by Doug Fine
I don’t like to think about dying, either. But if I had stopped to look at my overall survival ability when I embarked on this experiment, I concede that it would look like I had a death wish. Without any of the skill sets that allowed earlier pioneers to eke out a life here, I chose New Mexico for the project, both because I love the mellow culture and vast wilderness, and because I thought it would have some of the best solar power potential on the planet.
* * *
Extremely hot weather actually makes solar panels operate less efficiently—you get about 0.5 percent less production for every degree centigrade increase in temperature.
* * *
Sure, I had to drive across the dry beds of the Mimbres River (a mile away, between me and the nearest paved road) and Stitzel Creek (on my property) to even access the canyon that contained my nine-hundred-square-foot, thirty-year-old adobe composite home. But heck, locals said it’d been two years since a major flash flood. Sure, the land resembled matzo, and barring a massive climactic shift that included sudden deluges of rainfall, I’d have to corral my own milk goats for a couple of years until the range recovered from previous mules on the property.
I was OK with all that. The one thing life as a roving journalist teaches you is that there’s no point bitching about the weather. I donned the inexplicable regional hat, bought me the ranch, and started integrating words like “I reckon” and “bought me” into my vocabulary.
Global warming might even be a boon to my project, I thought upon move-in and all the associated perspiration. When it comes to solar power, New Mexico is in fact the place to be. Passive Heat Gain, which sounds like a mental disorder associated with menopause, has been utilized by the local adobe culture for at least a thousand years. Today, New Mexicans of every gender, political inclination, and cultural background stop me on the street when they see a solar panel in my truck and insist on shooting the breeze about their theories on wattage, placement, and current inversion. It’s like the way Chicagoans know about wind, or Angelinos about traffic.
* * *
Solar panels are mandatory on all buildings in Spain.
* * *
There was certainly enough sun here for even a neophyte solar aspirant. I recall Raoul, the owner of the glass store in Silver City, a rapidly crunchifying, hip little town of ten thousand where Billy the Kid was once imprisoned, telling me not to sweat the positioning of the solar water collector I was surrounding with two panes of his finest tempered glass (delivered via fossil fuels and made through God-knows-what polluting process—so much for a minimum of hypocrisy).
“Man,” he said, sounding a lot like Cheech. “There’s enough sunlight here from all directions. It’s almost sunny at night.”
Indeed, I detected a decided absence of moisture in the New Mexican air. I mean to say, there was none. The world was drier than a Steven Wright monologue. I didn’t mind this one bit. I love the sun. I spent my first New Mexico afternoon runs greeting neighbors with a wonder-filled, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
They sort of looked at me with an expression that said, “Um, every day’s a beautiful day here, son.”
In fact, when I switched off my iPod and asked my gazillionth-generation neighbor Señor Mendosa for his take on the drought while I was trespassing on his ranch during a run, he didn’t tell me climate change is changing everything in his crops and orchards. He told me it already has changed everything.
“There hasn’t been a normal rainy season for ten years,” the silver-haired elder told me as he tilled his corn. “We never had anything like this weather when I was growing up. Neither did my father. Or his father.”
* * *
The number of reports of hail and severe wind in the United States have gone up tenfold in the past fifty years.
* * *
News reports promised more of the same for about, oh, about the next three thousand years. The cover of the latest Farmer’s Almanac (and can I say how proud I was that I needed a Farmer’s Almanac?) screamed, “Watch out! Another wild year ahead.” Indeed, around the time of my closing/opening, there was some talk of shutting the highway to town, on account of half the nearby Gila National Forest being on fire. I could smell it on my runs.
It wasn’t just the forest that was suffering. A biologist came by to check out the recently healthy but now deceased deer that had been providing take-out buffet for the local coyotes, wild cats and vultures since a couple of days before I moved into the Funky Butte Ranch. It fell about sixty yards from the studio the LOVEsubee had barely avoided. The scientist told me that he was unsure if the deer had been killed by a mountain lion or had dropped dead from sheer thirst.
* * *
If the Greenland ice sheet melts entirely, sea levels would rise twenty-three feet, flooding out hundreds of millions of people and inundating cities like New York, London, and Shanghai.
* * *
I was glad the predators had a distraction from the goats I was soon to pick up from my Craigslist seller in Tucson. And frankly, I was glad they had a distraction from me. Before I found the Funky Butte Ranch, I had rented a wasp-infested one-room straw bale shack about four miles farther up this valley, which is called the Mimbres, after the river. When friends visited, they would insist on going to the outhouse armed with a two-way radio, merely because I had been stalked by a mountain lion once or twice and because there were tracks all over the place. I don’t know what they expected to convey to me upon an attack: “Breaker, Breaker. I’m being eaten while reading the latest issue of the Home Power Magazine. Over.”
The point, though, is that everyone and everything in New Mexico was thirsty, and when I moved to the Funky Butte Ranch, it was making creatures, which I would personally have “forgotten” to load on Noah’s Ark, pay me visits, like the two toilet-exploring scorpions I nearly sat on on my second night at the ranch.
