Category Archives: Adventures

Adventures of urban gypsies.

An Ode To Homeless Folks

A Poem About Being Homeless

by Julie Webster

The concrete is cold

The wind is worse

When I sleep on the street

I hold on to my purse

 

Not that there’s anything in it !

It’s been empty for so many years

But today I was surprised to find

Instead of its usual crumbs and tears

 

I saw there a twenty dollar bill

When was it put there, by whom and why

Was this really for me?

I started to cry.

 

I started to think

of what it would buy

Thinking of buying anything

was hard to try

 

A bag without holes?

Shoes from Goodwills?

A muffin with coffee?

Or refill my pills?

 

God bless the good soul

Who brightened my day

Don’t worry ’bout me

I’ll be ok

Walmart Nomads

Meet the American Nomads of Walmart’s Plentiful Parking Lots

By Jakob Schiller

11.01.13

If you’ve ever tried to sleep in your car on a long trip without planning ahead, you may have run into the law at some point. Each U.S. city has a different policy and tolerance for car-sleeping and it’s hard to find a legit spot if you don’t know where exactly you’ll be stopping.

What you can count on is one of Walmart’s over 3,000 stores being nearby. The company’s policy of allowing overnight stays in their parking lots is intended to boost sales, but has the tangential effect of creating a subculture around its locations (though they’re still at the mercy of local laws). Paste this url into you browser to read the rest of the story on Wired:

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/11/walmart-parking-lots/#slideid-94861

How To Make a Birchbark Canoe

Complete Video of Making Canoe From Scratch

furtradecanoemain150smA great video made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.  Master woodworker Grant Goltz leads the team in the ground up reconstruction of an indigenous birchbark canoe. It helps to be in the northeast when you want to do this, finding a grove of birch in the Los Angeles area might be a little tough.

Life and Death in Dirty Dave’s Homeless Camp

Filmmaker Michael Arth Spent Years Documenting the Drama of

A Homeless Camp in the Woods of Florida

200px-Michael_E._Arth_5-21-09His film, “Out of the Woods” is an engrossing study of the folks who live in a camp in the Florida woods.  Some are drunks, fighting the demons created by alcohol; some are dopers, others just out of work or homeless with no place to lay their head at night.  Dirty Dave Grimsly, who weirdly has a slight resemblance to George Bush (the Junior one), takes them all in.  He feeds them, cooks meals, gives them a tent or a sleeping bag, and tends to them.  Because of their emotional and physical situations, the people who live in the camp provide us with dramatic statements of the personal horrors and the angst they are going through.  Michael Arth is to be honored for this timeless study of those who need a helping hand, but find that the there is none from the local government.  For those poor folks, the last stop is a tent deep in the woods, in a camp run by a good natured alcoholic nick-named Dirty Dave.  And if there is an unlikely saint in this film, it is Dave.  Every day he lives through his own hell of being a drunk and an ex-con sent to prison for manslaughter  But it is Dave who gives his love and attention to a squad of lost souls who occupy the camp. It will probably be a long time before you forget some of these characters and their sad and tragic lives.  Filmmaker.Arth holds up a backwards-looking mirror in which you not only see them in the present, but you see them as children, growing up, handsome and beautiful, ready to jump into the American dream.  The juxtaposition of their youthful years, so hopeful and full of life, with the shocking reality of their hopeless descent into the swirling hell that lies beneath the surface of our society, is a major achievement by Mr. Arth.

Mr. Arth made this film in part to promote the construction of a project called Tiger Bay Village, to give a last chance to homeless folks in the area, a place to detox and recover their health, as well as living quarters so they can recover their personal dignity. Michael Arth has been working for years to push through this project, which is still stalled by the local government.  The pathetic, actually enraging and ironic slap in the face to the American people, is that when our own folks need this kind of help it is not to be found, and our own government, year after year dumps millions of people into the U.S. as “refugees” or for “political asylum”.  As this is syrian_refugeeswritten, your tax paid mentally ill rulers at the Department of State are planning on bringing one and a half million refugees from Syria into the country.  What for?  We don’t need them or want them.  We have our own to take care of.  Every war that the CIA loses becomes another humanity dump of millions more into our decaying cities.  With the jobs sent to China, and the banksters pushing millions of families from their homes into the streets, the homeless population is increasing at a rapid pace. Tell Washington to STOP NOW.  Get out of these foreign countries, and please, no more refugees until the American born homeless are taken care of, and that includes our Veterans, 800,000 of whom have been waiting for years for their benefits. The smells in homeless encampments are nothing compared to the stink from the politicians in Washington, D.C., the world’s biggest sewage pit masquerading as a city. Those politicians are not fit to kiss the feet of a guy like Dirty Dave Grimsley.

