In 1984, I relocated from a snug but ever-pricier Telegraph Hill apartment with an East Bay view to a haphazardly renovated octogenarian farmhouse in the upper Midwest. The proximate cause of my move to this lovely surround was a guy named Phil whom I’d met that spring at the First North American Bioregional Congress. Phil was a bioregional organizer, co-op activist, and hippie carpenter. Like a lot of North Woods counterculturalists, he still upheld the values of material simplicity, respect for ecology, and community despite the fact that it was the 1980s. What’s more, he had a very attractive body politic. Like the fruit on the maverick apple trees around this countryside, Phil was ruddy, tangy, and free. He lived with his good friend Rob in the aforementioned farmhouse, known locally as the Hovel. Not long after Phil and I met and fell madly in love, I visited him for a long Fourth of July weekend. Smitten by both the man and his home, when the hint was dropped that I might come and abide awhile, I could hardly wait to move in.
That I was — on the basis of a brief encounter, two months’ correspondence, and a casual invitation — going to an obscure part of the United States known mainly for cold, in a belated move back to the land, struck my friends and family as an appalling piece of impulsiveness. It would entail some heavy dues.
It was rash indeed to have pulled up stakes and followed if not my heart, then some other major organ, to a life here in the upper Midwest. Even though a handful of interested and disinterested observers hinted that the prospects for our conjugal future were doubtful, I’d left San Francisco aiming to be wed. Hindsight tells me that marriage was something I had to get out of my system, and Phil obliged me all the way.
Four months after our storybook wedding, we were in a terrible automobile accident, a head-on collision in which Phil was almost killed and I nearly lost my right leg. After hovering for a week at death’s door, Phil beat the Grim Reaper. He walked out of the intensive-care unit not long thereafter and began rehabilitating himself by helping to organize the Second North American Bioregional Congress. The injury to my leg was termed the “maximum sustainable.” It took about four years and six surgeries to fix it, so I went through intermittent bouts of hospitalization, pain, and disability for a while.
While Phil and I were still in the hospital, someone pointed us in the direction of a plaintiffs’ attorney who had just settled a civil suit against the state concerning the very stretch of highway where Phil and I had been hurt, arguing that the road was marked in a way that conduced to mayhem. We, too, sued, and three years later we each won a goodly sum of money. I like to think of mine as my Crashenheim, a state arts grant.
Meanwhile, about a year after the accident, Phil and I needed to clear out of the Hovel. Rob’s wife-to-be, Peggy, and her two daughters had also taken up residence there, and we all needed more room. On the northeast corner of Rob’s seventy-five acres, Phil and I set about building ourselves a house.
My participation in the construction was as much as I could manage, on and off canes and crutches, in and out of casts and braces. I gardened a little and dug a trench for the foundation. I drove a lot of nails in the subfloor. I cooked for the work bees and tried to feed my good cook of a husband, who was bringing home the tofu and laboring on our house after he returned from his job with a small construction company. Most of the time, though, I read and wrote and thought, none of which bought any thermal-pane windows.
A trim little place of our own design, financed by a loan from my parents and raised with a great deal of help from our friends, resulted. Meanwhile, our strike-anywhere match was guttering out. On Christmas Eve of 1988, Phil and I moved into our slightly unfinished house. By Valentine’s Day of 1989, we’d split up. The divorce was final that July. I bought Phil’s equity, got the deed, and became a householder in my own right. Thus the horrible providence of divorce.
The five acres we’d bought from Rob had been farmed out years before and later planted with rows of Scotch pine, a Christmas-tree crop. We did only a minimum of clearing for our homesite, and over the years the pines have continued to grow, along with young sugar maples, cherries, poplars, and beeches — trees native to this place that are reclaiming their territory. Even though I’m in earshot of my neighbors, it looks as though I live deep in a forest, although not a primeval one.
A few years after I regained my single status, I had the opportunity to purchase another thirty acres from Rob, expanding my scruffy nature preserve considerably. A piece of paper says this land is mine — not the nuthatches’, not the Scotch pines’, not the red squirrels’, not the knapweed’s or the pin cherries’, not the grasshoppers’ or the black flies’. Barring untoward changes in regime, my tenure is as secure as can be. The truth of the relationship, however, is not so much a matter of my owning the place as of the place owning me.
