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The phone rang when I was<\/strong> shoeless and only a couple of sips into my morning coffee. “Hi, it’s Novella Carpenter,” the caller said. “My goat is giving birth.”<\/p>\n Twenty minutes later I was crouched in the hay at Ghost Town Farm, pushing away chickens and peering into the pen that housed the expectant mother, B\u00e9b\u00e9. Her udder was so swollen she couldn’t get her hindquarters down. Bleating, she clawed at the dirt with her right front hoof as if searching for a stash of Vicodin. “Pass me the iodine,” Carpenter said. “We better wash up.”<\/p>\n Similar birthing scenes have unfolded countless times in America’s agrarian past, but none, I suspected, had the soundtrack of the Ghost Town neighborhood in Oakland, Calif. As B\u00e9b\u00e9’s cries reached an apex they were matched by the caterwauling of a police car siren on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Then came the intestine-undulating bass of hip-hop from a passing car. Residents disagree on how Ghost Town got its name\u2014for the isolation created when freeways cleft the neighborhood from the rest of the city in the 1950s? For the appallingly high murder rate? For the casket companies that used to be located here? More unanimously accepted is that Ghost Town is a singularly odd location for a homestead that hosts pigs, goats, geese, peaches, potatoes, spinach and bees. Carpenter is living a version of the Laura Ingalls Wilder fantasy all right, but hers is Little House in the ‘Hood.<\/p>\n Carpenter, the author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, is, by her own admission, “a bit nuts.” If so, she has company\u2014similar farms have sprung up on city blocks in Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh and Detroit. And food is hardly the only commodity that people are producing for themselves these days. A small but growing number of American households generate all of their electricity using wind, solar or micro-hydro. But off-the-grid living has come to mean something more nuanced than cutting all ties with utilities and society; for many, it’s about finding creative ways to produce and conserve resources at home. Hundreds of thousands of Americans capture rainwater in barrels, can food from their gardens, heat water with solar collectors and commute by bicycle. We may be nearly a decade into the 21st century, but the self-reliant spirit of an earlier era\u2014that of homesteading pioneers\u2014has returned with gusto.<\/p>\n At Ghost Town Farm, Carpenter cleared the head-high weeds from a 4500-square-foot lot and started planting. She didn’t ask permission. When the lot’s owner discovered the squat garden he warned that he would soon develop the real estate\u2013that was five years ago. Now the lot is verdant with lavender, sage and thyme; lime, rhubarb and raspberries; artichoke, collard greens and avocado.<\/p>\n Strolling through the garden, I became overwhelmed by a feeling that could only be described as vegetable lust. But something deeper than my appetite had been stimulated, too. My grandfather once worked a small mountain farm in Greece. He immigrated to California’s Central Valley in his 20s, opening a produce stand and then a grocery store, but he never totally severed his connection to the land. I remember strolling through fruit-laden trees in his backyard as a boy. Now, I was gearing up for major changes myself\u2014the arrival of my first child, the purchase of my own home\u2014and I had been thinking about what sort of sanctuary I could create for my own family. The house I envisioned was solar-powered and garden-ringed, a little safer, smarter and more productive than the wasteful world around it. I was deeply curious about the experiments of modern homesteaders because I wondered just how self-sufficient I could be, too.<\/p>\n In the pen B\u00e9b\u00e9 continued to push and, with a little gentle guidance from Carpenter, the newborn’s head crowned. Then the front legs were out. B\u00e9b\u00e9 gave a final, anguished cry and the kid was born, a female, soon to be named Hedwig. Twenty minutes later, she had a brother, Eeyore. The two Nigerian dwarf goats wobbled about on untested legs and, undistracted by a car alarm that had started to blare, tried to find their mother’s teats.<\/p>\n America is dotted<\/strong> with remote, off-the-grid homesteads. Certain regions\u2014including western Texas around Big Bend National Park; the mesas outside of Taos, N.M.; and pockets of the Sierra Nevada northeast of Lake Tahoe\u2014host whole mini communities. The Surprise Valley of northeasternmost California supports another. There, where skyscrapers of light slant from the heavens to the mirror-flat floor of the desert, I was crouched on a mattress attached to a rope.<\/p>\n The other end of the rope was hitched to a Ford F-350. The tires spun and soon I was hooky bobbing\u2014surfing at 30 mph, a roostertail of dust in my wake. I felt as gleeful as the Road Runner with Wile E. Coyote giving futile chase. The truck stopped after a few minutes and, as I spat dirt clods from my mouth, a pretty young woman in a red plaid shirt and a white cowboy hat emerged from the cab. “You’re lucky you’re just visiting,” Tierra Hodge said. “If you lived here we would have set the mattress on fire.”<\/p>\n I’d been introduced to Tierra through a tortured chain of connections\u2014my wife’s cousin’s father’s friend’s daughter, or something like that. She grew up off the grid on land near here, and had agreed to guide me around a place I never knew existed and introduce me to people who didn’t necessarily want to be found.<\/p>\n The first stop was welcoming enough: a mountain homestead replete with mud, solar panels, semi-clothed children, and chickens. Then we had lunch in the town of Eagleville with Ed and Wendi Lutz, trompe l’oeil painters who’d retired to build an off-the-grid retreat. Tierra said the place was beautiful\u2014circular, with deep wooden sills and colorful bottles embedded in the walls\u2014but the Lutzes refused to disclose its exact location. I’d told them I was a journalist and might as well have said One World Government Spy. “We have come to value our privacy,” Wendi said, eyeing me warily. That afternoon we drove past a doomsday retreat, complete with its own private airstrip, belonging to a wealthy Bay Area businessman. “He’s preparing for the end of the world as we know it,” Tierra said with an enigmatic smile. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or applauding his foresight.<\/p>\n The specters of financial crisis,<\/strong> climate change, uncertain energy reserves and a fragile food supply loom large for the new generation of survivalists\u2014and though I don’t share their apocalyptic mind-set, I find myself relating to the urge to run for cover. In April, the top-selling action and adventure book on Amazon.com was Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse, a work described to me by its author, James Wesley Rawles, as a “survival manual dressed as fiction.” Its plot appeals to those on the political right, who fear a too-powerful government\u2014and the anarchy to come in the wake of its inevitable collapse. Leftie off-the-gridders gravitate more to the “grow-local” approach championed by author Michael Pollan. “We’re using up the world’s resources more quickly than you could imagine,” says Ruby Blume of the Institute of Urban Homesteading. “I think we need to be prepared.”<\/p>\n Lately, homesteaders of all political stripes have settled upon a common concern: globalization. The shock waves of any crisis\u2014for instance, the subprime meltdown\u2014now spread far, fast and wide. Many doubt that major institutions can be counted upon to save the day. “You’re on your own, your job is at risk, and a lot of the commodities you rely upon are vulnerable to disruption,” says John Robb, author of Brave New War, which describes how terrorists could exploit global systems. To my ear, such statements straddle the line between reasonable advice and hyperventilated threat. One day you’re sipping a frappuccino. The next you’re using a pitchfork to fend off rioting mobs. But even if I don’t fully agree with the dystopian diagnosis, I like Robb’s proposed cure: “You’re going to have to start doing more for yourself.” The beauty of the DIY solution is that the exact problem doesn’t matter; greater self-sufficiency makes sense to survivalists and eco-utopians alike.<\/p>\n In the early 1970s, Tierra’s parents established their own fully off-the-grid homestead in Mendocino, and later in Surprise Valley, with the thought that “when society crumbles, we’ll be able to raise our children in a safe environment,” Tierra says. She and her sister, Celesta, grew up in a tepee; her mom, Tina, and dad, Bill, supported the family by breeding llamas and selling medicinal herbs. Instead of sitting in a classroom the Hodge girls were home-schooled, usually outdoors. Instead of playing video games, they explored the mountains on horseback.<\/p>\n Growing up in the wild was idyllic but not always easy. When Tierra was 15 a boy braved the long dirt road to the homestead to pick her up for a date to the county fair. He emerged from the car looking spiffy in an all-white outfit only to have the Hodges’ pet raccoon pounce with muddy paws. Then one of the llamas pegged him with a wad of saliva. Tina, always on the lookout for free meals for wildlife she rehabilitates, shouted after the couple, “Goodbye, honey, have fun, and don’t forget to look for roadkill!” “I just about died,” Tierra recalls. But in spite of their upbringing\u2014or because of it\u2014the girls turned out fine. Tierra went to college. And Celesta moved almost directly from the tepee to a penthouse in New York, gracing the cover of Cosmopolitan as a fashion model.<\/p>\n The day after hooky bobbing, I found myself standing ankle deep in llama poop with a shovel. My job was to ferry wheelbarrows of the stuff up a hill to a garden, dump the smelly payload and then do it again. And again, ad infinitum, until it got dark or my blisters burst. It was raining, so I was damp, and the sodden manure was getting heavy. Then the clouds broke, and the sun beamed down on the Hodges’ secluded mountain\u2014160 acres surrounded by protected wildlands. The air was pine-scented and pulsing with the sound of a creek.<\/p>\n Just as my back<\/strong> began to give out, Bill mercifully invited me to tour the family’s airy, three-bedroom house. It was built earth-berm style, dug into the mountainside and covered by a living roof of soil and vegetation. The ground temperature stays close to 57 F year round, which makes the house extremely energy efficient. A small solar array provides enough electricity for lights, a refrigerator and a stereo.<\/p>\n Bill crouched beside an unfinished section of wall, where he pointed out a grid of 3\/8-inch rebar layered with steel mesh. He had painstakingly covered the rest of the grid with a mixture of sand, cement and water\u2014ferro-cement construction that was affordable, fire- and pest-resistant and exceptionally tough. Bill bent the rebar before applying the mortar, which resulted in strong, gracefully curving walls. The house had taken him more than two decades to complete\u2014and should be there for a thousand more, he says.<\/p>\n That kind of work\u2014the kind that results in dirt under fingernails\u2014is back in vogue. Not everybody builds his own home, of course, but people with office jobs are raising hens, bees and wind turbines, learning to weld and taking up quilting. My blistered palms reminded me that manual work is still work, and tasks like shoveling manure can be just as mind-numbing as data entry. But I couldn’t deny the appeal of creating something tangible and unique.<\/p>\n After the tour, Bill and I plopped chairs down outside and popped tops off of a couple of beers. Purplish mesas flanked the horizon to the east. To the west rose the snow-topped Warner Mountains. He admitted that living off the grid on 160 acres was “a utopian thing” not many people could emulate.<\/p>\n As for Tierra, she moved back to Surprise Valley after several years away. She started a fencing company and has built a small off-the-grid place of her own. It has three tiny rooms that she shares with Sienna, her 4-year-old daughter from a recent marriage. The house has only enough solar power for a refrigerator, a few light bulbs and a boom box, but the desert view surpasses that of most million-dollar vacation homes.<\/p>\n Tierra is conflicted about her future and considering a move to the Bay Area. After getting a taste of her life for the past few days, I had more than an inkling why: It is lonely to live this far out of the mainstream. I couldn’t do it myself, no matter how dazzling the mountain scenery. And yet Tierra is proud of what she has achieved. “There’s a resourcefulness to living this way,” she says. “You know that if all else fails in the world, you’ll still be okay.”<\/p>\n