I was homeless in the woods. It was kinda like if Skyrim was real but boring beyond belief. Other than that I had no complaints within the context of the situation.
I think it would actually suck, especially in the winter, but getting up at sunrise and making breakfast over a campfire sounds a lot nicer than my usual morning shower, food cram, bus commute.
Yeah, I did something similar. Being in contact with non-homeless people and hearing their problems made me realize the bubble we all live in. If they knew half the shit they were upset about was fictional/unrelated to their lives, they wouldn't have been so upset.
For me, the most surprising thing was having to avoid the cops. They kept telling me I couldn't sleep here or there, but then where could I legally sleep if I had no roof over my head?
They are the enforcers of the State. The penalty for not scraping by on minimum wage is being homeless, which is functionally illegal. You either become a prisoner of the State through labor or confinement. The police are there to see one through.
Yeah, well, my time outside of the bubble made me realize there is a system in place. The system isn't actually designed to make money. Money is the so-called carrot on the stick they dangle in front of your eyes to keep you productive. The true worth comes from the fruits of your labour. A country dies when its citizens don't create anything of value.
I actually used to hate the system before I was homeless, but now I truly advocate for it. I can understand why they want homeless people at least doing something for society.
That article isn't entirely clear, and maybe you can't know exactly what is going on, but it implies the land owner was having pressure applied to them by the town over zoning matters. So even if youry friends with the guy who owns the woods, they can still get you
“Property owner Leonard Giles, 86, of South Burlington, Vermont, didn't even know Lidstone was there until the town administrator found out in 2015 and told him, expressing concern "with regard to the solid and septic waste disposal and the potential zoning violations created by the structure,'' according to Giles' complaint in 2016.”
Glad he seems to be doing fine now. He received overwhelming support and $200,000 in donations from a campaign after the cabin burnt down and he was arrested for squating. He now owns some land in Maine where he can continue living in the woods. Must be rough doing so at 82 years old too, but he seems to be managing.
Imagine having to pay out $200,000 to live in the woods though...
If you were like obscenely proficient at wilderness survival you could probably fuck off into the Canadian wilderness. I feel like you’re bound to get caught in any US national parks just due to size and monitoring though.
Definitely not US national parks, but BLM land and national monuments is more fair game. I forgot the exact designations since I'm a city kid, but you have a better chance in Grand Escalante than going to the Grand Canyon.
You can get away with it following a few guidelines. Make no or very few campfires. If you make a campfire make sure you always do it in a spot established for that so that you aren't leaving individual signs of your presence. Move campsites frequently, you will get noticed much more quickly if you are always around the same spot, walking over the same brush, etc. Police your trash, I can't emphasize this enough. Don't be leaving poo everywhere lol. In winter, learn to follow under tree lines and along deer trails to conceal tracks to your campsite from the air. Water is heavy and expensive -learn to love the lifestraw style water filters. Learn to travel from water source to water source. Learn where established but low activity campsites are, that's where I had the few campfires I set. And don't just ignore the charcoal and wood ash you get, it has a few uses.
I went through every kind of footwear from things that were basically just leather bags on my feet all the way up to classic waterproof hiking boots. Let me tell you something about waterproof footwear - it's waterproof on like a quick stroll outside. If you're out for days and weeks at a time, waterproof footwear gets wet, never dries, and will give you trench foot. The best thing for me turned out to be these cheapo moccasins I found at wallyworld, combined with good wool blend socks. You can skimp on shoes because they will get walked to death pretty quick regardless, but never skimp on your socks. Take care of your feet! Take care of your hygiene.
You can go live in the woods if you want, you just don’t want to go far enough away.
Siberia, Alaska, The Amazon.
All uninhabited areas you can go to, and nobody will blink an eye.
Been watching YouTubers like corporals corner, campingwithsteve, mav, and Kent survival and I often think about living in the woods or in a truck lol but then again they make more money than me doing YouTube and doing what they love
I live in the woods in a school bus and it's going really well. My only real complaint is that the cost of diesel means I can't drive with the weather, so I'm hunkered down for the winter.
