When the 5K race was over, I left the awards ceremony and looked into the lifeless water of the lake beside Dow Chemical. Since returning to the United States, I felt something wasn’t right with me. I’d been a squid out of ink, the joy squeezed right out of me. I closed my eyes and traveled back to Bolivia, to the banks of Lake Titicaca and the particular moment I’d remembered while sitting with my mother.
It happened just three months back. Two friends, she American and he British, were getting married. They’d lived in Bolivia for years, working with the country’s indigenous people, and an Aymara shaman was going to marry them. Before the ceremony began, I stood with the shaman as we admired the most extraordinary sky, a rusty orange-and-red blend, and the famous Andean lake, which was the size of a small sea, its unseen far shores in Peru. We stood at thirteen thousand feet, and the light cast a gossamer shimmer over three distant islands. Above them, the jagged Andes.
The shaman looked out over the landscape and asked me, “What’s the shape of the world?”
Farther up the lake, I saw the bride and groom mingling with other Bolivian and American friends, all dressed in their finest. About half the Americans lived and worked in Bolivia; the other half were just there for the week. Honamti, the shaman, was dressed in an olive jacket and jeans and looked nearly iconic, his long hair tied back in a ponytail, an ambiguous expression in his dark eyes.
“The world?” I finally said. “It’s round.”
“How is it round?” Honamti asked.
I showed him, putting my two pointer fingers together in front of me and drawing a downward circle.
“That’s how most people imagine it,” he said. “But we Aymaras disagree.”
He was silent for a long moment. Alpacas and sheep grazed in the distance, shepherded together by an Aymara woman in a colorful, layer-cake skirt. A pejerey leapt from and plunged back into Lake Titicaca, sending out rippling circles. “We say that the earth is round, but in a different way,” Honamti finally said, and he traced an upward circle, the opposite of how I’d drawn it, beginning at his belly and finishing at his heart. He traced the shape slowly. Amazed, I watched it spring to life in the landscape. His upward stroke began with the lake, curved up the sides of the Andes, and finished gloriously with the dome of the sky.
“And it’s also round like this.” This time he traced a circle that began at his heart and went outward toward the lake, finishing two feet in front of his body. And the earth took that shape, as the lakeshore curled into the base of the distant mountains and then into the sky’s horizon, a perfect outward circle.
“And it’s also round like this.” Keeping his hands two feet in front of him, he traced a slow circle back into himself. The circle finished at some hidden place inside, the outward world circling into our inner world.
Somebody called over to Honamti; the ceremony was to begin. But before the Aymara man turned to go, I asked him, “Which of the three is it? What’s the shape of the world?”
He answered by repeating: “What’s the shape of the world?”
I opened my eyes: the lifeless Dow Chemical lake before me, Honamti’s question/answer echoing in my head. Did the world have to be flat? Was it too late to imagine other shapes?
“YOU’RE A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY,” my father said, looking up at me from his sickbed.
I looked out the hospital window: three smokestacks blew gray smoke into a gray sky. The backs of adjacent six- or seven-story gray-brick buildings. Beside me, the muted beeping of an IV drip; the smell of fast food and Ben Gay. Fluorescent lights and the television’s flicker illuminated my father’s slightly ashen face.
Suddenly, and despite the dreary surroundings, I felt a rush of love for him. He’d given me gifts of stability, diligence, and an appreciation for the power of ideas. He was telling me, his thirty-six-year-old son, that I was a man without a country not in criticism but out of love. He was right: acute culture shock had pushed me into a kind of exile.
I touched him on the shoulder, pushed the hair back off his forehead, remembering something from my childhood. One year, during the Fourth of July barbecue, he taught me how to grill London broil. On that humid day the forested spaces around our Long Island home were alive with box turtles. This was before urban sprawl defined the island, before our magical woods were cleared for McMansions. My sister and I found a turtle and brought it home and set it loose. Billy, my dad called over to me, I want to show you something. As I watched his hairy forearm expertly flip the meat, I loved him. The sound of fireworks in the distance; a red, white, and blue flag up on its pole, where my father raised it every public holiday. I felt organically connected to my home, my family, and our prosperous society; to the yard, the turtle-filled woods, the smell of meat grilling.
The sound of sizzling meat drew me out of my reverie, back to the hospital room: a Wendy’s ad on TV, reminding me of the hospital’s preferred food option. My father dozed off to the sizzle of burgers and a corporate jingle, and I walked through the labyrinth building, past hundreds of patients, to the source of many of their health problems and heart disease: greasy hamburgers. UNC Medical Center had outsourced meal service to Wendy’s.
I brought a tray of burger and fries to a table by the window. Outside was a parking garage, its asphalt stacked five stories high, packed with vehicles — the source of many of earth’s health problems. I checked my voice mail; still no response from Jackie. I considered calling her again but decided against it — I’d already left three messages. Beyond the parking lot, a monoculture of pines and the highway to the mall. I tried to feel something for the landscape, but it lacked shape.
