Come on, Judith. No room for pansies?
All art, said Georges Bataille, is luxury. Might beauty be a necessary luxury?
JULY 7
While looking around for an off-the-grid interview subject, I am readingRadical Simplicity, by the Vermont author and reformed weapons designer Jim Merkel. Radical Simplicity is one giant step along the simplifying spectrum, beyond downshifting, beyond making do without cable TV or Q-tips. At this end, the remedy for overconsumption starts to taste less like chamomile tea and feel more like do-it-yourself amputation.
The goal of Radical Simplicity is to conserve the earth’s resources and do so equitably among its people, starting with one’s own personal life. The simplifier starts by measuring her “ecological footprint,” the Redefining Progress calculation of the amount of “nature” used to sustain any given life. Merkel pretty much promises his readers that their EFs will be closer to the American average of 24 acres than the global fair share of 4.7. I take my pocket calculator to the rougher formulas in Chapter 6, entering our frequency of egg-eating and plane-riding, the square footage of our living space and volume of trash we throw out compared with our neighbors. Even with all our interstate travel, I discover that Paul and I subsist on 12 acres of nature apiece. That’s half the American average, not too shoddy, but still two and a half times our ration.
To fit your size-24 foot into a more modest resource allocation, Merkel says you’ve got to cut back—radically—and recommends giving away your excess possessions, walking or cycling, not driving, growing not grocery-shopping, repairing not trashing. I’m sure there are tons, or at least pounds, of waste hiding in our “stocks”—the stuff we own—but I’m dragging my feet before undertaking the more refined formulae at the back of the book. Because to limn Paul’s and my true EF, I will have to inventory, price, and weigh everything we own—food, clothing, furniture, and appliances, including the refrigerator.
Like Lionel in the Voluntary Simplicity group, I haven’t looked into the back of the refrigerator for a long time. Now I’m supposed toweigh it? My reluctance gives me pause. If I’m too lazy to do even this, how will I get anywhere close to a 4.7-acre lifestyle?
JULY 12
Talk at the food co-op is almost unanimously anti-tower. Someone has put a petition on the counter, along with Xeroxed articles about harmful emissions and links between cell phone use and cancer. The page is full of signatures. Whenever Paul walks in the door, someone buttonholes him. He listens, then invites the person to testify at a public hearing. But Paul does not make up his mind before he knows all the facts. At home, the usually high piles of paper are even higher with reams of legal and scientific articles about radiation, wind stress, and FCC rules.
We’re struggling. I can’t refrain from asking him questions. Factual ones he answers. But he won’t disclose his opinion, if he has one, and meets each query with the same answer: he has to use his judgment within the strictures of the law. This only inflames my desire to change his mind (if indeed it needs changing). Neither he nor I owned a cell phone until about six months ago, when both my parents’ health worsened and my mother insisted she be able to contact me at any time. Now, we have one cell between us and rarely remember to carry it. I want to appeal to him as a noncellular citizen.
In Hardwick we don’t carry the phone for the obvious reason: it wouldn’t work. But even if there were service here, I don’t know if we would use it. For one thing, no matter where you go in Hardwick or the neighboring towns of Greensboro or Walden, you are never more than ten minutes from home. For another, no tower shorter than about five hundred feet is likely to outwit the ripples of steep and wooded hills spliced by winding river valleys, a geography that defeats cell reception at every dip and turn. You might be five minutes from home but unable to sustain the three-minute conversation necessary to ascertain that yes, we need milk and no, we don’t need bread, and okay, I’ll pick up milk but not bread and how about the paper, too, yes the paper, too—without losing the signal. Around here smoke signals may be a more appropriate technology than ultrahigh-frequency electromagnetic waves.
“We don’t need cell phones,” says Angela, as she rings up my milk, bread, raisins, and dried split peas. Angela is one of numerous silken-haired, solstice-worshipping, yoga-practicing vegan earth daughters who work at the co-op, where Annie is the manager and pagan mother superior. “I moved to Hardwick to get away from all that, and I want to keep my daughter away from it, too.” When I ask her what she means by “all that,” Angela describes a sped-up, consumer goods–choked modernity whose soundtrack is television. When I come to Hardwick, I like to get away from all that, too.
