This is a story about the kind of life you can have living off what other people throw away. A story of living free. Free in the sense of no money being spent, but also free in the sense of freedom from a certain kind of system of living. Aside from the regular Monday confessionals I don’t use this blog much as a personal diary. Forgive me for this slight indulgence, but I feel that other people might be interested in learning a bit about this life and they tell you to write about what you know. So lets start the story at the beginning.

I graduated college with a computer science degree. Frankly I had no desire to get a job working in a cubicle, I wasn’t sure what to do with my life, and I was living in a situation that seemed at the time to be an endless spiral. I was spinning my wheels but going nowhere. I had no money, in fact what I had was a mountain of debt from school. I was what many people are at some point in their life, stuck.

With my apartment lease soon to be up, I started to look for a way out. I looked for jobs, first in the for-profit industry. I didn’t find anything I really wanted, so I moved to the non-profit industry. Through some magical stroke of luck I stumbled upon the AmeriCorps website. Never has one Google search so changed my life. This was it! My ticket out of the corn field. I had the skills and the desire, they provided the job and the chance to see someplace new.

I had been reading a lot of books, and I was starting to get very worried about the environment (this was pre-al gore, pre-Katrina, pre-live earth, pre-all that). I wanted to do something good for the world, and for myself. I signed up for every single program I could find that involved the environment, and a chance to be outside. I was eventually accepted into a program in the Louisiana bayou that would involve restoring the wetlands environment. I was told by the man running the program in a very thick Cajun accent that I would “be seein an aligato bout every day, yu huh.” I was going to be living in the swamp, way way out in the swamp, I was stoked. My mother was terrified.

That is until president Bush de-funded AmeriCorps (or tried to, even after promising to support it) and I got a call informing me that the swamp restoration project had been put on hold. Stuck again. My phone rang again. The good people in Austin Texas wanted me to come build trails with them. I was guarded, but happy. Lucky for me this time it stuck. My mother was still terrified.

I had no car and very little money. I gave away everything, recycled or threw out the rest, and slimmed down my entire belongings to two duffel bags, and a box. The bags would go with me on the greyhound bus (from Toledo Ohio to Austin Texas, a 24 hour + bus ride). The box would be shipped to my new home once I found one.

You will meet the strangest people on a greyhound bus. I slept through most of Ohio and Missouri, but somewhere we picked up this old woman, maybe in Arkansas. She “loved men folk” and was “keen” on “rubbing my shoulders”. I was flattered but this woman had to be in her 80’s. After what seemed like a million mile journey I arrived in Austin Texas with no place to live, no car, and a bit of money in my pocket. (I would later make the same journey home for the holidays with a horrible cold, the drugs and fever made me hallucinate slightly and I was unsure when to get off the bus, it was a nightmare journey filled with crazy memories and jumbled recollections of peoples faces and endless highways)

The program didn’t start for a couple of weeks, and I wanted to give myself a chance to get an apartment. I had a place picked out over the internet before I got there but when I arrived and called them they said that the room was not going to be ready for a week or two. I spent most of my cash on the cab ride to the youth hostel and then on the room at the hostel. I met some very cool travelers from Europe and we enjoyed a night of authentic Austin Texas Live music. The guy from Belgium seemed to be really into country music and knew “all the great places.” I had a great time talking and laughing with them. They took me out for breakfast the next morning, and we discussed the fact that Americans seem to be much more hung up about sex than Europeans. It was fascinating conversation, but I was really interested in the free food, I hadn’t eaten in a ten hours and was starving.

I did however have a problem. I was not going to be able to afford to stay in the hostel for two weeks, and pay my first months rent at the new apartment (I was going to have to find enough money to pay for the second months rent, during the first month living there). So after running the number I realized that if I worked it out just right, there would be a two day window in which I was neither staying at the hostel, or staying in the apartment. I asked the people at the hostel if I could leave my bags there, they were nice enough to let me and I slept in the park for two days. It was strange. I have never been “homeless” in my life, and I don’t really count this as being homeless. I was scared, didn’t sleep well, and would not like to do this again.

This is what I would call my “rookie” season at living free. At this point I was still buying food from the store, mostly M and M’s and peanuts. I was hungry most of the time, but other than that ok. I eventually got an apartment, got my stuff into it (it filled one small corner, as I had no furniture) and then the news came.

I had no phone, so I was using the pay phone across the street. When I called my Austin program to check in, they informed me that due to budget problems they would not be starting for a month and a half, but not to worry I was still in and everything was going to be ok. I had a problem. I had not budgeted a month and a half of no income into my plans. (in fact I would not get paid till after the first 4! weeks of the program, so really it was 2 and a half months of no income) This is when I really started to think about giving up and moving back home. I had enough money for a return ticket, but little more. I was all alone, and I had no way to pay for next months rent, let alone food. I was very close to packing it all in, calling my mother and begging for help.

