Humboldt Squatter Evac Network

Personally Im a hiker first, & a traceless, fireless, lightless, dogless, tentless camper second. Im experienced although not accomplished, & I can carry in & back out everything I need in one trip including a huge sheet of plastic in case I get caught in the rain. I dont leave clothing & paperbacks & bottles lying around everywhere, but I also dont just ignore them when I find them. Thus Im not antisquatter & I wouldnt tell others how to camp. But Ive now cleaned so much squatter wreckage in Alameda & Humboldt counties that I dont mind sharing the experience.

Winter is the best time to begin cleaning a new area. Its easiest to see clearly that a site has been abandoned not just for hours but for months or perhaps years. The soil is soft enough to pull things free & the rains every few days help rinse the piles of freshly exposed materiel. The temperature is also ideal for heavy work including walking the filled bags out of the woods. Squatter cleanup is immensely useful to learn what the fashions currently are in hightech homelessness, but it is also a way to restore beautiful areas crippled by artificiality to a pristine & healthy state merely with the honest work arising from a sense of compassion.

A new site is discovered, examined, & its strategic perimeter defined. Normally theres 1 or 2 bigticket processes necessary right away: eg some huge ugly heavy broken thing or a spray of high albedo litter everywhere. Squatter sites are often dumps & not only were never inhabited but can be cramped & uncomfortable to work in.

Space should be cleared for the main categories of items: metal (tools, appliances, portable tentpoles &c.), tents / tarps, durable plastic weathergear, bedding (sleepingbags & blankets), glass, general litter (including plastic bottles), biohazards (sharps, batteries, rotted paperbacks &c.), & of course clothing / textiles. Some sites have large numbers of odd items such as shoes or pillows which are best piled separately. Finally a spot should be selected to collect & arrange artfully the most interesting of the discovered relics; creating something between a trophy & a shrine.

At this writing I have 14 separate sites under cleanup in the McDowell gulch. Once its clear where everything belongs it becomes an iterative process; each time you come by you notice something which needs to be put in its proper pile. The consolidation alone does wonders for any site. Its good not to start bagging immediately but to "turn" everything by pulling it free & perhaps emptying it of water &/or debris. This gives the (often slow moving) critters living inside & below the chance to realise somethings up & relocate, allows the scars in the landscape to begin to heal, & lets damp & filthy stuff get rinsed & dried in the elements.

Doing a complete first turn can also permit examination of almost everything in the site, illustrating particular trends or idiosyncracies in the process of debris accumulation. This knowledge can substantially speed a successful cleanup.

A properly organised site becomes comfortable to be in & often all the loose collected litter can be bagged & removed in a single day, vastly improving its appearance. This is plastic bottles, candy wrappers, styrofoam containers, rusted cans, anything that gets moved about by the wind & rain. Most of my sites rapidly become completely litter free with nothing but large consolidated piles of heavy or waterlogged equipage remaining to be hiked out over the days. Abandoned stuff decomposes so rapidly that I never encounter actual food except sometimes sealed in glass; this means critters arent digging into the bags & they can be accumulated undisturbed for a week or so, making it possible to hike them out all at once.

At the other end of the spectrum glass bottles are often the last thing I take if at all. Somewhere in the middle are the sleepingbags & blankets. Some bags are engineered so they dry almost completely even between winter rains, & even with plants growing out of their muddy guts theyre light enough to take out in a garbage bag. The blankets & the rest of the bags need to be laid out where theyll get the spring sunshine; as soon as theyre light enough to carry they can go. The process with the rotting clothing requires a slightly longer timeframe however.

"But," he was asked, "why would you put in all this effort to remove all traces of these messes in the woods? Noone will know you did the work."

"I," he replied, "will know how to put the whole thing on the internet, & will not only have a permanent record of what it looked like, but will be able to brandish about my URL & show people the work I do. Nyaah nyaah."

If the McDowell gulch tent city is related to the homeless encampments in the ACF in 2008 then it could either be an abandoned alternate squat or merely a dump created at that time or later. Despite its size I performed the complete first pull in a single morning including an hour to collect the litter.

When I came back after 2 days of rain someone had gone in there & taken it all out. It has to have been a team & they were probably able to take it to a vehicle on ACF trail #9. Thats still an enormous job & on my own it would have taken me weeks hiking perhaps one tent a day all the way down to HSU. Thank you Humboldt Squatter Evac Network!

Early May means theres a week of sunshine sometimes. The sleepingbags & blankets can be baked in the sun until theyre light enough to bag, & the rest of the hightech tents can be shaken clean & bagged as well. The edge of the pond begins to recede around a foot a day; time to take the telescoping pole & fish the rotted clothing from the water before it dries into the mud for the summer. By graduation 2010 Ive taken out my 50th bag of bundled trash since I started in March. Go Lumberjacks!

last update: 2010may20