by Ben Hewitt
Did Erik’s sudden and significant leap to an exponentially higher standard of living give me pause? Well, yes, and quite reasonably so, I’d argue. For despite my recognition that Erik’s wealth was not dependent on his thrift, or on his having eschewed the trappings of contemporary American life, how could I not wonder if perhaps he had allowed himself to become swept downstream by the very current he’d spent the majority of his adult life swimming against? How could I not wonder if he’d capitulated, if he’d simply grown weary of living within the self-imposed boundaries of his self-imposed thrift? How could I not wonder if he’d followed a path similar to my parents’ and abandoned the simple life for the easy one? From all outward appearances, I certainly couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the man had given in to the status quo. From the outset of my friendship with him, I’d always seen Erik’s housing—and in particular, the manner in which he’d built his own home—as somehow emblematic of his relationship to money and wealth. Now, and rather suddenly, the particulars of his shelter had changed dramatically, and I could not help but wonder what else might change too.
Yet, in my more charitable moments, I decided that maybe he’d merely bowed to the same fate that has befallen so many of humanity’s best intentions: love. After all, it wasn’t Erik who knocked on the door of the weathered little cape; it was Heidi. It wasn’t Erik who was trying to convince the bank to extend a loan to someone who had a meager repayment history; it was Heidi. Maybe it was as simple as this: Erik had followed the girl he loved to the home she wished to buy. Rather begrudgingly, I had to admit that I would have done exactly the same, and under the circumstances, his upward mobility seemed entirely justified.
This was something of a conundrum for me because I suddenly had the nagging sense that perhaps I had overestimated his commitment to thrift. Worse yet, this was followed by the even more nagging sense that the very thesis on which I’d built my book was imperiled. Who was I to blame for that, assuming it was not myself? Heidi? That hardly seemed fair. Besides, the notion of blaming anything on this sweetly soft-spoken young woman, with her omnipotent cheer and midwestern warmth, made me feel like an ogre. So, Erik was out, Heidi was out, and I lacked the introspection (or maybe it was simple courage I lacked) to blame myself. One option remained: hope like hell that Erik’s new living quarters were somehow immaterial to his ethos of thrift.
This may all seem a bit dramatic. But for more than a year I’d viewed Erik as a mentor to my evolving understanding of money and wealth. And of all the facets that had originally drawn me to him, his exceptional contentment with the humble shelter he was building for himself was most affecting. Given this context, how could I not be alarmed that he’d suddenly abandoned his modest home? And this alarm, at least in part, explained my return to his cabin on this preternaturally warm November day: I hoped, quite frankly, to dispel my concerns. I hadn’t seen much of Erik in the past few weeks, and I was wondering if perhaps all I needed to regain my confidence was to immerse myself in his life again, even for a few short hours.
I met Erik at the new place, where he, Heidi, and a young, twenty-something, shaggy-haired fellow named Sepke (Sespe? Kepse?) were all tucking into a tin of warm muffins. The plan for the morning, once everyone had had their fill of muffin, was to head over to the cabin, where Erik was midway through an application of finish plaster on the interior walls. Over the preceding year, he’d made slow-but-steady progress on the place, which, now that he was living at Heidi’s, he had begun to refer to as his “man-cave.” He’d finished the exterior siding and installed a front door; more significantly, he’d insulated the walls with a combination of clay, water, straw, and little chopped-up bits of Styrofoam, which he’d gotten somewhere for free and felt compelled to use, despite the fact that it didn’t really fit the earthy ethos of the place. The mixture was, essentially, muck, peppered with little blue chunks of polystyrene, and he’d scooped and packed it into the wall cavities behind thin strips of wooden lath to hold it in place. Once the insulation dried sufficiently, he’d smear thin layers of the plaster concoction over the whole shebang. Muck on muck, if you will. It was not a technique likely to find its way into the pages of Fine Homebuilding magazine or Architectural Digest, but the price was right, and, if Erik was to be believed, it would deliver performance superior to synthetic insulations and wall coverings. “Contemporary materials aren’t evil, but they embody a mindset of working against the place we live,” he told me. “This plaster is made of the land from here. It’s of this place! And in that sense, it has the capacity to work with the place,” he explained, emphasizing the word “with.”
