[The following is an account of 24 hours spent at Ephemerisle, an annual autonomous river gathering in Northern California, founded in 2009 by a Silicon Valley startup called The Seasteading Institute. The full piece also appears in Baited Area #8, which you can order in print or pdf form here.]
Opportunity Lives Here
The pink-haired cashier at the Grocery Outlet just outside of Antioch, California says she hasn’t seen the latest version of the New York EBT card. She tells me it used to be colorful. I wonder if she’s seen the Oregon card, The Oregon Trail, presumably named after the 90s side scrolling computer game, or the Louisiana card, the Louisiana Purchase, but I don’t ask. The cashier asks if I live in New York and I say yes, sort of. We’re spending the weekend on a boat nearby, Roxann clarifies. More specifically, we’re plotting our way to Ephemerisle, the annual seasteading gathering that assembles in the Delta region where the Sacramento River and San Joaquin rivers meet. Each year a couple hundred people arrive by boat and build temporary structures, or “islands,” connecting their various watercraft, then they live and host events there for up to ten days. The only way to Ephemerisle is by water. The only rule is “don’t die.” But I’ve learned to take proclamations about no rules with a grain of salt.
The cashier’s stepdad lives on a boat. “It sounds nice for a week or maybe a month,” she says, but no longer than that. “Maybe in the Netherlands, where the infrastructure exists, and the attitude toward living on the water is different, but not here, not yet.”
She’s confident that the attitude will change, though—that it will have to, due to rising sea levels and housing costs. I ask to use the restroom, but there isn’t one open to the public. “The 7/11 up the road has been cool lately,” the cashier says, and, mistaking us for homeless, offers a few other local resources before handing us our bags.
Heading back to the highway, the 7/11 is one of the few buildings not boarded up. Whole strip malls have been left behind. The city of Antioch’s motto used to be The Gateway to the Delta; in 2020 it was changed to Opportunity Lives Here as part of a municipal rebranding campaign. We’re about 20 miles from the coordinates where Ephemerisle is set to take place and less than five from the river, but it’s hard to imagine water anywhere nearby. Much of California is characterized by this contrast between wet and dry. We’re looking at rolling golden hills, dusty skeletons of strip malls. With any luck we will soon be floating on the San Joaquin.
The Institute
Ephemerisle was started in 2009 by The Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit founded a year earlier by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman, grandson of influential economist Milton Friedman. The organization proposes floating polities on the high seas, start-up cities working outside the influence of existing governments and tax codes. In theory, these communities would operate competitively, like corporations. If a city’s inhabitants are unhappy with the way things are going, they can detach their modular floating homesteads and find a competing cluster to join. Peter Thiel gave the Institute half a million in seed money when it began.
Ephemerisle was one of the Seasteading Institute’s early experiments. The gathering borrowed a few basic premises from Burning Man and combined them with the libertarian ideas of the Friedman dynasty. The first year about a hundred people attended. The Institute officially detached its name from the gathering after this first year, but Patri Friedman remains involved. His name continues to appear on our various transmissions, which are scattered in classic decentralized form across Whats App, Signal, Facebook, GitHub, an official website, and more.
Unlike Burning Man, Ephemerisle hasn’t grown much since it began. Attendance there continues to hover around two or three hundred. And while Patri still visits, his formal business dealings have moved back to land. In 2019 he founded Pronomos Capital, a firm that uses VC money (Thiel is, again, a notable investor) to build experimental startup cities in the third world. Actually, it’s in Prospera, one such city off the coast of Honduras, that Patri had all of his mouth bacteria replaced with other bacteria. He can also open his Tesla or give you his business card using a small implant in his palm, and he’s made arrangements for the cryogenic preservation of his body after death.
Waiting
The location of this year’s party isn’t far from where Roxann and I are loitering, but getting there is proving difficult. The river’s current can be strong enough to necessitate a decent motor, which we don’t have. We spent the morning combing through instructional YouTube videos about DIY drill-powered propellers, watching men dip long drill attachments into the water, aim, and push themselves across lakes in their canoes. It looks fun, but we’ve run out of time to build. Tonight is Ephemerisle’s last night, and sometime tomorrow the islands disassemble into their constituent parts for another year.