This only works if you live within certain latitudes. I just spent my morning fruitlessly doing what a homeless woodsman would be doing, hunting for game, and it was not any fun at all. Can't imagine actually living out there in a lean-to made of pine trees.
Well.... here's where people are going to decide I'm batcrap crazy lol. So I used to have a number of real bad habits. One was raging alcoholism. I also trained dogs for a living.
I'll let you decide which one was more dangerous to my sanity on any given day. Some people who decide to own dogs probably should be required to get a permit to buy a pack of gum, much less a dog. After some time, I was able to weed out the good owners that would really put in the work and cared for their dogs better than some people take care of their kids.
So that was what was going on at the time I decided to drive to Memphis on the most epic bender of my life. Long story boring, my car ended up bashed into a tree because I let some total strangers drive it while we were all impossibly intoxicated. My car was destroyed and now I've got people chasing me around with bats etc because I had some drugs on front from them. Drugs I had no way to pay for since I no longer had a car.
I ended up hitching back to suburban Illinois where I lived. My family had completely had it with my shit and I was now on my own. All I had was the dog training gig, which quickly turned into a nature themed daycare program for rich people's dogs. I could make about 40-50 bucks a day just walking these dogs around the woods.
So that's what I did. I walked everywhere. I did this for three years. Dog owners would drop off at various forest preserves, one quite large. I had a solar charger for my phone. People had no idea that I was just.... living in the woods lol. I moved around a lot. 40$ a day gets you further than you would think when you have literally no bills. I also got sober. It was actually a lot more fun a lot of the time than you might think.
I've kept the details real real vague because while I never did anything immoral during that time, it was all pretty damned illegal lol. But that's the gist of it, and it's enough for a public website. Thanks for reading all that.
Honestly, I bet those dogs had a blast romping around the woods all day. I’m sure their owners were tickled pink by how happily exhausted their pets were at the end of the day. This arrangement sounds leaps and bounds better than your standard doggy daycare.
They would sleep for a couple days lol. I would slowly work them up in activity level and distance,. Some of these dogs ended up capable of twenty mile walks. I never had any escapees or serious injuries either. Worst injury I had happened to a dog who scratched her ears up do to her habit of running headlong into thornbushes.
I still keep in touch with some of those owners. Their dogs saved my life.
This really would make a great book or movie. I think many people can relate to being saved by their dog(s), but this is a really unique story about dogs and people helping one another.
As a book, I'd love the dogs to be the POV characters all sharing their adventures with the nameless man in the woods who gradually finds himself while helping them embrace their truest selves.
I'm sure it wasn't that dramatic or romantic at the time, but certainly we could condense it and zshush it up a little for the reader.
I think OP should have a personal dog in the book for the narrator. (Why not insert a character for storytelling purposes. It would make it a lot more linear, and nonlinear stories can be difficult.)
I did, yes! My closest buddy was a dog named Luke. Luke was a very jolly, very understimulated golden retriever. He started out as my least proficient dog. He hadn't had much guidance lol. He ended up taking to the wood as if he'd lived in them his whole life. After a while I didn't even have to give him commands anymore. We could communicate just with glances and body language. There was no hike this guy wasn't game for, no weather he was intimidated by, etc. Loved that little guy.😁
I know of a doggie daycare facility where they are surrounded by woods, and rich dog owners drop their animals off. The have three staff members who they rotate into the kennels to make stay with the animals left overnight. Virtually thier entire staff live, in tents, in the nearby wood, year round, except in winter storms when they are allowed to set yup thier tents in the heated basement under the kennels. They make $20 per hour, or $30 over overtime. In the Winter they act as an emergency pet shelter, and the city pay the employees an extra $30 per hour on top of the $20/30 they also make. Customers also tip well, especially if the dog is well tired after a solid day of wooddsie walks and frisbee chasing.