Still there’s another “all that” that I, and Angela and Jim Merkel, do want. The aesthetically pleasing recyclable glass half-gallon bottle of Strafford Farms milk and the hand-baked organic multigrain local-bakery bread that I’ve just packed into my canvas bag satisfy my desire for fresh, unadulterated nourishment, my commitment to supporting the local economy and sustainable agriculture, and my eagerness to stick it to General Foods in any small way I can. Yet each item cost four dollars, more than twice what I would pay for conventionally grown and distributed foods at the Grand Union.
Flavio, who along with Ann is converting a barn in northeastern New York State, has told me he adores walking to his next-door-neighbor Jamie’s farmstand to buy his organic vegetables. But Flavio understands that this politically correct and socially satisfying act depends on his own relative wealth and the flexibility of his life, and that Jamie’s viability depends on the growth of a community of urban gentry like him who have made a weekend destination of this depressed area. Flavio also knows it’s a process that is likely, slowly, to displace farmers like Jamie.
“You enjoy the bourgeois privilege of bohemianism,” I say to Flavio. Angela and I enjoy it, too. We are all consumers, and like all consumption, bohemian consumption has its costs.
JULY 14
“How much do you think our refrigerator weighs?” I ask Paul. He looks puzzled, so I explain the Merkel system.
A practical man, Paul can’t make sense of it. “You mean plastic is good, wood is bad?” He’s alluding to one of our favorite ditties, from a skit performed at Bread & Puppet’s annual Resurrection Circus. It goes like this:
Plastic or wood?
Plastic or wood?
Plastic is bad.
Wood
Is good.
Paul continues: “According to this system, it would be better to build with plastic than with wood, because it’s lighter.”
“And better to use pine than hardwood,” I add. “Even better, paper.”
“Forget the granite countertops.”
We move on to furniture. We agree that under the weight system, our iron bedstead in Brooklyn should go: it takes two people to lift in order to store the air conditioner underneath it at the end of the summer (and forget about the AC!). “No waterbeds. Water is very heavy,” I contribute. Best, we conclude, to sleep on an air mattress.
What about appliances? Paul asks. New ones are lighter than old ones, though the old ones last longer. Does the system depreciate weight over time? I make a mental note to look this up in the book.
JULY 18
The gurus say you can simplify wherever you are. New York’s dense settlement and exemplary public transportation enable us to live without our car, so our EF is about the same there as in Hardwick, where we heat with wood and reduce, repair, and recycle everything. But there are limits. If I were to take Merkel’s counsel entirely to heart, I don’t know how I’d fit the cucumber plants on the fire escape or explain to the co-op board about the compost heap on the stairway landing.
The problem is not just physical; it’s metaphysical. Because at its heart, Radical Simplicity of the spiritual kind is a country thing. Virtually every simplicity primer quotes Thoreau’s beautiful passage fromWalden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, an
d see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” My own feeling is that, avid naturalist though he was, Thoreau’s own emphasis was more on the essential facts than on the woods. He conducted his experiment in rusticity with the intention of returning, vision clarified, to the fog of civilization.
The true role model for Radical Simplifiers is John Muir, the conservationist, nature writer, and cofounder, in 1892, of the Sierra Club. Muir, who is widely seen as the father of American environmentalism, would have had no trouble resisting the nineteenth-century equivalent of lime-green shoes orFahrenheit 9/11. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine him losing sleep over missing any movie. Although he maintained a wide circle of friends and political connections as high as the president of the United States, Muir’s passionate attachments were to animals, trees, and rocks. The religious principle of human dominion over the earth disgusted him. “Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man,” he once wrote, “and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.” To Muir the preservation of human sanity resided in wild, not human, relations. For him and, he implied, for anyone, “Going to the mountains is going home.”