Luckily, the gathering offers informal ferries to and from the site. Having no idea what sort of makeshift watercraft passes for a ferry in this context, we’ve condensed food, water, and sleeping gear into a couple of backpacks and an overstuffed IKEA bag. We’ve also brought Poison, an ill-tempered 13-pound chihuahua who, by endangering all potential pet sitters, has earned an indefinite spot as my plus-one.
The ferry schedule and pick-up site have yet to be disclosed, so we sit in the car, stare at our phones, and wait.
Room for two more
I can tell by the outfits on the dock at King’s Island Marina that we’re in the right place: sequins, neon animal prints, eclectic headwear. We take a seat next to someone wearing a foam hat shaped like an oversized taco. He gives me a knowing glance, then reveals that he’s harboring a small chihuahua in his coat.
“I’m from not far from here, in the Nevada City area,” he tells us. “I didn’t realize there were all these weird little islands and waterways and stuff [here.] It’s a totally different vibe...”
The taco guy drove here in his parents’ car with a paddle board and vague plans of paddling out to the island, but his friends discouraged it. Judging by the river current and the distance from the dock, this was good advice.
“I feel way more at peace in the woods,” he says. “When I was living in SF in my 20s around a lot of concrete and cars and stuff like that, I’d go to the park and feel a noticeable change.” During pauses in conversation he cranes his neck down discretely and sniffs ketamine. “There might be something to it, the more plants you’re around—maybe even just because of the way that they’re shaped, as opposed to the way that city structures are shaped. The way there’s all these hard angles and flat surfaces, and the way that everything bounces off of them in a certain way, as opposed to leaves and dirt where everything gets diffused. Like, there’s not as much reverberating vibes...”
An arriving boat interrupts our conversation. People stand up, gather their things, and move toward it. As it docks it becomes clear that not all of us will fit. The glittery crowd presses aggressively forward in no particular order. Roxann and I move with hesitation, and so does the taco. The boat is filling up rapidly.
The captain yells, “I only have room for one or two more!”
“You should take the spot, there’s two of you,” taco insists. “I’ll catch the next one.”
We stand paralyzed for a moment. It’s kind of him to offer, but the mob on the boat has cast a serious shadow of doubt on our whole plan.
The captain yells again: This is the last boat ferrying passengers for the evening, there is no next one.
“Go for it, it’s all you,” taco insists again.
Before we can plead any further, he’s gone. We climb timidly aboard. The boat pushes off, and I follow his cartoonish silhouette as it moves toward a group of European party animals on the second dock. People on our boat are telling us where and how to sit. A guy in an unbuttoned silk shirt is already dropping the names of billionaires he knows. A small sinking feeling introduces itself.
Omens not heeded
The magnetic pull of the Delta should not be understated. It’s a region of stunning, often surprising contrasts. There are countless canals and channels snaking through over 50 small islands. Navigating them by boat feels like being inside of a video game. Sometimes the place looks like Louisiana or Texas, sometimes like Vietnam. Miles of narrow levees cut through the water, and the distant sky is dotted with countless alien wind turbines.
Ever since my first visit to the region I’ve thought of it often. On several occasions friends and I pooled our money and rented a boat there. One year we rented a pontoon from a marina on Bethel Island and took a wrong turn while everyone was high on psilocybin. The propeller on the boat was designed to shatter into a million pieces when it hit something, which it did when we inadvertently turned onto a shallow channel and ran aground. The staff at the marina had gone home for the night, the physical map was useless, and the emergency supplies consisted of a pack of expired flares and half an oar. We sat for hours on the still boat. It began to get dark and cold. When a good samaritan eventually pulled up in his boat to give us a tow, he bottomed out, too.
Eventually, someone from the marina figured out we’d missed our return time by many hours. They sent the coast guard to pull us back to safety. As it turns out, an emergency coast guard tow is not a cheap procedure. I had to impersonate a litigious web programmer for a month to avoid paying the fees.
The next year we did it again. Being unwelcome at the previous Bethel Island marina, we chose a different one located in Stockton, about 30 miles away on the Delta region’s eastern edge. At the time I had a small cut on my foot stemming from a shoe that didn’t fit correctly. We drove the rental boat to a tiki-themed marina and RV park, camped there for the night, and returned it the next day.