Before we could head to the cabin, Erik had to make a quick stop en route, so that he might procure a small quantity of sheep’s wool, an essential component to the plaster mix, which also contained clay (dug from the stream bank about 20 feet to the south of Erik’s front door), sand (sourced from an elderly fellow who, as Erik explained it, spent his spare time swinging his homemade steel club to whack golf balls off a homemade golf tee, made from a modified spark plug no less, into his—you guessed it—homemade sandpit), water (from the same stream that provided the clay), limestone (from the same fellow who had the wool), and cow poop. The manure, Erik explained, was rich in enzymes that would help bind these disparate materials to one another, creating a finish of exceptional durability. I was well past the point of being shocked at much of anything Erik did, and even his smearing cow feces on his walls was no exception.
We piled into Ryan’s car and Erik pointed the wagon up a steep hill that led out of town, and within only 2 minutes we had parked and were strolling down a narrow footpath that wound through a field. We passed a large fenced-in garden, climbed a short hill that led to a small, sloping apple orchard, and just beyond, partially obscured by a copse of young pine trees, we caught sight of a clapboarded cabin that was perhaps 10 feet by 12 feet. There was something distinctly fairy tale and even dreamlike about the whole scene: The long, trod path, the grassy rise of earth, the wending through the apple trees, and the diminutive nature of the building all created an aura of hazy enchantment, a subtle “through the looking glass” feel.
This was the home of Erik’s friend Brad (Erik called him “Bradski”), and although it was nearer to completion than Erik’s cabin and assembled with an evident degree of skill that my friend, quite frankly, lacked, it shared much in common with Erik’s humble abode. Most obviously similar was its size, or lack thereof, and the fact that there was no electrical service or running water. Less obviously, Bradski’s cabin, like Erik’s, was situated on land to which he held no title. Sure, he had verbal permission to build there, but still I was struck by the reservoir of trust such an arrangement necessitated. What if his relationship with the property owners took a wrong turn? What if they sold, or lost jobs and were forced into foreclosure? Bradski had obviously invested hundreds of hours into his home; this was no cobbled-together hovel. The frame was hewn of small timbers and the floors sanded and shellacked to a warm sheen. Outside, a dry-stacked stone wall, itself representative of days, if not weeks, of hard and exacting labor, sat half-completed.
We stood in the house for a half-hour or so, chatting. No one seemed in any hurry to get on with the day, despite the fact that it was approaching 10 o’clock. Bradski’s girlfriend was curled into the corner of a bench seat, knitting. Far as I could tell, there was no job anyone needed to get to anytime soon, and when Erik asked Bradski when he was expected at his place of work (a bakery), he scrunched his face quizzically, as if scanning his memory for whatever commitment he’d made to his employer. “The seventh,” he said, finally. More than a week away.
Finally, we left Bradski’s, one small box of wool and a trio of borrowed trowels richer. Despite this being only the first time Sespe (yes, that was it, definitely—I think) had met Bradski and his girlfriend, he embraced them both, and we passed again under the dormant apple trees and over the short rise, where I turned to briefly survey the scene below me. What w
as it about the view that made me feel as if I could finally exhale a breath I’d been holding for too long? Some of it was aesthetic, I knew. The tidiness, everything so small and tucked into place and even more so, it seemed, being not imposed upon the place but rather of it, like the cow feces–enhanced plaster we were about to spread on Erik’s walls. It felt somehow manageable in a way I’d never experienced at my own home, which, the more I hung out with Erik and the people he brought me into contact with, was beginning to feel like a sprawling embarrassment of riches. The orchard certainly didn’t hurt, and along with the setback from the road and the fact that the cabin was accessible only by foot, I had the distinct impression that I’d somehow stumbled upon it in a fateful manner that lacked any definable intent. Again I had the now-familiar sensation that meeting Erik and being drawn into his extended network of like-minded frugalistas was one of those serendipitous events that would shape my life in heretofore unimagined ways.
