The Flats

We talk with Pulitzer finalist Ted Conover about his book Cheap Land, Colorado: Off Gridders On America’s Edge. Ted bought land in an area outside of Alamosa where he and his neighbors lived off grid with few social safety nets. His take away? It’s a difficult life with incredible views and intense poverty. But you can find lifelong friends and experience a special sense of liberation.

ME: One thing I’ve been asking everybody this season is – can off grid lifestyles become a viable solution for the affordable housing crisis in the American West? Can you scale these oddball housing choices up so they can actually make a dent in the number of severely cost burdened Westerners? If you’ve made it this far, you probably know I have a lot of skepticism for that possibility. Tiny house developments are too expensive to build…parking lots are too exposed and sketchy…so are no man’s lands…RV’s are too hard to care for in our intense winters…NIMBYism is too rampant. The obstacles go on and on.

But whether communities ever figure out how to scale these transitory situations up is sometimes irrelevant. Because lots of folks have been scaling up these crazy living situations with or without any official stamp of approval. You heard a little about these communities in episode one when I told you how my husband Ken and I bought land in what I’ve been dubbing a “no man’s lands” outside Flagstaff.  These are remote lands, usually without water or electricity, that people can buy for dirt cheap and live on in various states of development. I lived in a tent. My ex-sister is law Janelle Cassidy, who lives in a yurt, calls them “outlaw lands” because they also fly under the radar of the police and have little access to government or medical safety nets.

Recently, I sat down and talked with an award winning journalist who immersed himself for years into one of these no man’s lands. Ted Conover is the author of Cheap Land, Colorado: Off Gridders At America’s Edge. Back during the pandemic, Ted bought some property and moved into an old mobile home in what’s known by the community as the Flats. It’s a massive subdivision outside Alamosa, Colorado on the border of New Mexico. His book examined the whole picture of how such a housing development can exist in the 21st century – its history, its realities, and what could be done to help improve living conditions there. We had a really fascinating conversation.

ZAMBONI

Melodie Edwards: [00:00:00] One thing I've been asking everybody this season, can off-grid lifestyles become a viable solution for the affordable housing crisis in the American West? Can you scale up these oddball housing choices so that they can actually make a dent in the number of severely cost burdened westerners? If you made it this far, you probably know I have a lot of skepticism for that possibility.

Tiny house developments are too expensive to build. Parking lots are too exposed and sketchy. RVs are too hard to care for in our intense winters. Nimbyism is just too rampant. The obstacles go on and on. But whether communities ever figure out how to scale these transitory situations up is sometimes irrelevant because lots of folks have been scaling up these crazy living situations with or without any official stamp of approval.

You heard a little about these communities in episode one when I told you about how my husband Ken and I bought land and what I've been dubbing. No man's lands outside Flagstaff. These are remote lands, usually without water or electricity. That people can buy for dirt cheap and live on in various states of development.

I lived in a tent. My ex-sister-in-law, Janelle Cassidy, she lives in a yurt. She calls them outlaw lands because they also fly under the radar of the police and have little access to government or medical safety nets. Recently I sat down and talked with an award-winning journalist who immersed himself.

For years into one of these Snowman's lands, Ted Conover is the author of Cheap Land Colorado Off Gritters at America's Edge back during the pandemic. Ted bought some property and moved into an old mobile home and what's known by the community as The Flats. It's a massive subdivision outside of Alamosa, Colorado on the border of New [00:02:00] Mexico.

His book examined the whole picture of how such a housing development can exist in the 21st century. Its history, its realities, and what could be done to help improve living conditions. There we had a really fascinating conversation.

For Wyoming Public Radio and PRX, this is the Modern West exploring the evolving identity of the American West. I'm Melody Edwards.

Melodie Edwards: I wonder if you can just start by telling me a little bit about how you found out about the flats in this area of Colorado and, and why you started to think that it would be a good story to share.

