Thoughts on Dwelling Portably

Dwelling Portably was (is?) a zine put out by Holly & Bert, a husband and wife team living off-the-grid and self sufficiently somewhere deep in the woods of Oregon.  The zine has been around since the early 80s.

The zine is basically written in the format of short blurbs.  Holly & Bert write blurbs about personal experiences or any thoughts and tips that they think may be helpful to readers.  Readers also write in with tips and personal experiences.  Most of the people who wrote for DP appeared to be the post-hippie type.  Some of the writing comes across as overly paranoid about Armageddon and The Man, but the advice is helpful irregardless.  There are many reviews of various camping items, too. I didn't find them particularly useful, especially since some of the reviews were over a decade old, so I skipped over those.  However, I gleaned countless pieces of advice re: camping, nature, and alternative living, etc.

The DP collections were a pretty amazing read for me.  Having grown up deep in suburbia, back-to-nature and off-the-grid lifestyles couldn't be more foreign a concept to me.  I had no idea that:

A. Such lifestyles are actually viable and possible in the United States today.
&
B. That there are so many people to whom these sorts of lifestyles appeal.

Or so DP led me to believe. I'm not sure if there are really "many" people who engage or want to engage in portable living, but there sure were plenty of interesting (maybe even weird) people who wrote in to DP about their alternative living situations.  It's very intriguing. Holly & Bert were seemingly two normal people who got tired of the corporate rigmarole and decided to be self-sufficient.  Much of the writing in DP rings true to me since I'm the lost college grad type.  I'm not sure that I'll ever shun society and wipe my ass with moss, but I suppose that I am trying to find a sort of compromise between balls out corporate culture and complete hermit.  The people who write and wrote in to DP were back-to-nature/simple living in the extreme. I wonder what all the bloggers who tout "minimalism" would think of the lifestyles portrayed in DP?

I picked up the collections from Microcosm.  The zine collections have print that is very, very small and it is not as readable or as well organized as the book versions that were put out.  The three book set is only $20 from Microcosm (cheaper than on Amazon).  I recommend them highly to anyone interested in alternative living or bare bones camping.