Apocalyptic American Dream


Ken and I actually did visit the no man’s land of the Mesa once. Back when my brother and sister-in-law first moved to Taos but before they moved out there into their yurt. That’s back when we looked at cheap land everywhere we went. A realtor was offering some really cheap land outside Taos when we were visiting them. So we scheduled a time to go check it out. What we saw made us leave in a hurry. It was an old school bus half buried in the middle of the sagebrush on about a quarter acre. This was out on Two Peaks…the scruffier zone of the Mesa. The guy who lived there looked like he was having a rough go of it, hiding from the dust and wind and sun like a jackrabbit. We said thanks but no thanks… and skedaddled.

But that was decades ago. So I decide I want to go visit the Mesa once again and see how things have changed. Is it really still an outlawland? My brother and nephew said the Mesa is growing like crazy since the pandemic. But in what way? Is it a good thing? Forcing the community to provide better services and safety? I wanted to find out. 

So my ex- sister-in-law Janelle Cassidy, who we met in the last episode, put me in touch with a family who has lived on Three Peaks since the pandemic – Johanna DeBiase and Eric Mack. They produce a podcast about their offgrid living called Our Uncertain Future and Eric recently published an article in the economic magazine Forbes. The title?  “An Off Grid Apocalyptic Version of the American Dream Starts at $900.” Oh yeah, these would definitely be my perfect guides to The Mesa. They invited me out to visit their strawbale house. So I set out onto the backroads of northern New Mexico to see this outlawland with my own eyes.

“Hi.”

“Hello!”

“You found it okay?”

“I did.”

Johanna has a good reason to ask whether I had trouble finding the place. They don’t have any sort of actual address. They had to send me a Google pin drop and a photo of their house. I drove about 20 miles east from Taos to get here, then turned off on a good dirt road headed into a neighborhood with a crazy array of homes. Some were pretty nice but there were also a lot of people living in buses and RV’s and shacks too. Johanna’s text said “the most important thing is that at the end of our driveway is a metal trashcan and that’s how you know where to turn. If there is not a metal trashcan, do not turn there LOL.” They obviously have a tried and true system for getting visitors out to their place. Driving up, their little strawbale house seems to blend into the sagebrush…a wall of windows reflecting the blue sky. But now here they are letting me in. I walk across a beautiful mandala painted onto the entrance floor.

“So this is the kitchen?” I ask. “This is beautiful.”

“This is the living room,” says Eric. 

“Really? Oh, the living room,” I say.

“Yeah, it’s the livichen,” says Jo.

“The Livichen! Yes. Gotcha.”

“This is what we have right now,” says Jo. “So that's why we started an extension so that we could have more of a table that we could sit at. And more of a living room.”

We head out to see their newly added extension. They haven’t finished putting the mud on the walls so I can still see the straw bales exposed. The original house size was pretty small.

“ It's like a tiny home,” says Jo. “So I think our house, what is the square footage of our original house?”

“Maybe 700 square feet,” says Eric. “And then this is another 600. Yeah.”

“So we're doubling it.”

They could use that space. Especially since they have a 17 year old daughter.

“ Our daughter, her bedroom is up this ladder,” says Jo. “Up that ladder is a tiny little bedroom.”

One whole side of their new space is now just south facing windows.

“ So this'll be the kitchen or a living room?”

“This will be the living room,” says Jo. “And the kitchen will be bigger and it'll have a kitchen table. This'll be the living room. This is probably, we've been doing this for a year now. It's just the two of us pretty much working on it.”

“So is the rest of the house straw bale as well?”

“Yeah. We love the straw bales, so we stuck with it. And we're also putting in this greenhouse. So this'll be like, you'll be able to plant stuff in here. We took this from the Earthship design.”

“Right. How they all have that front area where you can plant stuff and gray water goes in there,” I say.

“ There's a gray water pipe,” says Jo. “It's funny because we actually, the gray water goes into our garden back here. So the gray water comes out, it goes into our garden, then it goes back into the house. Just because of the order of things.”

“Yeah. So it's flowing through.”

“That's why we have fruit trees, bushes and stuff.”

“Ah, what kind of trees are they?”

“That one's a plum tree and that's an apple tree. The plum is doing a lot better. But it's hard to grow things out on the Mesa because there's not a lot of water. You can see over there are cisterns. All our water comes off the roof. And then you can see our solar panels there.”

“Yeah. Yeah. And are you guys completely solar?”

“There's no grid out here.”

We go back out the front door where I first came in and out into their yard where a hammock sways in the wind next to some colorful lawn chairs.

“Tell me about your view here.”