Ted Conover: Sure. So I grew up in Denver. I wrote an earlier book about Aspen, Colorado and how that town changed from the time I was a kid.

To six or seven years ago, hearing from a sister of mine who's still in Denver about people living off grid on what's known as the Prairie or the flats in the San Luis Valley, which, yeah, is this gigantic. Open space between the Sangre De Cristo range and the San Juans that was subdivided in the 1970s into five acre lots.

Just a profusion of five acre lots that were sold for very little money and were sold in magazines and newspapers and tv. You know, buy your Colorado Ranch, $30 down, $30 a month. And people did amazingly, even though there was nothing provided besides the property lines basically, and some dirt roads that had been cut.

And I just thought, how have I gotten my whole life without knowing this existed? And then why have people just started living out there now, or more accurately? You know, in the last 15 years or so, it went from almost nobody who actually tried to build that quote unquote ranch to, you know,  a sizable number of people who decide this is a realistic option for how I might live against all odds, because as you know, the it's all do it yourself. There's nothing provided, there's no utilities. There's very few services from the county. It's not. Nice weather lots of the time. It's super windy in the spring and super cold in the winter, and there's just all kinds of reasons.

It's difficult. And yet from these pictures my sister sent, you know, I could see people were giving it a go and not in log cabins, you know, but in. Old RVs and tough sheds and half hole in the ground, half lean to built around it. I mean, really basic stuff that I did not know existed. In Colorado

Melodie Edwards: and I thought it was really interesting, your approach. You ended up partnering with La Puente, which is an amazing organization that you found that was doing all sorts of really helpful outreach to this community. Can you talk a little bit about that organization? Just tell me who they were and and how you got involved with them.

Ted Conover: So, La Puente is a social service group based in the San Luis Valley, in the town of Alamosa. They've been there oh [00:06:00] many years now. Uh, they started as a, a shelter co-founded by a group that included a nun and some other concerned citizens who. Who knew that people were dying in the winter just by not having a place to go.

And a lot of these people probably had had too much to drink, but there's just nowhere to go. So they started a shelter. It was an very early sort of rural shelter, meaning a lot of the people who came there were not townspeople, but they, they were from far-flung areas and they had tried to make it on their own and.

And when the weather got cold, especially they couldn't. Anyway, fast forward to when I got in touch with them. La Puente had started this rural outreach initiative because right around now actually, um, you know, early winter is when the beds would all get full at the shelter and it's from people who ran out of firewood [00:07:00] or, or propane if they used that or just warm Coats or food or any of the basics they needed. And so La Puente got a grant to try to connect prairie dwellers with some of these resources, and it was only enough to let them hire one full-time person for an area, basically the size of New Jersey. I mean, that's huge. So I introduced myself and said, I, you know, I'm not here with any political ax to grind. I'm just curious. Who is out there and how are they managing and why would they submit themselves to, you know, what's, what's a pretty tough life? And um, long story short, La Puente said I could become. Uh, sort of the volunteer rural outreach worker. You know, they set me up with the guy who's full-time, who I really, uh, [00:08:00] liked a lot and I'm still in close touch with him.

His name's Matt Little. He was a Air Force veteran who, uh, himself lived off grid and didn't think of these as clients. He said, these are my neighbors. I, I'm not doing service. I'm helping my neighbors and that was a really important distinction to him 'cause he's not a fan of welfare or handouts. He's a fan of mutual aid and that really fit with the culture there, I think.

And people respected Matt and, and Matt slowly explained the basics that anyone had spent any time living out there would know, but which I did not like how to not. Frighten somebody when you roll up on their property. And, uh, but that I thought would be a way I could meet people and maybe do a little good at the same time.

Melodie Edwards: And then eventually you decide that you're gonna actually move there. And then you, you found a place to park a camper trailer and you met the Gruber family. I wonder if you can tell me about them and just kind of your, your living situation with them and, and what you came to find out about why they were there.

