Saved

by Ben Hewitt

  But, of course, neither of them did.

  * * *

  1 Of course, in the longer term, time is not so egalitarian, since not everyone lives for the same number of 24-hour days.

  2 “Scarce” in the sense that most people wish for more time, not less, so that demand for time typically outstrips supply.

  3 My father, who is also a writer, likes to joke that this is why my work is full of very short words, such as “a” and “it.” And also why I endeavor to include stutterers in my stories.

  4 Thinking even a bit more outside the box, we might consider that the very idea of time is a human contrivance, as is its measurement. In other words, does time even exist outside the boundary of ourselves? Or at the very least, does it exist in the manner in which we’ve come to view and measure it?

  [ CHAPTER FOUR ]

  IN WHICH I EXPLAIN HOW I MET ERIK AND BECAME INTRIGUED BY HIS RELATIONSHIP TO MONEY AND WEALTH.

  I MET Erik Gillard in 2008. I liked him immediately, as did my wife, Penny, and we soon inquired as to whether he might mentor our boys in wilderness skills. Both of our sons had displayed a keen interest in the primitive; they wanted to create fire with bow drills fashioned from tree branches, hunt rabbits with homemade arrows, and sleep in stick-and-leaf shelters, having feasted on the very beast they’d brought down only hours before. Every time we passed a mangled lump of road-killed raccoon or woodchuck, they clamored for us to stop and retrieve it, so that they might fashion something from its hide. (This in no small part explains why our car has utterly no resale value; it simply smells too bad.) These struck us as noble pursuits that would engage all of their developing facilities, and because Penny and I lacked these skills ourselves, we needed some help.

  Erik accepted our proposal and thus came to be a weekly fixture at our home. He would arrive in the morning, do his thing with leaves and sticks and the occasional unfortunate furred creature, and hang around for lunch. The boys loved him, and it was not hard to see why, for he is one of those people who seems always able to muster the specific energy children demand and to express delighted interest in the particulars of their small worlds, without a hint of condescension or belittlement. In short, he is respectful of children in a way that feels genuine. And increasingly rare.

  Now, I don’t recall exactly how the monetary component of our relationship was established, but I do remember that fairly early on, Erik made it known that he did not wish to be compensated with money. This was interesting to me, although not exactly shocking or revelatory; after all, we had conducted informal barter with friends and neighbors before.

  But the more I learned about Erik, the more intrigued I became. It wasn’t so much the mechanics of his life, which were slowly revealed over our lunchtime conversations. Rather, it was the sense of contentment and satisfaction he emanated in the context of what I had come to understand was a life largely devoid of accumulated wealth. To be sure, there are seekers aplenty who pledge themselves to scarcity and deprivation, but this was not Erik. He had not aligned himself with any particular religion or movement; he had not forsworn any particular luxury or desire.

  In fact, as we chatted around the old farmhouse table in our kitchen, it seemed the opposite: It became clear that Erik was pretty darn certain he was one of the richest sons-a-bitches ever to walk the face of the earth. Of course, he would never say such a thing; already, I’d come to understand that his capacity for hubris was exactly zero. So there was nothing he said that gave me cause to believe he felt wealthy; it was more a matter of what he embodied and the way he seemed so thoroughly in command of his time. He rarely, if ever, was hurried; often he would linger, either over the remnants of lunch, or when engaging with the boys long after our agreed-upon time had elapsed. They would draw, or write in nature journals, or carve something out of a piece of wood liberated from the forest floor. Eventually, almost languidly, he’d lace up his dumpster’d tennis shoes, amble out to his mufflerless, $500 Volkswagen, and rumble down the road.

