stationery from a newspaper or publishing house. Tell them you will be writing a feature story for some magazine on the tourist spots or handcrafts of the country. The embassy will arrange for you to travel gratis aboard one of their air force planes. The planes leave only from Washington and New York at unscheduled times. Once you have the O.K. letter from the embassy you’re all set. This is definitely worth checking out if you want to vacation in a foreign country with all sorts of free bonuses thrown in.
A one-way ride is easy if you want to get into skyjacking. Keep the piece or knife in your shoe to avoid possible detection with the “metal scanner,” a long black tube that acts like a geiger counter. Or use a plastic knife or bomb. It’s also advisable to wrap your dope in a non-metallic material. Avoid tinfoil.
The crews have instructions to take you wherever you want to go even if they have to refuel, but watch out for air marshals. To avoid air marshals and searches pick an airline which flies short domestic hops. You should plan to end up in a country hostile to the United States or you’ll end up right back where you came from in some sturdy handcuffs. One dude wanted to travel in style so he demanded $100,000 as a going-away gift. The airlines quickly paid off. The guy then got greedy and demanded a hundred million dollars. When he returned to pick up the extra pocket money, he got nabbed. None the less, skyjacking appears to be the cheapest, fastest way to get away from it all.
IN CITY TRAVEL
Any of the public means of transportation can be ripped off easily. Get on the bus with a large bill and present it after the bus has left the stop. If the bus is crowded, slip in the back door when it opens to dispatch passengers.
Two people can easily get through the turnstile in a subway on one token by doubling up. In some subway systems cards are given out to high school kids or senior citizens or employees of the city. The next time you are in a subway station notice people flashing cards to the man in the booth and entering through the “exit” door. Notice the color of the card used by people in your age group.
Get a piece of colored paper in a stationery store or find some card of the same color you need. Put this “card” in a plastic window of your wallet and flash it in the same way those with a bona fide pass do.
Before entering a turnstile, always test the swing bar. If someone during the day put in an extra token, it’s still in the machine waiting for you to enter free.
For every token and coin deposited in an automatic turnstile, there is a foreign coin the same size for much less that will work in the machine. (See the Yippie Currency Exchange, following, for more info.) Buy a cheap bag of assorted foreign coins from a dealer that you can locate in the Yellow Pages. Size up the coins with a token from your subway system. You can get any of these coins in bulk from a large dealer. Generally they are about 1,000 for five dollars. Tell him you make jewelry out of them if he gets suspicious. Giving what almost amounts to free subway rides away is a communal act of love. The best outlaws in the world rip-off shit for a lot more people than just themselves. Robin Hood lives!
4. FREE LAND
Despite what you may have heard, there is still some rural land left in Amerika.
The only really free land is available in Alaska and remote barren areas of the western states. The latest information in this area is found in a periodic publication called Our Public Lands, available from the Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D.C. 20402. It costs $1.00 for a subscription. Also contact the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Washington, D.C. 20240 and ask for information on “homesteading.” By the time this book is out though, the Secretary of the Interior’s friends in the oil companies might have stolen all the available free land. Being an oil company is about the easiest way to steal millions. Never call it stealing though, always refer to it as “research and development.”
Continental United States has no good free land that we know of, but there are some very low prices in areas suited for country communities. Write to School of Living, Freeland, Maryland, for their newspaper Green Revolution with the latest information in this area. Canada has free land available, and the Canadian government will send you a free list if you write to the Department of Land and Forests, Parliament Building, Quebec City, Canada. Also write to the Geographical Branch, Department of Mines and Technical Surveys, Parliament Building, Quebec City, Canada. Correspondence can be carried out with the Communications Group, 2630 Point Grey Road, Vancouver 8, British Columbia, Canada, for advice on establishing a community in Canada. The islands off the coast of British Columbia, its western region and the area along the Kootenai River are among the best locations.
If you just want to rip off some land, there are two ways to do it; openly or secretly. If you are going to do it out front, look around for a piece of land that’s in dispute, which has its sovereignty in question-islands and deltas between the U.S. and Canada, or between the U.S. and Mexico, or any number of other borderline lands. You might even consider one of the abandoned oil-drilling platforms, which are fair game under high seas salvage laws. The possibilities are endless.
If you intend to do it quietly, you will want a completely different type of location.
Find a rugged area with lots of elbow room and plenty of places to hide, like the Rocky Mountains, Florida swamps, Death Valley, or New York City. Put together a tight band of guerrillas and do your thing. With luck you will last forever.
If you just want to camp out or try some hermit living in the plushest surroundings available, you’ll do best to head for one of the national parks. Since the parks are federal property, there’s very little the local fuzz can do about you, and the forest rangers are generally the live-and-let-live types, although there have been increasing reports of long-hairs being vamped on by Smokey the Pig, as in Yosemite. You can get a complete list from National Park Service, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. 20240. The following is a list of some good ones:
• ALABAMA-Russell Cave National Monument, Bridgeport 35740
• ARIZONA-Grand Canyon National Park, Box 129, Grand Canyon 86023
• ARKANSAS-Hot Springs National Park, Box 1219, Hot Springs 71901
• CALIFORNIA-Yosemite National Park, Box 577, Yosemite 95389[1]
• COLORADO-Rocky Mountain National Park, Estes Park, 80517
• FLORIDA-Everglades National Park, Box 279, Homestead 33030
• IDAHO-Boise National Forest, 413 Idaho Street, Boise 83702
• ILLINOIS-Shawnee National Forest,Harrisburg National Bank Building, Harrisburg 62946
• KENTUCKY-Mammoth Cave National Park, Mammoth Cave 42259
• LOUISIANA-Kisatchie National Forest, 2500 Shreveport Hwy., Pineville 71360
• MAINE-Acadia National Park, Box 338, Bar Harbor 04609
• MARYLAND-Assateague Island National Seashore, Rte. 2 Box 111, Berlin 21811
• MASSACHUSETTS-Cape Cod National Seashore, South Wellfleet 02663
• MICHIGAN-Hiawatha National Forest, Post Office Building, Escanaba 49829
• MISSOURI-Mark Twain National Forest, 304 Pershing St., Springfield 65806
• NEVADA-Lake Mead National Recreation Area, 601 Nevada Hwy, Boulder City 89005
• NEW MEXICO-Aztec Ruins National Monument, Route 1, Box 101, Aztec 87410
• NEW YORK-Fire Island National Seashore c/o New York City National Park Service Group, 28 E. 20th St., New York, NY 10003
• NORTH CAROLINA-Wright Brothers National Memorial Box 457, Manteo 27954
• OKLAHOMA-Platt National Park, Box 201, Sulphur 73086
• OREGON-Crater Lake National Park, Box 7, Crater Lake 97604
• UTAH-Bryce Canyon National Park, Bryce Canyon 84717