Watch the film below, or find it directly on youtube:  Out of the Woods

Contact the filmmaker Michael Arth at www.goldenapplesmedia.com

Check out the Tiger Bay Village site at www.villagesforthehomeless.org

 

Couch-Crashing In Los Angeles

Forced Homeless, Teacher Survives in Storage Unit and Friends Couches

by “Elisabeth”

About ten years ago I was living camped out in a back add-on building, called the ‘chapel’, of two story old house in the edge of Hancock Park, actually on the border of Korea Town, when the house was sold and I had no clear vision as to where to go. With my brother’s brainstorming help, I decided to put all of my somewhat gypsy belongings into a storage locker right off a main freeway in downtown LA…but still didn’t know what I was going to do next.

At the time I had my own business teaching, well, actually tutoring, doing educational therapy with kids of all ages with learning differences. My weekdays varied. I worked with my students, after school, at their homes, and in all different areas of the city, On a weekly basis I would drive from Malibu to Silver Lake, from Glendale to near LAX. to tutor academically and emotionally challenged children of mostly above average income parents. Since I had been doing this work for some years I didn’t mind driving and actually grew to feel like a taxi driver, knowing all of the short cuts and shops everywhere. I felt at home in all of the different areas of LA. My varied friends were also scattered throughout the city and the expanded metropolis.

When my friends heard of my new lifestyle they wanted to be supportive and to my surprise offered me the keys to their houses. Since most had a spare bedroom they were happy to have me crash at their houses one night a week. On the weekends I would visit my storage locker in order to get a change of clothes and different educational material that I needed for the week. I had part of the storage locker set up like a bedroom with chest of drawers highly organized into categories of clothes and racks of shirts,sweaters, pants and skirts from which to choose.

When I finished tutoring sometimes the parents would invite me to stay for dinner. In addition I soon discovered how to eat simply out of grocery stores and that McDonalds had the best chicken salad of all the fast food places. At that point I wasn’t fussy in my eating habits. After tutoring I would call my friends who lived in the area in which I was working and ask if I could spend the night at their house. Their answers were always an excited, “Yes, you have your key, just let yourself in and I will be back from ‘wherever’ soon.” Sometime they would welcome my company for a delicious dinner that they had fixed or an impromptu dinner that we co-created.

I was able then to visit my friends at night and in the morning, and quality time too. Invariably they had problems in their lives and they welcomed my counseling expertise. They seemed to at least listen to my input and It felt good for me to be able to help them.

I had known that I liked spontaneous living and that the word ‘plan’ wasn’t really part of my vocabulary, but existing in this ‘free-spirit’ way showed me just how content I was to simply be ok with what was. Actually the whole thing was more liberating and satisfying than I could have imagined. Well really, I did not go into the future enough to imagine anything. I didn’t do any planning, other than my students, and just went from doing one thing to the next. Since I love short trips and people, this life style suited me well. I learned a lot from my constant interaction with people…and that hiding within myself, in my room, wasn’t the most productive for me. I was amazed at how my self confidence and self esteem grew, just realizing that I was flexible enough to fit in anywhere. People seemed to value not only my counseling and people skills but my astrological knowledge as well. Everyone wanted me to look at their charts.

This experience was so positive I would love to do it again. Unfortunately, I now live in a cottage in Santa Monica that has rent control. and I am afraid to give up this low rent to venture into the unknown. Since I have temporarily abandon my nomadic ways and collected a cottage and a garage full of ‘tools of the trade’ and semi ’emotionally attached to’ precious possessions, I will continue to hope that someone reading this will be able to help me get unstuck. Suggestions and comments are most welcome.

 

 

 

Nomadic Food Farms In Pick-Up Trucks

Bucket Gardens are Perfect For Nomads and Tribes

New Concepts To Carry Your Food Farm With You

The Gypsy Cool Way To Farm

New concepts in growing food in “bucket gardens” is totally relevant to today’s nomads.  The discovery of growing food in buckets is not that new, but using the 2 bucket system means that your entire food farm is portable.  Let’s face it, we need water and sunshine to grow food. With the 2 bucket system an entire food garden could be loaded on the back of a pick-up truck.  The truck becomes the farm.  A tribe or extended family might have several vehicles in their caravan and the addition of a pick-up truck means that their garden moves with them.

Let’s take a small tribe, anywhere in the world, but this is written for the Gypsies of the New Millennium right here in America.  You may have several vehicles in your nomadic caravan.  Maybe a couple of RVs, a few cars, a couple vans.  In the hot summers you want to move to cooler climes.  Why burn up in Arizona when you can go north to a nicer, more mellow climate for the summer?  If you get a pick-up truck or a small flat-bed type vehicle, you can outfit it as a mobile garden.  Plants don’t like to necessarily get moved a lot, but you are in your spring encampment in the southwest and it is starting to get hot.  Your bucket garden is all planted and hooked up with the self-watering system that we will refer you to.  The self-watering system means that you don’t have to even bother watering every day with this simple gravity system that connects a hose to all of your food buckets.  Summer is around the corner, and the tribe is set to move north to some cooler digs, say Utah or Northern California. The tribe moves out, the portable farm in the bed of the pick-up truck goes with the caravan, no problem.  When you get to the new spot up north for the summer, just make sure the buckets are secure, have water, and get a lot of sunshine where you park your pick-up truck.