Place is sensual. “The brain has blood in it,” says archetypal psychologist James Hillman. We have eyes, ears, noses, and fingertips with which to pay attention. Also tongues, for tasting snowflakes or wild strawberries. We are nothing if not sensate beings.
The knowledge that surrounds me is awesome: how to fly, how to hover, how to find the film of water on a soil particle, how to locate a mate with only a pheromone molecule for a clue, how to grow thirty feet tall in sandy soil. My land sustains the ground of my being, grants me the privilege of belonging to a community whose every last member — from snow fleas to chickadees to lichens to serviceberries to voles to grouse to garter snakes to coyotes to white-tailed deer to white birches, basswoods, and barred owls — “knows way more than I do,” as anthropologist-author Richard Nelson’s Koyukon hunting mentor told him.
In one way or another, I have been dwelling in the same place, among the same countercultural friends and alongside the same real-life neighbors, for upwards of fifteen years now. All the life of the place is my community, really, from the periodical cicadas buzzing on a humid late-July evening to the red squirrels yabbering year-round in the acres of pines.
Details are my delight. In the country, many of the details have minds of their own: lady beetles crowding around, seeking winter hibernacula; knapweed flourishing everywhere; a raccoon and her pudgy kits climbing a cherry tree; a crow japing overhead. All this living, self-willed detail informs me in ways that cities no longer do.
Often, on a late-night transit from my house to my writing studio, I can see the galaxies coursing overhead. My place is far enough out in the country, and the region’s ambient light is low enough, that on a cloudless night I walk in starlight that’s cold and bright as diamonds. To be able to see just how full the night sky can be is both a perfect wonder and, to me, a necessity.
When I left San Francisco, it was in hope of finding a partnership conducive to living simply and self-reliantly, of forging a tie with the land. It turns out that living in the country and making a living in the country are two different things. My attainments in simple living and self-reliance are middling, owing mostly to my decision not to have children and to the meager income that rewards the writing life. I try to limit my damage, and being in no danger of becoming rich helps.
Most people’s definition of enough is “just a little more,” and in my first impulse I am not unlike most people. Still, because I am persuaded of that Thoreauvian precept that real wealth is a disinterest in the acquisition of things, and because I suspect that the ultimate wealth might be to be entirely freed of the need for things, I regard my advantages, privileges, and comforts also as liabilities. Conveniences quickly become necessities. They have enabled my ignorance of some fundamental survival skills and cost me opportunities in resourcefulness.
The hardihood it took to live here in the upper Midwest a century or ten centuries ago was integral. Form followed function. Hunters and trappers, then farmers and loggers and their womenfolk, probably didn’t fret, as I do, about body image, but about how to produce enough food to sustain a tremendous amount of hard work, such as raising barns or families of nine children, both of which got done eighty years ago at the homestead that eventually became the Hovel. They slogged around in buffalo or bearskin robes, woolens, and leather boots, not Gore-Tex or Polarfleece. Living through the typical woman’s day in those circumstances no doubt would feel like a violation of my human rights and help clarify why it is that people embrace progress with such abandon.
The twentieth-century notion of progress entailed ever-increasing reliance on goods and resources brought from afar and brokered centrally. Most of my post-progress household’s economy — electric service; propane for cooking; gasoline for driving; paper, metals, and food — is imported from outside the bioregion and as such is not sustainable. Long lines of supply are costly and vulnerable to disruption.
Living in the country in the modern way seems to entail using a car, or maybe the car makes it possible to live in the “woodburbs” in a non-self-reliant way. It comes down to the fact that my Toyota wagon makes a direct annual contribution to the greenhouse effect, which is changing the weather and degrading the country. So my way of life is threatening my way of life. Like so many well-intentioned people, I’m caught in a monkey trap.
Finding ways to walk my talk and reduce my complicity is a long-term project. It’s some consolation to know that I’m not the only aspiring simplifier who’s found it difficult to unclench her tiny fists from some amenity. In “Voluntary Simplicity,” a seminal article published in 1936, Richard Gregg told of fretting aloud to Mahatma Gandhi that truly to simplify, Gregg would have to give up his library. Gandhi responded: “As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice, or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you.”