We rolled back down the steep hill and hung a left onto Erik’s road. Erik parked and we made our way up the path, which had been significantly affected by Hurricane Irene. The quiet stream that normally burbled alongside the cabin had become a raging torrent, overspilling its banks and diverting much of its flow across Erik’s footpath. It was still passable, but the erosion was significant and lent the place a gentle postapocalyptic vibe. Still, there’d been one unexpected fringe benefit of the flooding: It had caused the stream’s banks to slide, exposing a large cache of steel-colored clay. It was the very source of the clay we were about to spread on Erik’s walls.
Between the visit to Bradski’s and the particulars of the interior finish Erik had chosen, the ingredients of which had cost him essentially nothing, I was beginning to regain my faith in my friend’s commitment to limited-cash living. This put me in a magnanimous frame of mind, and regarding the move to Heidi’s new home, I felt only empathy. Love is a powerful thing, and if it came with the burden of hot running water, a flush toilet, and electrical outlets, well, hey. A guy can make compromises. A fellow can survive these things and so, it seemed to me, can his embrace of extreme thrift.
If anything, Erik’s commitment to commodity economy resistance seemed more fervent than ever, and it occurred to me that his recent immersion into relative abundance had only affirmed his desire to live a Spartan existence, in the manner that people sick with a hangover tend to swear off drinking the morning after a binge. It was clear that Erik had been doing a lot of thinking about his chosen lifestyle. Furthermore, he told me, he was questioning if he was doing enough to bring about the changes he wished for the broader world. Why, just the night before, he’d found himself walking the somnolent streets of the neighborhood at 1 o’clock in the morning, his mind wild with thoughts and self-recriminations. This was not the first time he’d been kept awake by his doubts and concerns, he told me. “The question of how to save the planet from industrial crapitalism and disturbia is a question I consider to be lifelong.” Erik often employed wordplay when discussing systemic forces he reviled; I wondered if perhaps it was something of a coping mechanism. “It’s a question I’m willing to devote my life to. It’s crucial, sacred, and incredibly urgent. It is perhaps the thing I feel most beholden to.”
Erik could not help but ask himself if it was enough to live a life of conscious-but-quiet intent. Was it enough to create a lifestyle that to the greatest extent possible ensured his nonparticipation in a parasitic system that brings only sorrow and sickness to the natural world and to so many of his fellow Americans, trapped on the majority side of the 99-to-1 percent divide? What actions or nonactions could match the urgency of such a planetary crisis? Was it enough to protest through what he didn’t do?
“I mediate a lot of my experiences through a judgment: ‘Is this the way I want to live my life?’ ” he told me, as we troweled thin coats of plaster onto the walls. The smell was moist, even dank, like a basement, but it was not unpleasant. “My fear is that I’m just part of a subculture and that a subculture isn’t going to slow anything down. I mean, just by building this house and having it be what it is”—I understood that he meant the humble nature of the place, the what-it-is-not as much as the what-it-is—“isn’t really going to change anything. It’s not going to keep the machine at bay.”
I’d long understood that Erik’s anticonsumer ethos was rooted in more than the fringe benefits of the freedom it bestowed upon him, and in more than the relationships and skills it fostered. But I’d underestimated how troubled he was by forces that felt beyond his control, forces that would not be defeated by his having chosen to live on the margins. He was but 1-in-300-million-odd Americans. In terms of shifting the status quo, the numbers were not on his side.
He continued: “The industrial economy wants us to believe that our choices are limited to what we can buy, and that what we buy is how we define our lifestyle.” The conundrum, of course, was that defining a lifestyle by choosing not to buy was still defining a lifestyle, and Erik was beginning to wonder if lifestyle alone could affect the sort of change he knew in his heart was essential.
“I wish I could just live a kick-ass life connected to the land,” he said later, when we paused to gnaw on some carrots I’d brought along for a snack. “I mean, some people drop out and live in a sweet little straw-bale house in the woods. . . .” His voice trailed off, and he looked a little pained, as if he wanted to want nothing more than to want nothing more than that, the simple satisfaction derived of starving the system as much as any one person can starve the system of its lifeblood: money. From a material standpoint, he was fulfilled. To be sure, this fulfillment was based on a laughably meager collection of belongings, at least when compared to our culture at large. Still, there was little doubt in my mind that his was true fulfillment in this regard, and probably even truer than most of us realize in our personal lives.