“The Sangre De Cristo Mountain,” says Jo. “It's the southern part of the Rocky Mountain range. Yeah, we have beautiful views. A friend of mine calls this the dome because it's 360 degrees of views you could see everywhere. There's no trees obscuring the view. It's all sagebrush. That's one of the perks of being out here. Also, the silence. It's just very, very, very quiet.”

“Driving in, I also saw a sign encouraging people to protect the darkness so people can enjoy the night sky.”

“Lots of Milky Way evenings. Yeah,” says Eric.

“ It's really beautiful,” says Jo. “Yeah, it's nice to just like, come home and look.”

After my tour, we return to the cozy livichen and sit down to talk. They tell me how they ended up on the Mesa and how it’s been one giant crash course in do-it-yourself everything.

“We bought this April 1st, 2020,” says Eric. “And like at that point we had like no idea if it was like a terrible idea because it's a house essentially for the price of a new car. But it was like all of our savings at the time. And at that point in the pandemic, we didn't really know which way things were going to go, if everything was going to collapse or if what actually happened happened, which is everyone and their mother moved to Taos and the housing crisis just kind of accelerated.”

Over and over this season we’ve heard about how the pandemic caused hordes of people to buy up affordable housing in communities across the American West, jacking up prices. And how that’s still sending out ripples to this day. Well, Johanna and Eric had been blithely renting in Taos when this phenomena struck. They weren’t paying as much as a lot of people but they did have  a dream – to be mortgage and rent free. They saw this tiny straw bale house on a quarter acre for sale for a little over $30,000 dollars. They debated whether it was a good buy.

“So that equation then becomes like what we actually paid for this property. And also at this point for building it out and improving it and making it livable. That's basically the same we would've paid if we had continued paying rent in town for the last five years. So at this point, if somebody were to show up with a deed from 1960 and say, actually, I own this entire mesa, – which is like a very low, but I guess a nonzero chance of happening – it would still be worth it.”

What Eric is referencing there is the lurid history of the Mesa that they’ve been digging up since they moved out here. They wanted to know how in the world this large swath of sagebrush turned into a no man’s land? When Eric and Johanna tried to get title insurance for their place, they found out aaaall about it. A New York Times article from the mid 70’s describes widespread problems with land fraud and an effort by lawmakers back then to crack down on it. Supposedly, quote “land swindlers would sell the same worthless piece of desert property over and over to different buyers.” Lots of these involved high pressure sales and failing to provide water or infrastructure.

“Huge chunks of land were subdivided, and then like advertised in maybe misleading ways. And in the case of this subdivision, it was found to be fraudulent by a court and people wound up in jail. And actually if you go back far enough, the person whose name is on a lot of this is the guy who started this, and I don't remember his name, but he wound up in jail. And everything for a while was turned over to his attorney, a man by the name of Lee Bailey, who went on to be famous for representing OJ Simpson.”

“Oh wow,” I say.

“But so basically a lot of these parcels are in the name of something called the Great Southwest Land Trust.”

I tracked down the name of the lawsuit: Robert N. Golubin versus the United States. Golubin was indicted on 26 counts of using the mail to defraud people by selling them super cheap land and pressuring them to buy more. 26,000 lots were sold at around $50 each with promises to provide surveying, water, electricity and phone lines. Eric says there’s some questions about why all the land didn’t pass along to someone else after Golubin went to prison. But they speculate that a fire in Taos may have burned a lot of the paper trail.

“And so in the seventies, after it was long bankrupt and ceased to exist,” says Eric. “They started being sold off at delinquent property tax auctions. And they still are, kind of on a regular basis. And so that's how people come into possession.”

“So the state will sell it to us, but the title companies won't insure the title,” says Jo.

“Right,” says Eric. “We had a friend who's a lawyer before we bought it do a title search for us and go down to the courthouse and try to do the chain of custody. And he said, ‘It is as if your property literally pops into existence magically in 1960,’ which is obviously not true.”

It’s a pretty similar story to the one we heard earlier this season about the no man’s land near Alamosa, Colorado. And it reminds me of the no man’s land I lived on in northern Arizona. In all likelihood, both of those areas were part of this era in which land fraud became rampant in the American West. Except that in the case of the Mesa, someone went to prison for selling the land under false pretenses through the mail and tricking folks into buying land without access to basic necessities like water and electricity. 

“So that's why a title company won't insure it. Because it's obvious that there's missing paperwork,” says Eric.

Ever since then, the Mesa community has just been building on that wild history. As I saw driving in, Johanna and Eric’s neighbors now live in a wide array of living situations.

“Actually you could probably see both ends of the spectrum if our next door neighbor were here,” says Eric. “I mean, here's why, because I mean, I work online and for like, like a software company. Whereas he hasn't even set up solar panels. So like when the sun goes down, he's got no light. And I've talked to him about it. He’s like, I've been camping for 20 years. I love it this way.”