The boat was unscathed, but I was not. When we were swimming some bacteria had made its way from farm waste runoff into my bloodstream via the small cut on my foot. A week later I woke up in the middle of the night vomiting and unable to walk. The infection caused my leg to swell drastically. I was hospitalized for five days. During this time I managed to develop a minor morphine dependency followed by extreme insomnia. The insomnia led to vivid, violent hallucinations. By day four, any time I closed my eyes I’d see an endless tapestry of 10th century gore.
I couldn’t sleep, and I knew there was no chance of recuperating on a hospital diet without rest or sunlight. I wasn’t sure what floor I was on, and I wasn’t mobile enough to make an escape. I called a friend and tried convincing him to break me out of the place. He sounded concerned.
“I think you’re being paranoid,” he said. “When you’re well enough to go, they’ll let you go.” But I knew I was stuck in a feedback loop. On my final night in the place I sat sleeplessly, repeating a mantra: I was well, I was recuperating, there was color in my face, I was on the road to recovery. I was not seeing gore behind my eyelids. Etc.
Somehow, it worked. I managed to pull myself together just before my morning doctor’s evaluation. I projected health and good humor. “You look a lot better,” the doctor said, his mouth resembling a rotting stigmata wound covered in flies. “You can go home.”
All of this is to say, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta has a unique and powerful pull, one that persists stubbornly despite many bad omens.
Promises, Resistance
Our ferry captain is a middle-aged man with a small gap in his smile. He has one of those big chests like guys used to have in the 1950s. His name is Captain Zack. We’re seated next to a tech employee in his 40s and his elderly parents. Opposite us are his wife and their two twin boys. The couple moved from the Bay Area to Sacramento during lockdown.
“With the billionaires eyeing [the region], it might not be the way it is for long,” the mom says. The twins take turns performatively eating a Snickers bar, looking around for reactions. “They’re trying to start a walkable city, in Solano County mostly. Parts of Solano County butt up against the Delta. There are a lot of promises, but there’s a lot of resistance from farmers, too.”
I wonder if one of the billionaires might be Balaji Srinivasan, the VC who wrote The Network State: How To Start a New Country, and who has reportedly been buying up lots of acreage somewhere in Northern California.
The man with the silk shirt is telling the captain about a nearby marina, Stars and Moon Art Park. Not long ago it was River’s Edge, a blue collar marina and RV park with a local reputation for meth and crime. Recently, it’s undergone a transformation. The new owner is Chicken John, an early Burner and head builder at the very first Ephemerisle in 2009. (In 2007, Chicken ran a gag SF mayoral campaign on the Green Party ticket. Campaign PR involved public performances, puppets, and fake blood. He lost to Gavin Newsom.)
“It’s more operational now,” the silk shirt says. “They’ve sunk a bunch of money into it.” He quietly does a bump of coke and sips his beer. “But they have a tenant that’s violent,” he continues, “so I think it’s a little bit...”
“Can they kick them out?” Captain Zack interrupts.
“They’re looking into it,” says the silk shirt. “[The tenant] is on a lot of drugs.”
Our commute is about 45 minutes, dock-to-dock. At times the wind throws big sheets of water over the side of the boat, misting everyone on board. I laugh imagining the two of us in a rickety canoe, fighting the current by pointing a power drill in front of our path like a divining rod.
We pass an incongruous mansion, which Zack says is owned by the Hiltons.
“They do a big fireworks display every July 4th, a million dollar thing,” he says. “Apparently Paris Hilton used to visit Ephemerisle incognito, but I don’t believe it.”
The Hiltons bought the estate during Covid. In addition to the fireworks display, part of their bargain with the locals involved a large donation toward saving the Delta from looming tunnel projects. The water system we’re navigating, like much of rural California, is threatened with the Sisyphean task of hydrating the greater Los Angeles area nearly 400 miles away.
Vague dance music pulses as we near our destination. The grandparents take pictures with a long lens. Small boats and ramshackle structures are tethered to a giant barge. On top of the barge someone dressed as a frog is gyrating.
Sea legs
We exit the boat and plop our bags onto a wobbly dock. Nearby there’s a dance floor that connects the main structure to other walkways. One path leads to a huge repurposed military crane barge with a tall tower and an American flag on top. The other connects a glowing yacht to a big trawler filled with bunks and sprinkled with half-drunk Europeans. On the barge nearest us the pink LED glow of a selfie kiosk stands out against a beautiful reddish sunset.
