Rural Life, Marginal Life, Good Life

or: Margaret likes Foghorn Mag

Up at the top here I want to say that I’m not ignoring current events, I just don’t see myself as a hot take writer. I have infinite love and support for the anti-ICE rebels, and the protests across the country give me life. I believe that we will win. I believe that we are many and they are few. I believe that we’ve all read the “first they came for” poem and we know that we have to stop fascism here and now, with the first people they come for, and that it’s all one struggle.

The other thing I want to say at the top is that I have two new books out. One is The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, which I’ve been talking about for awhile, the third book in the Danielle Cain series. The other is called The Defenders Almanac, and it’s a companion roleplaying game to the board game Defenders of the Wild. The almanac and its roleplaying game work entirely standalone from the board game. I didn’t write the game system, but alongside a few others I spent years developing the world and writing in it. I got to write lots of stories about animal witches fighting giant machines, and I think you’ll like it. It’s also designed to be readable and entertaining for people who aren’t even going to play the RPG.

Rural Life, Marginal Life, Good Life

This morning, at around 11:40am, I remembered that rural post offices close at noon on Saturdays. This was a problem, because I owed someone some overnight mail and I live in the woods and the post office I usually go to is about a 20 minute drive. Google Maps told me there was another one, in a tiny town only 11 minutes away, so I threw on my Real Tree crocs and jumped into my van and sped off down windy roads and then found myself… at a big farm nestled into the mountains. Instead of a post office, there was a little unattended farm stand selling tomatoes by the honor system.

I parked for a second and approached a middle-aged blonde woman driving a side-by-side. I was wearing black tactical pants, a punk vest with a burning cop car on it, and a Hello Kitty free Palestine shirt. There was gold jewelry in my face and I had sparkly purple nails and my hair was down and wild. “Google Maps told me there’s a post office here,” I told her, “but I’m guessing there isn’t one.”

She laughed, and we talked for awhile about how Google Maps dumps people at her door from time to time. She had assumed I was there for a bluegrass festival, which was miles away in a different county, which Google Maps also dumps people at her doorstep for every year. That I might be going to a festival was a fair enough assumption based on how I was dressed and the van I was driving. After chatting amicably for awhile, I drove away. I sure didn’t get what I needed into the mail today, but I had this nice reminder that I like country life, and that Appalachians aren’t afraid of strangers. People in this area tell me or my guests “we like all kinds around here” on a somewhat regular basis.

Of course, not everyone around here “likes all kinds,” and most people around here don’t tend to vote in ways that indicate that they like all kinds, but by and large people in Appalachia just want to live and let live.

Waiting in my mailbox when I got home were my contributor copies of Foghorn Mag, “an anarchist record of marginal life.” It is, in short, a print newspaper for rural anarchists. I wrote about my experience building and living in a 12x12 off-grid A-frame cabin, and that article sits alongside primers on how to start a land project, how to couch-surf, how to use clay paint, advice for dealing with county inspectors, memoir about how preparing firewood is the rock that you keep pushing up that hill (maybe at the top you can make a deal with god?), and plenty more beside.

To quote the paper’s own description of itself:

Foghorn Mag is a semiannual print journal, an anarchist record of marginal living. It is for the squatters, off-grid freaks, land defenders, woods dwellers, communal weirdos, and all those living out of bounds, beyond the grasp of the landlords, the county, the state. Those who have lived this way for generations, and those who are just beginning. Foghorn is published from traditional Twana & S’klallam territory on the so-called Olympic Peninsula.

I think that it’s also for all people of insatiable curiosity, for people who are always happy to learn how other people are doing things, for people who want to keep every option open in their lives.

When I first started traveling, I went from city to city. After a few years, as I moved from focusing on the alter-globalization movement to forest defense, I went from town to town instead. I found myself staying at land projects both functional and dysfunctional instead of just at squats and punk houses (of roughly the equal ratio of functional vs. dysfunctional… no one way is better). I started showering in outside showers and shitting in compost toilets and learning the subtle differences between east and west coast hippies and between rural hippies and rural punks and also just the people who have always lived outside or close to nature who can’t really get plugged into a subcultural box.

When I was first exposed to rural life, it didn’t feel accessible to me, not really. I was always just passing through these various land projects, and had no particular income because activism was my full time job. It’s much harder to play accordion on the street for your money when you live rurally. (Though I will shout out the farmer’s market on Pender Island in British Columbia, were I made a few Canadian dollars while hollering terrible songs with the rest of the punks. I can’t believe I pretended for so many years that what I played wasn’t folk punk.)

