Armed with toolboxes and traveling in dented pickup trucks, they prospect in garbage dumps, abandoned houses, cut-over timberlands, deserted beaches. Their haul seems shabby: driftwood, salvaged lumber, squares of flooring, old banisters, fragments of stained glass. But to the foragers, these gleanings are golden. Months or even years later, their booty reappears in the recycled glory of selfstyled, handmade homes.
Recently these architectural anarchists have been at work putting up hundreds of houses from Oregon to New Mexico. They are most active in the exurbs of the San Francisco Bay Area, where counterculture instincts still bear strange fruit. In Marin County, scores of rebels-cum-saw ignore building codes, hoping that inspectors will ignore them. Attempting to live quietly ever after with their violations, the builders—many of them dropouts from traditional professions—adopt linguistic camouflage. An illegal third story in a tower, for instance, is termed a "storage shelf rather than a bedroom.
While sparring with the authorities, the builders are always on the alert for material to improve their homes or start new ones. "Every time I bring trash to the dump," says one, "I bring home more than I took out there."
Some of the dumpyard creations are startling in their originality. They cling to treetops, hug mountainsides and nestle in wooded ravines. They offer a hodgepodge of winding exterior stairways, overhanging balconies and thatched roofs with soaring pitches. The interiors are equally daring. Polished steam engines serve as stoves; old windshields make unorthodox solariums. In fact, these houses have everything but the basics. The bathroom is often an outhouse. Electricity and central heating are rare. But there is more to life than utilities, or so say the owner-builders, who value the karma of self-expression over the convenience of plumbing. "A hand-hewed home is to a preconstructed one what fresh-baked bread is to a TV dinner," says Lloyd Kahn.