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GALT'S GULCH IN MENDOCINO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA??
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Regarding the "Galt's Gulch Project," besides the one in Colorado, there
is something of a libertarian community spontaneously evolving up in
Mendocino County, in Northern California. For many years, that area
(including Humbolt County and the Lost Coast) has been a haven for
artists, writers, and intellectuals, as well as various hackers and
outlaws. The libertarians up there are pretty friendly, real down-home
kind of folks. The hippies and leftists have already taken over
Garberville further up Highway 1 01, but Laytonville is
anarcho-libertarian territory. The person to see about buying real
estate is Strider, who used to write a libertarian newsletter discussing
zoning, property rights, and things like that. He's still in business,
in fact, I just bought 40 acres from him about a year ago. It's
beautiful land, with deep canyons full of ancient Doug firs, high
hilltops covered with oak groves, and gentle rolling meadows. All kinds
of wildlife: bears, deer, raccoons, wild turkeys, hawks, owls, and the
occasional mountain lion. It takes a while to get to know who your
neighbors are, but once they get to know you a little they start to open
up and turn out to be real friendly. Laytonville is ideally positioned
for several reasons. When the U.S.A. breaks apart in about ten-to-twenty
years from now, we can reasonably expect something like what happened in
the former Soviet Union. Some places will end up like the Baltic States,
relatively calm and peaceful, while other areas will have the Rodney
King Riots all over again, on a grander scale, a la Bosnia. Mendocino
County seems like a "Baltic" kind of place. For a rural area, it has a
lot of culture, artists, writers, etc., some of them world-famous, not
just the starving kind. I don't think it's going to make one bit of
difference how many libertarians there are in any area, since we aren't
numerous enough be diddly squat. However, having artists and writers and
gentle country folk for neighbors doesn't sound like such a bad
proposition. If famine breaks out, me an d a few hundred neighbors have
a million acres of wilderness to go hunting in, and there's plenty of
deer, not to mention fresh drinking water. It seems as if half the
people in the neighborhood own their own electrical generators,
bulldozers, etc. Most of the roads up there are privately owned, and
people have been doing their own maintenance and repair for years. Most
of the local fire departments rely entirely on volunteers, and donations
to repair the 1936 fire-truck, etc. These people are very
self-sufficient, and they are nearly all libertarians at heart. Even the
communalist hippies believe in "live in let live." There are an
estimated 300 "alternative communities" in that area, some of them
established for several decades. The Grateful Dead have their "Hog Farm"
within the Laytonville town limits. Wavy Gravy's "Camp Win-A-Rainbow" is
just down the road. Nearly everybody up there smokes pot occasionally,
except the Disciples of Rand and the Seventh Day Adventists. In the
fall, the old grandmothers are out in the forest harvesting magic
mushrooms. Gun ownership is obligatory, because of the relocated
Yosemite bears, courtesy of our fine government. Even the Jehovah's
Witnesses up there are armed, "just for bears, of course."There's no way
to describe what it's like in words. You have to see it with your own
eyes, sitting around the campfire, or hiking through the woods and
stumbling onto a vision of blond-haired high-school girls skinny dipping
in a creek. Don't worry, they're not embarrassed. Just sit down, relax,
take off your clothes and have a toke on this here joint. Y'all come
back now, ya hear?  By the way, I just heard from Larry Samuels that
he's planning to relocate the Rampart Institute to Mendocino County in
the not-too-distant future. He's looking for land a little closer to the
ocean (where all the beaches are clothing-optional), but I'm trying to
talk him into locating closer into town. Laytonville is about ten miles
from the coast, but there's a range of h ills in between, and the road
is unpaved for most of the way. Still, it makes a nice outing on a warm
summer day.