Ted Conover: The Gruber are mom, dad, and, um, five girls. They were all being homeschooled. They had sought help from La Puente when the dad needed cancer surgery on his colon. He had had that, but he'd been un unable to work. And, uh, LA Puente had given them, you know, various kinds of assistance and introduced me to them.

The idea was I would park my camper trailer in one corner of their five acres and pay 'em $150 a month, and they all found me very amusing as I tried to figure out how to stay warm in my camper and how to manage around all their dogs and animals like they. They had a huge number of dogs.

Stacey, the mom is from Casper, and they had lived outside Casper and gone to public schools, I don't know, maybe three years before I got there. And then they'd spent a year in Greeley, outside Denver. Frank worked as a house painter, and then they just thought, you know. If we could just reduce our expenses to basically nothing, maybe we wouldn't all have to worry and work so much.

And it's a really seductive idea, isn't it, that if you just scale down enough. Maybe you don't have to live that rat race life. And, um, but they were barely scraping by. I mean, to the point of not having a working car a lot of the time, and not just for want of gasoline. Sometimes they didn't have gasoline or a working car and you know, neighbors help neighbors out there.

But there's also a limit and you don't wanna be, as they say, too, asky. And so they were anyway, happy to make some money from my rent and happy to introduce me to their neighbors. And that became sort of my launchpad out there

Melodie Edwards: at a certain point that stops working out. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about why, but you also end up deciding, Hey, I wanna buy some land out here myself.

Ted Conover: yeah.

Melodie Edwards: So maybe you can talk a little bit about that transition and, and how that went, looking for land.

Ted Conover: Sure. So I'm still very close to them. I see them every single time I'm out there. I on my to-do list right now, is Christmas present for the Gruber? 'cause uh, I've gotta send one. But, um, [00:12:00] there's just a lot of chaos. They moved after I'd been there. About a year, they moved to a different place that had a well, well, part of the deal was that the people selling them this new place got to stay on the land while they were making the payments.

And it's a older couple, both of them, veterans, I think I was already there when they finally arrived. I had the primo corner lot with the good view, but they. They put their, their camper trailer right next to mine and they had, um, you know, two pit bulls on a chain who, who barked a lot. You know, they'd have arguments late at night and they, there were firearms involved.

The dad is a. Big aficionado of firearms and had grown marijuana for a long time and was quite used to traveling [00:13:00] with weapons wherever he went, and he just, that was his life habit now, but he also enjoyed shooting them, and that's fine, unless it's. After midnight and the shooter's been drinking. You know what I'm saying?

So there's just minutes where you think, oh gosh, here I live in the middle of this vast, quiet prairie with the most beautiful skies. And why am I listening to the generator and the, the sounds of the AK at 2:00 AM And um, so yeah, that gave me a little. Incentive to see if I could find my own place.

There's a zillion places to buy and if. [00:14:00] You spend time out there, it's almost like you can't not think of buying one because they're, you know, four or five, $6,000 for five acres. And in fact, Harper's Magazine, which assigned me to write about this initially said they'd even pay for me to buy five acres.

And why hadn't I gotten around to doing that? And I had to admit, it sounded like ridiculous that I had not spent their money. I have a thing against wasting money and to buy five acres out there in many cases is kind of to waste it because for one thing, you'll never get that back right away. There's so such an oversupply of these lots that there's just really no market.

And then the other thing is. If you try to live out there part-time, which was my goal, anything you leave behind isn't very secure. Right? It might disappear, [00:15:00] and I thought, I'm only gonna buy land if it's next to somebody. Who I know and trust, and I found such a place, uh, next to a man named Troy who lived out, still lives there.

He's lived there his whole life. His dad was a cowboy before it was even subdivided. And uh, Troy was a truck driver. He lost a leg and a farm accident. He's an amazing, wonderful guy and he keeps an eye on everything, including the decrepit trailer from the seventies or eighties that came with my property, which I have sort of worked to fix up since I bought it.

