Homage to Arizona: 2
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)
A friend of mine built this cabin by hand, using raw wood from a local saw mill and loose stone gathered on the 40 acres where the cabin is located at the end of a 10-mile dirt road. He lived here for a couple of years, mostly on canned food, before selling the place at a good profit during the real-estate bubble.
Since the water table is too deep to enable a well, water is mostly collected from the roof, into several buried barrels. A wood-burning stove is fuelled with juniper logs. The satellite TV is powered from one car battery through a small inverter.
Today my friend is prospecting for mineral deposits in an arid wasteland just south of the Hoover Dam. As an expert on mining and minerals, he likes to remind me that almost every single product around us is derived ultimately from raw materials that were dug out of the ground, or from things that grew in the ground. Our civilization depends entirely on activities such as mining, drilling, and logging, and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.
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Prospecting! I was looking around AZ near Prescott for some land at the end of the boom. There were more real estate agents out there than coyotes. Most of the houses for sale were double-wide trailers that had been 'expanded' by the owners as needed over the years. The ones that had wells were drawing about 1 liter per hour at the most. It was pretty dried out at the time. They were trying to get between 200 and 300k for stuff like that. I almost bought one that was sliding down a hill because the foundation was being undercut by a washout. Nobody would insure it against certain disaster, so it would have been a 180k pile of plywood on 15 acres of dust in the middle of the desert.
If you want to live year round in AZ I recommend higher altitudes. Up in the mountains rather than down on the plains or foothills.
Sorry, but every time someone reminds me of the fact that 'almost every single product around us is derived ultimately from raw materials that were dug out of the ground' I'm always reminded of the Hopi prophecies I learned about from Koyaanisqatsi - and a chill runs down my spine.
As the price of minerals rise I'm hearing that there's a jump in people sluicing old gold tailings. Problem is that some of the most likely spots, at least in Southern California, are in sensitive Arroyo Toad habitat.
Mining has never been a friend to the environment.
Drive through the mining towns of Arizona, and you'll see many cars with the bumper sticker, "IF IT CAN'T BE GROWN, IT MUST BE MINED."
I'm about to do an IPO for my new Arizona company, Suburban Strip Mining Inc. We plan to start harvesting all of the steel, copper, gypsum and PVC from the vast sea of abandoned tract homes surrounding Phoenix. The way we figure it, by 2011, 30% of the homes in the Phoenix basin will be abandoned, and there is gold for the taking "in them thar hills!"
Flickr is of course lousy with Arizona ghost/mining town pix. Here's mine:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bostworld/sets/72057594089104596/
Including my personal favorite tailings hovel, from Superior:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bostworld/2316833717/in/set-72057594089104596/
I hear if you cut capital gains taxes enough things just appear out of nowhere!
I love the vertical-log cabin construction. It's not the building that make real estate expensive, it's the land.