I sat down, and on the back of a junk mail envelope I wrote a list of things I would need. Food, transportation, and money, the big three. I have since taken to using junk mail envelopes for list paper, and regularly keep the nice white ones in a stack. I needed to know the area before I could find any of those things. I asked the lady who worked at the apartment office, and started walking to all the places around my apartment. If you are familiar with Austin I was far down South Lamar, not the best place to find work. There are a lot of goodwill’s, pawn shops, and restaurants. With the list before me I somehow found new strength and vowed that I would make this work.

My first mission was to find some food. I was hungry and broke. I learned that you could volunteer at this Macrobiotic restaurant on weekend mornings chopping vegetables, and then they would allow you to have an all you can eat breakfast buffet. Sign me up! This mostly meant chopping hundreds of onions, I wept, but my belly was full every weekend. Next I needed some transportation. The nearest grocery store was about 8 miles away, and I didn’t relish walking that far with grocery bags. Lucky for me the pawn shop had beater bikes for 50 bucks. Score!

With no job, I had a lot of free time. I would get my backpack, and ride around to all the dumpsters behind all the stores within a ten mile radius of my house. I found an old bike that was so bent up that I could only assume it had been hit by a car, but on the back was a bike shelf thing, like the kind people used to hold their school books on in old movies. A bit of wrench work later and my bike was tricked out with such a shelf. A score of an old milk crate, and some reused zip ties from an old sign (did you know that if you slip a knife gently into the zip tie head, you can get the zip ties back open without ruining them?) I now had a trunk for my bike. I was in business, with that simple find I had tripled my carrying capacity for free stuff retrieval.

I was still hungry, and still needed some money. The weekend food job was just that, food on the weekend, I don’t know about you but I like to eat every day. My rent payment day was looming as well. Time to get a job. I made the choice to spend my return ticket money, and fully commit myself to giving this life a try. I got a 3 dollar phone from good will, and signed up for the 24 dollar a month, bare bones ATT phone plan. No call waiting, no long distance, no nothing. It would ring if you dialed the number, and little else. I started calling every job in the paper that was close enough to my house to ride a bike (20 miles or so). As luck would have it I got a job with Texas Campaign For The Environment, going door to door trying to convince the good people of Austin to give me their money so that we could increase the recycling of computer parts. I was alright at this job, but not good enough to meet quota. They let me stick it out for a couple of weeks, making enough money to pay that rent, and buy food, but just barely.

I was “let go” because frankly I was just not forward enough to get up in peoples faces and make them give me some money. Anyone who has ever done canvasing knows what I am talking about. It takes a certain kind of person, and I am not it. I did have some adventures though. We were picked up by the cops one time because someone had called them claiming we were bothering the neighborhood. The cops picked us up and drove us 20 minutes away and dumped us at a corner store. We told them that we had to meet back up with the van that would take us back to the office, but they didn’t care. With no phone, and no way to get back to our drop off point, we ended up convincing this very nice couple who had a pick up truck to drive us all back to the van. It was an interesting night.

So at this point I had learned a couple of lessons. One was don’t pay for anything you can get for free. At this point I had found a recliner in the dumpster down the street (covered with dog hair, but that came off). In fact my daily dumpster rounds had also turned up a dinning room table, three chairs, pots, pans, forks, spoon, and some cups. If you lived in my apartment complex you would regularly see me carrying a lazy boy or some other large object on my back up the steps into my apartment. I left the lights off at night, and went to bed when it was dark, I couldn’t afford air conditioning so I would throw myself in the river every day and float around with just my nose sticking out until the heat of the day was a little less (the heat is never really gone, but it does go down a bit). I found a box fan in the trash that was so dirty I thought it was black, until I got it home and cleaned it up in the tub to find out that it was in fact white.

I was good for another month, but I was really hungry, all the time. That is when I found two things, the library and Texas French Bread on south congress. The Austin downtown library is huge, has loads of books, is air conditioned, and free. A life saver. I started getting books to keep me busy (no tv, no friends, no Internet), including books on edible plants. I found Texas French bread with my nose. I used to eat dumpster bagels all the time in college, so it was no problem for me to jump into a bakery dumpster and pull out a bag of bread. TFB however was a whole other ball game. Fancy ciabatta bread, pastries, dense loaves of German dark wheat, bagels, croissants, chocolate covered cake things, this bakery made and threw away some of the best tasting bread I had ever eaten. I even got the guy who worked there to save me the day old soup in a giant plastic mayonnaise bottle a couple of times. I also noticed that many people in Austin (even the DPW people) had planted rose merry and other herb plants as decorative bushes in their front yards. Thanks to the library I was now regularly bringing home rose merry, mint, wild onions and grape leaves to feast on. My favorite dish was ciabatta bread with rose merry butter and onions cooked in the oven till the top got crunchy.