  I understand that this must all seem a little vague. Here I am, claiming this fellow is one of the wealthiest people I’ve known, without any tangible evidence to validate my claim. This is the challenge inherent in defining a form of wealth that is not based on money or other physical assets: There is no convenient metric to fall back on. If I were to say, “Erik Gillard is the richest man I know; he has 118 bazillion dollars in the bank and owns a half-dozen beachside villas,” you’d know exactly what I mean. But when I say, “Erik Gillard is the richest man I know; he is content and secure in the absence of money and seems to inhabit each moment of his life with great appreciation and awareness,” it’s a bit more difficult to sink your teeth into.

  The ways in which our language has evolved and shifted to focus our attention on physical asset-based wealth has not escaped Erik’s attention. “Economics is not just about the money economy,” he told me one January morning, as we huddled around his woodstove, upon which a quartet of eggs sizzled in a small frying pan. The yolks were big and round and orange, small tangerines floating on white inner tubes. And they smelled maddeningly good. My stomach literally mewled.

  Maybe I was distracted by sensory overload, but Erik’s comment puzzled me. Was he espousing a personal theory or stating an inarguable truth? After all, like most Americans, I had come to think of economics as being precisely about the money economy. Hell, “money” and “economy” even sound similar. He continued: “Actually, the root of the word doesn’t say a thing about money; it’s about the management and study of the home.” He flipped the eggs with a practiced flick of the wrist. Melted butter splattered onto the stovetop, and the air filled with a sweet smoke.

  By this time, I’d come to understand that Erik harbored a deep repository of interesting and little-known information, and I’d learned that most of the time his information was factually accurate, or near enough so as to grant him the benefit of doubt. Still, this matter was so aligned with the thesis of this book that I felt compelled to do some fact-checking. Turns out, he was pretty damn close. The first part of the word economy descends from the ancient Greek word oikos, which taken literally referenced the household, although more popularly came to differentiate between what was private and what was public. The second part comes from the word nomos, used to describe pretty much any kind of law, be it of the personal, governmental, or natural spheres. Per Erik’s contention, not a single mention of money.

  It’s not exactly uncommon for the meaning of a word to shift over time, but the fact that we have come to view economics and the economy as relating strictly to money strikes Erik as a particularly sad and damaging perversion. “People are always meeting their needs and managing their homes with ‘economics’ outside the money system. But no one sees that, or talks about it. In the popular sense, the economy has become all about Wall Street.”

  Semantics? Perhaps. After all, it’s only language we’re talking about; as Erik acknowledges, plenty of people are managing and regulating their private lives—or at least large swaths of their private lives—outside the dominant financial system. Just because they don’t have a convenient term for the practice, doesn’t mean they can’t do it. To a certain extent, we all do because as it turns out, there really are some things money can’t buy. But what we lack—what’s been lost along the arc of the shifting definition of economy—is a convenient and universally understood way of talking about wealth and economics in nonmonetary terms. And to the extent that ideas are spread through language, this profoundly hampers our capacity to define nonmonetized wealth.

  I first made Erik’s acquaintance during a particularly tumultuous time for our country. The year 2008 was, to put it mildly, a period of tremendous fear and, for some, even downright terror. Job losses totaled 2.6 million, the worst since 1945, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost nearly 34 percent of its value, its third-worst year in history. Of course, the housing industry was swirling down the toilet bowl of history: In December of 2008, the Case-Sh
iller Index recorded its largest price drop ever.

  I was not immune to the financial carnage; that same year a prominent magazine, for which I had been contracted over the previous half-dozen years to complete writing and editing services, was forced to cut nearly two-thirds of its staff. My freelance contract was not renewed, and in short order, I lost a position that I’d come to rely on for almost half my income. I managed to scrape together enough supplemental work to keep our household solvent, but like so many Americans, I was exposed to the sudden and unsettling understanding that I had very much to lose and worse yet, that I might actually lose it.

  This fear, at least as it relates to that specific place in time and my family’s long-term well-being, has since proven overblown (though not for a lot of people who did lose everything). Still, it is not hard for me to summon that sense of vulnerability, to retrieve it from the repository of faded emotion in which it has been stored. And it is difficult not to dwell on the possibility that such a crisis might well visit us again. Because what, really, has changed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis? Not much at all.

