Dispatch One: Germination

1,395 words

This is the first of a series of “dispatches from the front,” written to inspire and enlighten our folk about the reality of creating a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest right now. We don’t need to wait for revolution, uprising, or upheaval—we can do this now, peacefully, calmly, preparedly. I don’t claim to have all the answers. I am a stranger here myself. But I will share the process and point out what I can to those who are looking for the start of the path that will surely lead to a place of better advantage than those we leave behind. 

We neither ride the tiger of modernity, nor do we dodge its swiping claws . . . we have chosen to go where the tiger is not.

We are the new pioneers; our new homeland is just coming into focus, the first weary settlers appearing, the toil and grueling work of making this latest raw rugged place into our piece of the world is just beginning.

For now there are only a few of us here, with more people dreaming of when and how they can get here than are actually here. On the ground, we are scattered; we are outnumbered; we are outsiders who are looked upon as nut-jobs by the local inhabitants. This time, however, the locals look like us and share a common bond made up of blood, race, ethics, culture, and (they might not be aware of it) lifestyle point of view. (We are all here, aren’t we?) Assimilation isn’t necessary; we are already one folk. The fact that we aren’t nut-jobs will become crystal clear by and by.

We have cut loose the trappings and cords of modern urban life, selling houses, packing up books, storing furniture, buying seeds and farm manuals and rainbarrels, leaving behind family, friends, neighbors, and usually jobs. Taking all our savings, all our belongings, all our hopes and dreams and buying what we can afford to buy where all the people still look like us in places that are not infected with the mass sickness that the urban areas we are leaving behind are dying from.

Bare land for the most part is what we can afford, old RVs or (if we are very lucky to find one) converted school buses are what we use to make up what is called “interim housing.” Our new homes are not built yet. But when we they are built, they’ll be built by us, by hand—because using any sort of middle-man is a compromise we don’t want to do—on so many levels, financially, spiritually, integrity-wise. Because hand built homes are possible, they always have been…we’ve been pushed to buy into the idea that homes aren’t something that can be built by a man working for himself anymore, but we haven’t bought it. There is no reason to do so. We are capable of doing everything we need to do. Just like we have always been.

Sure it takes time, and it will take some money, but without a mortgage or high rent locking us down, money can be spent on lasting improvements (wood, nails, livestock, well pumps) that do not need to be constantly paid for month after month after month, year after year… Save for what is needed, pay for it. Done.

There are expenses:

A reliable car or truck payment is sometimes necessary, as some new pioneers have to travel to make money at first, (self-sufficiency aimed farming is tricky those first four years before it takes off), so a reasonable car payment is the only worthwhile debt on our heads—worthwhile because the payments are only there for 5 or 6 years, then they are done and the car is paid for. Of course, it’s better to buy old, second-hand, and have no payments, but our generation was robbed of auto shop classes. We must do what must be done.

Taxes are another necessary blight, and, unlike a car payment they will not end in the foreseeable future. But they are not so big a blight as to make this enterprise of ours pointless. There will come a day when our taxes are applied to a homeland we want to pay for. In the meantime, we render the Dane-geld unto the coffers.

The land we are on is cheap land, old compacted pasture land carved out in parcels from the original 100s of acres that were once owned and put to use by cattle and horse ranchers, or we are on old logged parcels—full of alders and second growth firs—that we hack into livability, into home sites, gardens and yards. There are lots of these chunks and pieces of land out here in the Pacific Northwest coast for under $50,000. Some are under $40,000. The one we bought, ten acres of woods and pastures mixed, cost us $38,000 which we paid for with the proceeds of the house we sold. We have no well, no real house, no electricity lines, no phone lines, no sewer lines, the post office doesn’t even consider us a mailbox worthy site (no house, no sewer, no electricity = no mail delivery . . . but the PO Boxes out here are cheap), no garbage service and no mortgage. We will have a well, a house, and hopefully mail delivered here soon. We will remain off the grid in every way we can. We will never have a mortgage.

We are doing it. Just like the stump farmers and pioneers and homesteaders who settled the Pacific Northwest in the 1800s did. People are led to believe that we cannot do this, that no one can live today free from the mess and binds of modern life and all that modern life entails. It is a wretched lie, perpetrated with only one end in sight—to keep our people chained to the cities, in the role of eternal consumer, forever weighed down by the twin blights of wage slavery and debt imprisonment.

We are told it is scary to step away, that the rural life is beset with rural ignorance, rural poverty, rural deprivation and rural isolation. That only (inbred religious zealot) Amish can put up barns without the hiring of general contractors and construction loans. That working with our hands is blue collar and beneath us: we are too special to learn how to hammer, how to saw . . . and conversely (always sure to keep us in confused conflict within our own heads) that we are not capable of learning how to hammer boards, how to run a saw, how to build a barn, how to make a life.

Don’t buy into any of that. We are both smart enough and special enough to figure out how to do anything. There is no limit to our ability to learn skills. We are living in the age of YouTube, of websites, of online forums, of homesteading books printed and reprinted and for sale online and in stores. We have more information about every aspect of living on the land and building a life by hand than our pioneer ancestors had. Think about that. And we have cars to drive us to places that sell what we need—nails, glue, cut wood, plans—it is all extremely doable.

I am one of the folk who sold a house on the outskirts of a metro area and bought a parcel and a schoolbus in the rural Pacific Northwest. Everything I write will be from this point of view, but there are as many ways to do this, to “take the gap” (thank you Harold Covington for the phrase), to become part of what is the first wave of settlers in the new homeland as there are people doing or going to do it. The goal is the same, creating and sustaining a white homeland for real, and some of us will do it by selling a house and buying outright, others by working to own a small derelict farm, others by moving to a small town, renting below their income level, and putting everything away for the purchase of land. There are grants for beginning farmers, grants for small farmers, grants for homesteaders that others might take advantage of. We are a creative folk, we will find all the ways we can to do what we must. The time is right. The place is here.

Welcome.

Next time—Preparing for the leap: how we got here from there.