kleinbl00 This morning I joined my partner and their friend out on the front porch after I made some tea, both of them are current/former punks/anarchists/squatters and have been so throughout their entire adolescent to adult lives, and they were talking about former squats and houses they've lived in, and people they have come across when the friend says: "Oh yeah, [mutual friend] sent me an article the other day about people discovering my first squat!" I fucking know it's gotta be this link. I pull up this article and show them the pictures and they just start laughing, "yeah! that's it! They think some like, old man or something lived there and it was just [mutual friend] who would go crash there when he got tired of being around people" In short, some weirdo teenage/early 20s punks lifted building supplies from a nearby construction site in 2007, made it as super stealthily as a few stoners could possibly be, testing out how far away you could hear conversational-volume voices, hammering in sync with some nearby clocktower that would help disguise the sound, giggling the whole time, and no one was the wiser for almost 10 years. But yeah, lots of people passed through there and knew the place, definitely a bummer it had to go.
The passage on the poster seems to come from a mid 90s-early 2000s anarchist zine called Willful Disobedience, by Wolfi Landstreicher (bonus! retrocities has a copy of the author's old eye-gouging geocities page!). I couldn't find dates for individual issues, but that poster was getting wheatpasted in San Francisco in 2002 or 2003.
the music comment was a nod to the Joy Division tape on the shelf. And while I can see how some one might look at this reclusive stuff and worry about a unibomber... the place seemed quite tranquil to me. Like... I go camping with the family. I like the solitude of the outdoors. I've been to Humboldt County and understand the vast swaths of quiet forest out there. And Arcata/Eureka is LOADED with homeless people, hippies, and nature lovers. The weather is perfect to just sorta... abide. This place seemed like some one's own little private getaway, built with care, for almost free, probably from repurposed stuff... or maybe I'm unibomber 2.0 and this whole thing is crazy. :-)
My head immediately went to the Thoreau and not unibomber generalization. I'm rooting for this person. There's a part of me that would love to live off the grid. Based on my survival skills I would last a week. Maybe.
Isn't this a defeat though? His paradise has been found, he's been kicked out of whatever little slice of peace and quiet he managed to build for himself. Who knows how long that cabin took to build, how many peaceful afternoons that are now just memory?
Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
Find a new paradise. West Coast's got a whole lot of forests. I honestly feel that the feeling of having built the place and being solely responsible for it and everything would be one of the best parts. It would be such proof of your abilities and independence. I would do it twice if I had to.
according to bhrgunatha's comment (which links to imgur) the person(s) vacated the property. Cool that the authorities left the note and allowed for a peaceful conclusion. Bummer that it had to come to this. I hope "Thoreau" found a new home... one that might not get logged for another century.
Based on this music selection, I'm not entirely sure that mk isn't the occupant. I feel bad for the guy, he obviously put time and effort in to this.
But hey, if the dates on the to-do list are any indication, he got 5 solid years' worth of enjoyment out of it. You know? Like, imagine being that guy. You're at the office on a Friday and everyone's talking about what they're going to do this weekend. Someone asks you and you go, "Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I've got that little place in the woods" and everyone nods sagely thinking you are talking about some small house on a lake maybe with electric and flushing toilets and a road and a town with supplies maybe 15 minutes down the road. And in your head you are like "You guys have no idea what my little place in the woods is like. It's awesome...And by god, you'll also never know." What a great hideaway and secret! How awesome to feel so self sufficient!
This story reminds me of a friend of mine who found a car in the middle of a forest when he was younger. It ended up becoming sort of a meeting spot for his friends but it didn't make any sense how it got there. The forest it was in was all tightly packed very old trees and as opposed to a house I don't imagine they would have just brought the pieces in to build it. At least I can't think of any reason why they would do that.
Great little mystery story. From time to time, it's good to hear about those in authority who behave reasonably.
Yeah, I was glad the original article read that if the possessions weren't cleared out in time, they'd be packed and held for the owner to retrieve them. That seemed almost too polite for modern bureaucracy. Although I'm pretty sure that technically, they should have gotten a warrant before entering.