I fixed the fence anyway. I've got my own place there, and when I bought it, it really changed how I felt. I was, I wasn't. No longer just like a tenant or a visitor, but like I felt these are my neighbors now, and it made a big difference.

Melodie Edwards: Like it's off the grid and everybody's excited to be sort of free from society, but there's some basics that people are kind of trying to move towards. Like you mentioned well, this, this issue of being off the grid, but you still have these needs for certain things and the government will get involved. They do check to make sure that folks have septic systems and that caused a lot of trouble for some people that you met.

Ted Conover: It did, especially right before I got there, there had been a big crackdown, like these septic system laws had been on the books for, I don't know, more than 10 years.

You know, it's a zoned rural area. You know, which oddly enough was also still being used by cattle contractors who dropped their herds off, even though it was supposedly a residential subdivision. So the county requires you'd have a septic system if you're gonna spend more than 10 days a year, I think, [00:17:00] on your land.

But they. Hadn't enforced that rule. Oh, there's other rules that if you build anything, any structure, it needs to be at least 600 square feet. So you couldn't have a tiny house, for example, and you needed to buy certain permits, including this one really outrageous people, a driveway permit just to turn off the dirt onto your own dirt.

So people had recently basically been frightened away by threats of daily fines if they did not immediately get a septic system and you can't get one immediately. You know, it takes weeks or months to find somebody to do the tests and all that.

And so the, the county, which is. The third poorest county in Colorado, it's Castillo County. They, they have very little money for enforcement, but they found it and [00:18:00] started enforcing in a way that freaked people out. I mean, it really, it attracted some right wing constitutional sheriffs to the area. You know, it really.Had a big backlash as I was getting settled there. That was dying down a little bit, but a lot of people still didn't have septic systems. They still don't, I'd say more due than before. Septic systems, I think now cost, I don't know, eight or $9,000, something like that. And wells cost 22, 20 3000 and up. My well, uh, is 400 feet deep and it didn't initially work.

The pump didn't work, and I had no idea what it would take. It turned out, it took this interesting man who, he's not an electrician, but he is like an electricity fan. He told me he's, he's got [00:19:00] Asperger's and electricity is his thing, but he basically would work on my old solar. Gear for free. If I would just give him like a switch box or you know, that roll of wire now and then, and he's a, a deer and troubled man who would, like, he felt if we just kept trying the well, it would work one day.

And one day it did this water gushed out of a hose that was on the bottom of a pressure tank. It was like Beverly hillbillies or something with the oil coming up. But yeah, it's that kind of. Thing where nobody hires an electrician, they do it themselves. Nobody hires a plumber. Like it's, nobody hires a mechanic.

It's all do it yourself. And you know, I'm not about to be the first person to hire a, an electrician, so I have to find neighbors who I can trade something with or pay [00:20:00] them some something. But people are more used to bartering than being paid. And it's so different from where I live in New York.

Melodie Edwards: Yeah. And, and that kind of gets at like a major feature of this area that you found, it seems like – and that I discovered myself living out in a community like this – is that reliance on your community to create a sense of safety when you're surrounded by people who are firing off guns in the middle of the night. You do need to create a certain bonding, um, among neighbors. Can you talk a little bit more about just that community reliance?

Ted Conover: It's so funny, like the word community. If you were just to drive out there with me [00:21:00] this afternoon, you'd be looking hard to see the community, like, you know, okay, what? What does anybody share here?

Like, here's an ancient church that doesn't look like it's been used in a long time. There's no schools out there. They're all around the edge of the valley. There's no community center, you know, but. People know who's out there and they are in touch with Facebook Messenger probably more than anything else.

They've all got like one or two bars of cell signal and um, and everybody refers to each other by their first name. It's, I think lots of times they don't know their last names. I remember being surprised when I would drive up to introduce myself to somebody and. And I'd be halfway through my little spiel about how I'm with La Puente, but I'm also a writer.

