“Frustrating. I have asked the state for help, the county for help, various cities for help, and a number of big winners of Silicon Valley for help. And this is just help with material and land: we can find people willing to help build out whole communities for free. Partially they want to do good and partially they want the experience of actually building things. If successful, it would be a massive project crossing the concepts from Habitat for Humanity and Amish barn raising. But I have only managed some amount of financing for materials and equipment. No land.” “I would love to see this happen too. I am not very good with tools though and don’t have any resources of note. Except garlic.” “I think you do actually… but you may not feel comfortable providing it.” We are stopped in front of the clinic and Mark is staring into me with even more intensity than I have ever seen from him. Are his eyes glistening? “And what are these resources I have?”
VEHICLES Caravans have been viable communities for millennia, although it may not be until the Romani vardo that the caravan started to feel like moving houses or even moving suburbs. I wanted some of the same features of those caravans in terms of mobility, but also needed to move a lot of particular resources that the Romani would not recognize. This took a notable collection of very modern and mostly common vehicles. First we needed a modern version of a horse. Freightliners are a brand of heavy-duty trucks with horsepower reaching the high hundreds. Torque is well over a thousand poundfeet. So these are very big horses. I tried out several different brands, - 68 -
