We started out just bringing muffins or extra eggs to neighbors. This has mushroomed into so much back and forth bartering, gifting and trading that it is just mind-boggling!  It seems the closer we get to collapse, the more food, supplies, tools, and tips are shared. The more we give away, the more shows up, despite the fact that we are pagan anarchists and most of our neighbors are Christian fundamentalists. Who woulda thunk it? One learns to speak many languages, depending on differing frames of reference.

In Part 3 of this series, we spotlight Freeacre and Murph,  two "anarchist farmers" living in rural Oregon. They share with us their journey of collapse preparation from a working class perspective.

Please visit their blog TROUTCLAN CAMPFIRE

CB:  Tell us a little about your background, where you grew up, your family, and the work you've been doing in recent years. 

Freeacre: I was born in Portland, Oregon, but after my parents divorced, I was raised in Michigan. I would have graduated from high school in 1967 and probably become a journalist, as I was granted a full scholarship to Michigan State University's School of Journalism. But, instead, I eloped with a draft resister and left for Canada. So, I guess you could say that I have always taken politics personally. I was divorced by the time I was 21.  Back in the States, I worked for Robert Kennedy until he was killed and later became a political activist against the Vietnam War. After that, I earned an associates degree and got into mental health and was a trainer of empathy and values clarification at a crisis intervention center.  Then, I became a counselor for emotionally disturbed adolescents in Michigan, Oregon, and California over the next 16 years. In 1978, I returned to Oregon, married a man with three children, and had one of our own. We lived in Portland until the recession in 1984 brought us to Jamaica for two years (with Project HOPE), then Napa, California for six, and eventually, we moved to South Lake Tahoe. I began to sell advertising space in the local newspaper, which led to being an outdoors columnist and also a special sections editor. I worked at the Tribune nine years. My husband died of cancer after 25 years of marriage, and I put a new life together with an old friend from Michigan. Murph and I have been together since 2002. For the last five years, we have been retired and living in a forty year-old single wide mobile home on a paid for acre of land in Central Oregon, attempting to create a "lifeboat" for ourselves and family. I guess you could say that we are militantly working class and committed to the concepts of freedom and localizing food production. Murph can tell you about his history.

MURPH'S STORY

I was brought up in a pretty conventional Midwestern family in Michigan.  My father was a frustrated city boy who wanted to be a farmer and got an agriculture degree from Purdue but was never able to actually do the farming trip.  Both parents were college grads.  So through out my childhood I usually had all kinds of animals around, and I learned a lot about husbandry from my dad and worked summer jobs on a variety of farms.  When I graduated from high school in 1959, I immediately entered college.   

Both of my parents held education, not job training, high on the list of priorities for their kid's futures.  I sort of adopted a curiosity about nearly everything and my college background showed that; 320 hours in a huge variety of areas. I didn't actually graduate until I went back to school in the 90's, and then qualified for three degrees. 

I was never able to do a sufficient amount of compromising to utilize my education to make money, and so I migrated from one kind of job to another, preferring, generally, to work with my hands.   I spent 4 years in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, taught for about 3 years, and finally ended up training as a tool and die machinist in the 80's and 90's until I retired from "Working on Maggie's Farm". (A reference to one of Bob Dylan's songs)

CB: When was the very first incident or event or experience that started you thinking about collapse? Please elaborate on that.

Freeacre here.  I'm trying to remember my first inkling of the collapse. I think it was around 1998 that I was asked to attend a conference on Sustainability as a press person on the college campus in Tahoe City. I had never heard of the term "sustainability" before. But, a bunch of really fascinating scientists and specialists were there, and they blew me away with concepts of resource depletion, etc. I am pretty sure that Richard Heinberg was there, but I am not certain, as my notes have been lost. Anyway, I was hooked. A year or so later, I got connected to the internet for the first time. I must have looked up "sustainability" and come across Mike Ruppert's "From the Wilderness" website around 2003. I took that very personally as well. That is also when I first became aware of you, Carolyn, on Ruppert's site.

