Vida Loca. Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa

By Christian Probasco, 9-12-07

Jeremy and Randy Stulberg spent two years documenting the lifestyles of the poor and infamous “homeless” residents of a New Mexico mesa.  I found the result riveting. I led the same sort of life while I was working at a truck stop in northern Arizona.  I parked my 14 foot trailer in various locations in the national forest behind the store and pointed my solar panel at the sun to charge the bank of deep-cycle batteries that ran my computer, radio, black-and-white television and mobile phone.  I filled up a five gallon propane tank and a water tank once a month and washed my laundry in the machines by the trucker’s lounge. 

So I’m something of an expert on the subject, and I recognize the character types; veterans who never mentally returned from their wars, addicts, mental cases, old hippies, criminals and plain-old misfits with an unusually strong hankering to be truly free from the bullshit we all subject ourselves to on a daily basis in the city.

The denizens of the mesa live in shacks, trailers and motor-homes.  A gulf-war vet named “Maine,” dying of cancer, resides in a school bus with a VW bus body welded on the roof.  Few of the domiciles are clean. Some are downright filthy.  Water is scarce on the mesa and so is cash. Pot is the currency of the realm.  There’s no government per se, and everybody lives by some variation of the golden rule.  As one man puts it, “the real law out here is, ‘be a good neighbor or you’re not allowed to be here.’”

The mesa is a real community—the kind that urban planers have been trying for decades to weave back into the fabric of American culture.  Without the government or employers to take care of them, residents of the mesa have to watch out for each other, and they do.  They lend and borrow and help those that are sick or too poor to buy their own food. They try to keep an eye on each other’s property. 

In the course of the film, a group of violent young vegan communist thugs known as the “Nowhere Kids,” relocates to the mesa. They steal from their neighbors when they’re out on errands. The other mesa-dwellers are ready to answer the sticky-fingered threat with firepower or to drive the teens off the mesa entirely.  But the Nowhere Kids hint that they, too, are armed, and so an uneasy truce prevails.

Plenty of other exciting stuff happens.  Broke-down cars are set on fire (a staple of entertainment in most such communities), a 17 year-old crackhead hooks up with a man over twice her age and gives birth to a healthy baby girl, a few folks go skinny-dipping in the Rio Grande River (editing on this segment was merciful) and a middle-aged drop-out named Gecko, who is “home schooling” his young children in the disciplines of driving and shooting loses them to his ex-wife who takes them back to Connecticut.

One “elder” of the community, a retired psychiatric nurse by the name of Mama Phyllis labels the mesa an “outdoor insane asylum.” “Dreadie Jeff” describes the mesa as “the last part of America that is truly free.” Quips Robbie, another elder, “The cops don’t like to come out here, and this place is built on being left alone by the authorities.  People say to the government, ‘F--- you. Chinga tu madre.  We don’t want your government and you can get out of here.’”

I found myself nodding in agreement with Robbie—an aging hippie.  The whole country used to be as free as the mesa and now you can’t travel to the other side of town without two forms of I.D.

Towards the end of the video, Maine, the dying veteran, delivers an impassioned speech on how much he loves this country and how he would fight for it again on a moment’s notice.  The local law enforcement, meanwhile, flies helicopters over the mesa occasionally to keep an eye on developments. They raid residences once in a while, without warrants, to root out pot growers and make sure nobody gets too comfortable.  The feds and local police operate by completely different rules than the people of the mesa.  I can testify from experience that when they see a community taking care of its own problems and getting by without any guidance from the government, where the citizens don’t pay taxes or follow building codes, their first thought is, ‘how can we crush it?”

Thank you Jeremy and Randy Stulberg, for recording for posterity one tiny corner of the country where the American dream, as weird and crazy as it is, has not yet been completely bulldozed into oblivion.