Vonu: The Search for Personal Freedom, Part 2, Letters from Rayo

Vonu: The Search for Personal Freedom, Part 2 collects letters written mostly between 1968 and 1974 by Rayo, the pen name of Tom Marshall, who defined vonu as invulnerability to coercion. Jim Stumm, who edited the collection and removed proper names for security, added a June 1988 introduction with memoirs and commentary. Shane Radliff wrote a January 2018 foreword for Liberty Under Attack Publications, whose undated reprint is available as the publisher's PDF. The letters treat vonu as a revisable experiment, and its arguments, many of them Stumm's, concern which dependencies a mobile, secluded life reduces and which it leaves in place.

Rayo's case for starting now rests on timing: he faults people who wait for a collapse before changing unfamiliar habits, because an arrangement tried early can still be revised. Motorized nomadism fits that logic as an interim stage tied to highways and fuel, and he declines to sell it as a cure for everything. By 1972 he and Roberta call themselves experimentalists and admit doubts about winter and unfinished plans for year-round comfort. Their forecasts and wilderness competence rest on their own reports, and what the letters describe is a practice of trying and adjusting.

Stumm tested that practice in person, visiting in September 1971 with a view to moving there; he returned to New York unpersuaded, and his October letter turns the visit into a supply-line critique. Rayo, the letter observes, avoids buying land to escape property taxes yet uses land owned by others. The letter adds that a camper still needs a license and registration and that the household imports fuel and spare parts while exporting labor and corresponding mainly by state mail. Real independence, Stumm argues, would mean producing everything, which would take more people than such a life could attract. Rayo answers that Stumm saw an unrepresentative period and misread their arrangements, and the book prints both accounts without settling which describes ordinary life. The dispute separates reducing exposure, which seclusion and mobility can do, from abolishing dependence on the economy that supplies parts and wages.

Communication posed a related tradeoff. Rayo proposed exchanging recorded tapes, and later a small selective newsletter network, so correspondents could share information while travelling less. Stumm notes that the tape scheme was never tried and argues that companionship needs more than information, and in September 1973 Rayo writes that Roberta alone gave him sustained theoretical discussion. A network can cut trips while leaving the problem of company unsolved.

Selling vonu as a service exposed different coordination limits. Vonu Week, described by Tom and Roberta, charged visitors for a stay in secluded woods, reaching individuals without waiting for libertarian politics to win converts. Rayo's March 1973 report counts two groups of two during 1972, about what the couple had hoped for, since more would have taken time from other projects; clients were satisfied, though one criticism was that Rayo leaned too heavily on words and another that the hosts never checked skills such as orienteering. Villa Via, an earlier plan for a vehicle-nomadic community in southern California, met weak stated demand: about a dozen surveys came back, and one respondent wanted to live there most of the time. Rayo later judged himself over-optimistic about seclusion, since many vehicles would wear a trail. He also warned that renting private land could make the venture unattractive and that his rates had omitted a per-trip charge for commuting. Both samples are tiny and self-selected, so neither proves reform futile. The essay Against Social Reformism ties education to practiced self-liberation while keeping a place for theory and association.

Other correspondents weigh the costs of concealment differently. Stumm compares paying taxes and owning property openly with those burdens, and Roger Kenmore replies that he may be projecting his own values, while Bert in Oregon contrasts eastern and western conditions. Of Rayo after 1974, Stumm knows of no further news. The original collection closes with Stumm's own February 1984 essay, Liberated Lifestyles. It separates cheap limited tactics from whole-life strategies whose costs rise with the freedom they buy. Those strategies fall under six overlapping headings, with Rayo's wilderness vonu among them. Stumm expects people to combine them or change as circumstances shift, and he treats none as a lifelong pledge.