plastics out of that process.
Eventually getting a point where, unless the temperature of the surface of the planet doubles, I can live so happily and so ridiculously comfortably in the cool months, sinfully blissfully luxuriating in the comfort of the cool months.
I said to a friend, maybe three months of hell, is the cost of nine months of heaven, or make that four and eight. But that's the deal that I'm in. If I can mitigate hell, heavens always gonna be worth it.
I do not wanna leave those eight months of heaven in this paradise of a place that I have.
I really don't wanna leave it. I can capture rain, and I can have my own ponds, lakes and my own ocean.
I'm perfectly okay with that. Perfectly happy with that. The biggest thing to be happy about is less people, less problems I can create in an ecosystem that's a scale model of the Earth.
With my food forest and my ponds and my rainwater catchment systems and tankage and everything.
I can grow an oasis. I can grow trees. I can live everything I've ever wanted to live in the name of permaculture out here, if I can just affordably optimize the cooling situation.
A few more solar panels a few more batteries is all it would take for me to probably get the misting system working.
It's possible for me to have the only remaining crutch on surviving out here be toxic batteries and toxic solar panels.
That would be my only compromise at a certain point.
Nothing else will be imported to this land with any toxic, petroleum based...only natural, organic, biodegradable materials.
And the only cheats are, the only compromise from that standard would be except for the solar powered system. Maybe we'll get lucky. There's been more rain this year so far. Already. This year 2024, it's been cooler temperatures that are really blowing my mind.
I can't believe how forgiving the temperatures have been. And apparently there are crazy storms of very freezing temperatures throughout the country right now.
I seem to get the crumbs of the extreme temperatures I got the crumbs of the rain but I get all the heat that's for sure, there's no way around that.
Ideally, somewhere, some day in the future, I will be living a life where there I'm not responsible for importing anything toxic on to the site.
I have been responsible for importing plastics onto this site as prosthesis, the scaffolding for where I wanna go.
But I'll have to take responsibility to have it hauled out of here or to haul it out myself.
I don't have trash service to make it easy to have out of sight, out of mind.
Because, as I've learned before, there is no “away”. You cannot throw things away because there is no away.
And here that piles up fast. So I wanna be done with importing toxic materials.
I wanna be done with importing in general. But if I have to import anything, it's gonna be all natural, biodegradable, compostable materials.
I can't throw it away, but I can get it out of sight, out of mind, and make it someone else's problem.
The solar panel, after life processes, the battery after life processes, I'm not gonna be disassembling solar panels and batteries and trying to find some way to recycle the materials or to properly dispose of them on my site.
That has to involve the outside world. Another, dimension of interaction I wanna minimize and then and then dissolve to nothing at some point.
I've got a couple more months to do what I've been doing, scurrying around and sort of optimizing different things, it's almost like preparing your home to have someone disabled live there.
That's what I'm doing now for myself. For the summer, I've gotten spoiled by the cool temperatures where I've been ambulant and mobile and able to move around and do a lot of things.
But that's going to start to really narrow and shrink down to almost nothing very soon.
So what have I gotta do while I can do it to optimize for my safety when I get into that debilitated zone.
Hopefully what I've done so far that's worked, will keep working.
What I'm doing to enhance that and to evolve, it will work even better.
And next time I talk about this topic, I will be in a place of extreme happiness, knowing that some of these calculations are actually correct, and they're gonna pay off, and they're gonna make everything right.
So wish me luck. And I hope you're doing well whether you’re a climate refugee or someone who has a higher power bill to do your climate control indoors. Hopefully you're doing what you gotta do and you can afford the time energy and resources to optimize your relationship with the sun so you don't feel like you're doing what I'm doing and what a lot of people on Earth are doing.
Which is staring down the barrel of the Sun. Cheers.