But Erik had bumped up against the same wall that many of us bump up against at some point: You can’t buy contentment. Perhaps more accurately, he’d bumped up against the other side of that very same wall: You can’t not buy contentment. It wasn’t that he was overtly unhappy—indeed, I still viewed him as one of the happiest, most content people I knew—but there was nonetheless something gnawing at him, and its teeth were becoming harder to ignore, in part because the beast was no longer satisfied with being fed on Erik’s nonparticipation in the moneyed economy. Erik had reached one of those inflection points that all of us reach at different times in our lives, where it seemed as if the particulars of his future should be determined not by choices that were hard and specific and evidenced by a single action, but by subtler choices of an evolving ethos and the multiple actions that would dictate.
He wanted to want only what he already had, but something inside of him was whispering, It’s not enough, it’s not enough. To a man who for most of his adult life had defined himself by setting his expectations of “enough” so low that a 96-square-foot house was both a source of unbridled joy and no small amount of pride, this incessant whisper must have been confusing. It’s not enough, it’s not enough. He’d done everything he knew how to do, he’d scrounged and scraped and downright willed himself out of the machine. What more, really, could he do?
“I think I have to go beyond the lifestyle,” he said, as he tossed his carrot end into the woods and reached for his trowel.
“So then you have to decide what that means and how to act on it,” I pointed out, which probably doesn’t rank very high on my all-time list of Most Helpful Things I’ve Ever Said.
He chuckled, but it was rueful, not humorous. “That’s why I was up all night.”
Then he grabbed a handful of plaster, smacked it against the wall, and leaned into his trowel.
[ CHAPTER TEN ]
IN WHICH I CHOOSE FREEDOM.
IN LATE February, Erik called to see if I wanted to go skiing the next day. I did not have to ask if he meant alpine skiing; the idea of Erik driving an hour and paying $70 for the privilege of being carried t
o the mountain’s summit, so that he might slide back down atop a veneer of man-made snow, was preposterous. It was like imagining the pope in Pizza Hut. Nothing about it fit.
Still, the notion of cross-country skiing seemed to me nearly as unlikely, if only because the ground was all but devoid of snow. It had been the sort of winter that could compel even the most right-wing ideologue to embrace the concept of anthropogenic climate change; the average temperature for January had been a full 6°F warmer than normal, and snowfall was nearing historic lows. The passing storms had delivered mostly rain or, on rare occasions when the thermometer dropped below freezing, a dispiriting spittlelike substance that encased everything in a rind of ice. By the middle of February, nearly 3 weeks ahead of the historical schedule, almost all the state’s commercial syrup makers had set their taps, and some were already boiling. Great billows of steam rose from the rooftop vents affixed atop the sugarhouses. If you were lucky, you could catch a whiff of hot syrup as you passed.
Befitting the winter’s general temperament, the day I drove to Erik’s with my long-neglected skis in my car was warm and glowering. It was precipitating lightly, and I say “precipitating” because none of the usual descriptors seem apt. It was not snow. Nor was it rain, or sleet. It was definitely not hail, although it made a spattering sound on my windshield, before half-bouncing, half-sliding down the glass. It was not shaping up to be a pleasant day.
It was about 8:30 on a Thursday morning when I embarked, perhaps a little late for the morning work rush, but not so late that there wasn’t plenty of traffic, particularly in the westbound lane, which led toward the state’s centers of commerce. Not for the first time, I was struck by the freedom Erik had forged for himself, and, for a moment, I allowed myself to feel pleased that I too was free to do as I wished at a time when most Americans were heading to jobs that the majority found unfulfilling. True, I was, in effect, getting paid to ski with Erik, to the extent that time spent with him could be considered “research.” In short, I was going to work too. This was actually an uplifting realization for me; I recalled Erik’s quandary over whether or not to spend $675 on a secondhand bicycle, and how he’d decided the enjoyment he’d glean from the bike was entirely worth the time he’d given to earn the money.
