Not Buying It

by Judith Levine

  He walks to the gas station next door, which can be reached either by treading through a gravel-mulched shrub garden or climbing over an 18-inch curb. He chooses the latter, but to no avail: noNew York Times. He tries another convenience store, but inconveniently, there is nobody around, so he trespasses over another gravel-landscaped embankment, risks his life crossing the four lanes of North Seventh Avenue, and hikes the paved desert of Wal-Mart’s parking lot. Wal-Mart is closed, so he gives up and buys theBillings Gazette from a vending machine outside the store and makes his way back to the motel.

  Later, he shows me what he’s written in his Palm Pilot: “I look up: Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn, Best Western, I-90, East to Billings, West to Butte. I am surrounded by comfort, a holiday, and the best, yet something is missing. I have no car to go to Butte or to Billings.” He says he felt like an illegal alien.

  Real Montanans may not walk, but, boy, do they hike. And Amy, who now lives in northern California, is a hiker. She and her Bozeman friends know every trail in the vicinity, and since today is the first day out of the tunnel of my cold, Amy and two of her friends pick Paul and me up to trek one of them. My nephew, Jacob, arrives looking sleepy but game. We’ve decided on a hike in the Gallatin range, from the Middle Cottonwood Trail to the Foothills Trail to Sipes Canyon, which should take about four hours.

  We drive up the canyon to a trailhead at the sparse end of a subdivision. Even as a small boy, Jacob was a mountain goat; now he’s long, skinny, and effortlessly swift. He and I move ahead of the group. We climb up a long dry riverbed into the trees. The sun is hot, but there are still patches of snow underfoot, with yellow glacier lilies peeking through them, and blue lupine and larkspur in the warmer spots. We all pause in a grove at the top of the first long rise and share a bar of Belgian chocolate. Paul and I are enraptured by both the view and the refreshments.

  Carefully treading a foot-wide path on the edge of a cliff, we wedge ourselves into the mountainside to let pass two men riding their bikes down the trail. When we reach the other side of the ridge, we encounter other cyclists coming up. The grade is steep. Not easy hiking, this is some tough biking, and the cyclists are sweating hard under the much hotter sun on this side of the ridge. They look miserable.

  That is, their faces do. The rest of them looks grand. All are dressed in spanking-new mountain-biking shirts and shorts of cycling-specific wicking fabrics. Their shoes, helmets, and gloves are also made for mountain biking. On their backs they carry close-fitting camel packs, designed to let them sip water without stopping, God forbid, to rest. Their bikes are also brand new, feather light yet fully loaded to absorb all shocks. They and their bicycles are festooned with electronics to monitor speed, calories, heart rate, and distance.

  Theirs is a species of consumerism that Douglas B. Holt, a professor of advertising at the University of Illinois, calls postmodern. In the postmodern marketplace “the ‘good life’ is not a matter of having a well-defined list of status goods,” he writes. “Instead, it is an open-ended project of self-creation. The idea is to circulate continually through new experiences, things, and meanings, to play with different identities by consuming the goods and services associated with those identities.”

  On this mountain track, the identity is extreme athlete, the experience is extreme duress, and the accouterments are extremely expensive and extremely high tech. Holt describes this self-creation as a kind of play, but it looks like work to me. Nor is there anything playful about the codes that govern it. Just as an unwritten law prohibits travel without a car in the valley below, up here travel on an ordinary old mountain bike (or ordinary old feet) in an ordinary T-shirt is only condescendingly tolerated.

  As we drive back down the canyon through the looping lanes of subdivisions that were once thousand-acre ranches, Amy’s friend Linda tells us that the people in these houses have been battling the village for years over water. Not only is the area undergoing fast population growth, but each new resident is using up a lot more water than a resident might have done even five years ago. To make matters worse, the region has been plagued by drought on and off for a decade. As I walked with Linda near the peak of one of the mountains we traversed, she pointed out the signs of stress on the needles of a species of evergreen that is nearing extinction. At this lower elevation the natural landscape is mostly brown and yellow. Yet each McMansion stands on a square of brilliant green, sparkling under the sprinklers.

