The Fever Called Living
Gary Duncan, Rio Grande National Forest, Colorado. All photographs from Colorado and New Mexico, July 2024, by Richard Rothman for Harper’s Magazine © The artist
I first met Gary Duncan three years ago, outside a pub in the town of Saguache, Colorado, from which he led me to a remote corner of public land at the northern end of the San Luis Valley. A wily, leather-skinned Vietnam War veteran, Duncan has maintained a hermitic lifestyle for the past two decades, wintering in a propane-heated trailer outside Moab, Utah, and spending the nicer parts of the year shuffling between sites like this one, selected for its seclusion from man-made electromagnetic fields, or EMFs. It is illegal for anyone to live on public land full-time, so although Duncan spends much of his life rooting out invasive species and repairing damaged roads, he is forced to stay on the move, constantly looking over his shoulder for law enforcement.
His “mobile domicile,” as he calls it, is a 1987 Dodge pickup that he has modified beyond recognition. It looks like Ted Kaczynski’s cabin on a flatbed, with a wooden steering wheel, barrel-roofed living quarters, and an adobelike mixture packed into the vent wells—just one of Duncan’s many dubious DIY interventions meant to ward off radio-frequency, or RF, radiation. The vehicle’s exterior is plastered with laminated prints of his poetry, manifestos, and diatribes against cell phones and pesticides.
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