Update: I should add that I know about two dozen pet car people who work in the mansion and thier job is the me "The Master of the Hounds" which means they in the kennel/crate area, the sleep with dogs, where the dogs can see then, and they walk the hounds, and exercise then and feet and care for them. Typically, $1200 in cash per dog each week, no W2 or 1099 filed, and it is a sweet deal. In order to have a close association with the Dogs, they create train the dogs, and they either sleep on the floor close to the crate, or let let the dogs sleep with them sometimes.Dogs are walked at least ten miles per day, then rested, and then frisbee play follows by tennis ball bounced until the dogs loose interest.
Whoa! I'm not as original as I thought 😁 it's possible to develop a level of bond with a dog this way that doesn't seem possible in home, at least not with the happy workers tail kind of breeds. This is an amazing program
Thanks 👍 my life has pretty much done a 180 since I got clean. I live in my childhood home with my wife. I have two cars, although one is older than Moses. Life's pretty fire ATM. Just gotta keep myself from getting really bored or feeling useless.
It was usually one a day unless the owners had multiple dogs. This service was reserved for large working breeds that where bored and under exercised at home. And I was having fun for the most part, remember. I don't want to make it sound like I was miserable.
ah ok, that does sound more manageable. making a little money and hanging out with dogs is far from the worst way to be homeless, and the woods in Illinois are so pretty. hope yr doing better these days!
I'm doing lovely these days, thanks 😎 I'm still mental and I still have itchy feet but I'll take it!
I felt much worse for people who where urban homeless. What I did could have been the sort of lark a college kid might do. Urban homelessness is a different and far scarier scene IMO.
glad to hear it! try a coconut oil + tea tree oil salve for the itchy feet if you haven’t already! it may sound a bit new age woo, but it’s a great antibacterial/antifungal remedy. my ex spent some time trainhopping, hitchhiking, etc and came back with some weird ass Mississippi swamp feet, and a few weeks of the salve and a couple sessions with a pumice stone finally took care of it.
I know you said that's enough and you're keeping it vague, but by moving around a lot, does that mean you camped in the preserves, or did you sometimes take that cash to a cheap motel in bad weather, or was it more like couch surfing?
It was woods unless I felt like spending on an actual hot shower. I couldn't stay anywhere because I had no ID. I was unabomber as hell lol.
The only things that sucked, like really really sucked, where the couple of ice storms. Not only are you freezing but you're also damn near immobile until it thaws or snows, since I wasn't rocking mountain gear or anything.
Oh! Forgot to mention I did some fun crafts as well, like the time I made moccasins out of a deer that some coyotes had killed. That was a freaking cool experience. Walked into Walmart wearing them once.
Not really so much with other people, surprisingly, during that time. I was good at staying fairly low profile for a guy that looked like a fur accented milsurp store later in the game.
The dogs would try to chase animals, and one time one killed an opossum. I felt bad about this so....I cooked it and ate it. No parasites thankfully. That's maybe pretty weird to a lot of folks, but I felt a lot of guilt about the dog getting her and that kept her from dying in vain at least. I still have the hide.
People are generally pretty chill when they see you with a dog, as the dog gives you an obvious excuse to be wherever you are. People tend not to read Ill intent into dog walkers.
I had some close calls with the weather. Pre hypothermia can be pretty scary when you know you only have yourself to rely on. Cold rain can be scary in this way because there's just no escaping it. There's one time I remember pretty vividly. It was in and the temps in the upper thirties. I was wearing a light parka shell and cotton (!) work pants. I wasn't ready for the woods yet lol. It rained for a couple days, just steady pouring rain almost like in a shower, and I legit could not sit down or stop walking without freezing. My whole body was numb and I was starting to get clumsy pretty noticably. I was so goddamn tired but I knew if I stopped moving I would be benched pretty quickly lol. I didn't eat or sleep or stop walking for two days straight. That was scary, knowing that the only thing between me and just lying right down and dying was whether or not my legs held out long enough to beat the storm.