The great thing about the 2 bucket system is that it works anywhere:  on a rooftop, on a deck, on an apartment balcony, or in the back of a truck.  Multiply your food supply by simply getting more buckets to grow more food.  If you don’t have a pick-up truck available for your tribe, you can carry the buckets in your vans, cars, and RVs to move them.  It is just easier to have a pick-up truck, because the food farm is in the back of the truck and is self-sustaining and completely portable.  Once it is set up, you don’t have to load and unload the buckets just because you change locations.  As you nomads know, sometimes you have to move out of an area and find another spot for various reasons.  If it is windy or some other weather situation, the entire bed of the pick-up truck can be covered with a tarp.  This could keep out dirt when you are moving, keep the plants warmer at night if there is a frost, and also keep out unwanted critters.  A couple of dogs tied up around the pick-up truck at night will usually be enough to keep the possums and racoons away.

A few of the Gypsy Cool crew were sitting around a few months ago trying to formulate a method to have a nomadic food farm.  What we came up with at the time was to turn the bed of a pick-up truck into a garden plot, in other words fill the bed with garden soil.  Further research led us to the amazing 2 bucket system.  We feel this is much better.  The individual buckets can be changed quickly and different plants put in them.  The self-watering system is simple and fantastic, and works even on the move.

Although some of us are idealists in many ways, we are aware of certain realities.  We think it would be hard to grow enough food to totally live on in the bed of a pick-up truck.  But it can certainly augment your foraging with some fresh vegetables and tomatoes. You will have to continue with your skills at foraging, dumpster diving, fishing, and possibly hunting,  as well as purchasing some food products.  But you can live better and a little cheaper by taking your food farm with you wherever you go.

So how do you build the 2 bucket system?

1. Google it on the net.

2. Check out the information at Yard Eats.

3. Check out the great info at Global Buckets.

4. Go to youtube.com and search for videos on bucket systems.

5. The youtube channel of jwwm2 has a lot on the bucket system,.

Start building your buckets today!

Desert Gypsies in 1950

Cool Story of a Couple Desert Gypsies from the May 1959 Desert Magazine.  This wonderful magazine disappeared in the 1980’s, but once in a while you can find a few old issues in used bookshops. I also found an internet archive that you can download old issues for free, check out this great site: Desert Magazine Archives. If you like to camp out and have some desert fun, this is a great resource. Although some of the places in the deserts of the southwest are now off limits because of a Federal government land grab, there’s still a lot of places to go.  The old Desert Magazine is also packed with articles on lost gold mines and places to pan gold.  Don’t forget that until the early 1970’s gold prices were fixed at $35 per once, and now gold is over $1,750.  Working hard to get a little “color” is a lot more profitable now.

Some of our greatest authors also loved the desert, a good example is Erle Stanley Gardner the great mystery writer.  Mr. Gardner loved the desert and often went on long expeditions, even down to the Mexican bad lands.  He also wrote some riveting books on “Hunting Lost Mines by Helicopter”, and books on exploring Baha, Califonrnia.  There was actually a Gardner museum up in Ventura at one time, but the web site seems to be down, maybe the museum is gone.  For a while it was in an old library bus, packed with Gardner memorabilia, and the bus would show up at schools and downtown Ventura during festivals.

Here’s a fan site that lists all of Gardner’s books on his gypsy travels: Erle Stanley Gardner Bibliography. You can see all the cool books he wrote on desert camping and exploration.  I have read many of them and they are all great.  Gardner really made a production out of his gypsy travels.  He usually had his “cast of characters”, old friends, who traveled with him.  He also brought his secretary and dictated some stories while enjoying the desert.  Might as well turn that sand into some coin while you are at it!

Desert Gypsies 1.pdf

Desert Gypsies 2.pdf

Desert Gypsies 3.pdf

Desert Gypsies 4.pdf

Desert Gypsies 5.pdf

 

 

American Gypsy Woman

American Gypsy Woman

Oksana Marafioti’s parents performed in a traveling Romani ensemble until she was

15, when they moved to America. Growing up, she saw the Mongolian deserts and

the Siberian tundra, watched her father get into bar fights with Nazis, learned about

sex by sneaking into illicit movies, and endured the hostility of school bullies. What

little Oksana and her sister, Roxy, knew of the United States they had learned from

MTV, subcategory George Michael. Not quite prepared for the challenges of

immigration. Marafioti cracks open the secretive world of the Roma and brings the

absurdities, miscommunications, and unpredictable victories of the immigrant

experience to life, one slice of processed cheese at a time.

Oksana spoke at Vroman’s Bookstore August 7, 2012 on her family life as a gypsy woman.

Video of the talk:

Part 1 – Gypsy Woman Oksana Marafioti

Part 2 – Gypsy Woman Oksana Marafioti

Part 3 – Gypsy Woman Oksana Marafioti