And, and they go, oh, I know who I know all about you. [00:22:00] I, I, I know your truck. I know people recognize vehicles. They, um, and that's community, right? But another part of community is being told kind of who to be careful of like. That person never comes out, never talks to anybody, and you shouldn't really even go to their gate or that person has some warrants out or that person might, I've heard it's, he's an unregistered sex offender.

People pair up like for shopping trips into town, so you don't use extra gas. Right. My neighbor, Paul, who introduced himself, the first words out of his mouth were, hi, I'm Paul, I'm gay, which totally was like, I, I never had anyone introduce themselves that way, much less in the middle of. Nowhere where you think you might need to be careful about announcing that everywhere.

But he was not [00:23:00] in the least concerned and he would love to go shopping with two women who lived within like three miles. And he'd, he said, yeah, the prairie bitches are going to Walmart this afternoon. You know, that's community. Or if somebody's house catches on fire and you see they are staying at on Troy's couch, I mean, that's also, that's community.

Melodie Edwards: And yet there was, a, a moment in your book when you are seriously considering buying yourself a gun. And that gun culture that is maybe even necessary out there. There's just like a lack of police presence, like a feeling that even if you call the police, they're not necessarily gonna come, or, you know, I, I mean, I experienced that myself. You know, that it's just like. They're afraid they won't even be able to find you.

Ted Conover: Yeah. With reason. Yeah. So though I'm still, uh, I go back and forth about whether I [00:24:00] should own a firearm or not. I enjoy shooting pistols, but, you know, occasionally, I don't know, I might have guests who have a kid or something, you know, I, I'm, I'm scared to have a pistol around at the same time.

The people who believe most strongly in firearms out there seem to be people who have big marijuana plants, uh, approaching harvest time. 'cause those things, you know, are worth more than a thousand dollars a piece. And you might have a dozen and they get stolen. I mean, you go into town and you come back and you're.

Christmas tree sized marijuana, Bush is gone. So that's why there's, yeah, a lot of dogs on chains and that just kind of goes with weaponry. You know, there's a lot of veterans who are very comfortable with firearms. Um. I think anybody who is a little bit vulnerable maybe should consider having [00:25:00] a firearm.

And that could be because you're elderly or maybe you're female or maybe who knows you have something somebody wants or somebody's mad at you. From five years ago. Yeah. In the course of excavating my mobile home out there on the property I bought, I came across both a derringer under a mattress and. A shotgun, like inside a vinyl raincoat, tucked sort of behind the refrigerator.

My neighbor, Troy, who had owned the property. Troy had owned it for five years and then left, and he had never known that those firearms were in there. And so they're everywhere. And he asked if he could give them, if he could return them to the family who had sold the property, and I said, yes, and I still am not sure I should have done that, but I did.

Melodie Edwards: You were there right before the pandemic hit and then you, you were there during, and I just wonder if you can talk a little bit about how that historic event affected the community.

Ted Conover: I was, uh, sort of paranoid that I would be, because I'm traveling more than most of them, that I would be the one to bring COVID to our little area, but.

I think in retrospect that was naive. You know, people going to town. For jobs and COVID found its way there. There's a lot of resistance to vaccine mandates as you can imagine. And um, most people were very much not in favor of that. And people ask me, you know, you live in New York, is that, do you think this is real?

I still remember. And I said, yeah, well, hey, I live next door to a doctor who says at his hospital there's three cooler. Trailers out front for the morgue. So I said, yeah, I think it's real. I remember meeting this old [00:27:00] cowboy who's a local historian, big farmer. I offered my forearm. I said, we are gonna bump elbows or, or fists.

And he goes, oh, you're not one of them are you? And I said, Hey, I, I live in New York. And so, yeah. And he goes, oh, gimme a break. So many people were like that. Fast forward to two years later, he came within an inch of death due to respiratory. Infection. He was hospitalized many days. His kids all thought they'd lose him.