Like personal mobility, my solitude isn’t something I’m ready to give up. Yet I am persuaded that individualism, if not individuality, is a major obstacle to the sharing of goods that is essential to the truly simple life. Facing my own complicities, I’ve concluded reluctantly that the simple life is not something best practiced in isolation, at least not by a person of sub-Gandhian character.
The harmful aspect of living alone is being the sole consumer of one of everything, rather than being part of a household or community in which many things may be shared. Certainly, a society reduced to its least common denominator of singletons, one to a dwelling, is the ultimate market, with each and every person a consumer wanting his or her very own hot tub, lawn mower, and espresso machine.
On the other hand, a singleton can run a frugal household without worrying about depriving anyone (like children) of a normal way of life and without nudging spouse or offspring on conservation measures like using leftover water from the cat’s drinking bowl to irrigate houseplants or mandating that the dishes be washed in an aqua-frugal, if less than perfectly hygienic, way.
Some conservation and hardihood is built into my household infrastructure. Such high-minded measures can lose their luster, become onerous, but they remain commitments nonetheless. There is wood heat, for instance, to which I am structurally committed by the deliberate omission of any other economical means of heating my house. As of February 2001, midpoint of a gray, snowy winter, the corollary virtues of wood heat were long forgotten, but it remained my only good source of warmth. Somehow, I had imagined that all the work a wood stove involves would get easier the longer I did it, but every year it becomes more difficult. I forgot to factor in the aging process.
Of a chilly morning, I may be found on the couch swaddled in a spiffed-up comforter, drinking tea. The only sounds in the house are of the draft of the wood stove and the ticks and creaks of its sheet steel, of the cat giving herself a bath, and of my own digestion and the stroking of graphite on paper. A blue jay near the bird feeder might make a commotion. In such moments, I lead the perfect life, with comfort, solitude, a spacious privacy, and the invitation to write. Yet in the midst of such moments, I clutch at my comforts and necessities, fearing the day when I may have to do without if, say, the economic house of cards in whose cozy attic this word-monger dwells is collapsed by a gust of ecological reality. “Scratch a fear, find a wish; scratch a wish, find a fear,” said my friend Felicia Guest.
Troubling awareness of the growing inequality within human societies and the encroaching scarcity or contamination of the basics — food, fuel, water, shelter — are part of the reason I value my own sleek simplicity so acutely. In this world, that there is food for me when I want to eat amazes me. I can even be choosy about my midnight snack: Graham crackers or whole-wheat toast? Yogurt or banana? Soy milk or herb tea? I savor the food and choke back the thought of all the hunger on earth. Heightening that awareness is the fear that someday there might not be food for me to eat; then I’ll go bereft of victuals, let alone choices of what to savor.
The paradox is that I seem to be having a good time on the eve of destruction. Seeing the degradation of land and life at the planetary and neighborhood scales causes me pain. Yet every day, sooner or later, some living pleasure overtakes me. It could be the midnight coyote chorus or an owl asking, “Who cooks for you, oo, oo?” It could be a letter from a friend, the preparation and enjoyment of a meal, or a walk out back to plant acorns. Love confronts death daily, and so far, it’s a draw.
The place where I live now is not a summer-land of eternal youth but a realm of cycling change. Each year is a parable begun in stillness and chill, of bare ground warmed with spring life returning, then bursting, buzzing, peaking in summer, and issuing a final flare in autumn, to subside in another winter’s seeming nullity.
Living near the earth in a climate with dramatic extremes presages certain difficult realities of human existence. Ineluctable changes such as the blooming and withering of wildflowers and weeds throughout the summer remind me that in both the short and long runs, our days are numbered.
“Nothing lasts forever, Stephanie,” said a friend, a Zen bridegroom on his wedding day, in response to my tactless wish that this third marriage of his might endure. Stars collapse upon themselves; mountains are worn down; every species eventually becomes extinct or vanishes into something different. Climate changes, empires devolve and crumble, different generations of gods know their twilight, hemlines rise and fall, the flesh wrinkles and sags, the goodies all get eaten. The impermanence of the universe is manifest, inescapable. I know that, yet I am immoderately attached to this life, these pleasures, this place.
“A Simpler than Average Life” is excerpted from Epicurean Simplicity, by Stephanie Mills. © 2002 by Stephanie Mills. It appears here by arrangement with Island Press.