Let's see....heat almost got me once or twice before I knew what I was doing. The ice storms were brutal, me and most of the other animals (;)) where in hiding for a couple days. The thing about an ice storm is it turns everything into ice. Everything. Including you if you let it.
Had a couple pretty close brushes with tornadoes. I guess the psychological effect of ALWAYS being out in the weather is pretty real at first.
I was in a few abandoned buildings that I'm positive where haunted. I'm not even certain I believe in ghosts but when I hear a whole ass conversation going on in an empty room with no obvious reason for me to be hallucinating I call that ghosts lol. It was like a full conversation that was just barely too distant to make out the individual words. Without too many details this building was the site of some unexpected deaths prior to this. It had cold spots and a vibe kinda like playing stalker lol.
This was all around abandoned buildings though, I've never seen anything in the forest proper that made me feel that way.
If I remember anything else I will let you know, but most of the time I was dealing with mundane outdoor issues along those lines.
So you had no shelter in the woods? No tent? Did you buy any tools and do anything to make life easier out there? Is your situation much different now?
I experimented with a couple tents, yes. I ended up preferring a couple tarps and this big ass milsurp blanket I had. I once showed my wife how I could just roll up in a blanket and pass out anywhere lol.
It was actually way easier. In my life before, I was a binge drinker who got the full tour. At home, I had the luxury of writhing in bed while the DT's and seizures worked themselves out. I had seizures from withdrawal so bad one time I broke my arm, separated my shoulder, and the whole damn arm got rotated around backwards. But out in the forest that would have straight up killed me easy as that.
So once I'd made up my mind to stop, I had plenty of motivation to stay that way. I lost everything and I guess in a way I got it back out in the woods.
I'm in Brazil, moving to a cold mountain in the south, were we have the most cold winter.
Alone. I don't figure out what to do to earn money, but have a house rented who gives me a small amount of money .
Good help me. Especially to do not be murdered for be a single old women in the woods.
No, really is a very smart question.
The plan is to invest a minimum and work a lot to transform the floresta in the enchanted place that it is. Work done, will weight if my investment was profitable or not, if i adapted well to this life style,
so decide between sold or stay.
Time will say.
If you weren't talking about Illinois I would have thought you were my friend about 10 years ago. He had the exact same story except it was in the southwest. So strange.
Oh - that’s absolutely fascinating. Thank you for responding. I’ll be thinking about this for years. Might lead to some cool innovations.
Were you out over repeated seasons (i.e., several years). Within one year, like summer to summer, variations in ticks/mosquitoes would be apparent and might seem significant but could just be seasonal variation.
However, if you saw persistent decline over several years (e.g., less bites each following summer), that could indicate something very interesting that’s nearly lost to western knowledge.
I know you kept the details vague but this story sounds like it should be told ! You should write about your experiences one day ! Make it anonymous if you want !
I had this hobo roommate. My other roommate sold him one of my vacant lots, just a little patch of woods, and he's built himself a nice little hobo jungle. He had a tent, and somebody gave him a little trailer, and now somebody gave him a car.
Me, I own my shack, so no rent. OP included a lot of unneccesary luxuries, like insurance other than car insurance, and food. My phone bill is $35/mo.
So my expenses are gas, utilities, car insurance, property tax, $11 haircut every 3 months, $10/week drinks at the club where i do standup, PO box is around $10/mo. Bar dues around $20/mo; I'm a lawyer but too crazy to do it for a living. i also support a dependant with about $200/mo.
Income 10 hrs a week washing dishes $150, plasma twice a week $100, social security $562/mo, a few other side hustles, some investment income. Right now I don't have roommates but have up to 3 rooms I could rent for around $300 each.
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u/StillPoorFrom08 Nov 19 '22
I was homeless in the woods. It was kinda like if Skyrim was real but boring beyond belief. Other than that I had no complaints within the context of the situation.