You know, there's a lot of older guys, especially who are not in good shape, who have diabetes or alcoholism, and several of them died though they never, they die at home or in their truck. And so you never really know that they died of COVID or not,[00:28:00]

but I'm pretty sure that four or five. Of these guys must have, and that's sort of what's locally believed right now is they probably got COVID. So that was just like a photo negative of my experience in New York where I, you know, I'm a professor and all my classes were online and uh, you know, we just didn't go out and.

We ordered everything in and we wiped down our shopping bags. I mean, it was a little over the top there wasn't it for a while.

Melodie Edwards: A lot of folks, the reason they're choosing that lifestyle is they, they already have a certain level of distrust of institutions, it seems like then that is only going to like push them to a further edge. You know, I mean like a lot of the folks that I know that did a lot of off the grid living were maybe more like hippies and sort of more in the left wing politically. And it seems like this, this can kind of move people in a rightward direction just by the nature of that distrust of, of institutions.

Ted Conover: Absolutely. Or of any kind of compulsion, right? Any sort of government mandate, especially one involving your body. But yeah, and then I would just, you know, a lot of my friends on the East coast, imagine it is solid Trump country.

Trump has a lot of support there, but I think. People's attitude is more libertarian like, just rather not have any government at all and may not take the trouble to vote just 'cause it requires some gas or some planning or you know, it's in another entanglement in the system that hell, if you can avoid it, why not?[00:30:00]

Melodie Edwards: As you're working for La Puente, I wonder if you saw ways in which the community could have been better served, how could the state or, or the county or any services have helped even more especially as we're having just this horrible, affordable housing problem.

Ted Conover: So that's really an interesting and tricky question, like one.

The thing that a bunch of my neighbors said, asked me to propose to La Puente was, um, a free community. Well, a place people could just go fill up their water, right? And it would save people so much trouble and expense and the appeal is obvious, but there's various reasons La Puente didn't wanna do that.

Um. One is it goes against the state water division's rules for how a well can be used. My well can only be used [00:31:00] to supply my needs inside my dwelling, like I'm can't even use it to water my garden. And Troy has an agricultural well, which can be used outdoors on fields, but. You know, he's not allowed to use that, not to fill up the tote on the trailer behind your truck.

So La Pointe didn't see a way they could do that without violating some rules. And also too, they didn't wanna have to police it. And also, yeah, you'd need some sort of electricity source, which means equipment subject to theft. That goes into the next question of should a lot of people be living out on the arid prairie to begin with?

Because it doesn't sustain a lot of life. Right? And without trash collection, everybody out there is using their burn barrels and their burying stuff, [00:32:00] and. The land is fragile and wow. If people lived on all of those five acre lots, it would be ugly. It really would. Yeah. Then you get into the question of is it better to encourage people to live in town, and I don't like that idea.

That is somehow more sustainable. But there's a lot of people out there sort of natural resource people who, who say, that's subdivision, you know, that should have been BLM land. That should never have become a place to park your ruined RV and change its oil. Beyond that is, yeah. What, what's the best support to give to people with very.

Few resources, period. And I think, you know, if, if you're asking me it would be you can support them with better healthcare and, [00:33:00] and, and better education.

Melodie Edwards: I think it was your wife that maybe called it a, a prairie ghetto. Yeah. It's just a yet another example of an issue of poverty and the gap between the haves and have nots.
It just looks very different than what we sort of think of the urban version.

Ted Conover: Exactly. And you don't think of the, you know, westward bound settlers of. 150 years ago as poor people who would live in a ghetto. Right? That's like a different category somehow. But I think that an awful lot in common in terms of being people with almost nothing who were willing to leave everything behind and try putting down roots in an unpromising environment and hoping they'd make a go of it.

Yeah, there is definitely a through line. To both places, right? To like the Rocky Mountain West, you know, with wagon trains and all that. [00:34:00] And then urban ghettos that have the kind of social problems, you know, relationship abuse and malnutrition and drug addiction.

Melodie Edwards: And I know that one of the things that you loved so much about this experience was living on the land, being out there. I just wonder if you can kind of try to describe what it was that you loved so much about living in the flats.

