Walk #225: Fire in Abandoned Cars...

Commotion on the ridge the other day, Joni tells me. A fire started amongst one of our neighbor's abandoned car collections. It is a Redneck thing: to have oodles of various (sometimes vintage) cars in various states of unrepair lying about your property. Drives me nuts.

I walked over to inspect the damage. The neighbor's kids blamed the fire on someone who was camping in one of the cars. I sort of suspected as much, as a couple of weeks ago, Angel found the garbage collection from the said Camper (tasted good, she barked).

One very cheap way of surviving in California is the "homeless camp". Since we had a fire last summer that destroyed 205 of the 250 structures in Concow (almost all of them uninsured), there are plenty of former Concowians living in the woods.

This fire is a possible consequence of such rural homelessness. As we descend further into barbarism in this country, we shall see more and more of this sort of creative living arrangement. Collect your GA check through a post office box, or your unemployment check, or your SSI check--squirrel it away and live as cheaply as you can during the eight months without rain that we have in this part of California.

With unemployment still clicking up, despite talk of more hopeful economic news--look for more creative folks to be living in old abandoned cars. Camping in the woods. Eeking out an existence.

What to expect in the next couple of years? With real unemployment hovering around 20 percent, I'm thinking Obama will announce a new WPA program within a year or so. The most hopeful thing he could do is to close down the more than 700 foreign military bases and announce the end of the American Empire. Not the end of the American Dream. (Which is what we are facing now.)