HOW MURPH BEGAN THINKING ABOUT COLLAPSE

I really didn't get much involved in politics until the 70's when I had my own business as a guitar maker, a family, and started to get really nervous concerning the economic and political shenanigans going on at the time.  My parents were also very concerned, and we felt that there was a high probability of economic and social collapse back then.  My parents bought a quite remote 100 acre plot of ground in the middle of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas, to which I moved to in 1980.  That collapse didn't happen even though the nation came close, and my family and I stuck it out in Arkansas for 10 years, at which point I moved back to Michigan after a divorce in 1990. 

That is when I really got interested in politics.  Needing a job, I finally moved to Iowa in the middle of a corn field and worked for an outfit as a machinist in training.  Got a computer and started reading a lot more on the subject of politics and economics, tried a bit of investing in the stock market until I figured out that was a racket with few winners.  Then Freeacre and myself got together, and I moved to California.  The intensity of political and economic investigation started to increase 100 fold.  Ruppert's book, "Crossing The Rubicon" and web site looked pretty authentic to me, and we began making plans to divorce ourselves from the greater society. 

CB: And then what happened? What lead to the next things, what books, documentaries, and people influenced you?

Freeacre again.  When I think about it, I realize that Mike Ruppert's brilliant messages about Peak Oil and the impending economic collapse fell on fertile ground. My plans for life had already been destroyed several times. I was not under any illusions that "things will be okay" or "it can't happen to me." My step-son had gotten a particularly virulent form of cancer when he was thirteen. He underwent 22 months of chemotherapy and a lifetime dose of radiation which left him scarred for life and left us bankrupt. We stupidly filed a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which left us with forty percent of the medical bill of $200,000. We lost our house and our car. It took us five additional years working three jobs between us while raising our baby and 3 teenagers, one with cancer, to pay off the debt. Years later, after leaving a lucrative job with Project HOPE, we were more or less homeless for a year, You see, after leaving Project HOPE as a trainer for biomedical engineering and looking for suitable employment, my husband lost the caps on his front teeth. Have you ever attempted to get a job with no front teeth? How about trying to get a dentist to do the work when you don't have a job? Forget it. Welcome to my working class world.  We were poverty stricken for years. I was a counselor in a very good residential treatment center with years of experience. But the state of California put a $7.25 cent an hour cap on wages for psychiatric child care workers. It took us forever to claw our way out of debt and buy a home in Tahoe. A week after signing the papers on the house, Ralph was diagnosed with fourth stage lung cancer. Nine months later, my husband was dead. I was 50, and my world had already collapsed at least three times. By the time Murph and I got together three years later, and we began to read "From the Wilderness," we realized how vulnerable we were and began to make what Howard Kunstler calls, "alternative arrangements."

I don't think I was reading much else about peak oil and financial collapse. Instead, I was reading metaphysical books, Daniel Quinn, and searching for the feminine face of God. We re-financed the home, paid off our credit cards and the automobile. Then, we took the rest of the money and fixed up the dwelling. We knew that we only had two years before the mortgage re-set. So, we had to get it sold by then. Happily, for us, real estate prices were sky-rocketing. We sold it and had enough money to purchase the cheapest listing in the poorest county in central Oregon with cash. We put in a new well and septic and fenced the property. Then we began composting and building up the soil. We've been doing that for almost five years now. Except for several months where I was the ad director for our tiny community newspaper, I have lived off my savings because I developed a debilitating case of fibro-myalgia in Tahoe and was, of course, turned down for disability payments. We made the savings last until the Social Security kicked in. Today, I am in pain most of the time.

But, I am not alone. Have you ever wondered where all the people go that fall by the wayside in this ruthless climb to the top that we are supposedly all on? Little, backwater small towns would be my answer. About a quarter of the people walking around in the grocery store here look like they could have been the Unibomber. We are fat.  We are crippled up. We wheeze when we take a deep breath. We may be left with one breast from a mastectomy or have a stent in the heart. We don't look at all like the folks in the magazines and on T.V.

