Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

Jackie was pursuing a kind of positive psychology, not a preachy austerity; still, did her neighbors feel judged by the existence of such simplicity right next door? The Thompsons, after all, had an ordinary-sized house, three bedrooms in all, plus a nice-sized living room, a TV, and all the other electrical appliances.

  Even so, looking at things through Long Island suburban eyes one day, I wondered how Mike and Michele plus six kids — eight people — could live comfortably with just three bedrooms. Until one day, while chatting with Michele Thompson on her porch, she said rather curiously: “I don’t know why we built such a big house.”

  I didn’t say anything, looking over at a colorful Muscovy taking noisy flight from the pond. I looked at the house again. Too big? Quite the contrary, it was a prefab house, not that big at all. “We all sleep together in one room anyway,” Michele continued. “So that’s two bedrooms too many.”

  Inadvertently I frowned slightly. It just seemed weird that eight of them would sleep in a single room. Seeing my reaction Michele explained, “We sleep with the baby and littlest one in our king-sized bed, and the others either squeeze into the bed with us, or curl up together in their sleeping bags on the carpet below! Now that Zach’s fourteen he sometimes sleeps in one of the other rooms, and Kyle has been known to join him. But there’s always at least one of the three bedrooms empty.”

  What was a little odd, perhaps, from one perspective was perfectly ordinary from another. Most of the world’s families sleep together in a single room. From the Gambian kunda to Tibetan mongour, necessity and tradition has Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and the Baby Bears all together in the same den. In Turkey, a census showed the most common place married couples had sex was the kitchen — one of the few spaces they could sequester away for some privacy. Going back just slightly in human evolutionary time, we find Homo sapiens sleeping together in communal tents or caves, not just with eight members of the nuclear family, but in clans of thirty or forty. So the Thompsons, by homesteading, were simplifying their material lives and increasing their sense of warmth and togetherness in a way that is quite natural in 99 percent of human history and even in most of the world today.

  DID I REALLY NEED THE CAR? Two weeks had passed without using it, and I began to wonder.

  I recalled my years living and traveling in villages and cities throughout Africa, India, and South America, enmeshed in communities of people who lived outside modernity, who walked and biked — and swam — everywhere. In large cities like La Paz, Bolivia, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, less than 2 percent of people own cars, mostly because they can’t afford them. When I lived in those places, I watched the locals and tried to emulate them. Squeezing five to a tiny taxi in La Paz you could cross the city for a quarter. Rapport usually developed among fellow passengers in such tight quarters, leading to some fascinating conversations.

  In the Bolivian Amazon, the indigenous Chiquitano people have no cars, and barely any roads — the river is their highway. They engage in what I came to call Amazon swimming, where they combine pleasure and function into a seamless activity. Instead of swimming directly up the Amazon tributaries to do the chore at hand — weeding a field, visiting a relative — they backstroke in a lazy, curvy pattern, sometimes chatting with a friend as both swim. They might stop midway to eat wild pineapple springing up on the river bank somewhere. I began to do this in Pine Bridge, taking the circuitous route down dirt roads for diversity or going out of my way to visit new neighbors and friends.

  All the while, in front of the 12 × 12, that one-ton monstrosity of metal, plastic, and rubber sat as a nagging reminder of Western excess. I got in it once and turned the key, the motor roaring to life, blue smoke shooting out of the tailpipe. I turned it off and walked down to No Name Creek. Before I even reached the banks I knew what I was going to do. I knew that having that car in that place at that time was too much. I’d crossed the elusive threshold of living well. In this situation, the car didn’t add anything. In fact, it rather complicated my life. Each day, one more unnecessary decision: drive or bike? With fewer options, I’d feel and be freer. And, anyway, why did I have to get anywhere faster than two wheels or two feet could take me?

  I called my mom and told her. Silence.

  Finally, she said, definitively: “You’re keeping the car.”

  I tried to explain, but she told me there was no public transport in the area. I said I could take the bike ten miles to Siler City, lock it up, and get a bus from there, but she insisted.

