Solo on river shantyboat： quits city to live free at edge of society

It's not a realistic goal to say that I'm ever going to go somewhere in America and actually live for free, but there are places where you don't have to pay rent and there are places where you don't have to pay taxes. Welcome to the Duck River. What, no one out here? No, you have a pretty good boat to get in here in no way. I've tried to figure it out over the last couple years. You go real slow and you take your fancy depth meter and you check the depth and then you go a Your house is out here now. Yeah, it's about a quarter mile that way. I lived in a nature reserve. 2,000 miles of shoreline, a public shoreline that's national forest, state animal reserve. They're not allowed to have a dock on this water. There can be a mansion up there, but you won't ever see it because they can't cut any of these trees for like a quarter mile that way in every Seven years ago, I started to do RVing. They have all these rules and you have to pay for all this stuff and then I realized that like if I was just parked on the water and anchored 10 feet off of the land, I don't need to pay for camping fees. Even though it's an RV, you don't have to pay for it. The only criteria is I have to move every 14 days. When I lived in an RV and in a van, I would end up with all these weekly and monthly permit fees for just staying in public property. A boat, you don't do that. This is great. It's so private. It's my little harbor. It's a little lagoon. Yeah. And you would never, you just don't know. I mean, it's not going to be mapped. You have to explore. No, yeah. So when people come to like see me, I have to go meet them on the main channel. You don't say, hey, it's off on the right. You just, you know. So you looked for a while to even get back into here, right? Like this is, this is probably a couple years of exploration to even know this area well enough to find something. Right. Because we just came down a finger. Yeah. You came down the fifth finger of the duck rib. Each one of them I've mapped and showed like people where they are and how they are. So you're sitting on a floating dock. And I found all this stuff in the river. When there's a flood, everyone's stuff floats away on them and I go and collect it. The foam came from a dock that broke and started floating down the river. And you have a garden? I've started this this year. I've started and I planted grass for my cat over here. Everything you can think of you have in a house. I have it. It's smaller. Yeah. All of my kitchen stuff is outdoor indoor. It's all movable. So this goes inside it. The mosquitoes don't affect you now, but when the sun goes down, come out here and you'll die. So my sink goes inside too. And there is no plumbing. So I wash with the lake water, rinse with fresh. And then back here, I also have the same thing hanging here. And then this is if I use the bathroom, this is where I wash my hands back here. So I have three running waters. And then this is just and I shower in the river water. This is my shower. Living on water, you get your own water. That's the main thing is that you're not trying to figure out how to find water because you're actually living on it. And how I do my dishes with this water. It's clean enough. You don't want to drink it. You want to filter it before you drink it, but it's perfectly fine to do your dishes and stuff. That's why I do my laundry out here, too. It's just the waters. I'm on the resource. The propane, I use this big. I never buy little ones. So you fill these with this. So these are expensive. This is only 15 bucks to refill. So you turn them upside down and you fill these and then I can cook and do my little buddy heaters with these. Here's the propane tank that runs the refrigerator. Not much food. No. Tomorrow I have to go get food. So this top shelf would be all meat tomorrow and it's only propane. So you have two panels here. The two right here. 300 watts of solar. 150, 150. And then I have a 400 watt and a 600 watt that I put up in winter. So this is an island. So you're really living on a private island in a way. Well, but remember, it's National Forest, so it's our island. Okay. Our island. It's a public island. You're the only one docked here. Absolutely. Yeah. There's no other boat that could get in this water like this. So what are you looking for, for a boat like this? I mean, it looks like you're just right on the mud. I'm not. I know. No, I know. That's literally six inches of floating. So what I bought was a boat that can hold 6,000 pounds and I built a 1,200 pound house. This is how you move around in the little water. That's why I don't worry about getting stuck too. So like if I'm in here and I'm trying to move out of here, I use this just like a raft. Do you really? Yeah, this is how you move it around. That's the best part about tiny houses on water. You can move them with your finger. You don't need to call a tow truck or pay a bunch of money. No, you can do it with a kayak and an oar if you have to. And you move your mile and you're done. Oh, so you don't even have to power up if you didn't want to. You had a little current. No, exactly. That's the main thing. Like gravity goes away on water. The thing doesn't weigh anything. You can literally move it. You just push out there and go and then come back in on a mile and you tie up the gondola. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. How many people are living on shanty boats these days? Full time out on the river? Yeah. Me. Really? There's not one person that does this here anywhere. What happened? Because I used to be. The rules change for a while and once it moved to moving, people won't do it. Nobody wants to be a nomadic. Right. I love the front of this. It's like a little house. Yeah. So the colors, my mom's passed away, but this was what my mom would have painted it. Was she alive when you did it? No. Part of me doing all this, I kind of had a professional life and my parents wouldn't have been okay with me doing this. And once they passed away, it was my free shot to. What was your professional life? I was working at a bank, telling people how to close their mortgage and what to pay off their mortgage. And we used to just give financial advice. It was boring. Basically, as I grew up, I started to learn there's two answers and two solutions to not having enough money. One is to make more money. And you really don't have any say in that. And the other one is to spend less money. And you have all control over that. So you have wooden. Cabinet here, just like this. Another cabinet. Oh, I see. Yep. Two storage. And then the entire bed is cat litter, cat food, laundry, tools. There she is. And if you look under the mattress, it's just. Plywood. Yeah. Simple. Yeah. The whole build is simple. So I started to slowly move into being a minimalist. And then I slowly started figuring out ways to not paying a monthly rent. I spent about five years of experimenting with different setups. I bought and refit a sailboat for $5,000 and then lived on it. And then I moved around the National Forest and lived for a year for free without paying rent. And it's actually pretty good. Trying all the different nomadic lifestyles. I'll tell you, it is hard to park an RV for free. So the idea of being able to just drop an anchor anywhere you're at on the boat and not have to pay someone to drop that anchor changes the idea of living for free immediately. You just anchor. You can drop your anchor. So if you're actually comparing one square mile of land that you can park on to one square mile of water that you can park on, the percentages are so different. They're not even comparable. The moment you move on the water, you're able to use almost 100% of it. They're calling for the bridge opening. I started on Lake Michigan in a sailboat. You know, when you go online and you look at ways to live for very little, the first thing that pops up is sailboats because you can move without gas. I fell for it and I lived on Lake Michigan for a long time. You can see he wants to come out. I don't want him out when I'm sailing though. But then in Wisconsin you have to leave six months out of the year because the lake freezes. This spot, you just found it. I googled where do people live on the river. This area, most of Tennessee, a huge chunk of Kentucky, half of Alabama, a huge chunk of Mississippi, almost a quarter of Georgia, was purchased by the Army Corps of Engineers with taxpayer money. They then made all these channels, moved everyone out, then they flooded it. Now before they flooded it, it was all taxpayer property. It was all public property and once they flooded it, the shoreline now here is public property. No one lives on that property because it was all purchased prior to starting this huge endeavor, which makes this place special. For a place like this to exist on the planet is extremely rare when 99% of the shoreline is public access through four states, hundreds of miles of shoreline. So when you add up that square mileage, it is 40,000 square miles of watersheds. It's one percent of America that we're talking that you can float around on. So you built this? Yeah, in 12 days. 12 days? Yeah, in a campsite. So I was off-grid the whole time and I used solar power to charge the tools. So I bought a boat like you would normally see with 17 seats on it. It's all glued on like a normal pontoon boat. Then I stripped everything off of it. I'm not going to use two by fours for the walls because look how much heavier that would be. I went to Home Depot and bought wood and all these windows. Pretty much it's all window in front. And it's really like 20 sheets of plywood and 50 two by fours. The fix for the three inch mistake, I'm gonna put two by fours in. All better. Fixed. So the police just came here. Apparently there are a couple hunters who said that there's a crazy man out in the woods trying to build a house saying that there's a guy out there using his generator and sawing at five in the morning. I don't think it was five in the morning but probably six, the latest. And then after me showing my permits to them, the officer said, you're not breaking any rules. You're in a legitimate campground. You have your boat. A lot of people bring their boats. So if people don't like what you're doing, they're supposed to move further away. I'm gonna see how it floats. As soon as it could float and had doors where I could lock the cat and dog inside, I put it on the water and started living in it. All right, I mean this thing is sitting pretty flat to me. It has to be in shallow water and kind of check on it but everything looks like it's going pretty good. So I am out on open water. First thing I noticed is that the boat is very boat-like. It is going up and down with waves. As soon as you cross the center line, it puts your weight on the other pontoon. But it wasn't anywhere near done. And then every week I'd go and get material and take it up to any island and work on it. So the cedar is the outhouse. I did have some storage under the sink here. So this kitchen net is completely rustic. You can see all the screw holes. I use cedar fence. Cheapest backslash you can buy. And because it's cedar fence, I can handle whatever you throw at it. I did take the time to under screw because I want this to look like a bar. The bar completely encloses the controls. The bed is in. I haven't done storage underneath the bed yet. I have not started working on the bathroom, although I bought my toilet. If that's what's stopping you from going on your adventures, get over it. It's not that bad at all. What do you have for a heater? Mini cubic. And then this is the water tank that heats the coffee. Oh, it's great. Isn't it awesome? It's my favorite thing in the world. But it's so tiny. It's so