But, to me, it feels like Murph and I have found our perfect place. I love it here, and I love the people here more and more every day. They are amazing and from all walks of life. Retired from all sorts of lines of work from rocket scientists to loggers - these people may walk in slow motion, but they are the friendliest and most knowledgeable and skilled people as a whole that I have ever known.

When we first arrived here we began to collect a whole library of books and documentaries with which to attempt to educate the locals. We have them all - Kunstler, Heinberg, Baker, Astyk, Jensen, Greer, and Ruppert, along with all the documentaries on Peak Oil and "What a Way to Go".  But, we got very few takers. I'll tell you what has worked better for us later.

CB: As you were finding yourself on the journey, did you sometimes kind of look in the mirror and ask yourself, "What on earth am I doing?" Did you ever wonder if you had lost it or taken leave of our senses?"

Ha! Only almost every day - especially when for so long the dire economic forecasts of collapse seemed to not happen and all is denied in the mainstream media, and the television programming reinforces a reality that doesn't match up at all to ours. We read LATOC, peak resource, alternative news and financial sites every day. We are baking all our own bread, cooking everything from scratch, raising a garden in the high desert and gathering eggs and have disconnected the satellite TV, while our friends are buying RV's and going on trips to see friends and relatives as if everything is just hunky-dory. We often turn to each other and ask, "Are we fucking nuts, or what?"

CB: How have your family members responded to the changes you've made? Have you had conflicts with them around your changes and if so, how have you dealt with that?

For years, pretty much everyone thought we were depressing and didn't want to hear what we had to say. After awhile, they'd just say, "Well, you are probably right, but we don't want to hear it. It's too depressing." After sharing that I am not planning to live much beyond 2012. For instance, I was accused of trying to make my sister-in-law an "emotional hostage." I guess I didn't realize how painful that concept is for her and others. So, I've shut up about that now. I have more compassion for those in denial than I used to. I realize that there are some things that are too horrifying for them to deal with. I think it starts very early. Like, "No, Daddy doesn't really love you," or "No, this isn't the greatest, most free place to live."  We live in a matrix of lies, and the truth, let's face it, it is very painful. Now that our emphasis is on living this very healthy lifestyle and we are enjoying ourselves and our little "free acre" so much, friends and family are beginning to take much more of an interest and trying some of the things that we have been doing. I think fun and pleasure are more potent agents for change than fear or guilt. That would be my contribution to the movement, I guess. Once people see that you've filled your chest freezer with produce from the garden, they taste your excellent free range eggs, eat some of your yummy fresh bread and rabbit jerky, and learn that you are living on just your Social Security, they want to know your secrets. You don't have to convince them of peak oil or the doom-o-sphere.

CB: What kinds of emotions have you experienced on this journey?  As you are doing what I call "staring collapse in the face," what kinds of feeling emerge? How do you manage those feelings?

For several years, we were appalled and very angry at the information we were learning about resource depletion, the destruction of the environment, the corruption of the corporations, the complicity of the government, the profiteering, the loss of liberties, the wars, the torture, etc, etc. We began to participate in blogging on a site that bemoaned all these things with wonderful, tension-relieving rants. This evolved into our own site, http://www.troutclancampfire.blogspot.com/.

We still get angry, depressed, appalled, and fearful. But, it seems just the right people have shown up at the cyber campfire and in our physical lives to form a supportive community that is very helpful.

CB: I'm wondering what the role of community is in your life.  It's a lonely, if not hostile, world out there if one is talking to most people about collapse. Where do you get support?

We are very active members of a local Community Action Group that was formed to thwart the county's efforts to bring in millions of federal dollars in grants and collect substantial fees for individual and unaffordable nitrogen reducing septic systems. The county seems to want to encourage resort development and displace the poorer people who live here, so we fight them tooth and nail.  We have also joined the local Grange, which supports community agriculture. In connecting with all these people, we find a lot of common ground despite huge differences in politics and religions. One learns to speak many languages, depending on differing frames of reference. For instance, one can look at the malfeasance of the powers that be and conclude that Satan is in charge, or Reptilians, or that sociopathic scum rises to the top. Whatever... no matter what you call it, they still suck and must be defeated.