  “You’re keeping the car,” she said, “and that’s my final word.” I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get her to take the car back. I figured the only way to convince her was to bring her out to the 12 × 12 so she could see for herself.

  THE STRENUOUS CONTOURS OF ENOUGH

  7. MOM AND LEAH VISIT

  I DROVE BACK TO CHAPEL HILL and picked up my mother, and we drove back to Jackie’s. Instead of relaxing in the deep countryside, however, she grew increasingly anxious as the quiet isolation swallowed us, and particularly as we turned onto Jackie’s dirt road and parked in front of the 12 × 12.

  “Now you’re really keeping the car,” she said, a horrified look on her face as she regarded the miniature house on No Name Creek. I remembered my own first reaction: embarrassed for Jackie that she lived in such cramped quarters.

  In awkward silence we walked through Zone 1 and entered the house. My mother sank into the old rocking chair and soon remarked at how surprisingly roomy the place felt. We brewed tea from rainwater, picked mushrooms and asparagus for the evening meal, and watched the bees — as Jackie had predicted, they were now “swarming like a freight train” around the hive. After her initial wilderness shock, my mom blended rather easily into 12 × 12 life. Perhaps it was because she had a reference point: she’d served as a Catholic nun for fourteen years. Amid Jackie’s material simplicity, my mom talked about entering the convent at age eighteen. She’d wake up joyfully in her cloister at five AM each day to pray in silence. When she left the convent at age thirty-two to marry my father, she had almost no material possessions.

  Nor did my father. He’d been a Catholic priest for fifteen years, mostly in the Brooklyn diocese, leading the Spanish Mass for Latino communities. It was the progressive sixties, and disillusioned with the slow pace of Church reform, he left the priesthood to start a family. He met my mom at a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert and lured her out of the convent with love poetry. Then came my sister and me. My parents became college professors, and we moved into a middle-class home on Long Island, where our backyard was a forest of pines and oaks with a maze of contemplative walking paths that dead-ended or looped into themselves. My father baptized my sister and me at home amid their group of intellectual Catholic friends from the university. In our house, there was a sense that every object — from the piano to the Renaissance paintings to our gardens — spoke of that-which-is-more-than-just-human. I think it was this unusually contemplative upbringing that opened me up to the idea of living 12 × 12 and also what led my parents to have an entry point for understanding it.

  My mother and I hiked deep into the woods, past abandoned farmhouses, stopping to pick grass and feed it to two horses, one beige and one patterned like a chocolate chip cookie. On the way back, as the sun dipped deeper into the western sky, she told stories about my childhood, ones I’d heard a dozen times. We wondered aloud about the thirty-acre intentional community — Jackie, the Thompsons, José, Graciela — whether that kind of harmony between humans and nature could actually be brought to scale in twenty-first-century America.

  We were almost back to No Name Creek when we both saw it at the same time: a big snake, not two feet from us.

  We froze. It must have been six feet long and was dark brown, a constrictor by all appearances. Not the least bit worried about the pair of tool-making bipeds standing before it, the snake ribboned its way into a bit of bush and climbed the nearest tree, a twenty-foot oak sapling. My mom and I stood in rather awed silence as it muscled itself straight up
the thin trunk. The tree had few branches, so the snake gracefully utilized any available niche to hold its lower body as it arched and wound itself skyward until its pointy head rose above the sapling’s tip. Then it turned quickly into a right angle, eyeing a larger pine tree several yards away.

  It eased itself up still higher, now seeming to defy gravity. Half its length rose as a straight broomstick above the tree, and it shook the tree back and forth, trying to get within jumping range of the pine, but its efforts were in vain. The pine was simply too far away, and the snake, if it did attempt the leap, would certainly fall to its death onto the rocks below.

  “Help it out,” my mother urged. I stepped past the bush and pushed the sapling. It swayed under the efforts of the snake, and as it swayed forward I leaned into it. Our joint effort bent the sapling far enough for the snake to finally take courage. It leapt.

  Suddenly the snake was suspended in the gap between the trees. In slow motion, this slender cord soared through the air, its body like the bends of a river. It landed, crouched in the pine needles, and then foot-by-foot graced its way up the pine until its head rose above the highest pine branch.