  I couldn’t help noticing how unaffected Erik was by the storm surge of economic malaise, and I knew it wasn’t simply a product of his easy-going nature. He seemed as if he really didn’t have much to lose, at least not in the realm of material goods and financial investments. He had long since structured his life and set his expectations to thrive in conditions that by comparison reveal precisely how unfree most of us are. It is worth pointing out, I think, that these have not been the preparatory efforts of a man consumed by the decline of modern American society, but instead have evolved from a deep ethical imperative to live in just such a manner. Rather suddenly, it seemed to me like an imperative worth adopting.

  For the record, Erik Gillard does not view himself as “frugal,” “thrifty,” “cheap,” or “austere.” He especially does not like the word “austerity,” for he associates it with imposed cutbacks, the brunt of which are borne primarily by those least able to bear them. If there is something he wants very much, and he has the money to buy it, he will. It is worth noting, however, that he doesn’t tend to want much, or at least not much that can be procured with money. During the 18 months I spent researching this book, he made the most expensive single material purchase of his life (in aggregate, of course, his cabin cost more). It was a used high-end touring bicycle, and it cost $675. It was not an easy purchase for him to make. “At first, I felt guilty,” he told me. “And then I realized that the price equaled six workdays; six days in the woods with kids. Would I trade six days in the woods for this beautiful bike? I realized I would, and it affirmed to me that I am living a right lifestyle.” While Erik waxed poetic, I did some quick math: $675 divided by 6 meant that Erik was making roughly $112 per day. Not awful, but not exactly a king’s ransom, particularly given the part-time and seasonal nature of his job.

  Still, there was something in Erik’s retelling of the bicycle purchase that made me happy in a way I did not entirely understand, but I thought might have something to do with the fact that it seemed tinged by a sweet naïveté. To fret so earnestly over a purchase felt to me somehow old-fashioned, like a story told by my grandmother as she mixed a batch of cookies. Or, more accurately, hunted morels and bestowed me with a crippling phobia of copperhead snakes.

  Or maybe it was that rather than simply fretting over spending the money—should he, shouldn’t he—Erik had framed the decision to make the purchase in the context of his livelihood. Furthermore, his decision to buy the bike had affirmed his affection for his job and the manner in which he spent the minutes and hours of his paying work.

  How many people, I wondered, think of purchases in this manner? How many people take the time to consider if any particular purchase is worth not just the money, but the portion of their life represented by the money? Erik had converted the abstract (money) to the concrete (him, in the woods, teaching children about nature), and the result had both comforted and buoyed him. I couldn’t help but envy this. “Escaping the idea that work has to be toil is part of my privilege,” he told me. “I feel as if I am privileged to live this way.” This is as close as I’ve heard him come to flaunting the benefits of his chosen lifestyle.

  It is important to note that when Erik speaks of privilege, he is speaking of entrenched societal privilege bestowed upon him by a structural hierarchy that by default does not deliver these advantages to all. (Otherwise, it could hardly be a hierarchy, could it?) Or as he explained it to me: “I am the same gender and skin color as those in the positions of highest power and domination, I have access to unearned cash if I were to really need it or as inheritance if my family were to pass on, I have afforded trust in relationships with folks who have access to resources with relative ease and often in a short time frame, and this also goes for interactions with cops, employers, clerks, teachers, and so on. I assume that some of this trust existed before me personally cultivating it, and was based simply on ways I look and am perceived in the context of terms engrained in society as the norm. I have access to land and grew up knowing the natural world, which has not been totally destroyed in the areas where I’ve lived. My first language is the dominant spoken tongue. If I were to need a job, I could probably get one pretty easily and one that paid well. My demographic and gender is portrayed as the winner and the hero in the media, and I’m likely privileged in ways I’m unaware of.”