The simple truth of it was that most land projects I stayed on, even though plenty of people there were low-income, the land itself was almost always bought with generational wealth. And it’s harder to casually move onto a land project than into a punk house in a city, most of the time. It’s harder to meet the people living rurally when you’re not already, and it’s higher stakes to take on a new landmate in the country than to let someone rent out the laundry room in your urban punk house for $50 or whatever (shout out to the house in Santa Cruz that let me rent out the laundry room for awhile).

I don’t know if there’s actually been a shift in how land projects get started or if I just got lucky, but when I finally moved out of my van, I met someone who’d started a land project by just, well, working their ass off at various jobs and by applying for various grants for first-time farmers.

It’s odd because rural, off-grid life is remarkably cheap once you get it set up. It’s just not always easy to get it set up.

I love living rurally. I think that’s the crux of this particular post. I love listening to the mourning doves and the windchimes. I love that there’s physical labor integrated into my daily life, moving mulch around or gardening or clambering onto the roof. I love having space and I love having privacy and I love how having company over feels like an occasion.

I love how seamlessly rural ties into, well, to quote the tagline of Foghorn Mag, the marginal life. I love how building bookshelves and plotting an outdoor kitchen for gatherings feels like a logical extension of when I used to couchsurf and hitchhike full-time.

I spent this week researching Bread & Puppet, the radical theater that started in New York City in 1963 and moved to Vermont seven years later, where they use the open space available to them to do pageantry on a massive scale. One of the founders of Bread & Puppet, Elka Schumann, was born in the USSR, but her grandfather was an American socialist from the turn of the century who wrote a book (alongside his wife who is rarely credited) about “living the good life” rurally, a book that heavily inspired the back to the land movement of the 60s and 70s.

And there’s so much to think about that book and the back to the land movement, too much for me to easily piece apart. Elka’s great-great grandfather, the grandfather of her grandfather, was a coal baron in Pennsylvania, and family money helped her grandfather live and write about “the good life.” But her grandfather, and especially Elka herself, helped so many other people live that way. The overwhelming majority of people I know who live off-grid (or just in deep rural settings, in these “marginal lives,” are doing so not by relying on generational wealth, but instead relying on the anarchist social safety net that we build for one another. The anarchist social safety net is real, because we believe in solidarity. It’s at the core of our politics.

People work odd and terrible jobs to save up a little money to build tiny shacks, but they’re are able to live fantastic (or at least not-boring) lives by doing so in community with one another. Chores and shared, food is shared. We try, where we can, to keep one another from falling through the cracks.

The last land project I lived on (my current spot is more of “a house on a mountain” than a land project) didn’t feel like a commune, but instead a community. I could walk from my cabin to the trailer down the hill and borrow a cup of sugar—or more importantly, hang out in the barn and play tabletop roleplaying games together. We started projects with one another, but as neighbors and friends and not all together as one unit. We had meetings from time to time, to talk about the communal work that needed doing. We had frustrations with one another. One person was doing most of the work in the ostensibly communal garden. Who is going to watch the chickens? I was regularly frustrated that I felt like I was the only one fixing the outdoor shower, and other people were regularly frustrated with me (though of course they were always wrong and I was entirely blameless in every conflict). We didn’t even agree about the name of the land project. Half of us called it one thing, the other half another thing. It worked. It felt like anarchy, like anarchism.

Of course, eventually, it stopped working. This isn’t really a memoir about that land project, though, so I won’t get into the details. Climate change was probably the single largest factor—the creek kept flooding worse and worse, and it was far beyond our capacity to shore it up enough to save the buildings in the field that should never have been a flood plain. Covid, and its attendant isolation, was probably the single biggest factor for me and what led me a little further north, still in Appalachia, into a brick house on the grid.

I also realize, more and more, what’s beautiful about cities. What’s beautiful when there are simply more people together, more capable of building complex social ecosystems. For my life, I’m greedy. I want access to both. I want to go to shows and dance with queer people to post-punk, and I want to sunbathe naked on the porch and listen to the wind chimes and the mourning doves.

So, while I’m alive, I’ll do both to the best of my ability.

And, anyhow, if Foghorn Mag sounds like something you’d like to read, including my essay about triangle houses, you can order copies for $6 (that’s cheap!) by writing foghornmag@riseup.net.