Not Buying It

by Judith Levine

  Richard, a tall, sinewy guy who looks fifteen years younger than his sixty-two years, welcomes me into his cabin through a porch hung with tools. He points out the handcrafted flail and the Austrian scythe. “Notice the straight snath,” he says, referring to the scythe’s long wooden handle. He picks up the implements and carries them outside, showing me how each one swings. The scythe, he says, allows the harvester to stand up straight (better for a man, like him, with a troublesome back). The flail, based on a design by his father, has no metal hinges; it rotates on interlocking rope loops, dropping grain onto a sheet as the chaff drifts off on the breeze. Richard grows his own rye and winnows it. He also buys fifty-pound sacks of wheat flour in addition to wheat berries, which he cracks himself. On the way inside, he points out his “fuel-sipping” porch lamps, recycled Volkswagen license-plate lights.

  A tour of Richard’s place reveals an abundance of similarly ingenious technologies—except, that is, an oil furnace, washing machine, dryer, television, microwave oven, blender, toaster, or refrigerator. “I’ll show you the deep freeze,” he says, opening a door in the floor and leading me down the steps to the root cellar, which maintains a constant temperature of 50 degrees. In it, Richard stores canned tomatoes (“Here’s my spicy sauce”), ropes of garlic, potatoes, onions. He inventories his food for me: “I’m self-sufficient in potatoes—four kinds—dry corn and beans, greens, sprouts, cabbage, beets, rye, peppermint, basil, dill, thyme, apples, turnips, carrots, apple sauce, cider, jams, and apple butter. I buy oil, rice, eggs, yogurt, rolled oats, millet, soybeans, honey.” He hunts deer and catches pickerel and crappie in Sodom Pond, across the road at the foot of the hill.

  Fuel to run the small reading lights and computer comes from the sun, collected with photovoltaic panels and stored in four deep-cycle marine batteries. Richard recalls a period when his batteries were running down with inexplicable speed. The culprit turned out to be his pre-owned computer. He was keeping it on when not in use. “You know, by turning your computer off, you can save tens of dollars a year,” he tells me, revealing the scale of his economies. Heat is also drawn from the sun: a large south-facing bay window of doubled recycled glass, and the sun photo-synthesized, or wood. Richard burns about two cords a year. Like the lumber for the 600-square-foot house, built in 1978, his firewood is cut on these eleven acres. Wood contributes to the cabin’s aesthetic touches, too: the stair rail is a twisted, polished limb.

  Nothing is wasted. A circulation system utilizes the wood stove to heat tub water and bring it back as reusable gray water. Soap shards are collected in a sack fashioned from a rag of an old sweatshirt, which hangs from the faucet for dishwashing. The tub is somebody’s castoff, as is the piano. Clothes are thrift-store finds. “I bought a pair of leather shoes for a quarter fifteen years ago,” says Richard proudly, “and I’ve been dancing in them ever since.”

  When it’s time to lighten my own load, Richard leads me down a short, steep hill to the composting outhouse. I stick the little bandanna flag in a holder specially made for it, for privacy. The privacy flag, coupled with the open way Richard describes the function of this intimate space, offer a metaphor for the man himself. A reserved, precise person, Richard is also utterly uncensored about the details of his life, which he offers as an example in simple-living classes at the Vermont Earth Institute. From time to time, Richard explains, he removes the catch bucket from the outhouse and carries it to a pile in the woods, where the contents are composted for fertilizer. He informs me that he personally produces a cubic yard of shit a year. I have no way of knowing whether a cubic yard is a lot or little for one man, but I feel shy about asking.

  About this time, the person Richard refers to as his “life partner,” Kinney, arrives. Kinney comes from “a whole different place,” she tells me—a wealthy family, a big house of her own that she shares with her kids, and “all the modern conveniences.” The two met when a group of activists from Friends of the Mad River visited Richard’s place. It was winter. Everyone went out for a snowshoe, but Kinney just wanted to sit in Richard’s sunny window seat. “I loved the silence,” she says. They all stayed for dinner, and Richard served venison. “I was stunned by what a good meal he made.” To this day, more than a decade later, “everything tastes better here.” She lovingly describes the chanterelle omelet Richard whipped up the first time she slept over. They don’t live together, though they may when her kids have moved out.

  While Kinney and I talk at the table, crafted from a slab of recycled wood flooring, Richard cooks. Ducking into the pantry, he calls out additions to his list of purchased stock: “Yeast, lentils, buckwheat, pasta, coffee, bananas, baking powder.” A pause while he reviews the jars and cans of homegrown and homemade foods. “Salt, pepper, vanilla, nuts.”

  Richard hasn’t worked full time since 1987, when he quit his job at the state’s Agency of Natural Resources. Now he earns up to $9,000 a year doing a little work for the Earth Institute, a little at the town sewer office, and a little milking for a local farmer. He lives on about $7,000 a year, about $1,000 of which goes to truck insurance, gas, and car parts and the same amount to federal taxes, including Social Security. A published budget in 2001 recorded $512 for “Learning (books, magazines, courses)” and $365 for “Entertainment (movies, one bus trip to Wisconsin to visit family, one bus trip to Nantucket).” There was still enough slush in the fund for “Donations/gifts” of $356. That’s $256 more than I gave away in the same year.

  Richard pays a dentist for a couple of yearly visits; he practices yoga, and when his back acts up, “it’s telling me to slow down,” so he rests. “I’m blessed with good health,” he tells me. “I’ve taken a half-dozen aspirins in my life.” He carries no health insurance, only a small savings account for a bigger illness. “I don’t worry about it,” he says. “If I died tomorrow, I will have had a good life. I’ll come back up as an apple tree.”

  Why this radically simple existence? “It’s nirvana,” is the first thing Richard says. “I love it.” But he lives “low on the hog” for more than personal satisfaction. “It’s about justice.” If you have a lot, you already have more than your share, he figures. Above a certain amount, moreover, money has to be put somewhere, and if that’s not the inside of your mattress, more likely than not your money will be financing some venture that is unfair to people, unfriendly to the earth, or both. In a bank or stocks, Richard says, “money gets up to no good. It’s filthy lucre.” He laughs, but he’s serious. “My goal is to live at the poverty line.”

  Unlike Jim Merkel, whose rebirth as a Radical Simplifier was assisted by the sale of a boat, a four-bedroom house, and a “four-plex” in coastal California, all accumulated during a career designing computers for the world’s armies, Richard comes to his chosen poverty as a civil servant without major assets, or illusions. He grew up poor on a Wisconsin farm, raising animals and selling eggs at the market square; his only inheritance was an education in frugality and the multiple skills of self-sufficiency. “I have this way of life in my blood and bones and hands,” he says.

  Dinner is served: whole-wheat spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce made with garden vegetables and herbs, homemade bread, and a huge salad. For dessert there are raspberries and blueberries, also from the garden. At table we talk about politics, mutual friends, Buddhism. From time to time Richard remembers another item he purchases. “Running shoes. Toothpaste.”

  “Soap,” adds Kinney, with a meaningful-looking smile.

  “My mom used to make soap. So for twenty years I didn’t buy soap,” Richard explains. Kinney screws up her face remembering the nasty blocks she was glad to say goodbye to. She’s also not a big fan of the slimy sock of shards over the sink.

  Kinney has brought wine and coffee and two large containers of water from her house, which she pours into our glasses. Richard’s gravity-fed well water “gets a little tasty,” he admits. I notice a stack of magazines on the window seat with Kinney’s subscription labels on them. Other than that, t
here’s not much evidence of her in the cozy but spartan house.

  When Richard rises to get something from the kitchen, Kinney confides, “Sometimes I worry a little about wrecking him.” She laughs, adding, “But I did put my foot down about that soap.”

  JULY 31

  Saturday morning, Paul and I gather up the rusty cans that have been moldering in the shed and cellar and bring them to the hazardous-wastes collection station at the town garage that is set up twice a year by the state’s solid-waste agencies. We pull the car onto a large plastic sheet, where a team of clean-cut kids empties the paints and solvents into drums, then places the cans of pesticides and other household poisons into another drum, which they lower into a still-larger drum with a heavy lid. The liquids will be blended and recycled as industrial fuel additives, which are scrubbed when burned. The cans will go to a “containment facility,” a kind of super-secure landfill.

  The workers are wearing thick yellow rubber aprons and long rubber gloves, plus sporty short-sleeved polo shirts and dark wrap-around sunglasses. Their costumes, along with the big metal containers, lend the operation a sinister aura, a cross between a CIA stakeout and a clandestine dump by renegade nuclear regulatory commissioners. Indeed, the collection site is a closely guarded secret. Earlier, we met a friend on the road, driving around unable to find it.

  If the government required manufacturers to pay the expense of recycling (as in many European countries), they might come up with some less deadly ways to clean our paintbrushes, Paul notes as we pull away from the garage. The state, in other words, could make recycling both compulsory and easy.

  Instead, it is voluntary, difficult, and expensive. We have had to store our toxic potions for six months, find out about the collection, locate the site, then hand over $23 in hush money to bury the traces of our environmentally illicit addictions.

  In America, saving the earth is something of a bourgeois consumer privilege, too.

  AUGUST 1

  If I haven’t been sounding either tempted or penitent lately, it’s because Not Buying is becoming a habit. When I’m picking up groceries at the co-op I don’t even think about grabbing an egg roll from the cooler; when I’m driving, I have no impulse to stop for coffee. I don’t read magazine ads, even for movies, and I peruse the mail-order catalogues casually, like a woman declining the advances of a lover who no longer thrills her. For their parts, J. Crew, J. Jill, L.L. Bean, and my other suitors seem to have sensed my cooling affections and are responding with heightening ardor—more catalogues, more e-mail announcements of special sales, more missives asking where I have been.

  Yet I am not beyond seduction.

  I am in Burlington with Paul. While he’s at his therapy appointment, I’ve been checking out the used clawfoot tubs at the architectural salvage warehouse, for the upstairs bathroom. With some time to kill before we meet, I walk down the hill toward Lake Champlain. On Battery Street, I encounter Common Threads, a clothing store. The cool, modern window display, decidedly non-Vermontesque, entices me through the door. Inside, the inventory is my aesthetic ideal: simple but not preppy, hip but not trendy, distinctive but not bizarre, with a few bright, frivolous trifles mixed in with grays and blacks like sweets after a classically prepared meal. As it happens (and it doesn’t often happen this year), I feel appropriately dressed to walk into an elegant shop like this one. This morning I put on a white sleeveless linen shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons and black Capri pants (touch of Hardwick: they’re faded). I’m wearing, not my Nike slides, but a pair of black wedge-heeled sandals.

  The saleswoman is about my age, maybe a little younger. Her hair is hennaed red and clipped square at chin length, with short bangs. Her glasses are of a flat-finished pea-soup green in a squarish shape. I compliment her on them; she returns the compliment. We confer on where we bought our glasses. Hers are Danish; she got them in Berlin. Mine are from New York, I say. She knows Mikli. We know each other.

  She is wearing a skirt from the store, of gold ripstop nylon with a sewn-in flounce at the back, a joke on the bustle. I take a skirt by the same designer off the sale rack. This one is made of lavender ripstop, sewn flat around the hips with intermittently gathered seams that create billows and an uneven hem. When I put it on, the skirt delights me. It is a work of art. Like a Mike Kelly sculpture, it manages to be both silly and sophisticated at once; like a Mexican religious icon, it is both gorgeous and humble. I twirl before the long oval mirror, admiring the skirt from all angles. It’s a little tight in the waist, I say to the saleswoman, who is admiring it along with me. She tells me hers is tight, too, and lifts her shirt to shows me where it rides up. Not made for ladiesd’un certain âge, we agree, but still eminently wearable. She suggests that the skirt be paired with a plain T-shirt, like the one she is wearing. “Or dressed up,” I add, thinking of a wedding Paul and I are going to next month, to be held at a country inn. She says the skirt looks great on me.

  We are flirting. It’s a ménage à trois: salesperson, customer, product. But I’m not so smitten as to be out of my head. I reflect: where else will I wear it? Before another opportunity, the skirt will go out of fashion. At $117 on sale, it’s a luxury I wouldn’t indulge in even if I were buying things. Besides, it’s too tight to eat a wedding meal in. I say no, and feel relieved—rescued from myself.

  Then I see the pants: a greenish jacquard silk-polyester blend, at only $138 minus 30 percent. They are the right color (the color of the saleswoman’s glasses), the right level of dressiness. Woven with a bit of Lycra, they make me look thin and, unlike the skirt, let me breathe.

  Those can be worn with a simple T-shirt, too, says the saleswoman.

  “Or dressed up,” I add. Now we have a history, “our song.”

  “They look great,” she says, smiling at me in the mirror.

  I am also flirting with myself. A summer of swimming has made me trim, outdoor chores have made me tan and strong. I look like myself to myself, my best self. I also feel like a woman, doing what women do: preening, flirting in public. Shopping affords a woman this pleasure innocently, like an asexual affair.

  “I’m thinking about it,” I tell the saleswoman as I dawdle around the racks, still wearing the pants.

  “That’s allowed,” she says, moving to the cash register counter, whose immaculate surface she busies herself tidying. She tells me again how good they look. She is smiling like a cat waiting for the bird to fly into its jaws.

  I take out my credit card. Reader, I am fallen.

  Paul meets me at Burlington Salvage. We peruse the tubs, but don’t buy anything. We will check out theGreen Mountain Trading Post, a local classifieds sheet in which people sell everything from broiler chicks to used garage doors.

  Not until a half-hour has passed and we are walking back to the car do I tell him about the pants.

  “Why do you think you did that?” he asks (he has just come from his shrink).

  I tell him I lost control; it was an impulse buy. That’s a lie. I didn’t, it wasn’t. I thought it through, right up to the imagined tightness of the skirt’s waistband at the third forkful of Nic and Juliet’s wedding cake. I premeditated, then meticulously executed my crime.

  “An impulse buy,” he repeats. “Interesting. I never make impulse buys.” He says he’s spent ten years in therapy trying to be impulsive.

  “So maybe Not Buying It is counterproductive for you,” I say. “Let’s go to a store and give you five minutes to buy something.” I’ve lapsed twice now, and more times than that if you count the help I’ve gotten from my friends. I want to deflect the heat from my own transgression. But I’m also getting a little weary of Paul’s effortless purity.

  AUGUST 4

  Linda and Marie are coming to dinner, so Paul pulls a bottle from the last case of wine in the closet. As the stock diminishes, his campaign escalates. “I’m really going to need more wine,” he tells me.

  I say nothing. After all, I’m not stopping him from buying it.

  He
repeats, plaintively, “I mean, I need it.” Perhaps remembering that comparisons between wine and milk didn’t cut it last time, he adds, “I’m Italian. Wine is like water to me.”

  I shrug. “It’s up to you, honey,” I say. In Burlington, I wanted him to be bad so that I could look good for a change. Now, I’m feeling a little hope that he will succumb to appetite, like an ordinary fallible human.

  Condemn anticonsumerist moralism all I want, it seems impossible to forgo judging consumption—or avoid feeling righteous when abstaining. I chuckled at the spiritual hand-wringers in our Voluntary Simplicity group. But I might have noticed that I was looking down on them from a perch of self-bestowed superiority. They were agonizing over premium cable and Starbucks moccaccinos.Pfftt! Paul and I hadn’t purchased a cup of prepared coffee since 2003! Now, as he and I wrangle over wedding clothes and wine, the competition is between us. The winner isn’t just the person who buys less, it’s the one who wants—evenneeds— less. I rejected Irwin’s self-abnegation, Sal’s denunciation of sinful greed. But here are Paul and I, battling to be the better martyr.

  Tonight, Paul will need that wine. TheHardwick Gazette is fat with letters to the editor concerning the cell tower. I read out loud from the third (or is it fourth?) submission from Toni May, who has emerged as Sandy Howard’s first lieutenant. “The need for people to expand and be a part of the rest of the world is not going to go away,” writes Toni. “Our kids are the next generation and are not satisfied with what Hardwick has to offer in the lines of communication. They want more. They’ve either already moved on to more civilized areas of the state or talk of doing it when they graduate from high school. And who can blame them? If you’re happy with the simple quiet life, so be it. But don’t expect everyone else to be held back because you choose to stay in the Dark Ages.” Toni would no doubt pronounce Paul’s and my life medieval, lacking as it does a microwave oven—to say nothing of how she’d judge the Czaplinski homestead in Adamant.