  At the end of the day, my mother drove herself home in the car. I waved good-bye as she reversed onto Jackie’s lane. The sound of the motor softened, then disappeared. The dust settled on the lane, and a blanket of silence covered Jackie’s little homestead. The place where the vehicle had been wasn’t empty; spaciousness filled the gap, the elusive contours of enough in the ripening leaves of the forest.

  I biked down to the bridge, gazed down at No Name Creek, lost in thought. My mother and I hadn’t talked about theories of living better vs. living well or the perils of degrading and erasing subsistence cultures. It was the snake that changed her mind about the car. The silence and strength of it brought her back to those reverent five A.M. moments in the chapel, incense burning, when she was a young nun obedient to a vow of poverty. The snake didn’t possess anything in this world, but still it rose to the tallest branch, proclaimed and celebrated its being. Do we really need so much more than that snake? Do we need Hummers and Sony Playstations? China cabinets and electronic sensors in our running shoes?

  I TOOK LOTS OF LONG WALKS. Rambles, you might call them, without specific route or time frame. The day after my mother’s visit, while rambling, I did an experiment. I tried to see the world around me in “color patches.” In a book at Jackie’s, I’d been reading about recovering cataract patients at the turn of the nineteenth century, and several used this expression to describe their first experience of vision after being cured. Each place they’d fix their eyes was another glorious set of colors. One patient was exhilarated by the fact that everyone looked different; another asked the doctor about the black stains on paintings. “Those are shadows,” the astounded doctor explained. The world looked beautiful to me, seeing it as if through freshly cured eyes, one color patch after another. I looped around from the tracks onto the highway, back to Jackie’s. My sense of whimsy sobered as the colors came to represent strewn garbage under my feet. Old ii’ South’s shoulder was littered with Coca-Cola, Fanta, and Diet Sprite cans; Jack Daniels and beer bottles; paper and Styrofoam cups; Snickers and Three Musketeers wrappers; cigarette packs. New grass sprouted around the colorful debris, tentacles enclosing it bit by bit until it would disappear from sight all summer, reappearing, if faded, in the dying grass of fall. It just seemed wrong. Spotting a plastic bag, I began collecting trash.

  The bag filled quickly, and I grabbed another one that had snagged onto a bush. As I filled the new bag, I tried to connect the faces of the drivers and passengers in the minivans, SUVs, pickups, and sedans passing me with the rainbow of trash I walked through; I could not. All I saw were beautiful faces, and I began to wave. That slight nod, the lift of wrist and flash of those two fingers. Sure enough, the hands came out the windows, not to toss an empty Marlboro packet at my feet, but to snap an NC wave.

  They chuckled at this fool. The dark pleasure of schadenfreude. They liked the fool for being carless, worse off than they. They liked him for picking up their trash. I didn’t even have to initiate the NC wave. People started waving first, and I felt happy. It didn’t matter that Dr. Pepper was dripping down my pant leg and onto my shoe through a hole in one of the bags. I found myself whistling and waving, everyone exchanging the greeting, until one person in one car didn’t return my wave. In fact, the car stopped, turned around, and headed back my way, stopping beside me. The door opened — and out stepped Leah.

  Lost in my long walk, I’d forgotten about her visit. She looked angelic, her blonde hair, freshly washed, falling over her shoulders. A corded wool sweater. Her blue eyes radiated intelligence along with dismay. She looked at me, horrified, this guy with a three-day stubble and sweat pouring off him.

  I stretched out a hand to shake, then realized it was shellacked in Dr. Pepper. We shrugged awkwardly. “I bet you’re ready for a nice hot bath,” she said, trying to ease the tension. Then she remembered there was no bathtub at the 12 × 12 and backpedaled, “I mean…”

  Back at Jackie’s, I’d forgotten to put the solar shower bag out to warm that morning, so I scooped cups of cold water over my body behind a bush and lathered up. Meanwhile, Leah wandered through Jackie’s gardens, trying to respect my privacy by not glancing my way. She squatted by Jackie’s bees and remained there, engrossed, for some time.

