Ephemerisle, 2009. Photo by Liz Henry via flickr.

To get to Ephemerisle, the floating festival of radical self-reliance, I left San Francisco in a rental car and drove east through Oakland, along the California Delta Highway, and onto Route 4. I passed windmill farms, trailer parks, and fields of produce dotted with multicolored Porta Potties. I took an accidental detour around Stockton, a municipality that would soon declare bankruptcy, citing generous public pensions as a main reason for its economic collapse. After rumbling along the gravely path, I reached the edge of the SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta. The delta is one of the most dredged, dammed, and government subsidized bodies of water in the region. Its estimated that it provides two-thirds of Californians with their water supply.

At the marina closest to the festival, I spotted a group of Ephemerislers in swimsuits crammed into a dinghy. I approached them, but they were uninterested in small talk: their engine had run out of gas, and the marina was all out, too. They could give me a ride, they said, if I tracked down fuel. I contemplated the sad marina, its shabby rental boats, the murky water. Almost an hour had passed when the festivals ferry service showed up. At around noon, six of us took off in a small motorboat, speeding past Venice Island, a private sliver of land where Barron Hilton, heir to the Hilton hotel fortune, hunts ducks and puts on an annual July 4th firework display. Five minutes later, Ephemerisle came into sight, bobbing gently in an area called the Mandeville Tip.

It looked, at first, like a shapeless pile of floating junk, but as the boat drew closer, a sense of order emerged. The island was made up of two rows of houseboats, anchored about a hundred feet apart, with a smaller cluster of boats and yachts set off to the west. The boats had been bound together with planks, barrels, cleats, and ropes, assembled ad-hoc by someone with at least a rudimentary understanding of knots and anchors. Residents decorated their decks with banners and flags and tied kayaks and inflatable toys off the sides, giving the overall landscape the cephalopodan quality of raver pants. Dirty socks and plastic dishes and iPads and iPhones littered the decks. An enormous sound system blasted dance music, it turned out, at all hours of the day.

Each of the two-dozen boats at the party had a nameBayesian Conspiracy, Snuggly Nemo, Magic Carpet, Mini-ocracyand each name a personality to match, conveyed by the resident boaters choice of drug, beverage, or degree of exhibitionism. When I arrived, the Ephemerislers were partying in various stages of undress. They had been encouraged to make the space their own, to mind their own business, and to do as they pleased. This was, after all, a celebration of the laissez-faire lifean escape from the oppressive, rule-bound grind of dry land. In this suspended, provisional unreality, everybody was a planner, an economist, a designer, a king. Attendees were ready for everything the elements had in store, but knew escape was just a few clicks away, should the experiment go terribly wrong.

It is apparently a coincidence that Ephemerisles location shared a name with the 16th-century proto-libertarian philosopher Bernard de Mandeville. Mandeville Tip is a breezy point in the middle of the Delta, flanked by levees and a short boat ride away from a former county park. Its named after a 19th-century Californian politician, J. W. Mandeville, but the more well-known Mandeville, of the Fable of the Bees, had much in common with Ephemerisles freewheeling spirit. The Fables most famous lines, cited by Keynes, come from Mandevilles poem entitled The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turnd Honest, which argues that allowing private vices makes for good public policy. Bare Virtue cant make Nations live / In Splendor; they, that would revive / A Golden Age, must be as free / For Acorns, as for Honesty, concludes Mandeville, after bemoaning the unhappiness and lack of prosperity the bees experience while living in a more wholesome, regulated hive. Ephemerisle was its own little beehive of decadence, a floating pillow fort saturated in sex and soft drugs. It billed itself as a gathering of people interested in the possibility of permanent experimental ocean communities, but felt more like Burning Man, if Burners frolicked in the tears of Ludwig Von Mises.

Ephemerisle got its libertarian streak from its founders: the event was originally conceived of by the Seasteading Institute, a San Francisco nonprofit that supports the creation of thousands of floating city-states in international waters. After overseeing the first Ephemerisle in 2009, the Institute handed over responsibility for the festival to the community in 2010it turns out a raucous floating party costs too much for a tiny think tank to insureand last year, the group consisted of 300 amateur boaters, intoxicated partiers, and a committed clan of Seasteaders.

Seasteaders made up about a quarter of Ephemerisles attendees. If they took the operation somewhat more seriously than the young Californians who came just to party and build things, its because they dream of a day when theyll have their pick of floating city-states to live on, work from, and eventually abandon in favor of a different platform when they get bored. Borrowing from the lexicon of evolution, the Seasteaders say that a Cambrian explosion of these new countries will bring about greater freedom of choice for individuals, stimulate competition between existing governments, and provide blank nation-slates for experiments in governance. Ephemerisle is supposed to distill the ambitious project into a weekend that would give people the direct experience of political autonomy. It combines its political ambitions with appeals to back-to-the-land survivalism, off-the-grid drug use, and a vague nostalgia for water parks. There are no tickets, no central organizers, no rules, no rangers to keep you safe, reads the Ephemerisle mission statement. Its a new adventure into an alien environment, with discoveries, adventures, and mishaps along the way.

I was dropped off on the North neighborhoodthe most raucous of the threewhich, in addition to a row of houseboats, had a big platform serving as a communal front yard. One of the boats had pirated a radio station, Radio FMerisle. Other boats had tents pitched on their roofs to accommodate boatless hangers-on. It was a vision straight out of Neal Stephensons cult sci-fi novel Snow Crash (1992), which turned out to be one of the most influential texts in the Seasteading communitybeloved for its dystopian portrayals of life in a virtual, post-statist society. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junk, dhows, dinghies, life rafts, houseboats, makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and slabs of styrofoam, wrote Stephenson two decades ago, describing an itinerant flotilla full of refugees called The Raft. A good fifty percent of it isnt real boat material at all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.

As I hopped from boat to boat and onto the platform, I noticed many of the men in attendance had sparkly turquoise polish on their grubby toenails. On one of the houseboats, a body-painting session was in full swing, but the hot California sun quickly reduced the painted swirls to an eczemic crust. Within minutes, I overheard an endless stream of conversations about start-ups, incubators, hackerspaces and apps. Naked bodies ambled by. While looking for a bathroom, I walked in on a couple having sex in a houseboats aft cabin.

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