  Economists and marketers tend to define consumption narrowly and technically, as the act of exchanging money for things or services. Consumption is what happens at the “point of purchase”—the supermarket, stockyard, or doctor’s office. But environmentalists want a more literal definition: theusing up of valuable and finite things, including the natural resources that go into production: ore, oil, soils.

  Another, less often named valuable thing that can be consumed by consumption is social harmony. Proponents of free markets, such as those at the World Bank, stress their democratizing effects. But as consumption increases, so does competition for the resources that support it. This can lead to corruption and violence. Oil is a cause of war. So is water.

  Pretechnological societies fought over resources, too. But their cosmologies also recognized the limits of those resources. The animals, fish, plants, and rain were gifts. They demanded stewardship, stint, and sacrificial gifts in return. By contrast, the grand chateaux of Bozeman, with their dishwashers churning, their many bathtubs and thirsty lawns sucking out a parched water table, exemplify the self-interested economic system whose only imperative is to grow.

  Are these houses serving utilitarian ends? In 1798 Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and founder of utilitarianism, defined utility as “that property in any object whereby it tends to produce benefit, advance, pleasure, good, or happiness [or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness.” Surely, these houses produce benefit, advance, pleasure, and happiness—for a few. But when the moving gifts of beauty and sustenance are hoarded, halted in their progress, their power is perverted.

  I watch the vapor rising from the sprinklers and turning to rainbows in the late-day sun. A miasma of mischief, pain, and unhappiness, it is deceptively lovely to look at.

  At around seven, Jon and Beth, Amy, her second (now ex-) husband, Jeff, Jacob, Paul, and I meet at Plonk, a tapas and wine bar where Jake’s best friend has been hired as temporary executive chef. Waiting for Sarah, we settle into cushy, burgundy velveteen banquettes and easy chairs around a low table. The place is too fussy by half, the art slick, the bathrooms tiled to a fare-thee-well. But having loitered for a half-year outside the precincts of commerce, where taste is constantly and anxiously recalibrated, I find Plonk comfortable, even glamorous.

  No one is looking at the prices; we’re just ordering a plate of this, a bottle of that. I’m tired from the hike, relaxed after a hot shower and a nap, woozy from the good Cabernet mingling with the antihistamines that are still in my bloodstream. Jake’s friend Matt is sending plates up from the kitchen, on the house. I sink into the cushion beside my brother.

  Sarah arrives on the arm of a Santa Barbara surfer who is crashing at the house for the weekend. Their flirtation has advanced since yesterday, and she is looking flushed and pretty. On her smooth, tanned chest is the necklace.

  We eat, drink, and grow merrier with each bottle of wine. More friends arrive with embraces and congratulations. Gifts move around.

  July

  Structural

  Adjustments

  JULY 1

  There’s a new reality show this month calledAmish in the City. In it five young members of the ascetic sect are brought to the fleshpots of Los Angeles to test their religious convictions. It’s not an altogether artificial test. At sixteen, every Amish kid gets a “rumspringa,” a “season of running around” before opting (or not) to be rebaptized into an adult life devoted to God. The show ups the ante by supplying the rumspringers with temptation and idolatry, in the form of everyth
ing from bikinis to veganism, and providing them with a team of buff and fluffy Angelenos to aid in their debauchery.

  Paul and I have spent our spring as Amish in the City, too, but without the rum. As we’ve traveled the fast lane at horse-drawn speeds, we’ve (pretty much) withstood temptation and evaded debauchery. The last week in New York presented one of the year’s toughest challenges: I refrained from seeing the politico-pop phenomenonFahrenheit 9/11. More than removed from American culture, I felt I was observing it from the Ulan Batur.

  So it is with relief that after a six-hour drive from New York to Vermont, I hear the car tires leave the pavement of North Main Street at the edge of Hardwick village and hit the dirt of Bridgman Hill Road. The first crest of the hill is a threshold from twenty-first-century life to one that looks and feels more like it did fifty or even a hundred fifty years ago. At this boundary, an arched gateway of trees gives way to a vista of pastures that slope from the ridge road to the mountains in the distance. At night, the space closes to a headlight-illuminated tunnel. From the dark periphery the eyes of a fox or a skunk may glint, a frog may leap across the road. There is no sound but the crickets and the rubber on the dirt.

