Collegiate Times

Architecture student Jay Osborne shows his sleeping bag he used to sleep outside.

“I don’t believe our town council is interested in that,” he said. “Plus, we don’t have the facilities.”

Crane is familiar with trespassing though, as people have tried to skirt the rules.

“A kid will make a fort,” he said, “you know, drag an old couch down there, a couple pieces of plywood and make a fort. If our maintenance people see it, the police see it, it is removed.”

Violators are also subject to further fines, although Crane hasn’t had to enforce them previously. As an alternative, he highlighted national forests near Blacksburg.

“We wish we had campgrounds closer to town. We get a lot of calls for that,” said Barbara Walker, volunteer coordinator for the Eastern Divide Ranger District in Blacksburg. “But, the national forest really doesn’t even start until you’re out towards Pandapas Pond.”

Pandapas Pond is approximately 3.5 miles west of Blacksburg on U.S. Highway 460, but the nearest developed public campground is White Rocks, which is nearly a one hour drive.

There are group camping areas — essentially fields — within 10 miles of Blacksburg, although they carry a $25 fee per night. Proximity and cost, then, make George Washington and Jefferson National Forests counter-intuitive for the efficient vagrant. 

But Jay Osborne said he eventually doubted his supposed efficiency. Subway sandwiches and prepackaged foods were expensive, and his body protested.

“When you eat canned foods all the time, it’s just a lot of salt intake,” he said. “It’s just not that healthy.”

Osborne struggled to fix a sleeping schedule too, thus ultimately concluding the theoretical benefits were outweighed.

“I think I pushed a bit too long with the experiment,” he said. “I feel like I understood it at the very beginning, what it was leading to. But after a while, it just got old. It seemed like I wasn’t really learning anything.”

So while Osborne eluded established policy against his natural abodes, the risk-to-reward ratio for parallel attempts by others is debatable.

Osborne said he happily signed a lease this semester for a basement apartment.

“It’s not that charming,” he said, “but it’s perfect.”

He said he hopes to call San Francisco home after graduation, where housing costs dwarf those of Blacksburg.

At least he’s got a backup plan.

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