Ok, you found a nice little spot for your mansion, take a little time to look the place over. Really look it over, you may be here a while. Not every place is perfect or even close, but what you want is acceptable and acceptable can mean a lot of things.
Look up, look for dead trees or ones leaning hard in your direction. Look for dead tops and broken branches. All of these things can kill you or worse injure you, remember the reason you are there is because no one else is and if you get pinned or trapped, it might be a while before anyone finds you. I like heavy brush over tall trees for this reason, plus the brush hides you better. If you have to pick a spot where there is this danger, try to get in the middle of trees that have already fallen. Spend a night out in an ice storm and you will understand this much better. Or just take my advice.
Look down and around, is there high ground you can set up on? How close is that creek? Is there trash five feet up in the bushes around you? Most places not being used are empty for a reason and flooding is a common one. Waking up at midnight in a foot of water is not fun and tends to kill any buzz you might have had when you went to sleep. Most of the spots I have used in the east are swamps and I find to be just fine as long as you set up on the highest ground possible and expect a soaking every now and then.
Be aware of animal signs, you don't need to set up on a gator slide or do what I did the first time I went west, set up camp right off a mule deer path. I was impressed with how large they were three feet away and how they might stomp me into a shallow hole in the ground.
Speaking of wildlife, make sure there are no anthills nearby. I have dealt with many camp pests, but ants are the absolute worst in my book. I even had one colony chew through the floor of a brand new mansion. Ant poison works, but if you can avoid them, that is even better.
If you are near a road, and most places are, make sure there is a guardrail, deep ditch, or a line of fairly good sized trees between your camp and the road, it is bad enough a drunk driver crashes right outside your camp, but if he crashes into your camp things get much worse. Even if you don't get hurt, folks that respond will definitely ruin your day.
Finally, try to sleep one night there to see if it really is a good spot. There might be an all night bar a block away blaring music, or a factory might have a piece of machinery that cycles every 2 hours and imitates an air raid in noise and intensity.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Monday, January 18, 2016
Picking Your Spot pt1
Finding a new spot has always been a tricky thing to do for me, most of the time I am moving to an area I have never been before and know no one that can help me. When I first started it involved a lot of walking, nosing around, and just getting lucky, now I have a system that helps preselect possible camp areas with a fair amount of success. First thing you want to do is figure out what you need in an area, my list is something like this, and in descending priority.
1. Day labor office close by.
2. Grocery store close by (convenience store is pretty good too)
3. Laundromat close by
4. Hotel fairly close
Some things you don't want
1. Major highway close, most larger camps are set up near highways, already occupied, and likely known to law enforcement.
2. Close to a shelter or soup kitchen, campsites are too likely to be occupied already and too great a chance someone will follow you if you do find a spot.
3. Close to a police or fire station, yes, fire fighters will report you, police station should be self explanatory.
4. Close to an apartment complex or other large housing complex, houses mean kids, kids go in woods, if kids don't wreck your camp, they tell parents, parents call cops,etc.
These are the major points to consider, there are some minor points that come into play later. Now you have a list of things to look for and avoid, what do you do with this information? This is where Google Maps helps a lot. If you do not have a tablet or a cheap smartphone (and you should, but that's another article) go to your library and ask for a guest pass to the computers, most of them will let you do it up to a certain amount of times, three times being the most common in my experience. Find the feature in the list most important to you on the want list and find it's address, put the address in the search box, then look around the area for the most appealing spots. Zoom in as close as you can, sometimes you can see other camps if they are there. Pick two or three areas, and find landmarks to get addresses you can use later. The are many reasons to pick several spots, one being there might already be folks there, two, sometimes it is hard to tell from Maps if what you are looking at is trees covering a ditch or drainage pond. Take some time to write basic directions down on paper if you are new to the area and do not have a phone.
Now you have found a spot, now you need to scout it. There are a few guidelines to doing this, one being don't go in dragging all your stuff, stash the bulk of it somewhere safe and walk out to the area. What do you see? If the land is posted private, move on. Fenced in, probably need to keep walking. Obvious paths? Not a deal breaker, but be cautious. Still looks good? Ok, wait for early morning or late afternoon to go inside and see what is there, if you find a camp, leave it be. Talk to the camper if he is there, just don't expect him to be happy about your presence. Try and find a spot far enough away or move on. If you find a spot you like, sit down a while and soak it in, feel the vibes, if you get a funny feeling about a spot, listen to it.
Continued next time
1. Day labor office close by.
2. Grocery store close by (convenience store is pretty good too)
3. Laundromat close by
4. Hotel fairly close
Some things you don't want
1. Major highway close, most larger camps are set up near highways, already occupied, and likely known to law enforcement.
2. Close to a shelter or soup kitchen, campsites are too likely to be occupied already and too great a chance someone will follow you if you do find a spot.