THREE
LAST EXIT TO WAL-MART
The evening after Lacy helped me extract the LOVEsubee from the putative herb garden, I watched the sunset from the peak of the Funky Butte with my new Australian cattle puppy, Sadie. It took about ten minutes to scale it. I couldn’t believe I “owned” nearly everything I could see.
Home.
At only 6.1 percent interest.
Still, home. One of the platoon of Realtors I’d worked with in finding this spot talked about the “Pyramid of Self,” with home space at the absolute base. “Once you’ve got that,” she said. “You can build almost anything else you need in your life.”
I took a moment to reflect on this. As a wandering journalist who had spent two decades crashing on couches from the Arctic to Rwanda, her words resonated deeply. I could now shop for more than two days of food at a time. Or better yet, I could try to grow a year’s worth. If my solar power and local ranching plans came to fruition, maybe I really could live a truly independent life, right from here. It seemed doable.
* * *
A solar-powered airplane flew for fifty-four straight hours over New Mexico in 2007.
* * *
But until then, I realized, I was hopelessly dependent not just on co-op veggies, but on Silver City’s one box store: a Super Wal-Mart the size of a small state. I didn’t like to think about it, but the LOVEsubee’s hatch was filled with one of those giant Val-U pyramids of paper towels that looked as though the trees had simply been converted from living, bark-covered plants to dioxin-bleached rolls of about the same girth and height.
In fact, on that same town run that netted me the oil-soaked organic tomatoes, I had pulled into the vast Wal-Mart parking lot seeking a water bucket for my new goats. It was an ugly reality: here I was, trying to live this local, healthy life, and my parts list was coming from China. The lifestyle contrast was too stark to ignore. I had a bag of organic goat grain in the LOVEsubee, for crying out loud. I was at a crossroads: was I going to go green and independent, or was I going to keep the Walton family buying Picassos? Shopping locally was an important part of my effort, and I
knew it.
* * *
Trade with China accounts for more than half the U.S.’ $850 billion trade deficit.
* * *
But it was hard to avoid Wal-Mart in rural America at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In fact, I hit the Wallyworld exit every time I went to town. It was open all the time, and its crappy, slave-made junk was often cheaper than the crappy, slave-made junk at the town’s local stores. There was always some excuse to head there (“online shopping also involves oil miles,” “the local stores don’t carry fly strips”), and progressives in my part of New Mexico were all too aware of the dilemma.
* * *
A product imported from Shanghai travels 6,438 miles to get to a market in Los Angeles. There were 7.2 billion visits made to Wal-Mart in 2006. Earth’s population is 6.5 billion.
* * *
“Busted!” we said to each other, jabbing the other guilty party in the ribs when we found friends in the gardening or paper towel aisle.
So as I did every week, earlier that day I had parked and trekked across a fire zone slightly larger than Namibia, returned the cheerfully fake greeting from the front-door shoplift guard, and lowered my sunglasses for protection from the bolt of sickly fluorescent light that pelted me when I entered the store that was laid out exactly the same as thousands of sister spore properties all over the planet. Even the temperature and humidity were regulated from Arkansas. The place was like a garden of discount retail soil that cultivated an ever-increasing crop of desperate shoppers. It even fed and watered them. In a sense, Wal-Mart executives could be considered farmers.
Shopping at Wallyworld invariably got out of hand. I thought I just needed paper towels and a bucket, and wound up investing in tire polish, mops, marbles, and roofing. There was no such thing as using the express lane. Plus, I almost never escaped without a genuine Wal-Mart preroasted rotisserie chicken. These came in lemon-pepper, barbecue, and “traditional” (traditionally preroasted?) flavors. The chickens, about the size of large hamsters, were cheap, and provided sustenance for three days to busy journalists.
On this visit, I had noticed that there was a “price rollback” on small pumps (one supplier in the Philippines had obviously undersold another in Indonesia), and it made me think about this arid region I was settling into. Water pumps (originally windmills) are the reason people are able to inhabit the Mimbres Valley. The Mimbrenos, the local folks who were here before the Americans, the Spanish, and the Apache, took off for Mexico the last time the climate acted this funky, leaving behind only their gorgeously psychedelic pottery filled with beans I intended to plant on the Funky Butte Ranch.
The original Mimbrenos, in fact, were one of my sources of optimism about my own chance to thrive in southwest New Mexico. Before they disappeared, leaving the thirteenth-century equivalent of the oven on, the members of this indigenous culture were so successful in my very valley that healthy adults were known to live well into their thirties. I took a lot of comfort from the Mimbreno pottery shards that were scattered all over the region, including some flints on the Funky Butte Ranch. That people did well here long before Wal-Mart I found encouraging. Standing in the toxic hardware and plastic bucket aisle, I thought that all the Mimbrenos needed were some well pumps and we might still be carving petroglyphs and using clay goat water buckets.