tiny, but it's so warm. So like the other thing is when I started, there was no insulation. So the walls were all this. And then everyone's like, you're burning through your firewood so fast because you don't have insulation. So last winter I was bored. Went to the store and I got insulation and then all those boards above. I still have some right there to do the cedar. So I bought cedar fencing. It's super cheap. And I put insulation in that I got from a remnants of a house that they were building here. And I just put it in and screwed this in. I'll tell you there's a big difference in the heat from having that now. But I went five years with no insulation, no nothing, and I was fine. My whole, all I do in winter is I find driftwood. I spend about two hours a day cutting that day's worth of wood for the following day. I stack it here, but I am burning cypress in here. The smell coming off of this fire is something amazing. These drying racks work really good. So this was sitting like this for about 25 minutes and you see how it's gotten the moisture out right there. And then as the one that's burning down there is burning away, you can dry this one out. You think about the old shanties and a lot of times that was economic, like just people necessity, right? Yeah. So the, originally the beginning setup of the shanty boat was you made your own boards by hand. So when you built your farm or you built your house, you cut that tree down and you hand saw that board so you would never walk away from a board ever in your life. So you took the board from your farm, whatever you didn't sell, like whatever shed or whatever barn house that you didn't sell in that house where you were moving away from, and you built your shanty boat with it. You took your oven and your animals on that boat and then you really went to greener pastures. You went downriver, only downriver, no other way to go, and you go downriver till you find a nice place to live, take the boards apart and rebuild your house. That was the original shanty and that's how that worked. And then the great depression came and it became a liveaboard boat. So the shanty boat had to have two criterias. You had to build it and you had to live on it permanently. It had to be an actual home. So that's a shanty boat. Now we're moving into this where they talk about it's a lifestyle. So you'll get people who will buy a factory houseboat and live the shanty boat lifestyle on the weekend. So that word just changed to be a lifestyle rather than an actual boat, you know. But in reality, the whole thing was getting away from the taxation of land, the requirement to pay money per month to a landlord or rent, and basically being able to fish and grab, you know, stuff from the water. Biggest part of boondocking and being able to boondock is your system. If you're using water, you're going to eventually run out of water. So shavings, toilet. I have done every type of toilet. Those all go wrong. They also happen where you have to go back and have them pumped out or dumped. This does not. You pull the bag out, you tie it. No water usage. Plus the whole setup is less than $10. All of my heating is off of diesel, fireplace, and then my air conditioning is a generator. So none of my batteries are running high output things. So they're all lasting forever. It is a boat fireplace made for living on the water. The whole thing tries to stay not hot. So like, if you were to touch this or touch this, it doesn't burn you. But it's because it's double walled and insulated. So this is, there's double, two pipes in here. When it gets to here, there's a third pipe and insulation. So it'll go, it goes, this is touching here. It doesn't actually burn anything. And when it's going, it can be 20 degrees outside, 10, 15 degrees below zero. And I have to have the front door open and I'm in boxers. Cause it's that warm. Yes. If I look at myself when I was 30 years old, the first thing that stands out was I had a house and I had two Two nice cars. I had a Volvo XC90 and I had a Jaguar. The car payments were about 800, including insurance a month. And the house payment was including insurance and taxes was 1,700 a month. Together it's a better part of 2,500. 2,500 that I had to come up with every month. Currently for me to live here as a 45 year old man, it's $1,080 to cover all my expenses for the entire year living here. Think about that. I am taking the amount of money I was spending every two weeks when I was 30 and I'm living off of it for an entire year. Imagine if you knew when you were 20, that if you just found happiness without buying stuff, you could live 90% of your life without working instead of the other way around. So how do you choose a site for a home? The wind and the sun. Like in winter, in winter I would need the sun or I'm running my diesel heater in a fireplace all day. And then in summer, I don't want sun to touch my boat. I don't want it anywhere near my boat. So like in there right around now, you'll see that whole side on the right is going to be all sun for the rest of the day. So you would move in winter from that spot right there over to this spot during the day. Here's where we're going to put the boat if there's any kind of storm. This little cut through goes to the other creek. Perfect little spot right there for not being part of any current flood or anything like that. Otherwise back in here to the right is a good spot too. This has really turned out to be an exceptionally quiet spot where no boat, the only boats that come in here are boats where I are my friends and I show them on a map where I'm at and they come and find me. Otherwise I've never had anyone come in here yet. I've been where I've made the right decision and I have a great night. And I've been where I made a bad decision and it was the worst night of my life and I thought when is this wind going to end? How long is the storm going to go? There's