elko 2

ELKO 2

As I have stated before, Elko is far from the perfect location to survive the coming collapse. The fact that it has been around for about 125 years and yet has grown less than the population in the US as a whole should tell us something. What it is telling us, I don’t know. Perhaps this winter I will be rudely reminded. Regardless, it does a lot going for it. Low population, relying on commodities ( at a time of increased inflation ) rather than tourism or other even less worthy economics, isolation. It is not that I would wholeheartedly recommend the location to others as much as it works quite well for me.
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The first night here I knew I had made the right decision to move here. Four miles from town ( two as the crow flies ) and it was absolutely peaceful and quiet. Trains run by about a mile down the road and just love to blow their horn, but since I love trains ( and appreciate their coming importance as the economics of semi-trucks compared to train freight are felt as we run out of fuel ) it doesn’t bother me. Trains allow you a moment of fantasy where you can travel back to a time the US was an economic superpower and actually built things instead of buying it from communist countries. I only have a third of a mile to go to get to the main road so getting into town is easy.
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The job situation threw me for a loop at first. It seemed like I was throwing people off by applying for a job unworthy of my skills. For the love of God!! He might leave us for another company when we treat him like pond scum and pay him a nickel over minimum wage ( why, back in my day, a nickel was a lot of money! He should be kissing my liver spotted wrinkled ass to be allowed to work for me at $6.40 an hour, by gum ). So two weeks went by with only one job offer. Twenty hours and I had to be available for different shifts. So in a fit of stupidity and desperation I accepted a job offer for a restaurant supervisor. Ooooh! $9 an hour and a raise in three months after I proved my worth. It only took one day to see what I was in for. Running around stressed and losing sleep at night for an extra hundred bucks a month. I actually tossed and turned and lost four hours of sleep that first night. I quit the next day. And as luck would have it ( or perhaps it was Baby Jesus trying to apologize for the tire fiasco ) that very day a job at the food bank opened. Now I can run around like crazy, but not have any stress. That is the kind of job I like-stay busy and leave for home without stress.
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There has been almost nothing about living off grid that has been difficult. Constantly thinking about it before hand, researching it on the Internet and writing about it ( as well as partially living it previously ) all made it a very smooth transition. The only thing I haven’t done is build an ice box for butter ( I know about room temperature storage in a crock but the wife refuses to believe it won‘t kill her and refuses to eat the butter out of one and I can‘t eat enough butter myself before it would go bad ), mayonnaise and leftovers. My diet is somewhat limited without a fridge but nothing too bad. I buy meat about three or four times a week while in town and we cook it up right away. The rest of the diet is dry goods or from cans. And canned food got old after the first week so there is little of that anymore. If it was really too stressful without a fridge I would have built the box or hooked up my propane refrigerator already, but it wasn’t as big a deal as I had thought to do without.
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Hauling water is pretty easy. I go to the city park once a week and fill up at a public faucet. I can haul two gallons in my bike basket ( yes, I look like a dork doing it ) five days a week and we only use three gallons a day so I could easily cut my driving back from once a week to every other week to haul water but I don’t have enough clothes to avoid the laundry that extra week. For solid waste I fill up a plastic bag and throw it into the park dumpster ( waste disposal will be another article ). For grey water I just hooked up my trailer drain hose to a five gallon bucket filled with rocks with holes punched in the bottom ( and a layer of rocks under that bucket ). I use the regular trailer toilet for urination and I have a bucket next to that with the lid/seat made for a bucket for the solids.
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Clearing the lot of sage brush is going to take some time. It is slow and heavy work clearing it by hand ( a hand saw to cut each bush ). It only took about six hours to clear enough space to park a thirty foot trailer and two vehicles however. The rest of the brush gets cleared a bit at a time. The reason I chose to do it that way was both to save money and to keep the plant roots in place to hold the soil in place. When the wind gets to whipping even the dirt from in between vegetation comes your way but by and large the only dust is from the idiot neighbors that insist on screaming past us at thirty miles an hour. They know they are generating a lot of dust so I can’t imagine it doesn’t occur to them that we are sucking it in. Rude bastards.
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And speaking of rude bastards, this town is not anything like I expected. Yes, most people are nice enough. But very few are small town friendly. I get the same attitude here as I did back in Carson City. Transplanted California Yuppie snooty. The town still lives on trains, cows and mining. Their high and mighty lifestyle won’t survive a downturn economically here. I guess people still think gold is like oil, never to run out in their lifetime. Oh, well.
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As Creekmore said first, I’m sorry I didn’t make this move a lot sooner. We may not be able to escape the Rat Race, but it sure is a lot nicer moving to a much smaller nest of rats.
END
Look for a guest article Friday