  In short, Erik is not blind to the difficult truth that his chosen lifestyle, as bereft as it may seem to America’s middle-class majority, is at least in part dependent on him having been born the “right” color, to the “right” ethnic group, in the “right” community. It may even be dependent on him being the “right” gender, with the “correct” sexual orientation. Put simply, he has choices that are not available to all, and the enviable freedom and connections he has forged for himself are the direct outgrowth of these choices.

  I was somewhat embarrassed to realize how inadequately I’d acknowledged my own privilege and furthermore, how profoundly I’d failed to recognize the range of choices that were available to me. I’d like to think that I’m not to blame for my lack of awareness; after all, there is little support for such recognition and decisions in our culture, in no small part because our economy is dependent on very few people choosing similar paths. Indeed, it is not hard to see that our contemporary economy is largely dependent on consumers feeling unprivileged, and striving to match the standards set by those whom they perceive as being better off (one can only imagine what would happen to the stock value of, say, Home Depot if Americans suddenly flocked to 96-square-foot houses). My own dawning recognition that so much of what I had assumed to be necessary and true in regards to my relationship with money and material goods was, in fact, merely part of a cultural mythology that ignores a deeper truth: I was free to write my own fable. I was free to decide what affluence meant to me. My economy could be about much more than money.

  Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, sang Janis Joplin, and although she managed to make it sound as if it arose from the ache of regret, I believe the greater regret lives in those of us who have lived as if the opposite were true. I do not mean to suggest that Erik Gillard has slipped the surly bonds of the moneyed economy, the ties of which bind even him, albeit much more loosely than most. But it requires little more than a cursory examination of America’s troubled relationship with monetized wealth to feel the first, haunting pangs of envy for a life that is, by and large, not defined by the accumulation and dissemination of cash, credit, and other physical assets.

  Of course, Erik has made sacrifices along the way, and his life is frequently made more complicated by his avoidance of accumulated wealth. Five-hundred-dollar cars leave him stranded, thumb out and shivering at the highway’s edge; tasks that many of us would hire out to an expert require him either to seek out a friend in possession of these skills, or to learn them himself. Jobs that are merely tedious or downrig
ht onerous and that beg to be subcontracted become his domain. It perhaps goes without saying that Erik does not own many of the objects that have come to be contemporary society’s assumed accoutrements or even necessities. He has no cell phone, no computer, no iPod or iPad. Since the retirement of his previously mentioned $500 Volkswagen, he has not owned a motorized vehicle, although he is granted access to Heidi’s truck and, more recently, to his brother Ryan’s old Toyota wagon. I’ve never seen all his possessions in one place, but I suspect that I would be somewhat shocked by how little he truly owns.

  Now, it is altogether true that Erik’s capacity to eschew material possessions is aided and abetted by others. He relies on family, friends, and community for the use of material goods (car, truck, computer, tools, and so on) that he has chosen not to procure for himself. In other words, a certain degree of his thrift and by extension his freedom is enabled by people who have chosen to be somewhat less thrifty. For a time this bothered me, as it seemed to me not merely ironic, but downright hypocritical. After all, if everyone chose to live on $6,000 annually, then who in the hell would we expect to be purchasing the things we could not afford, but occasionally needed to borrow? Or, as seemed to be the case with Heidi’s truck, somewhat more often than occasionally.

  I have come to view it differently, mostly because I have spent enough time with Erik to see how others benefit from his dependence on them. They benefit in pragmatic ways, such as when he returns a favor by helping plant a garden, or cares for an animal while its owner travels. But perhaps more important, they benefit from the gift of giving, of being depended upon. Of being, quite simply, needed. In the era of the commodity economy, with the capacity to call forth our needs and desires at a moment’s notice, there are too few opportunities to be truly needed by others, to experience the satisfaction and simple warmth of being crucial to someone else’s life. And it is important to note that Erik is conscientious and careful with other people’s possessions. Once, when he’d borrowed his brother’s car to visit our place, the muffler fell off. Erik was on the phone immediately, arranging for its repair.