Welcome to the boonies

It is not hard to find a corner in America where a man might father children with a kidnapped girl, start his own religion or run a private army, and the 'unincorporated' section of Antioch, California, zip code 94509, is one of them.

The hardscrabble collection of crude cinderblock houses, wooden cabins and trailer homes north of San Francisco is where Jaycee Lee Dugard surfaced last week as a 29-year-old mother of two, 18 years after she was kidnapped as a little girl with a golden pony tail.

'Unincorporated' means that this section of the local conurbation is not a town, nor even a village. It is a collection of buildings arranged around a network of streets without a school, library, post office or even police station. This is a modern-day Dodge City before Wyatt Earp came by to clean it up.

Before Jaycee's kidnapper Phillip Garrido, 58, put it on the map it was a backwater where people came to disappear. They might be hiding from debt - Antioch notched up 699 mortgage foreclosure notices in July alone, for a population of 100,000. Or they might be hiding from a shameful past, hoping for the freedom to indulge in a shameful present.

That is why there are four registered sex offenders within a five minute walk of Walnut Street, home to the Garridos. One of the four is Garrido himself: he was on parole for life.

The numbers expand with the horizon: Captain Daniel Terry of the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department, explains that his own section has 350 registered sex offenders, while the county itself has 1,700. "That's significantly higher than average," he says. "These people are walking among us."

They come because they can: as registered sex offenders, they are subject to Megan's Law, named for the seven-year-old New Jersey girl murdered by a paedophile, which mandates that they cannot live near a school, church, park, or playground, none of which are to be found in unincorporated Antioch. They are 'off the grid', beyond civilisation as we know it.

The phrase 'off the grid' came into the language 20-odd years ago with the rise of the militia movements, self-styled armies determined to live out of reach of government, recruited largely by National Rifle Association propaganda that Washington and the United Nations were plotting to confiscate their guns. They produced Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

'Off the grid' refers to living without electricity supplies, but it came to denote a wider backwoods lifestyle. It can include all sorts - the Unabomber, jailed for life, was a scientist who turned Luddite - but it has its roots in the Hillbilly ways of the Appalachian 'hollers' of Tennessee and West Virginia: banjoes, beards and boondocks.

Almost anything goes 'off the grid': if Grandpa is fathering children with his 14-year-old 'niece', quite legally if he has her parents' signature on the marriage licence, who would pay attention to a Garrido squiring a teenage captive?

America is huge, there are boondocks everywhere beyond the limits of its conurbations, and where there are 'boonies' there is poverty and white trash.

White trash culture has been defined as having no shame, but it is generally recognisable by the mess it makes. The Garrido compound on Walnut Street turns out to be a textbook example.

The family had not got around to stuccoing the cinder block of their house, while a neighbour explained that they had never noticed Jaycee and the children, captive in the back yard, because it was so overgrown with trees and shrubs, so cluttered with sheds and rubbish dumpsters and rotting vehicles, and so shrouded with old tarpaulins that the kidnap victims might as well have been in purdah in a mud-walled compound in Kabul.

White trash culture has been defined as having no shame

The boonies are a state of mind. In 2001, I drove to the far north of Idaho, home to the militia movement and the scene of the Ruby Ridge massacre of 1992 which, along with the siege of the Waco religious cult in Texas, had motivated Tim McVeigh.

I was looking not for a private army or religion but for the compound of Michael McGucklin, a one-time hippy who had been born to a Boston fortune. He had built a cabin and a barn not far from the tourist resort of Sandpoint, lived there with a wife and six children, and starved to death when the money ran out. His story came to light when child protection officers went there to rescue the children after he died, and were met by dogs and gunfire.

The odd thing was that the appalling compound - the septic tank had long overflowed, so the kids used the barn, and when that became too fetid, went out into the woods in the snow - was set along a paved road with suburban-style homes, a mile or so from a grocery shop, restaurant and lakeside marina. The locals knew perfectly well that six children were living raggedly behind the thickets of trees, along the driveway blocked by the carcass of a Chevrolet.

"Up here," neighbour Lloyd Wyatt told me, "we are a breed of people who say 'this your home', and you are entitled to live as you please, and to protect that home."

I also visited the family of Megan Kanka, whose kidnapping, rape and murder by Jesse Timmendequasi inspired the sex offender law. They lived in New Jersey, in a brand new suburban estate of cul-de-sacs, trimmed lawns and double garages, similar to South Lake Tahoe, the scene of Jaycee Dugard's abduction in 1991. It was clean and tidy, patrolled by the local cops. The killer lived there too, around the corner from Megan, on probation. It was a suburb of strangers, and Timmendequasi seemed just like everybody else.

Megan might have been saved by her own law. In theory, the killer could have been identified and banished. And if he had, he might have ended up in a place like 'unincorporated' Antioch.