  I roll down the car window and breathe in the perfume of cow manure and grass. Now, I think, I can relax. The lures of the marketplace, like the village streetlamps, grow distant in the rearview mirror.

  JULY 2

  But there is trouble in paradise.

  Last week Hardwick’s Zoning Board of Adjustment, which oversees land use and building in town, received a permit application from a Barre entrepreneur named Karl Rinker to build a telecommunications tower on Bridgman Hill. The tower’s purpose is to enhance the reach of his region-wide pager service, but perhaps foreseeing the imminent obsolescence of pagers, Rinker also promises to improve the town’s fire, police, and rescue team communications systems, which now use siren, radio, and telephone. And while no cell phone company has shown interest in our small-fry market, he is also pitching the tower as Hardwick’s launching pad to the future. To serve a town of three thousand, his drawings indicate space for six cell phone transmitters.

  As proposed, Rinker’s tower will rise from the upper pasture of Wendell and Beverly Shepard’s land, the acres that comprise lower Bridgman Hill. The farmer and the builder have already signed a twenty-year lease with an option to renew.

  Rinker’s application calls for 180 feet of lattice-work aluminum bristling with horizontal and vertical antennae (“like a porcupine!” he will boast at more than one hearing). In addition, a 19-foot, 6-inch antenna extends from the tower’s tip. The size of both tower and antenna, claims Rinker, are the minimum required to accomplish adequate transmission and reception. But it’s hard not to notice a coincidence: Hardwick’s zoning bylaws limit such a structure to 180 feet. Whether auxiliary equipment is included in this maximum allowable height will become a point of contention, but 199½ feet is just six inches shy of the height at which the Federal Aviation Authority requires a red light at the top, and the light is clearly prohibited by Hardwick’s bylaws.

  To a resident of Tokyo or Boston, 180 feet may not seem tall. But 180 feet dwarfs the highest tree or silo on the hill by about 120 feet. It is more than twice as high as any church steeple in the county. Although electric transmission, radio, and TV (and, increasingly, cell) towers prickle like voodoo pins from mountain ridges throughout the state, they are still rare in the Northeast Kingdom. You would have to travel to Montreal before you arrived at a human-built structure as high as the cell tower Karl Rinker wants to put up in a cow pasture on Bridgman Hill.

  Enthusiasm for cell service is high in town. At the first public hearing, in June, Sandy Buck Howard, the owner of a cut-rate furniture business in the next town, Wolcott, rushed to be the first citizen to testify. The board had just completed Step 1 of the process: making sure Rinker has submitted all the necessary parts of the application. After that comes public testimony; review of scientific, economic, or legal documents; and finally, a decision. It will be complicated, and new to the board, which generally considers such matters as whether someone can open a hair parlor over her garage. But Sandy was impatient. “He meets all the requirements,” she blurted. “Give him the permit.”

  Sandy is a champion of “business-friendly development” in Hardwick, which to her means restricting or even abolishing zoning. Wolcott has only recently adopted zoning, and Buck’s Furniture is visible testament to an older, more libertarian time—and to her family’s feelings about public land-use restrictions. In revenge against some now-forgotten town government offense, Sandy’s father painted his formerly white, 40,000-square-foot sprawl of buildings brown with broad yellow and orange horizontal stripes. Wolcott, whose “downtown” is a pass-through on Route 15, is known to many as that village with the ugly brown and yellow buildings.

  Not everyone in Hardwick wants the tower. At the first hearing, Karen Shaw, the organic dairy farmer next door to the Shepards, asked that the permit be rejected outright. She has brought the board evidence on the effects of electromagnetic emissions on people and animals. “We are trying to keep farming and have been there for twenty-five years,” she said. “Reduced milk production and sick cows would put us out of business.” Martha Zweig, a poet, talked rhapsodically about skiing and walking up Bridgman Hill. She noted that preserving the natural and agricultural landscape is one of the goals of the Town Plan, which the board is charged with taking into account.

