Dread-Locks in the Periphery

A CHALLENGING CONVERSATION

At 2 Dogs coffee shop in Morro Bay, I met a guy who completely changed my perspective on sailing. As I ordered my yerba mate, I noticed he had sailing pictures in his laptop. I said Hi. He looked at my kind of funny - it turned out we'd met before. 5 weeks ago I was in Santa Barbara anchoring my sailboat when the dread-lock dude and his lady friend showed up, having just sailed their 27ft Catalina from San Fransisco.

They yelled over the water, "How's the anchorage?"
"Pretty good! It's all sand, good holding ground." I shouted back.

The couple rowed their dinghy towards our boat.
"Hey, by the way, where's a good place to eat around here?"

Turns out they were headed down to Mexico. However, as I talked to dread-locks at the coffee shop in Morro Bay, I found out that his lady friend had to leave for work, and he went all the way down to Ensenada and back to Morro Bay where I now saw him, all on his own. And get this: for most of the way, without a motor!

Actually, he had a motor but it broke down the day he left San Fransisco - he claims this is the best thing that could have happened, because he REALLY learned how to sail. He sailed from Santa Barbara to Morro Bay in 3 days, upwind. Meanwhile, I've been spending weeks trying to coordinate this very trip. My boat is stuck at the Santa Barbara anchorage, and when I finally commit to doing the journey on my own, the motor has issues. So I didn't go. Of course, Dread-Locks didn't even have a working motor so this was never a problem for him.

I feel like I'm fairly gung-ho most of the time, veering towards the edge of reality, but this guy is really in the Periphery. Food Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails, what is he talking about? This is part of his network of existence in San Fransisco, where an alternative community finds livable, unused buildings to squat for free, and gathers packaged, healthy food from supermarket dumpsters. He recently did an experiment: to spend a year without using money.

How is this possible when you're living in the City?? Immersed in the ultimate urban setting, yet completely out of the system. Instead of creating waste, they are absorbing waste. By helping homeless people live in unoccupied buildings, they're making the most of perfectly livable spaces. By taking perfectly healthy food from the dumpsters of supermarkets and specialty food factories, they eat for free - not to mention reduce the landfills.

This lifestyle is not for everybody. In fact it's only possible because of the abundance in our society. But just to think that it is POSSIBLE is an amazing reflection of our culture.