Worse, doubt gnawed at me that the past decade of my professional life had been for naught. I’d labored incredibly hard as a humanitarian aid and conservation worker in places like Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Bolivia. Part of my job was to help people living on the borders of the rainforest improve their lives economically while defending their forest. I’ve got a toolkit: ecotourism, sustainable timber, nontimber forest products, shade-grown organic coffee, political organizing and advocacy. In the end, the logic goes, if the rainforest pays, it stays. If these folks earn their living from it, they’ll protect it from the multinationals coming to cut it down, whether for mahogany, for soy and sugar plantations, or for iron, gold, and diamond mines.
I have helped create rainforest-protecting municipal reserves, indigenous areas, and community forests that have successfully resisted logging, mining, and industrial farming. But these efforts have been trounced by the global trend. Have I been merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? From 1998 to 2008 the world’s rainforests have disappeared at a rate of an acre every two minutes, approximately 1 percent a year. At this rate, in forty years we will have destroyed the last of them.
When I fly over the rainforest into these places, I feel the irony. Planes spew dangerous global warming gasses into the stratosphere that hasten the desertification that fuels rainforest decline. I don’t want to get on the plane, and yet, I have to get on the plane.
I get on the plane. Below, there’s West Africa’s Upper Guinea Rainforest. There’s the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon, Central Africa’s Congo River Basin Rainforest, Central America’s Monte Verde cloud forest, and the final remnants of India’s forests collapsing under the weight of a billion people.
Still, it’s marvelous that we have some rainforest left. Sometimes, especially in the so-called megadiverse nations like Peru, Bolivia, and Indonesia, the strange green animal below stretches 360 degrees as far as I can see, bulging slightly in the middle distance, then softening out to the thin line of the horizon. That olive and lime green pelt sometimes looks so exquisite that I ache to reach down from the air and stroke it. It’s like the back of an enormous animal we thought extinct but that still lives, reclining below in soft curvature.
But when this animal’s side comes into view, I see the burns in its fur — ten-acre clear-cuts fed by logging roads like snaking arteries thick w
ith virus. Sometimes fresh fires still burn, but I can’t hear the monkeys’ screams of terror under the plane’s engine. When the fires are gone, there’s a pure black deadness to the skin — and it’s time to land amid the charcoal, the stumps. A million species flee or die; only one species moves in.
“ON THE HILLSIDES OLD CROPS DEAD AND FLATTENED … murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”
Granted, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was probably the worst possible thing to read during my reentry to America. But there I was anyway, a few days later, reading the novel in my parents’ condo parking lot. I recalled that McCarthy suggested his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel is not about some distant future dystopia; it’s really about the present time.
Boy, did I need some comfort food. In the supermarket across the road, I walked down an endless ice cream aisle and finally found it: Ben and Jerry’s, something I never see in Africa or Latin America, and a real treat. But something was different. On the back of the pint of Phish Food was one word: Unilever. The Vermont duo had sold their erstwhile eco-company to the world’s biggest food conglomerate, responsible for denuding the Brazilian rainforest and poisoning field laborers with chemicals.
I put the pint back. As I walked through that windowless, sterile mega-market, with piped-in music, the exit seemed to recede into the distance. I finally reached the door, only to escape into the sprawling parking lot. I didn’t belong here — not in fast-food hospitals or condos; not in industrial-park 5K runs or malls. The wisdom I thought I’d gained over the past decade couldn’t make sense of the dark direction the world seemed to be taking and of my own complicity in it. Perhaps the shaman was wrong. The world had lost its shape, and I was losing mine.
I felt a vibration in my pocket. My phone. “Hello,” I said.
A silence on the other end. Not a long silence, but one full and round with expectation. Finally: “Hi, this is Jackie.”
2. THE LEAST THING PRECISELY
JACKIE SQUATTED BEHIND TWO HEIRLOOM TEA BUSHES, covered with golden honeybees. They explored her skin, her hair, the folds of her white cotton pants and blouse. I could see her stroking the wings of one of them. She was so absorbed in it that she didn’t even hear me pull up.
The drive out to her permaculture farm was a collision of the Old and New South. The Research Triangle — which includes the cities of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham — and its McMansions, pharmaceutical plants, and research universities, like Duke and the University of North Carolina, disappeared as I crossed into Adams County, where Jackie lived. The wide highway narrowed to a single lane with occasional potholes, and the rolling green landscape evoked the Civil War setting of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. Plantation houses collapsed into themselves, and the old tobacco fields around them lay fallow. Jackie had moved into one of these abandoned, to-be-defined spaces.
She was partly obscured by the tea bushes. At a distance, all I could see was part of her face and a ponytail of salt-and-pepper hair. I got out of the car and, still unnoticed, walked in her direction. Though it was early April, barely past the last frost, under Jackie’s hand two hundred varieties of plants sprang from the ground in manic glory. Later, I’d learn their names by heart: Jack grape and Juneberries; hearty kiwi and Egyptian walking onions. Lettuce sprang up in a neat rectangular bed, and the winter wheat rose skyward. All of Jackie’s flora was in motion under a slight breeze, smeared together as if in an impressionist painting, with the muted purples, oranges, and reds against a background of green and brown.