so much wind right now. It's just overwhelming right now. Holy cow. I'm sorry buddy it's scary. Tornado warning for Benton County ETA 1005 to 1015. Eventually you start to be like all right this is serious right? We're really lucky because the wind is coming through really strong but if the trees behind us are blocking at the island I'm on are blocking. Look how they're hitting over there and I'm glad that's not hitting us. How often are tornadoes coming through? They call it straight line winds. Since I've been here I've been in seven like where they happen within you know 10 miles of me. If there's weather I'll never listen to someone's weather through a human voice. I want to look at the data and I'm not interested in what you're selling me. If the wind's going to be 15 I want to look at that number. Where is it coming from? When is it happening? And that's what I believe. But again I tuck underneath stuff so it goes up and over and you typically when a tornado comes through me I'm on the bottom part of the cliff and the tornado gets lifted up over. So I see it. I see the trees falling. I see the wind but my boat is not moving. And you worry about something happening? I mean if you got hurt or something? I stopped worrying about things like seven years ago. I promise you I don't spend one minute worried about something. But you have internet access out here? Yes. So you can contact them. Right and they have flight for life. So like as far as health they have flight for life here. Snake bites take 24 hours so it's not something that's an immediate response. Oh and I'm an EMT. I'm an emergency medical technician. So like I can stop my bleeding if that comes down to it. What are the things you look for then? You're looking for light? Fetch. So I don't want any distance where a wave could accrue. The distance between me and any body of water needs to be small. You see out of the front there's no fetch in front of me. So even if I get wind there's no wave coming to me because of that land in front of us. So the fetch and then in winter I want sun in summer I am afraid of sun. It's just the temperature like a microclimate. And then how often trees fall. That's the major fear here is the trees. When a tornado comes through here all 200 trees around me might fall. So you see something that's fallen here would that be from? That's what I do. So when I come into an area if I see a single trees that's age. If I see 15 trees that's wind. And then if I see them coming downhill that's a mudslide. So you see some here but could that be age? That's age. That's age and then the ones that are here are brought in here with current and flood. Plus the other thing is so we're looking at the back of two mountains. So if it rains for three days a lot of these will white cap through here and crush you. But the way that this you see how the wood is set right here it's not on the other side of the trees. It's on this side. That means that it fills from here. So it's what's called a backwash. So I'm safe with that land in front of my boat from trees hitting me. Nothing is going to come from behind me in this right where I'm at. Do you ever repeat locations? When the weather is perfect for this location I have like five really good spots for tornado type weather. And I will run to those spots depending on when I get an alert for it or whatever. This one's got too many trees so unless it's a straight storm coming from the south you don't want to be in here. You know you basically hide. So how many spots have you gathered by this point? I mean you must have a lot of spots. The ones that I remember and that I would keep like about a hundred. But I've been and you do the math on it. The other thing is we talk about the 14 days that's a limit. I move every three or five days depending on when the wind changes in reality. And then if I'm in a spot and the sun is getting me I'll move in that river five or six times during a day to just be in the right spot. And then if the wind changes if it's 90 degrees and I can put myself on a peninsula like where the waves are coming on the other side of the island I don't feel the wave but I get the wind coming through the boat I'll move to that. So it's really just trying to keep my microclimate like perfect. And then depending on the water levels the place where you're staying will either work or not work. Sometimes you just have to leave because the water got too low. Like this beach up here on the right I stayed there and the water got so high that the beach left and I couldn't let my dog out anymore. Why just because of seasonal? Oh no it's dams. So there's when they take power in Kentucky this goes down and when they make power in Pewaukee it goes up. In summer it's five feet higher in winter they drain it all for the animals and they're but you can't get back here and stuff. So right after this this all used to be a really nice 10-foot beach right here and now you see the trees underwater this is all underwater now. But that's I kept my boat here for two weeks in the shade the whole time. So it's all day shade right here and then the bad storms come from the south so this cliff blocked me from all the storms. So my boat doesn't feel any wind whenever there's a storm. I remember I was in my late 20s and both me and my wife's car were broken and it was the first time I actually had to go borrow money from my credit union to pay for maintenance and I had gotten a ride there from my parents and I said to them you know if we made just a little bit more money everything would be okay and they both laughed hysterically for five minutes at me and they said it doesn't matter how much you make it will never be enough ever it will always be just not enough and the advice I wish they would have told me was if you can find as much joy in a sunset as you can find in owning a Ferrari you can be a super rich person just by choosing the sunset