Ted Conover: I feel totally different when I am there. The landscape goes on for miles and miles and miles, so I, there's this. Feeling of expansiveness that you're not boxed in, you can breathe a little easier. There's not a lot of competition socially. Right. Whether it's. Traffic, which feels like a kind of [00:35:00] social competition.

Um, it doesn't exist out there.

The skies, you know, are both just so awe inspiring at night. You know, they inspire us like a spiritual feeling of beautiful forces much greater than ourselves. And then at the end of the day is my favorite. 'cause the sun, you know, there's all these prairie grasses and bushes, and when the sun gets low enough, they all sort of start to glow this golden glow.

And sometimes there's an amazing sunset that everybody's posting on their Facebook. At the same time, really, you know, often the great sunsets, you see several versions and all your neighbor's feeds.

I never spent more than six weeks there in winter. I. I would not be quite so [00:36:00] enthusiastic sounding if I had just done that. Right. Because it's pretty grim and you kinda wish you, there was somebody nearby you could have coffee with or, um, a place you could hang out that wasn't so forbidding looking. My, my feelings about it are complicated and then they're mixed with this instant nostalgia I get when I leave.

And then a sort of. I'll have been out there long enough and I'll think, okay, time to hit town.

Melodie Edwards: This compulsion to go west is kind of like related to this sort of survivalism of that the country was sort of founded upon and, and that impulse and it is sort of related to that feeling of wanting to own a little bit of that freedom of what you experienced out on that land and sort of our history as Americans, how it's related to this off the grid lifestyle that maybe people aren't even aware of is out there.

Ted Conover: You know, the way the United States expanded and expanded and expanded West, west West, and came to control these vast areas of land. Came to be seen as part of our national destiny, right? It is very much who we are as Americans. I think this whole idea of moving into embracing some might now say occupying or colonizing a space.

But it, that whole history is shrouded with a lot of warm tones. I think in the national story. There's also just the visceral experience of driving and say, coming over a hill and seeing a vast expanse laid out before you that is moving. It's [00:38:00] just sort of maybe apart from any national history that's that's just a kind of.

Thing that people everywhere I think would feel, so my book's been translated into some other languages and one of them is French and I was in um, Marsai a year ago, and there were some really smart people in the audience and two of them were professors and one of them said, what I want to know from you, in French, we have one word.

Right. You know, know it from the French Revolution. You have the same word, liberty, but then you have this extra word, which is freedom that we don't have. And can you explain to me the difference between those two things? And I thought, whoa, what an interesting question. Because we use them both a lot. [00:39:00] I said, you know, I think liberty is used mostly in terms of political rights.

The right of an individual, uh, versus the government, right civil liberties and give me liberty or give me death freedom. By contrast seems to refer more to your ability to pick up and move if you want. I think you, you're not tied to that job. You're free to go. You're not tied to that relationship.

You're free to go. You're free to look for something better. In fact, you should, if you're unhappy, you're free to choose an electric car or. A diesel ram truck. You know, that's your freedom of choice as a consumer. That's not a liberty so much. Right? It's a freedom or your freedom to, um, kiss the gender of person you're attracted to.

That's a freedom. I said there's a lot, there's overlap and we kind use one to explain [00:40:00] the other, but I do think we have. In America some, a lot of ideas around freedom and living our life with freedom that are connected to the subject of my book to um. Building a house where you want to build it and making it big or making it small, right?

And, um, making it pink or putting up vinyl, siding, whatever you want to do. Um, these are choices as Americans apparently we get to make and. So I do feel that, and I feel free heading out of Denver on I 25 as the traffic gets lighter and lighter as I go through Colorado Springs into Pueblo and then get off I 25 entirely.

I feel so much better and I feel more free and I generally feel more free in the valley and it has something [00:41:00] to do with space there as well.

Melodie Edwards: I wondered if you could just kind of give us an update since the book is, you know, kind of where it leaves off. How's the economy doing in Costilla County? What's going on with your land? Are you spending very much time there? What, what's sort of the status?