  But the federal Tele-Communications Act of 1996 may exclude Karen’s testimony. The law does not permit the consideration of data on the health risks of emissions that are lower than those allowed by the Federal Communications Commission. (U.S. allowable maxima are higher than those of any other country that has such standards.) In fact, under the TCA, Hardwick’s Zoning Board doesn’t have much wiggle room at all. It can put limits on the siting, size, and look of a tower, but it can’t prohibit the building of a telecommunications facility.

  I am sick with worry that the tower will go up. Paul has his own concerns. He is chair of the Zoning Board.

  JULY 3

  I usually drop about $40 on petunias and pansies, marigolds, lobelia, and nasturtium to fill the flower boxes on our deck. But this year I’m not buying annuals, which I have deemed inessential. Instead, I will plant Sungold cherry tomatoes and herbs—edible only, no ornamentals. Paul has already turned over the soil and put in the rest of the vegetables in the larger plot near my cabin, plus a dozen delicata squash plants in the field beside our raspberry patch. I weed my perennials and, to fill in the bare spots, drive around collecting whatever my friends are separating out of their gardens. It’s a nice way to spend an afternoon, but the result can’t compare with the immediate, bright-colored gratification of annuals in bloom.

  On my way through town, I drop in at the co-op to pick up some milk and eggs. I’m wearing jeans with a split at the knee, a shirt that’s now grimy with soil, and my rubber Muck shoes—the raiment of my Hardwick identity. My work clothes are battered but not artificially “distressed” or frayed at the edges like those pink-plaid rags-to-richesseChanel blazers that are fashionable this year. Thorstein Veblen observed bourgeois wives displaying their husbands’ wealth and their own indolence on their backs; he called it conspicuous consumption. This liberated unmarried cohabitator wears her labor, not her leisure, on her sleeve. In Hardwick, we esteem conspicuous parsimony.

  My last stop is at Surfing Veggies Farm, run by a couple of original back-to-the-landers. The name remains apt: as in their pre-farming days, Louis and Annie still make time to hit the waves. Louis and I chat about the winter, and I tell him about how our project has been going in the city, meeting the challenges of nonconsumption while locked into municipal systems of food distribution, energy delivery, and waste disposal—not to mention a social and cultural economy based on purchase. He suggests that I visit some people who are “really off the grid” for a glimpse of what it’s like to consume absolutely nothing.

>   To me, Louis and Annie qualify as really off the grid. They power the farm with solar panels, plant according to the phases of the moon, and wash their clothes with a soapless homeopathic plastic ball, which, as I understand it, cleans the way crystals heal. On the other hand, they do not eschew all the things of this modern world. For instance, they do their faith-cleaning at the Village Laundramat. And as I’m loading a flat of organic Sungolds into the car, Louis asks if I’ve seenFahrenheit 9/11. When I shake my head sadly, he tells me he and Annie are off to Montpelier to take it in tonight.

  Back home, while I pat the mounds of soil up around the tomato seedlings, I reconsider Janice’s proposal that documentaries be considered a necessity. I’m still using electric lights from dirty fuel sources. I haven’t given up laundry soap. Why not balance my polluting with the soul-cleansing polemics of Michael Moore?

  This makes me think again about my vegetable-flower distinction. Vegetables satisfy a primary (physical) need, flowers a “mere” aesthetic desire: that’s the rationale. But why draw the line at cultivated vegetables (including eight exotic organic Asian greens, including three different mustards)? Why not forage for dandelions and gooseberries? Thoreau agonized over whether his beans had any more right to life than the weeds he hoed out of the rows. The following year he took the weeds’ side. His disapproval of agriculture was echoed in his disdain for all extraneous human-made comforts, and his definition of extraneous was capacious. “A lady once offered me a mat,” he sniffs inWalden, “but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door.”

  Come on, Henry. No room for a mat?