© 1998 by Mary Lou Seymour and Claire Wolfe. This is a work in progress. You may download it for your own use, but it is not yet for circulation. We welcome any comments, corrections or additions you care to offer.

What is gulching?

Gulching is the act of building, or living within, low-profile communities of freedom seekers.

Gulching is a mode of living for "interesting times." Its goal: to provide maximum safety, privacy and freedom for residents and to help them weather various crises--including the long, slow, wearing crisis of creeping tyranny.

A Gulch is long-term. It's a community, not just a hoard of refugees thrown together by desperate circumstances. If it's well-planned and has a bit of luck, its members will never be desperate, never be refugees ­ because they and the community will be prepared to face a variety of futures.

Although you might not to want to live in a Gulch for the rest of your life, it's realistic to assume that if you do "gulch" you'll be there for a long time, and make a serious investment of your time, money and energy in building the community.

Although individual preparedness and skill building are aspects of gulching, gulching is inherently community oriented. It involves individuals working together--although, as you will see, it can take many forms, some of which might satisfy the most rugged individualist.

[Why Gulch] [What makes a gulch? ]

Why gulch?

One of the earliest things we discovered when we began talking gulch with acquaintances is that there are as many reasons for gulching as there are potential gulchers.

We found it useful to break the "Why gulch?" question into two parts:

• What scenarios motivate people to seek havens?
• What benefits do people seek in such havens?

What scenarios motivate people to seek havens?

Within our circles of friendship we found people motivated by:

• A simple desire to escape everyday oppressions of government
• A desire to live more self-sufficiently and groundedly
• Anticipation of the impact of the Year 2000 computer bug
• Desire to avoid growing national ID and citizen-tracking systems
• Anticipation of hyperinflation
• Anticipation of deflation
• Prospect of government-sponsored terrorism (including staged bombings and bio-war attacks) and resulting crackdowns
• Potential for a stock market crash
• Potential for worldwide depression due to other economic factors
• Desire to live among like-minded people
• Desire to experiment with new forms of social organization
• Belief in the eventual collapse of nation-states and the rise of free communities; a desire to pioneer this future
• We have also seen or discussed:
• Expectation of climate changes, polar shifts, etc.
• Prospect of biological warfare
• Potential for race warfare
• Various religious scenarios
• Meteorite collisions/alien attack
• Fear of natural disasters

But ultimately, whatever scenario of the future potential gulchers envision, the more pertinent question is:

What benefits can people gain from gulching?

Clearly, with so many different motivating factors, people are hoping to find a huge variety of benefits in haven communities. But the benefits can be summed up under a few broad categories:

• Security: To many, security might imply an isolated and/or easily defensible site. But that's not universally true. To folks of a different mindset and orientation, it could just as easily imply urban invisibility. Others find security in small-town services and comforts ­ if they can keep them in hard times. For gulchers expecting earth changes, security might mean high elevations. For those anticipating chaotic economic times, it might mean being far from major transportation routes (the natural paths of desperate people spilling out of cities). For people with a guerrilla mindset, it might imply a community that's extremely well-armed and trained. Whatever it implies to the people you'll be gulching with, security is one of your most important concerns. Without it, none of the other benefits of gulching are possible because your Gulch won't attract people or won't last if it does.
• Freedom: For purposes of this book, we're assuming that most modern gulchers are seeking refuge from too much government, too many taxes, too many laws, too much numbering and tracking of citizens, too much brutality and in general, too much incursion of false authority into their lives. Therefore, a Gulch will need to be a place of free trade, toleration, sufficient latitude for "doing your own thing," and highly limited government. Perhaps there are some potential gulchers who don't want to be free, so much as they want to be off on their own to practice pocket totalitarianism or build a theocracy to their own specifications. It wouldn't be the first time groups retreated from the mainstream for such purposes. There may also be communities whose members are interested in experiments in communal living, goddess worship, returning to early Christianity, waiting for a Close Encounter or some other non-political dream. But for the most part, we assume maximum freedom and toleration are desirable.

Naturally, there will have to be tradeoffs. For instance, if one member's "own thing" is dealing drugs on a scale that attracts enforcers and endangers the community, you'll have to decide what to do about it. Free people should be prepared to tolerate a lot ­ but lines have to be drawn in areas of principle and areas of safety.

• Sharing of goods, skills and services: A fundamental benefit of gulching is having people around who can do what we can't do (or don't want to do) or can produce what we can't (or don't want to) produce. To be a successful community, a Gulch is going to have to contain a broad cross section of abilities and interests. Or, if it can't for some reason, it'll need to have links to a broader outside community.

A Gulch may also be an ideal place with which to experiment with small-scale "appropriate technology" of the kind Karl Hess explored so brilliantly, yet idealistically, in his book Community Technology. Hess believed that small-scale basic technology, controlled directly by individuals, was a vital key to freedom, and he spent many of the last years of his life trying to make this work in two real-world communities. Hess has a lot to teach gulchers, though unfortunately some of the best lessons may come from the acknowledged failures of his work. The book was out of print for a while but was re-issued by Loompanics Unlimited (1-800-380-2230) in 1995.

• Comradeship: A lot of us in the freedom movement like to think of ourselves as lone wolves. And perhaps for some of us, being in a community is a very mixed blessing; we don't like being in close proximity to our fellow human critters, and we don't particularly like dealing with their demands, quirks, gossip, mooching, noisiness or whatever. And surely it's possible that some Gulches will be set up so that people can simply trade with and defend each other without actually getting very personally involved with each other. But when even the lonest and most wolfish of us examine our hearts and habits, we usually find that people are important to us, qua people. Not for the goods they can provide or the security they offer, but just because we want their companionship. Gulchers also crave like-minded companionship. Libertarian gulchers crave to live among people to whom they don't constantly have to explain themselves. Christian patriot gulchers might want to surround themselves with fellow Christians. And most of us ­ especially in dangerous times ­ simply need the reminder that we aren't alone in the world. If someone is truly a lone wolf, then they probably won't want to gulch, anyway. You can count on serious gulchers to crave companionship, even if they don't put it in those terms.

Your job as a Gulch organizer is to see that the location and setup of your Gulch provides as many of these benefits as possible, in ways tailored to the needs of your potential gulchers.

What makes a gulch?

Ayn Rand's Gulch was a small, self-contained village, far from any other vestige of civilization. And when most people think of a Gulch, they automatically imagine something along those lines ­ perhaps an isolated ranch, hidden from view of any highways or airlanes.

That's a possibility, and a great way to go if you can find and finance the right spot. We know a couple of places just like that ­ if you've got the $1.5 million and up needed to buy them and the millions more needed to maintain them, keep them secure and live in them, far from civilization.

But gulching for the rest of us might be something else altogether. For instance:

• A gathering of like-minded people in an existing small town
• A cluster of trailers on adjoining lots
• Several families sharing a rented rural acreage

The truly private, truly hidden Gulch is a near-impossibility, but let's not let that stop us from seeking to create free communities. Because above all, a Gulch is not a piece of land or a collection of buildings. It's a gathering of people and the way they choose to live, work and plan together.

So in building a Gulch, people are the first thing to consider.

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