This area was a clear-cut when she moved in, Jackie had told me over the phone. Over the four years of living here, she’d been helping nature heal. Now you could barely make out the gleam of No Name Creek through the thickening vegetation. But I could hear it. It gurgled and bubbled through her two acres. There were some whippoorwills calling out, but otherwise I was drawn by the sound of the creek. It seemed to whisper secrets.
I was so absorbed by the setting, I didn’t hear Jackie approach, but suddenly there she was, standing not six feet from me, regarding me with a kind of Mona Lisa half smile. She didn’t say anything for a long moment; neither did I. She wore a lined navy blue windbreaker, too big for her, and white cotton drawstring pants. I knew she’d just turned sixty, but she gave the impression of fifty. Health and agility sprang from her whole body and shot from her blue eyes. She wasn’t bold or assertive, far from it. She looked at me almost timidly, her eyes downcast.
I noticed several bees still clinging to her jacket, one in her hair, and another on her wrist. As we shook hands, the bee on her wrist made the short jump to my forearm. I stared at it without moving. With a little pull on my hand, Jackie led me over to some rainwater pooled by the tea bushes. We crouched there, and the bee flew off my arm and landed beside the pool. Above us sat a bee box. Jackie told me her Italian bees produced forty pounds of honey a year, enough to give to friends. “Listen to how quiet the bees are,” she said. “In a month they’ll be swarming, and it’ll sound like a freight train.” We stayed crouched there for a while, the air around us fragrant with raw honey. A slight buzz mingled with the murmur of the creek. We were surrounded by Juneberries, figs, hazelnuts, and sourwood. The bee that had been on my forearm was now sipping from the pool. Jackie reached down and stroked its wings as it drank. “Sometimes I wake up in the morning out here in the silence, and I get tears of joy.”
During the next hour, she led me through her permaculture farm. She pointedly described permaculture as “the things your grandparents knew and your parents forgot,” adding that the word is a conjunction of both permanent agriculture and permanent culture. She said permaculture can be defined as a holistic approach to sustainable landscape, agricultural, and home design. Our conversation consisted of my gawking in amazement and she gently, intelligently explaining the science and poetry of it all. She’d laid out the land in zones.
Zone 2 lay just beyond the fence and, along with her bees, held the crops that were inherently deer and rabbit proof and did not need to be enclosed in fencing: a profusion of native and wild elderberries and blackberries; several pawpaws, the largest edible fruit native to America, which is as plump as a mango; five Southern heirloom apple trees (“Four from Lee Calhoun,” Jackie told me, “the dean of Southern heirloom apple lore.”); three pecan trees from the yard in Alabama where she grew up; and two medlars, which produce apple-like fruits. “I got them because I was so enchanted by the shape of the plants,” Jackie said. “They were cultivated in medieval walled gardens, and eaten at feasts in those days. I use them today for medlar jam.” Zone 3 was her forest, which she used for collecting wood, edible mushrooms, and edible plants like pokeweed, and for bathing and meditating by the creek. I asked her about Zone 1, and she said we’d get to it later.
As she told me about the teas she grew, about her homemade jams and boysenberry wines, about the shiitakes she’d planted on a pile of logs, about the rainwater she harvested, I thought of something from Nietzsche: “How little suffices for happiness! … the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance — the least thing makes up the best happiness.” All of these tiny things — a bee, a creek, a tea bush — were causing me to loosen up, relax, and feel joy rush through me, the asphalt inside me beginning to crack.
Finally we made it into the core of her farm, Zone 1, stepping inside a green plastic deer fence. A membrane more than a frame, it unobtrusively circled a half acre or so of her two acres and harbored dozens of gardens full of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. There was Brugmansia, or angel trumpet, and Virginia bluebells, native persimmon for wine and preserves, cornelian cherry, mint everywhere, spicebush (for the spi
cebush swallowtail butterfly), and Dutchman’s pipevine (for the pipevine butterfly). But at the center of Zone 1 something stopped me. Was it a house? The edifice was so slight that, viewed from a certain angle, it seemed as if it might simply vanish, like looking down the sharp edge of a razor blade. Wait a minute. Sure, I’d seen the structure several times already during our tour (hadn’t I?), but it hadn’t really sunk in. It just seemed like a little shed or something in the background. She actually lives in there, I thought, suddenly feeling like I’d crossed a line by even coming here. I wondered why she hadn’t even mentioned the house yet. Was she embarrassed?
I was now looking at a different person. Where I’d seen this remarkable physician with the world’s greenest thumb, I now saw a pauper. Something deeply ingrained in me reacted violently to the situation. She has nowhere else to go. She continued to talk about the joys of homesteading, but all I could do was nod, mutely, and steal peeks at the horrifying sight of the 12 × 12.
“Would you like to come in for tea?” she asked.
Part of me did not. But she led me toward that terrible, tiny house. To choose to live in anything that small was insane. As we neared it the place looked far smaller than I’d imagined. I’m six feet tall, so it was exactly twice my height at the base. As we approached the house it seemed to shrink, and I imagined the awkward moment when we would both squeeze in and drink the tea standing up, painfully forcing conversation. Four winters had weathered its brown walls. As we stepped onto a minuscule porch, she asked me if I’d mind taking off my shoes.
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