But the Mimbrenos didn’t have pumps, so now we shopped at Wal-Mart for water buckets made from petrochemicals. But did we have to? Looking around me, I saw that the place wasn’t hurting for business. Where did these people come from? Was I way outside the mainstream to even think about local living? I knew that the region’s water tables, even with pumps, were in danger from the growing population of my patch of desert near the NAFTA-porous Mexican border. Despite our distance from Santa Fe and Taos, we already had enough Californicators seeking dream houses to ensure that mine is the first county in history where a majority of the population are Realtors. At the moment, most of the new arrivals seemed to be seeking discount bedding.
* * *
Nearly 20 million commercial trucks were registered in the United States in 1997. These vehicles drove more than 420 billion miles and consumed more than 42 billion gallons of fuel.
* * *
I decided that day, right beside the marked-down Mariah Carey CD bin, to begin to wean myself from the McMega store. It wasn’t going to be easy. There were just so many situations that demanded the kind of product in which Wal-Mart specializes.
Take, say, pet carriers. About a week earlier, just as I was preparing to move to the Funky Butte Ranch, I had rescued a stray cat named Robin, one of the world’s great mice-slaughterers, who went into heat the day after I brought her home. Every tomcat in New Mexico was suddenly prowling the perimeter of my straw bale rental house. This prompted an emergency town run.
Using those nails that had overnight decimated the local rodent population, Robin had managed to claw her way out of the computer box in which I was transporting her. I noticed this when I found a small distressed cat on the back of my neck about thirteen miles into my drive to town. I veered wildly, clawing blindly at her and giving thanks for the sparse back-road traffic.
After the operations (Robin’s ovaries and my neck), I asked the vet staff what I should do to get the groggy cat home.
“See if you can get a carrier,” the receptionist suggested.
“But where can I get a pet carrier in Silver City on a Tuesday evening?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Wal-Mart.”
“There’s no other option?”
“Not that I can think of.”
What the hell was I going to do? I don’t know what the Mimbrenos did for pet carriers (“What would the Mimbrenos do?” being a question I tried to ask myself in many of my lifestyle quagmires). I reckon I could’ve performed the cat spaying myself. But on reflection I didn’t own any anesthesia.
Seven hours after my vow to avoid box-store shopping, I sat atop the Funky Butte in a semi-lotus, with ubiquitous Sharp Desert Stuff turning me into one of those bed-of-nails swamis. With Arkansan chicken still in my belly, my thoughts moved through the day’s events at the Funky Butte Ranch. The runaway LOVEsubee. A new herb garden.
Suddenly a firm resolve hit me. I had been doing things half-baked; conducting my relationships, catching salmon, shopping for dry goods. I wanted to do things fully baked. No, wait, that didn’t come out right. What I meant was I was going to dive into this experiment with everything I had. Although I didn’t realize how literal that “dive in” pledge would soon prove. I would do it one project at a time. Maybe after a year, I’d see some real reduction in the oil in my life. But it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. At the moment, even with solar panels, I would survive as long as crunchy co-ops imported tomatoes and box stores provided preroasted protein.
I was done making resolutions for the day, so I stood up and pulled various stickers and Chinese star burrs out of my flesh. I noticed I was panting. Since it was after dark, the temperature had dipped back into the high two digits. I watched a smear of stars materialize. It soon became so dense that I could barely make out individual suns. I realized that most folks in these light-blinded days don’t even realize how populated our galaxy is. A coyote yipped not far off. Sadie left off munching some dry gramma grass and snapped her head around to sniff out her canine cousin.
I started to scramble down the Butte back to the ranch house and a tomato-and-basil cracker. I took a huge hit of dry night air—the desert evening is one of heaven’s great blessings—and to my shock lightning in the distance winked back at me. Wait a second. Were those clouds on the northern horizon? I rubbed my eyes in disbelief, then amusement. How quaint and odd. I felt like an Eskimo kid looking at his first pineapple.
I didn’t give the incoming front much thought. I had a ranch to turn clean, green, and local. This meant a million plans and tasks and objectives, all geared to one end. There were solar panels to order, biofuels to investigate, contractors to beg to work me into thei
r “schedules.” Most important, I had goats to pick up, deworm, hoof-trim, and feed twice a day. Since icky factory chicken was still working its way through me, it was easy to make local protein my first priority on the Funky Butte Ranch. That, I hoped, would keep me from the Wal-Mart rotisserie.
I was almost dizzy with the awareness of how much work was ahead of me, so when I got back inside I fired up the grid-powered subwoofer. I proceeded to dance for hours to the tranciest beats I could find on my iPod, the way a college student shrugs and goes out for a beer when faced with too much studying. In between songs, I remembered that I’d bumped into my valley neighbor Sandy Jones at the co-op earlier in the day. She was a local environmental heroine who had lived pretty independently for three decades while trying to inform the world about what the area copper mining operations were doing to the groundwater. She didn’t exactly rev me up about my chances of success when she told me, “You’re doing this alone? (Guffaw) You’ve got yourself into a two-person project. What you need, boy, is a wife.”
