M[aker HEIRLOOM TECHNOLOGY S_TW_EA_CM_HP]

By Tim Anderson

LIVING FREE IN THE FLORIDA EVERGLADES

I’ve been living outdoors for the past few months, mostly in the swamps and rivers of Florida. Fisheating Creek, southwest of Lake Okeechobee, is particularly stunning: white sand, cypress knees, cabbage palms, perfect cool sunny weather, and very few mosquitoes when I was there in March.

Living outdoors is great. I wake up just before sunrise, have lots of energy all day, and sleep well at night, unlike the caffeine-vampire seasonal-affective jetlag meltdown that afflicts most of the people I know back in the land of progress.

I brought plenty of work with me. My laptop is full of more PDFs than I can read and the digital remains of my last five computers. I’ve got a few thousand trip photos and Xeroxed notebooks of projects I need to finish drawing.

Too bad swamps are so damn interesting. My laptop resides in a urethane rubber envelope inside a gasketed, hard backpack. When I get paranoid, I put that inside a dry bag. I have desiccant but don’t usually use it. I bag my toys up when they’re warm, and condensation hasn’t been a problem.

Photography by Tim Anderson