We started out just bringing muffins or extra eggs to neighbors. This has mushroomed into so much back and forth bartering, gifting and trading that it is just mind-boggling!  It seems the closer we get to collapse, the more food, supplies, tools, and tips are shared. The more we give away, the more shows up, despite the fact that we are pagan anarchists and most of our neighbors are Christian fundamentalists. Who woulda thunk it?

CB: Not everyone would say that they have a spiritual path or perhaps any interest in spirituality at all.  Do you have a connection with something greater, and if so, how has it informed your life and the changes you've made? As you know, I've just published a book on this topic, Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse because it become so clear to me that just as collapse has enormous energy, food, climate change, health care, and other implications, it is the consummate spiritual phenomenon of the twenty-first century. I also wrote the book to provide a roadmap for preparing emotionally and spiritually for the collapse.

It's ironic, but I was a licensed Practitioner in the Church of Religious Science for twelve years. But, I could not reconcile the church's teaching on abundance with my visions of collapse. I became critical of the expensive workshops and the seemingly unconscious enthusiasm for consumer goods that seemed to have no connection to resources or what poor wage slave was producing all this stuff. So, when we moved, I did not join another church.

But, now, more and more, I find my spirituality strengthened. Without my even realizing it, my dreams have come true. I have a wonderful relationship, a paid for piece of land. We grow our own food and have great friends. Even the fibro can be interpreted as a sort of gift that has opened my heart to the suffering of others. I have come to know the powerful process of the drumming circle and the cyber tribe. I feel a part of something greater than myself. Most of the metaphysical training that I had has been validated for me.

CB: What is your passion these days? What gets you up in the morning and gives meaning to your life?

Freedom. We feel free. I know that on the macro level, our freedom is being diminished by the day. Many of our Constitutional rights are being compromised or denied altogether. As a people, our financial freedoms are disappearing as well. You name it, we are losing it. But, because we came here five years ago and declared ourselves "free", we have made it so for us. For five years we have gotten up when we wanted to, decided what we wanted to do that day, and pretty much done it. They can't take that away from us. We have imperatives like feeding the animals and watering the garden and going to meetings. But, those are all obligations that we have taken of our own choice.  We find the experience of freedom to be thrilling.

CB: I have just one last question for you. I'm wondering if you can comment for our readers on life purpose. That is, what have you come to understand as your purpose in life at the present time? What did you come here to do?

Well, this must sound totally grandiose, coming from a couple of old fuckers living in a forty year old trailer in the high desert of nowheresville, but I have a feeling that we are two souls who came here to help out with the transition that is happening. Call it "The Age of Aquarius." Call it whatever the Mayans called it. Maybe we are those that the Cherokees foretold would come back as Whites with Indian souls. I don't know. But, both of us seem to have been dissatisfied from day one with the culture that we found ourselves in. Murph is more of a warrior. I am more of a healer. But, between the two of us, we are a pretty good team.  In terms of the Collapse, when it gets scary and overwhelming, I like to think that, "We were born for this!"

CB: Please add anything else at this point that you'd like to say that I may not have thought of to ask you about.

Well, Carolyn, your book is still coming in the mail, so I have not read it. But, I think that Sacred Demise is a good title. I have been thinking a lot about my demise and coming to terms with it. My goal is to get my mind around the concept of "enough." In our type of sick capitalism, there is no such thing as "enough." Never. Not for a minute. We need more just to break even.

This seems to have spread out into everything else as well. Not enough money or stuff or time. We seem to have lost a sense of enough or plenty. And, until we do cultivate a sense of plenty, I believe that we will always be impoverished and we will continue to deplete the resources of the planet and kill life on earth.

I want to have a sacred demise. I want to be able to live and die with confidence, with strength, gratitude and grace. And, I don't think I can do that without cultivating a sense of "enough."

Aho.  That means, "I have spoken." The talking stick is passed.

You may contact Freeacre and Murph at: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

READ PART TWO OF THIS SERIES

READ PART ONE