  Leah and I had met a year ago. I was on a book tour, with readings every evening, media interviews, and daily travel, all the while getting up before sunrise each day to work remotely on my rainforest conservation project back in Bolivia. When Leah first called me, I was in the Christian Science Monitor studio in Washington, DC, having just finished an interview about Bolivia’s indigenous struggles for the rainforest with Terry Gross for the NPR program Fresh Air.

  “I’m Leah Jackson,” she said, “producer of a radio program based in Chapel Hill.” Leah asked me some pre-interview questions, and a week later, she came to a reading of mine in Chapel Hill. Coming up to me afterward, she said she couldn’t fit me into her radio show, but she offered to buy me a coffee if she could ask some informal questions about my work. “One of those alumni interviews,” she said. We’d both gone to Brown University; she’d graduated eight years after me. We went to Cafe Driade, sipping cappuccinos in a small garden while she grilled me on everything from ways to avert species extinction to structuring op-eds.

  At that time, her light blue eyes were almost hyperactive, shifting nervously as she flipped from one topic to the next. Her energy was scattered. She’d had two car accidents in the previous month, and she was restless after three years with the same show; she longed to be a reporter, not a producer, to have more control over her stories. She was also caught in a cycle of breaking up and getting back together with her boyfriend of two years, now a soldier in Iraq.

  During the past year we had exchanged the occasional email, and when I came to Chapel Hill to visit my father in the hospital, we had met for dinner at Glass Half Full in the town of Carrboro, Chapel Hill’s funky little brother. I almost didn’t recognize her. She’d just returned from Senegal and Mali and was tan and more beautiful than I remembered. She talked passionately about the inequality she’d experienced in Africa, and the way Western corporations were raping Africa’s natural resources, colonialism under a new name. She came across as self-assured, content with her job and life in Chapel Hill, the very same job she’d hated a year before. She had also permanently ended her relationship with her military boyfriend, started going to therapy with a spiritually inclined psychologist, changed her diet to organics, and begun a rigorous Zen meditation practice. Little in her external life had changed — same job, same little beater of a car, same apartment — but her perspective was completely different.

  All wasn’t fabulous. The spiritual path brings perils; Leah now felt more sensitive to her own hyper-individualism, as an only child of divorced parents, shuttled throughout her Colorado childhood back
and forth between the front range and western slope of the Rockies. “I’m well acquainted with saying good-bye,” she said. She also noticed how she tied her self-worth to stuff, living constantly at the edge of her budget, still immersed in the consumer pattern even as she awoke to it.

  When I told her about my plan to stay out at the 12 × 12, her eyes lit up. She wondered aloud if she might come out to visit sometime, saying it might help her “sort some things out.”

  I finished the shower and put on a light green button-down shirt and my faded blue jeans. Then we wandered down to the creek. She hadn’t stopped smiling, and as we crossed the creek and headed out into the forest, she said, “This is so brilliant out here. It’s perfect.”

  We bent down in unison to admire a spider web. But nature is a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t kind of thing. The sunlight turned the web into a fragile tangle of shimmering swords. Then clouds passed over, the light dimmed, and the web was broken glass. “Thank you for popping into my life,” she said.

  She talked about her ex, James. He was a West Point graduate who had been sent off to Iraq. His was primarily a desk job, but still. Their biggest fights had been about the war. He wanted to serve his country; she felt he was being used in service of a lie. She followed him faithfully to rugby matches around the state. He wanted to marry her, said he’d try to get out of the military and into politics, eventually. She couldn’t picture a life moving from military base to military base, socializing with other military folks, taking their kids to rugby matches.

  “So why did you stay with him that long?”

  “After growing up in my family — divorce and a general lack of communication — he and his family showed me what a real family should be, what love is. Love is something that’s slathered on.

  “In the same way, my job. The reason I’ve spent four years there really is because it’s a caring, supportive team. Everyone works together, supports each other. Between that and James’s family I’ve learned that it’s possible for me to have that kind of cooperation and love in my life.”