Ted Conover: Yeah, so I don't think life out there has changed a lot since I finished writing my book. Every spring, new tents appear and new constructions begin out there. By September or October, most of them have been aba, have been abandoned. Uh, some old timers passed away this year, not from COVID, but from other reasons.

People I'd written about actually Paul, the aforementioned Paul who would shop with the Prairie bitches. He, um. He stopped taking his blood pressure medication and was dead within about 10 days. Uh, he was very upset about the politics of the country. He would [00:42:00] post on, on social media and he, he was just deeply worried, but he wasn't always worried about Trump or about Biden. He was just worried about things falling apart.

Melodie Edwards: La Puente's doing okay? Their, their services are, they're still being able to provide and…

Ted Conover: they are

Melodie Edwards: Great.

Ted Conover: They're in a position of strength, and if anyone listening is looking for a good charity, uh, they, they qualify.

I still, uh, hang out with the director of La Puente every time I'm out there. Uh, I've stayed friends with him and this is a little unusual for me. I, it's my seventh book and normally I finish and I'm onto the next, but, ah. I don't feel finished in the valley. I,

I just upgraded the batteries and my solar power set up to, um, [00:43:00] to lithium. I'm so excited about it. I can't wait to go out there and charge and recharge them. I was there four times this last summer for a couple weeks, a shot. Now that I have a, well, I have to turn the water off when it gets cold. In addition to all the people I catch up with, I am just still the owner of my five acres and the taxes are.

I think they're now $64 a year. I still own my trailer. I still think about it when I'm gone. I have a neighbor who somehow shares his internet with my trailer via an antenna from his internet, and it's enough to power some security cameras. So I get to watch the dogs visiting my property after it snows and the birds that perch on the porch and I.

Uh, miss it and I can't wait to go back and so. [00:44:00] Yeah, I'm not sure what that means for my next project, that my mind is still thinking about that valley.

Melodie Edwards: This has been such a delight. I really appreciate it and uh, best of luck with the next project.

Ted Conover: Okay. Thanks Melanie.

Melodie Edwards: Take care.

Ted Conover Bye-bye. Good bye.

Melodie Edwards: That was Ted Conniver, author of Cheap Land Colorado off Gridders at America's Edge. You should definitely go and check out his book to hear the full story. Next time on Cheap Dirt, we meet a couple who have been homesteading and organic farming on the high Prairie of Wyoming. For decades when cancer struck, they thought they had to move into town, but then they realized they couldn't afford to buy a house anywhere else, so they doubled down and made the best of things.

Celeste: So we began to look at places, and two things happened. One was that no. [00:45:00] We cannot replicate what we have here with the amount of money that we could invest. But the other part is we see a lot of people moving and they change the fabric. I realized that if we moved, we would become those people. We'd be people, we would be changing the fabric of wherever we moved
Gary: It's like the “Milagro Bean Field War”.

Are you living off grid? Or in a quirky housing situation. Share your story with us on social media at Modern West Pod, or email us at the modernWest@gmail.com. I'm your host, melody Edwards. The story editor for this episode is Camila Ska. Sound Design is by me. Thanks also for help from Connor McCracken Flusher, Mike Gray, Cody Hume, Milena Nielsen, and Diana Denison.

So guess what? We're collecting stories for an upcoming podcast season about the unique way that love manifests itself in the American West, whether that's romantic or [00:46:00] otherwise. So if you have a great love story, we'd love to hear it. Pitch us your idea by leaving a message on my work phone at. 3 0 7 7 6 6 2 4 0 5 or email us at the modernWest@gmail.com.

Make sure to give us some contact info where we can get back to you. To see photos and videos about this story, visit us@themodernwest.org. Help us spread the word about this season of the podcast by leaving us a review on your Apple Podcast app, our theme song. Is by screen Door porch. The modern West is a production of PRX and Wyoming Public Media.