From POPULAR SCIENCE, March 2009

Cave Junction, Oregon, was once, long ago, the center of a gold rush boom that, like so many booms, ultimately consumed its host. Prospectors mined the land around the towns in an ever-tightening circle, until the only gold left was below the saloons, assayers and burlesque halls. Those fell next. The towns were mined right out from under themselves—with no trace left of the old frontier burgs but scars in the earth.

The people who trickled back, decades later, came to satisfy a different urge: not to pursue something but to escape it. Certain hardy members of the hippie diaspora of the ’60s realized that you could live out here entirely under the radar and off the grid. With no one to badger you, you could pursue your own idiosyncratic dreams. You could, in fact, quietly build your better mousetrap and wait until the right time to spring it on the world—the very moment when the world needed saving.

On a lonely stretch of blue highway near the treehouse he lives in and the workshop where he’s been refining that mousetrap, Charley Greenwood slips into the driver’s seat of the FM-4 HumanCar. Or rather, the seat the driver would occupy in a regular car. You don’t “drive” the HumanCar; you row it. It’s the pulling and pushing of the four passengers, converted by a four-gear transmission into rotational thrust, that powers the car at 25 or 30 mph easily, and up to 60 or so on a good downslope. (Where you go in the HumanCar is your business. But rest assured, it won’t be to the gym.)

Read the rest of the story here:

www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-02/power-people