3. Close to a police or fire station, yes, fire fighters will report you, police station should be self explanatory.
4. Close to an apartment complex or other large housing complex, houses mean kids, kids go in woods, if kids don't wreck your camp, they tell parents, parents call cops,etc.
These are the major points to consider, there are some minor points that come into play later. Now you have a list of things to look for and avoid, what do you do with this information? This is where Google Maps helps a lot. If you do not have a tablet or a cheap smartphone (and you should, but that's another article) go to your library and ask for a guest pass to the computers, most of them will let you do it up to a certain amount of times, three times being the most common in my experience. Find the feature in the list most important to you on the want list and find it's address, put the address in the search box, then look around the area for the most appealing spots. Zoom in as close as you can, sometimes you can see other camps if they are there. Pick two or three areas, and find landmarks to get addresses you can use later. The are many reasons to pick several spots, one being there might already be folks there, two, sometimes it is hard to tell from Maps if what you are looking at is trees covering a ditch or drainage pond. Take some time to write basic directions down on paper if you are new to the area and do not have a phone.
Now you have found a spot, now you need to scout it. There are a few guidelines to doing this, one being don't go in dragging all your stuff, stash the bulk of it somewhere safe and walk out to the area. What do you see? If the land is posted private, move on. Fenced in, probably need to keep walking. Obvious paths? Not a deal breaker, but be cautious. Still looks good? Ok, wait for early morning or late afternoon to go inside and see what is there, if you find a camp, leave it be. Talk to the camper if he is there, just don't expect him to be happy about your presence. Try and find a spot far enough away or move on. If you find a spot you like, sit down a while and soak it in, feel the vibes, if you get a funny feeling about a spot, listen to it.
Continued next time
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Intro To This Blog
People say write what you know about, so I figured why not talk about some of the things I have learned from the years I have traveled the US homeless. This is not about raising awareness, making you feel bad, or some other lofty purpose, plenty of other folks do that. Just tales of what works and does not work for me.
Some things you may not know about homeless is there are several different classes even among homeless folk, the guy sleeping on the sidewalk is not the same as the one sleeping in a shelter or out in the woods and most try not to associate with the others. I sleep in the woods, so let me explain from a point of view that took me only a few weeks to learn. When I see a dude sleeping on the sidewalk, that tells me he stopped caring about himself and others a while back. Does not care about getting arrested or personal safety. Guys that live in a shelter tend to be real game players and will lie, cheat or steal to get what they want. The ones living in the woods are usually loners. As disclosed earlier, I am a woods guy and most comfortable around them whenever we meet. And we do meet, at soup kitchens, food pantries, libraries and during really bad weather, shelters.
As a rule, I do not do shelters, they are crowded and noisy, gestapo like to get in to, then wild west once you are in with little or no patrolling going on. If you don't have a disease or bedbugs before you go in, you might want to get checked after you leave. All the shelters want is a name on a line to get their funding continued. I went to a shelter three times and was always glad when I left.
Out in the woods is where it is at for me, in my nylon mansion (tent for the obtuse), in it I have seen some great and sometimes terrifying things, otters and foxes slinking by, mule deer that almost ran me over, thieving raccoons and possums, ice storms, tornadoes, bright moons and shooting stars. This lifestyle has enabled me to have experienced living in 45 states and get a real feeling of the US.
In the future I plan to present articles that focus on the how to side of things, this being my first article, I rambled, I know, but it sort of took a life of it's own, so I let it. Comments are welcome, but be reasonable with the language.
Some things you may not know about homeless is there are several different classes even among homeless folk, the guy sleeping on the sidewalk is not the same as the one sleeping in a shelter or out in the woods and most try not to associate with the others. I sleep in the woods, so let me explain from a point of view that took me only a few weeks to learn. When I see a dude sleeping on the sidewalk, that tells me he stopped caring about himself and others a while back. Does not care about getting arrested or personal safety. Guys that live in a shelter tend to be real game players and will lie, cheat or steal to get what they want. The ones living in the woods are usually loners. As disclosed earlier, I am a woods guy and most comfortable around them whenever we meet. And we do meet, at soup kitchens, food pantries, libraries and during really bad weather, shelters.
As a rule, I do not do shelters, they are crowded and noisy, gestapo like to get in to, then wild west once you are in with little or no patrolling going on. If you don't have a disease or bedbugs before you go in, you might want to get checked after you leave. All the shelters want is a name on a line to get their funding continued. I went to a shelter three times and was always glad when I left.
Out in the woods is where it is at for me, in my nylon mansion (tent for the obtuse), in it I have seen some great and sometimes terrifying things, otters and foxes slinking by, mule deer that almost ran me over, thieving raccoons and possums, ice storms, tornadoes, bright moons and shooting stars. This lifestyle has enabled me to have experienced living in 45 states and get a real feeling of the US.
In the future I plan to present articles that focus on the how to side of things, this being my first article, I rambled, I know, but it sort of took a life of it's own, so I let it. Comments are welcome, but be reasonable with the language.
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