There is off-the-grid and then there is OFF-the-grid………..ya know? 

No? 

No, I didn’t know that either.  Turns out that we (Sally and I and our neighbours, generally speaking) are ‘conventionally’ off the grid but there are quite a few sub-categories.  Some of them are whacko.

According to Nick Rosen, (www.off-grid.net) there are over 500,000 off-gridders in the US alone and the numbers are growing rapidly (15% a year).  He wrote a book about it.  Nick is a Brit and he says that there is a similar phenomena going on in Great Britain though, by dint of the density of the island, there are fewer living remote.

And in Canada, by dint of it’s size, there are likely more people OTG than in most first world countries.   

But then it gets interesting.  When I say ‘off-the-grid’, I generally mean that you are living too far away from conventional services to hook up to any.  Like us.  Like many rural Canadians.  But Nick includes those who are close enough to the grid but choose not to hook up (a minority), those who live on-the-grid but choose to prepare their house for the eventuality of the grid collapsing (a larger minority), a bunch who live partially off-the-grid (have a road and electricity but their own well and septic) and those who are ‘off-the-grid’ politically in that they have refused to file income taxes or have credit cards or phone numbers. 

There are also those who live in their car or RV (or boats!) but they are very dependent on the grid even if, technically, they are not permanently hooked up.  Some are criminals and some live as if they were – on the lam and off-the-watched-and-tracked-grid.  Then, of course, there are the homeless.  And there are the ones who are simply ‘flying under everyone’s radar’ (couch surfers, house-sitters, etc.).  By most categories that he employs, we are pretty damn straight. 

But even amongst those of us who live off-the-grid because we simply choose to, there are sub-categories.  Some are rich (Leonardo de Caprio has an island as do a few other celebrities like Johnny Depp).  Michelle Pfieffer lives not far from us!  Virtually all of those living on Stuart Island just North of us fall into the rich-but-not-celebrity niche of O-T-G’s. 

There are the religious ones (Waco, the Amish, Bountiful).  There are the ‘survivalists’.  There are ‘freedom seekers’.  Many are poor (squatters, etc.) and many are ‘minimalists’ trying to live within their means but not so much in poverty.  We like to think of ourselves in that category despite some obvious signs of slipping.  

Then there are the ‘ostracized’ and we have some of them but mostly our ‘O’-people chose first to go rather than get pushed (we like to think of ourselves in that category, too).  But he describes the mad, the traumatized and the deviant as amongst the ‘O’ people too.  Ours are just eccentric. 

We hope. 

I guess what I am saying is this: you can be off-the-grid while living in Burnaby.  You can do it be buying an island or a piece of forest somewhere.  You can do it by living in an RV or in a cardboard box.  Some are off-the-grid because they were pushed and some are off the grid because they went willingly and still a lot of people simply just aspire to it.  It seems there are a number of ways to check out of the system and, quite extraordinarily, many are making that choice.   Or are planning it.

Wild, eh?