The intention, or wish, to return to nature as an antidote to consumer culture is a strong strain in the simplicity movement. Michael Maniates calls it the “pastoral thesis of simplicity,” but the notion of the innocence of the “primitive” has a long provenance in Western thought, going back at least as far as Rousseau. In the return-to-Eden narrative, the colonial European sets off into the jungle accompanied by a fleet of porters laden with steamer trunks, only to remove his safari suit in the heat, fall in love with the tribal ways (and maybe a tribal girl), and eventually “go native.” The quintessential Simplicity Volunteer packs his Orvis flies, drives his SUV to the Sierras, and, standing alone in the stream with the hawks above and the trout below, confronts the essential facts and determines to sell the SUV, buy a bike, and change his life (he’ll probably still need the Orvis flies).
Jim Merkel describes his own rite of passage, which took place on a thirteen-day hike over the Muir Trail in California. On Day 9, at the peak of Mount Whitney, Merkel sees a bear up a tree in pursuit of his hanging bag of food. The man is scared shitless. By Day 11, though, another close encounter of the ursine kind triggers a different reaction: “I felt a primal shiver, hairs on end,” writes Merkel. “I was alive!” He reflects on his fear of nature, which he interprets as his fear of death—and confronts it. “Each rotted tree fed new life. I envisioned that I too could nourish life, even after physical death. My place in the big scheme of things was beginning to make more sense.”
Today’s SundayTimes Style section features a new demographic, which it calls Organic Professionals, or “Oppies,” who are also looking for their place in the big scheme of things. But their place is not on the craggy edge of a bear-crawling mountain. It is, “ideally in, say, a spiffy new Ford Escape hybrid (nearly $3,500 more than a similarly equipped conventional model), or with a picturesque country house from the reign of George III that has been ‘future-proofed,’ that is, wired for eco-sensitive climate-control technologies not yet invented,” says the article. If the Oppie lifestyle is kind to the earth, that’s nice, but its main point is to be kind to the practitioner. Mary Evans, a literary agent quoted in the story, comments, “It doesn’t just make me feel better, it makesme better.” The owner of Rural Gourmet in Livingston, New York, believes “it’s more spiritual and natural.”
Like those in Hardwick, the longtime residents of exurban New York City are ambivalent about their new neighbors. In Livingston, all that spirituality has raised property values 50 percent, pricing many locals out of the market. In Columbia County, the cell tower’s equivalent is a proposed concrete plant. The locals want the jobs. The newcomers are against the plant, as a polluter and a blight on the landscape.
JULY 27
Tonight all the folding chairs on the floor of the wood-paneled second-floor hearing room of the Memorial Building are taken; more people stand at the back and lean against the walls. According to theGazette, thirty-five people are here for this, the second public hearing on the Rinker application, a big turnout for a Zoning Board meeting.
Rumor has it that Sandy Howard has been rallying support. A few nights ago, driving up the hill after my swim in Nichols Pond, I noticed a half-dozen cars parked at the Shepards’ place. All had American flags and yellow Support Our Troops stickers on their bumpers. My muscles, relaxed from my swim, tightened. Which was disturbing me most—my suspicion that there was a pro-tower strategy meeting going on and my fear that they were going to prevail? Or the growing mutual suspicion in town that has me conjuring conspiracies and thinking of my neighbors as They? And what about the stress at home, where I am railing and wailing against the tower, and Paul, impartial judge, is keeping his own counsel?
As the hearing starts, Karl Rinker is in the witness’s seat facing the wooden table at which the seven-member board sits. He is a stocky man, his hairy forearms extending from a short-sleeved polo shirt, his dense waist pressing against the belt of his khaki shorts, on which is clipped one of his company’s black pagers. His salesman’s zeal shoots into the low-key, low-volume atmosphere like high-voltage sparks in a gray sky. Glad-handing and expansive, Rinker addresses all questions at length, referring frequently to the three-ring binder that contains his proposal. Paul listens without interrupting, taking notes. Other members ask for clarification.
Although he has no signed contracts with lessees, Rinker assures the board that if he builds it, they will come. He mentions again interest expressed by the town’s emergency services. Again, he fails to name any interested cell company, of which two currently operate in the region. Asked by a board member whether a cell carrier could provide service beyond a two- to three-mile distance from the tower, he replies with confidence that it could go as far as Wolcott, five miles down the road. Except, of course, for the mountains—and, um, trees—that might get in the way.
When Rinker is finished, Paul calls witnesses. Every Bridgman Hill neighbor speaks against the tower. They are worried about their property values, their health, and the health of their livestock. And they dread looking out the kitchen windows to see a monstrous metal thistle planted where only grasses and wildflowers now grow. Joe McCarthy’s house is directly across from the proposed site. “I like where I live. It’s beautiful up there. It’s important that I live there for the rest of my life,” he says. Joe has recently survived a near-fatal bout of cancer and has tried to change his life. I see him riding his bike up the hill every afternoon. Yet he seems almost resigned: “I know the service is necessary. I just don’t want to look at it.”
Suzanna Jones, a tall, soft-spoken resident of neighboring Walden, reviews the relevant clauses of the zoning bylaws and Town Plan, explicating how the tower would violate both the letter and the spirit of each. She asks that the application be rejected. She hands Paul the co-op petition, with almost two hundred signatures on it. When Angela from the co-op, who also lives in Walden, takes the stand, Sandy Howard calls from the audience that she shouldn’t be allowed to testify because she’s not a Hardwick resident. Paul informs Sandy that the law allows any interested party to testify. A few sentences later, Sandy interrupts again, and Paul calmly tells her she will have to leave if she cannot control herself.
Most of tonight’s witnesses want the tower. And from their nods of affirmation whenever Rinker addresses a question, it’s almost as if they want Karl Rinker personally. With the exception of Suzanna, Angela, Karen, and a few others, almost everyone feels that Hardwick not only desires cell phones, it needs them, and thus—though he has never promised he will deliver them—it needs Karl Rinker. Displaying a self-esteem deficiency to which struggling towns like Hardwick are susceptible, a number of speakers imply that it’s a miracle Rinker showed up in this dump at all.
&
nbsp; If we don’t approve Rinker’s application, witness after witness says, we will be left in the dust of history. Charles Sartell, whose family has lived in Hardwick for generations, predicts that his will be the last. “My children want to be part of the twenty-first century and they cannot achieve that here,” he says. His kids are moving to another part of the state, where they can enjoy “the benefits” of modern life.
Wendell Shepard’s son David testifies that his wife has a “recent disability” and needs a cell phone to contact him in case of emergency. Until such service is available, she will be confined to the house, unable to drive or work.
Susan Cross, who worked on the town ambulance for ten years, says there are dead spots between Hardwick and Morrisville where contact cannot be maintained with the hospital. She does not say if any patient has ever been harmed as a result of these occasional sputterings-out, but “even if only one life is saved by the cell tower,” she asserts, “it’s worth it.”
Cell phones will preserve families, liberate disabled women, and save lives! In the face of these unassailable aims, those who plead for human or animal health or natural beauty are alarmists and Luddites, clinging to primitive illusions. Parroting corporate lobbyists and trickle-down economists, the plumbers, secretaries, and road crewmen of Hardwick extol the civic goodwill of private enterprise and call on their fellow citizens to demonstrate trust and gratitude to the town’s would-be benefactor. “Give him the permit,” cries Sandy Howard—meaning, all 199 and a half feet of what he wants.
After the hearing I stop on the steps to chat with Angela, who has her sleeping daughter in her arms. Then I drive up the hill. The sky is brilliant with stars. Paul stays with the board to continue the meeting. By the time he gets home, I am asleep.
August
Memories of
Underdevelopment
JULY 30
“The best things in life aren’t things,” reads the bumper sticker on the red 1986 Toyota pickup truck at the bottom of the orchard. I park my car and walk up the hill, through a sprawl of apple, plum, and pear trees. I have come to the town of Adamant, a tangle of dirt roads and a clutch of buildings including a music school and a food co-op, to visit Richard Czaplinski, a man famous in these parts for occupying an ecological footprint the size of a hare’s.
Not Buying It Page 14