I was ridding my bike 25+ miles a day, sleeping in an 80 degree apartment and swimming a lot. I could eat anything I wanted and not gain an ounce. I ate pastries for breakfast every day, bagels for lunch and dinner (the best were the ones with fruit and nuts in them), and complimenting my diet with rice beans and some other foods from the store. This sort of living re-aligns your priorities. I remember once I had a powerful hunger for ice cream. I knew that any ice cream I got from the store would be melted in the hot Texas sun before I ever got it home, but I didn’t want to spend the money for a single serving at the gas station as I could get more ice cream for the same price at the store. My solution was to wait till 2 in the morning and then go get the ice cream and wrap it in paper bags to get it home. That cheap no-brand vanilla ice cream from a box tasted better than any scoop I have ever had. I enjoyed it slowly savoring every bite.

Later I would have my bike stolen once, and have two more fall apart on me, resulting in a Frankensteins monster of a bike put together from free parts I found, and me keeping my bike inside my apartment from now on. But for now, my food and transportation problems were mostly solved, I was ready to start my year in AmeriCorps. After a couple of false starts, and a bit of a change in mission (I would now be teaching people about technology three weeks a month and building trails one week a month), the money started to flow a bit and the worry of constant ruin was relived.

I still couldn’t do things like turn the air conditioner on, or take a cab anyplace but that was ok. I realized that I could actually start to save money, if I ate predominantly off the land and out of dumpsters. My monthly income was about 900 dollars. 600 of that went to rent, 50 of it to food, and 50 to utilities. The rest went right into the bank.

I was on constant lookout for the word “free.” Austin is a great place to see free music. I would often go downtown on my bike and watch some great band for free. I washed my cloths in the shower, I cooled off in the river, I constantly volunteered at any event that had food so I could take the extra home with me. It was a simple life, I read many books, and didn’t watch a single hour of TV for the whole year. I cut my own hair, made my own bed out of an electric blanket I found in a dumpster, even managed to get some shelves to put my cloths on. During the one month of cold I heated my home with the stove (free gas), and candles I had found behind the grocery store. They were all half burned and had pictures of Jesus on them, but if I lit ten or so of them they would keep me warm at night (the apartment was one room, and a bathroom).

I would get up early to beat the heat and the morning traffic and ride my bike downtown to the main AmeriCorps Office. I would sit in the shade under a tree for an hour and a half until they got there and opened the door. Serve all day, then ride my bike in the 100 degree heat up the big south congress hill to get some bread from the dumpster, then swing around to some good front yards to get some mint and rose merry, then it was home to drop off my booty. Get back on my bike and ride up south Lamar to Barton springs and throw myself into the river to cool down for a bit. Then ride dripping wet (it didn’t take long to dry off in the sun) back to my house for dinner. Often during these loops, I would stop at dumpsters to look for anything useful inside. Dinner was often dumpster bread, wild plants, rice and beans. I would read until the sun went down, then listen to NPR till about 10. Get naked, turn the fan on and try and go to sleep in the sweltering Texas heat.

Over the year I met friends, and had adventures. One time the drug addict who lived across the hall from me, he made me call him blue, took me downtown to listen to him play harmonica with his old band. It was by far the best music I have ever heard. Imagine Stevie Ray Vaughn on the Guitar in a tiny little club, with some of the best blues harmonica you have ever heard, playing to a packed crowd of Texans jumping and screaming to the music. It was amazing and one of the most memorable nights of my life. Blue would later lament to me that he had sold his harmonicas to buy drugs.

One night I came home to find the cops swarming over my apartment complex. Seems two boys were playing with a gun and had shot a bullet through the wall into the apartment next to mine. Later that year cops would show up at my door and make me prove that I was not the previous resident who apparently had a warrant out for his arrest. I saw great shows in the park, saw most of Austin by bike, met some very interesting people, and over all learned a lot about myself and my abilities.

By the end of the year I had saved up over 2000 dollars. I was ready to leave Texas for a new adventure. I didn’t want to have to start from scratch in my next location, and the money would provide a bit of a cushion. Even without the money I was convinced I would be alright. If I learned anything from my year in Texas it was how to make due with what you got. I packed up my two duffel bags, and sent my one box of stuff UPS to my mother, got on the bus and left. I left Texas a new man, a different person. I am pretty sure that most people would not want to live this life. The lessons I learned that year stick with me. I still look in dumpsters for stuff, get things free from the dump, never turn down a free meal, and always look for good free entertainment. If you have the right kind of eyes, you can find all of these things easily. I grew those eyes in Texas and it has changed my life.

If you have any tales of free living leave a comment and let me know what you learned, and how it has effected your life.