“There's different ways people live out here,” says Jo. “So you can kind of see that we have this nice comfy straw bale home. And there are people who live in homes made out of pallets and tarps. There's people in trailers, there's people in beautiful giant adobes, there's people in yurts. There's just all different kinds of structures out here.”

They recognize that sudden growth of the Mesa community has everything to do with increasing inequality in Taos County.

“The cost of homes has doubled since 2020,” says Jo. “The average cost of a house in Taos has doubled.” 

“And rent has probably gone up as much,” says Eric.

“All the rent has gone up,” says Jo. “And I see my friends struggling to find housing and it's like, they might find a place that's low rent, but then it goes back on the rental market really quickly. Like they have to move out for some reason. Like somebody's gonna sell it or they're gonna turn to an Airbnb or they've got family coming or something. It's so unstable, they're constantly having to move.”

But there is a limiting factor when it comes to growth on the Mesa. Lots of their friends have been scrounging for a reasonable place to live, including my ex-sister-in-law Janelle as we heard last episode.

“ But I was kept telling them, Come out to the Mesa,” says Jo. “‘Come check out the Mesa. There's this house for sale here. There's this for sale.’ You know, I would urge them to come out here. And they just didn't, they just didn't do it.”

“Do you think there was a stigma?”

“I mean, there's kind of a local stigma,” says Eric. “Because what you were asking about that, like you'd heard from Janelle. I mean that's kind of the reputation.
“Mesa Rats. That’s the term she used,” I say. 

“That's the old school term,” says Jo. “People don't use that as much anymore. We used to say Mesa Rats. And you used to say, when we first moved here 20 years ago, you're like, ‘I would never live on the Mesa.’ And then, yeah. I think it took a worldwide epidemic for us to be like, ‘Maybe we could look into it.’”

I ask them whether things are improving on the Mesa as more people are pushed out of Taos in search of affordable housing, bringing in a more middle class demographic.

“We've been in Taos County for 20 years and when we first moved to the county to get here, you had to go down, what, five or six miles of a really pretty bad dirt road,” says Jo. “And now there's a community well.”

“Now it's paved,” says Jo. “There also in our neighborhood specifically, there's the Stupa, a Buddhist community and Buddhist Dharma center out here. So the vibe's a little bit more about sustainability. There's more like families here. Whereas there are other neighborhoods that are a little rougher.”

Eric says Two Peaks, where my brother and Janelle once lived, is still pretty rough. Part of that is because the roads out there still haven’t been paved.

“ Their reputation is being a little bit more like gun happy, you know, like, ‘Don't trespass or we'll shoot you’ kind of vibe,” says Jo.

My nephew’s best friend Sheehan died on Two Peaks a few years back. And Johanna and Eric know other examples.

“No shade on Two Peaks, but yeah,” says Jo. “There have been a couple murders over there. Pretty seriously.”

They say they feel safer here in Three Peaks, but only marginally.

“There's very little authority out here,” says Jo.

“I saw a Forest Service truck for the first time in five years last week,” says Eric.

“Like housing authorities not coming out here, police aren't coming out here,” says Jo. “Forest Service isn't really coming out here. There's a lot of freedom in that. Even when we wanted them to come out, we wanted them to come assess our house and we couldn't get them out here.”

“Really? What did they say?”

“They just ghosted us,” says Eric.

“I went there and I said, we need an address so my daughter could get a driver's license,” Johanna tells me. “We need a physical address. And they just took some drone pictures and called it a day. They're like, okay, it looks like there's a house here. That was it.”

And even with the new paved road, they don’t feel like emergency responders arrive in a timely fashion.

“There was a guy who kept setting his house on fire or something like that,” says Jo. “His house caught on fire like three times the first year we were here. So that makes me feel like the fire department didn't get here quick enough. We had an incident with some neighborhood dogs. Somebody had too many dogs. They were out of control. They were dangerous really. And I can't remember exactly why I had to call the police. And then that house burned down. Unfortunately, the dogs died too. The dogs burned up with it. Like I sometimes worry, leaving our daughter for the weekend or something like that. If there was an emergency, I'm more likely to give her the neighbor's information.”

So yeah, people aren’t gentrifying the Mesa nearly as fast as it’s happening in Taos.

“ It's not for everyone,” says Jo. “It's not an easy life, that's the thing. I mean, you're hauling your own water, you're composting your own humanure. You're gotta make sure you have enough batteries to keep the lights on you. You know, it's work.”

