College graduate: no job or job prospects

The following story took place in 1980 for a few years. This person I later found out lived about a mile from my home and property but at the time did not understand this was going on.

In 1980 I was about 32 years old with a wife and three children ages 5 to 9 years old. Since like now there were no jobs we bought property, sold one of our vehicles and built a home on a remote inexpensive piece of beautiful land at 4000 feet on the side of Mt. Shasta. There were no electrical connections within 10 miles of where are property was located. There was a spring on the land for water for washing and bathing. We trucked in drinking water.

The gentleman I'm writing about just graduated college and couldn't get a job just like many of today's graduates and like many of today's graduates he had student loans. He owned a VW Bug that had an engine he had just rebuilt that was 10 or more years old, his skis, his clothes, some snowshoes, a lot of college books and little else because, after all he had just graduated college. Realizing that he didn't want to be homeless in his bug, he contacted a friend who had land within a mile of my property and stayed there for a while. But this man liked his privacy. So, the college graduate got permission to always park his car on his friend's property and proceeded to build a shack within 1/2 mile out into the deep, dense forest with no trails to survive the winter snows that could be up to 7 feet on any given day between the months of January and March in those years.

Then he went to a friend who had an aceteylene torch and tanks and bought enough acetylene and oxygen to cut his bug behind where the front seats end and to turn it into a little pick-up truck by putting metal behind the front seats and sealing it from the outside air and then putting a 1 inch thick piece of plywood between the metal and higher than the engine in the rear.

The next thing he did was to look in the newspapers for houses that were being torn down in order to get enough building materials to build his shack for wintering with up to 7 feet of snow. So, during the summer he built his shack and it wasn't discovered or torn down for about 3 years. During that time by working the kind of cash jobs that are available out in the country he was able to survive until the economy got a little better. So he did all this when he was about 22. By 25 he was able to get student loans and return to college and  eventually become a successful doctor. The beauty of this is that he got to live where he loved rather than to have to live homeless living out of his car and potentially endangering his life.

So though I'm not encouraging anyone to do this it is a way to survive for some during these terrible times we live in. Rather than expose yourself to the dangers of a homeless lifestyle there are other potential options.

Also during these times I knew of a young couple who lived in a Cave on Mt. Shasta for several years until they could save up and buy remote land near Wagon Camp up on Shasta and there they built a geodesic dome. I stayed in this amazing little Geodesic dome for a few days at one point in the snow and found it really an amazing piece of functional art. Though they eventually sold the dome and moved to Hawaii to buy another piece of property and live there, they  also  found a way to live where they wanted to and to survive the very difficult early 1980s as young people who were also college graduates.