Twelve by Twelve (10 page)

Nor did my father. He’d been a Catholic priest for fifteen years, mostly in the Brooklyn diocese, leading the Spanish Mass for Latino communities. It was the progressive sixties, and disillusioned with the slow pace of Church reform, he left the priesthood to start a family. He met my mom at a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert and lured her out of the convent with love poetry. Then came my sister and me. My parents became college professors, and we moved into a middle-class home on Long Island, where our backyard was a forest of pines and oaks with a maze of contemplative walking paths that dead-ended or looped into themselves. My father baptized my sister and me at home amid their group of intellectual Catholic friends from the university. In our house, there was a sense that every object — from the piano to the Renaissance paintings to our gardens — spoke of that-which-is-more-than-just-human. I think it was this unusually contemplative upbringing that opened me up to the idea of living 12 × 12 and also what led my parents to have an entry point for understanding it.

My mother and I hiked deep into the woods, past abandoned farmhouses, stopping to pick grass and feed it to two horses, one beige and one patterned like a chocolate chip cookie. On the way back, as the sun dipped deeper into the western sky, she told stories about my childhood, ones I’d heard a dozen times. We wondered aloud about the thirty-acre intentional community — Jackie, the Thompsons, José, Graciela — whether that kind of harmony between humans and nature could actually be brought to scale in twenty-first-century America.

We were almost back to No Name Creek when we both saw it at the same time: a big snake, not two feet from us.

We froze. It must have been six feet long and was dark brown,
a constrictor by all appearances. Not the least bit worried about the pair of tool-making bipeds standing before it, the snake ribboned its way into a bit of bush and climbed the nearest tree, a twenty-foot oak sapling. My mom and I stood in rather awed silence as it muscled itself straight up the thin trunk. The tree had few branches, so the snake gracefully utilized any available niche to hold its lower body as it arched and wound itself skyward until its pointy head rose above the sapling’s tip. Then it turned quickly into a right angle, eyeing a larger pine tree several yards away.

It eased itself up still higher, now seeming to defy gravity. Half its length rose as a straight broomstick above the tree, and it shook the tree back and forth, trying to get within jumping range of the pine, but its efforts were in vain. The pine was simply too far away, and the snake, if it did attempt the leap, would certainly fall to its death onto the rocks below.

“Help it out,” my mother urged. I stepped past the bush and pushed the sapling. It swayed under the efforts of the snake, and as it swayed forward I leaned into it. Our joint effort bent the sapling far enough for the snake to finally take courage. It leapt.

Suddenly the snake was suspended in the gap between the trees. In slow motion, this slender cord soared through the air, its body like the bends of a river. It landed, crouched in the pine needles, and then foot-by-foot graced its way up the pine until its head rose above the highest pine branch.

At the end of the day, my mother drove herself home in the car. I waved good-bye as she reversed onto Jackie’s lane. The sound of the motor softened, then disappeared. The dust settled on the lane, and a blanket of silence covered Jackie’s little homestead. The place where the vehicle had been wasn’t empty; spaciousness filled the gap, the elusive contours of enough in the ripening leaves of the forest.

I biked down to the bridge, gazed down at No Name Creek, lost in thought. My mother and I hadn’t talked about theories of
living better vs. living well or the perils of degrading and erasing subsistence cultures. It was the snake that changed her mind about the car. The silence and strength of it brought her back to those reverent five A.M. moments in the chapel, incense burning, when she was a young nun obedient to a vow of poverty. The snake didn’t possess anything in this world, but still it rose to the tallest branch, proclaimed and celebrated its being. Do we really need so much more than that snake? Do we need Hummers and Sony Playstations? China cabinets and electronic sensors in our running shoes?

I TOOK LOTS OF LONG WALKS.
Rambles, you might call them, without specific route or time frame. The day after my mother’s visit, while rambling, I did an experiment. I tried to see the world around me in “color patches.” In a book at Jackie’s, I’d been reading about recovering cataract patients at the turn of the nineteenth century, and several used this expression to describe their first experience of vision after being cured. Each place they’d fix their eyes was another glorious set of colors. One patient was exhilarated by the fact that everyone looked different; another asked the doctor about the black stains on paintings. “Those are shadows,” the astounded doctor explained. The world looked beautiful to me, seeing it as if through freshly cured eyes, one color patch after another. I looped around from the tracks onto the highway, back to Jackie’s. My sense of whimsy sobered as the colors came to represent strewn garbage under my feet. Old ii’ South’s shoulder was littered with Coca-Cola, Fanta, and Diet Sprite cans; Jack Daniels and beer bottles; paper and Styrofoam cups; Snickers and Three Musketeers wrappers; cigarette packs. New grass sprouted around the colorful debris, tentacles enclosing it bit by bit until it would disappear from sight all summer, reappearing, if faded, in the dying grass of fall. It just seemed wrong. Spotting a plastic bag, I began collecting trash.

The bag filled quickly, and I grabbed another one that had
snagged onto a bush. As I filled the new bag, I tried to connect the faces of the drivers and passengers in the minivans, SUVs, pickups, and sedans passing me with the rainbow of trash I walked through; I could not. All I saw were beautiful faces, and I began to wave. That slight nod, the lift of wrist and flash of those two fingers. Sure enough, the hands came out the windows, not to toss an empty Marlboro packet at my feet, but to snap an NC wave.

They chuckled at this fool. The dark pleasure of schadenfreude. They liked the fool for being carless, worse off than they. They liked him for picking up their trash. I didn’t even have to initiate the NC wave. People started waving first, and I felt happy. It didn’t matter that Dr. Pepper was dripping down my pant leg and onto my shoe through a hole in one of the bags. I found myself whistling and waving, everyone exchanging the greeting, until one person in one car didn’t return my wave. In fact, the car stopped, turned around, and headed back my way, stopping beside me. The door opened — and out stepped Leah.

Lost in my long walk, I’d forgotten about her visit. She looked angelic, her blonde hair, freshly washed, falling over her shoulders. A corded wool sweater. Her blue eyes radiated intelligence along with dismay. She looked at me, horrified, this guy with a three-day stubble and sweat pouring off him.

I stretched out a hand to shake, then realized it was shellacked in Dr. