I’ve been thinking all week about Richard. He inspired me. His house gave me ideas (those VW license-plate porch lights were especially fetching). His tomato sauce was excellent. I learned the wordsnath. The visit was like a refreshing vacation.
But Toni May’s letter returns me to the real world, where the bulbs are all halogen and an average family’s car-related expenditures come to more than Richard’s annual budget. Unlike the stance toward consumption that Richard and Jim Merkel represent, Hardwick’s final decision on the telecommunications tower will be neither radical nor simple. Like the laws that inform it, it will be a compromise of legal interpretations, priorities, and politics. Nor will the ruling be ideologically pure. Like Paul and me, establishing “rules” for purchasing, the board will have to find a point somewhere between need and desire and call it reasonable.
I’ve stopped pestering Paul for clues to what he is thinking as he lies on the bed reading the thickening stack of papers in his blue Zoning Board binder (there’s no room on his desk). But now, as I read to him from theGazette, he laughs ruefully. “Whatever we decide, Judith, somebody isn’t going to like it,” he says. In fact, he adds, if the board reaches a decent compromise, there’s a good chance it will please nobody.
AUGUST 9
SevenA.M. , at my desk listening to the familiar squeal of the modem, I imagine Richard. He is glistening with sweat from work in the field or forest, tucking into a well-earned second breakfast, carting a bucket from the outhouse to the woods. I sigh. Richard doesn’t dream of shopping. He doesn’t sit at a desk scribbling. He grows things, builds things, fixes things, conserves things. Even Richard’s shit does an honest day’s work.
“Oh, to go forth and labor with one’s hands, to do the poorest, commonest work of which the world has truly need!” laments Marian Yule in George Gissing’sNew Grub Street, slumping over a scholarly volume at the British Museum. “It was ignoble to sit here and support the paltry presence of intellectual dignity.”
Noble: that’s what Radical Simplicity is, and Richard Czaplinski is nothing if not noble. He is also gifted in intelligence, ingenuity, health, and strength and possessed of a discipline that in a less amiable person would look like rigidity. Thinking about Richard, his image melts into Thoreau’s. Both are polymaths of craft and basic agriculture, knowledgeable about the natural world and careful in all measures. But Richard also appears to share with Thoreau something else, or rather he lacks something else, which is fortunate, maybe necessary, for anyone who wants to live as he does. Thoreau, wrote Emerson, had “no temptations to fight against—no appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles.” Do you miss anything? I asked Richard. “Like what?” he asked, seeming unable to come up with something. I projected my own obsession: “What about movies?” He replied: “Most movies are overrated.”
This is a common sympathy among Radical Simplifiers. On his road to right living, Merkel rejected the car, the hamburger, and the television, then moved on to the public school and the modern city. In his “wiseacre scenarios” (a series of personal resource-use schema, each closer to an ecologically equitable footprint), he writes, “I excluded paid entertainment, based on the premise that free fun is abundant in the universe.” Merkel is channeling John Muir, who wrote: “One day’s exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.”
None of these lives is without comfort, but neither does human-made comfort or human-crafted beauty compel them. Thoreau quotes Cato advising the paterfamilias to keep a well-stocked pantry and wine cellar, “so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times.” This the writer contrasts with his own provisions at Walden of “a firkin of potatoes,” some peas and rice, a jug of molasses, and a peck each of rye and Indian meal. Hard times are pleasant enough for Henry. His peas have “the weevil in them,” which I presume makes eating them more gratifying.
“A fine house, dress, the manners and talk of highly cultivated people were all thrown away” on Thoreau, wrote Emerson. “He much preferred a good Indian.”
Kinney doesn’t want to “wreck” Richard, but what would she wreck? Even counting his tiny luxuries, Richard lives, emotionally, on the other side of the globe from the mainstream of consumer culture. That’s nice for him. But comparing myself to Richard has done little more than make me feel guilty. Can Richard—or Thoreau—be a popular role model? Can noble asceticism ever appeal widely?
Craig J. Thompson, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin, thinks any potentially successful anticonsumption movement shouldn’t even try to sell it. “Perhaps a radical politics of consumption should argue for getting more pleasure out of consumption,” he writes, “rather than repackaging the age-old admonition that individuals seek ‘true’ fulfillment by escaping the flesh, or mortifying it.” Less can be more, in other words, but the reward is not to be found in the lessening itself, in frugality or abstention. Less, in other words, is notmorally more.
AUGUST 15
For dinner I make quesadillas with the Mexicanhuitlacoche fungus on them. It looks like sludge and, being mold, tastes like mold. I’m still not sure it’s a food.
We are again discussing the sale of my Honda Civic, which would save us about $2,000 a year on insurance and upkeep. Because of its difficulties with our driveway, in winter the car sits in the snow and rusts. This month, I spent $500 replacing the brakes, which looked positively Paleolithic when they came out. And as good as the Honda’s gas mileage is, an online emissions calculator tells me that it and I have burned the equivalent of fifty-nine mature sugar maple trees this month alone.
Still, Paul points out, without the Honda we’d end up driving two less-efficient cars, the all-wheel-drive Subaru and the old truck, and using more gasoline. I’d like a hybrid gas-electric vehicle, but at the moment they start at about $30,000, almost twice what our two cars cost combined. Plus, there’s a two-year waiting list, and the all-wheel drive, which won’t be out until 2005, is an SUV, which I couldn’t bring myself to drive even if it ran on recycled packing peanuts. Now Paul tells me that he heard a woman calling the Car Guys on NPR. She lives in Brattleboro, Vermont and commutes to New York, just like us. Should she buy a Prius, the Toyota hybrid? Tom and Ray said no. She’d need a four-wheel-drive hybrid for the Vermont weather, which wouldn’t get the same fifty miles per gallon as the front-wheel-drive models do. Plus, the hybrids have no fuel-efficiency advantage in highway driving. So what should she buy? The guys recommended a Honda Civic.
AUGUST 17
The third public hearing on the cell tower is like the others, only bigger and more unsettling.
Steve Gorelick, Suzanna Jones’s husband, presents more petition pages from the co-op with about 130 signatures on them. They are dirty and torn, he says, because someone took them from the co-op and dropped them in the street. Two Bridgman Hill neighbors bring letters from a local real estate agent attesting that a cell tower would significantly bring down their property values. Toni May has articles to enter into the record that report property values are going up in Chittenden County, which comprises Burlington and its suburbs, the state’s most developed county. Toni notes that Chittenden County has a lot of cell towers. Property values are going up in Chittenden County. Ergo, cell towers raise property values.
Rinker weighs in that there’s literally a land-office business being done in lots beside a couple of his newer towers. How much do the lots cost? one board member queries. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” Rinker says, helpful as always. “But I can say this: they haven’t had any trouble selling them.”
“Did it ever occur to you they might be a bargain?” the member replies, perhaps tipping her hand.
In their testimony, representatives of both sides speak for the public good and characterize the other side as its enemy. Both accuse the other side of selfishness. Several times Paul has to admonish attendees to be quiet or leave the room.
On lawns in town, meanwhile, Take Back Hardwick signs are springing up. Sandy Howard, th
eir producer, has also made up Take Back Hardwick bumper stickers, covered her car with them, and parked the car on Main Street. She has paid for a series of Take Back Hardwick ads in theGazette, accusing the Zoning Board (withut substantiation) of bias and foot-dragging.
Her slogan echoes Take Back Vermont, the quasi-organized rumble that spread across the state after the gay and lesbian civil unions law passed. That law coincided with another law prohibiting clear-cutting of trees on large land parcels. People who tacked the signs to their barns and homes were disturbed not just by these two pieces of legislation but by what they viewed as a takeover by liberal “flatlanders,” trying to run the lives of “real Vermonters” like themselves. To some extent they were right.
Sandy has announced that as part of the effort to Take Back Hardwick, she will run in March for the Select Board, which appoints the Zoning Board, and assemble a conservative slate to run with her. Her campaign will be “pro-business” and anti-zoning, changes that she believes will entice people to spend money in Hardwick. This in turn will raise property values and improve the quality of life in town. Her ideal commercial residents, she tells theGazette, would be a Wal-Mart and a prison.
Ask people if they want their property values to go up, and almost everyone will say yes. But unless they want to move to a slower-developing community, a rise in property values does no more for the working inhabitants of Hardwick than it does for the working-class homeowners in my gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. Low property values have long kept Hardwick stable, allowing generation after generation to buy homes and take up their fathers’ and mothers’ trades, plant a garden, volunteer at church, and drop the kids after school at Grandma’s, a few houses away. Now, for the first time, many young adults who grew up here cannot afford to settle in town.
Ask people if they want economic development, and they will also say yes. But the truth is, it’s Vermont’sun developed beauty that has saved the state’s economy: tourism is the Number 1 industry. Much of Vermont’s unspoiled character can be attributed to a decades-old body of stringent land-use law and aggressive private conservation programs. But what has also kept Vermont, and the Northeast Kingdom, beautiful is poverty. Despite its growing popularity as a hip place to be, Hardwick is still remote, good local jobs are few, and Main Street’s landlords can never manage to fill all the storefronts at the same time. Land prices are climbing, but on Bridgman Hill you can’t build a spec house for less than the price of its potential sale, and that has kept development to a pace of one owner-built home at a time.
This frustrates realtors, and the town’s small size and relative poverty might also be the reason that no cell service company has yet deemed Hardwick a wise investment. But these conditions have also preserved the local family farm. Pressures to sell open land mount yearly, but around here working farms whose outbuildings are caving in and yards are littered with derelict tractors outnumber trophy estates with newly painted red barns and a few sheep picturesquely nibbling on grassy hillocks. Organic farming, the one agricultural segment offering potential for value-added pricing that translates to livable income, is outpacing conventional farming around Hardwick.
Will growth bring cell service? Will cell service bring growth? Will more consumption bring happiness to the people in town?
Sandy Howard may be right that if Rinker puts up his cell tower, Hardwick will see more development. The stockbroker from Boston may move here, buy ten acres, and build a half-million dollar house with a home office in it. He’ll be able to take calls from clients while weeding his garden or on his bike training for the triathlon.
In one sense, this homeowner is Sandy’s ally: he is fiscally conservative and antitax. In another, he’s not. He belongs to the GOP, but he may also be a member of the GMC, the Green Mountain Club (or Trout Unlimited, the gentleman’s conservationists); he may even eat organic foods and feels spiritually good about it. Once he’s got his house and acreage, furthermore, he’ll be clamoring to increase the zoned lot size to 25 acres to keep more people like himself out of town. Before you know it, he’ll start lobbying the Zoning Board to prohibit Main Street shopkeepers from painting their facades brown with yellow and orange stripes.
Sandy Howard wants economic development and a better quality of life for Hardwick. She believes the only way to get these is to rescue the town from marauding Luddites and erect an aluminum monument to modern consumption on Bridgman Hill. But the irony is, if she manages to Take Back Hardwick, she may lose the Hardwick she wants to save.
AUGUST 20
I go for a bike ride with Alison. She tells me she was hiking on Mount Washington and heard a cell phone ring.
AUGUST 27
Our friends Kim and Alec arrive for a visit from Washington. Fall is already in the air. A few nights this month I have covered the tomatoes to protect them from predicted frost.
Kim and I walk up Bridgman Hill. We pass the few houses that have small satellite dishes on their roofs; no longer necessary are the ones that looked like UFO landing pads. Up here you can get hundreds of channels, just like anyplace else. My neighbors’ windows on the world are not as small as I often assume.
When we arrive home, I excuse myself to go online and download a document I have to look at before the end of the day. If we had DSL (which I have since learned needs no extra infrastructure except phone wires), I could do this fast and return right away to Kim and Alec. If we had one of those satellite dishes, I could see the movies I live in New York to have access to. I would miss terribly the polyglot pleasures of street life, but with the right gizmos I could purchase much of the convenience and cultural enrichment of a globalized world in the twenty-first century—at least the electronic media’s simulacra thereof—while continuing to live in “unspoiled” nature. I might start wanting a cell phone.
In a few weeks, Hewlett-Packard will launch a gorgeous advertising campaign for its Photosmart R707 digital camera and 375 printer. The photographs in the ad, in deep shades of jungle green and ocean blue with accents of tropical red, show a small, simple cabin on a tropical isle, the back of a white woman with a sarong wrapped low on her slender hips, a black cat sleeping on a wooden deck.
“YOU have no razor, tension, fork, watch, plan, mail, ice, comb, road, electricity,” the text reads. “But you have beautiful prints. Find your soul. Print it anywhere.”
The ad turns upside down a myth of preindustrial societies, that the image of a person or creature steals its soul. Here in Paradise, where the native’s soul has been stolen by the photograph and his land has been stolen by a golf course developer, the digital photograph infuses the experience of the Organic Professional gone native with another, newly aestheticized incarnation of soul.
More important, the ad reverses a fantasy held by civilization’s discontents, the “pastoral thesis” that a rejection of technology can return you to a prelapsarian state of virtue. Instead, HP’s is the same story told by the advertisements of the SUV parked at the top of a butte or snowcapped mountain. In both narratives, the retreat from the industrialized world is accomplished, and enriched, by the use of technology. So what, no actual 4.7-acre-footprint island resident would consecrate precious sampan space to a digital printer. You can arrive by motorboat with the equipment, then switch to sampan travel once you’ve unloaded it. So what, global warming will melt that snowcap right off. Until then, drive your ozone-searing SUV to freedom.
If less is more, you need more of some things in order to experience the fullness of less.
But even if you went without the HP printer or the SUV, these days it would be nearly impossible to front Thoreau’s essential facts without buying anything. Want to walk in the forest? You need walking shoes and may have to pay to enter the park. Want quiet? You’ll have to post your land against snowmobiles and hunters—which means owning land to post. Want that pure organic milk? Presuming you don’t own a cow, you will have to go to the store, which is two or three or, if you’re really off the grid, fifteen miles a
way. In the summer you might bicycle, but that won’t be doable when it’s ten below zero. And if you want to recycle the glass, you’ll make two trips, one to buy the milk and one to return the bottle.
Richard Czaplinski has Kinney, who brings him magazines and purified water; he stores his fish and venison in a friend’s freezer. Thoreau dropped by regularly at the Emersons’ and the Alcotts’ for port and conversation. “Some Concordians claimed that ‘he would have starved, if it had not been that his sisters and mother cooked up pies and doughnuts and sent them to him in a basket,’ ” wrote one of his biographers.
None of us can go nobly to the woods, for the simple reason that there are no woods. The pastoral thesis is a pastoral reverie. The woods are a mind-set, an imaginary place where you can be “more natural and spiritual” between stock trades from your WiFi-equipped computer. And Paradise is a picture made with an HP Photosmart R707 digital camera and 375 printer.
I would not write off that photograph as superfluous, though. The future needs it—to evoke the memory of the fantasy of underdevelopment.
September
Security Fraud
SUNDAY, LABOR DAY WEEKEND
In Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, Phil T. Rich, Alan Greenspend, Lu Tenpillage, and other Billionaires for Bush are playing croquet to welcome the Republican National Conventioneers to New York City.
Their glee also greets news that the city has won a months-long battle against United for Peace and Justice, an anti-Bush coalition that had sought a permit to rally on the meadow. The permit was denied; the reason: the grass can’t take it. Lawyers for the protesters appealed, pointing out that about 100,000 fans of the Dave Matthews Band had convened here just this summer. But in a contest between free speech and the downtrodden lawn, the lawn won the day, and now the Billionaires are raising glasses to Mayor Bloomberg for his support of their own Keep Off the Grass campaign to privatize the park as a playground for the rich.
Not Buying It Page 16