And there’s the weather. Johannna says it’s a windy, dusty life. They tell me the story of a recent storm that affected a lot of people living in structures that weren’t very well nailed down. Like this mobile home I passed as I was driving out to visit them. The side of the trailer was beautifully painted with the words Sky Cafe. But the place was in shambles. It looked like its innards had exploded.

“ Have you got any explanations for Sky Cafe?”

“The wind. The wind took the roof off of that trailer like a sardine can. Like it just peeled it off. And that was pretty recent. Our neighbor also has a trailer and there was like a 120 mile per hour squall a couple winters ago that took his roof off.”

“ It was like six in the morning,” says Eric. “I was getting ready to go to school and we got like a radar alert on the phones, an emergency alert and it was a snow squall and we're like, ‘What is a snow squall?’ And you could just kind of see this crazy thing roll through on the radar and it was just 30 seconds of intense wind. There was actually lightning and thunder and it took the roofs off of our neighbor's house over here.”

“If you go look down our driveway,” says Jo. “You'll find the roof from our neighbor's place in the road over there. And instead of moving it, people just drive around it.”

But they say there’s plenty of upside to their choice to move out here. For one thing, it definitely benefitted them financially. Now they’re being able to save for the first time. That’s how they can afford to build on the extension.

“We really loved the idea of not having a mortgage anymore,” says Jo. “And we dreamed into it that it was gonna be this awesome thing and it has been. It has been really beneficial to our lives and not having utilities on top of that.”

It took them awhile but they’re starting to make friends out here too.

“There's a woman's full moon circle every month that I go to that has been wonderful,” says Jo. “There's a lot of elders that live out here, people who started this community way back when and they're descendants. And they're like incredible people doing such cool things. I mean, I really look to them as role models. These are women in their eighties, even nineties, who are living remote and off grid, some by themselves. It's really amazing.”

Just like Janelle’s new neighborhood, there seems to be a lot of older single women finding refuge in an off grid lifestyle. Maybe that’s because women may be suffering more from the effects of the housing crisis and the lack of good paying jobs. In Eric’s article about the Mesa, he says it’s the same hard scrabble, independent pioneering spirit that brings people out here during these difficult economic times, same as it did back in the 1800’s. 

“ There still was always this kind of like legend of the west thing and, I mean, pioneering or like some sort of like independence or like resilience I think like a self-reliance, Henry David Thoreau kind of thing almost,” says Eric. “I think there's a lot of people who  you get a piece of land for a thousand bucks and then you move out and try it, and then maybe it doesn't work out. And that also explains kind of a lot of the abandoned places that you're driving by.”

But Johanna says there’s a crucial difference between our American ancestors and modern day homesteaders. We haven’t quite learned the art of good old fashioned collaboration.

“New Mexico is the old frontier and people worked together, back in the late 1800’s. People were working together and helping each other and sharing the load. And I think that we're moving in that direction now as we're sort of in the downward collapse perhaps of the western civilization. Not to sound too dramatic, but I think everybody sort of has that sense that we're running out – we're out of easy oil, things are shifting.  But for us, it's also acquiring skills that would make us useful to a community when they become more needed and we all are working together.” 

In that spirit, they’re considering how best to serve their community.

“We have managed to avoid gentrification. If anything, we're the gentrifiers at this point, Eric and I. And we're doing our best to not upset the balance of things. And hopefully we've considered maybe even creating affordable housing out here, like building something that we can rent for inexpensively to people.”

They recently bought a couple more acreages at $900 a pop to do just that. Especially now they’ve got all these mad handyman skills. Johanna says in her opinion the apocalypse is upon us and such skills will become more and more valuable.

“ I've noticed a lot lately of people are very stressed out,” says Jo. “They're stressed out about the state of the world because it's so uncertain and they're scared of what's going to happen. I think that we are less stressed about the state of the world and what's going to happen because we are prepared. And we're not like traditional preppers. But there is that sense of, yeah, if things don't go great, we are a little bit more immune from it. Another great reason to embrace the lifestyle as well.”

But they have some advice if you do decide you can hack the hardship and responsibility of this life. Eric says he recommends becoming good friends with YouTube and AI. But also…

“ I really like Albert Camus and like – what's the phrase? – “rebelling against the absurdity,” says Eric. “When your pump that you decided to install outside goes out in the middle of a shower at 10:00 PM on December 20 in a snow storm. And, you know, there's nobody else to fix it. Maybe you should just laugh and go outside in your robe and just anticipate those moments and enjoy them.”

Johnanna’s take?

“ It's easier now than ever. There's so much more off-grid technology available, solar panels and windmills, and you can just take a bus or an RV and start with that. But I would say go for it. I think there's so much opportunity. And really the more people that embrace a sustainable, minimalist lifestyle, the better for everybody.”

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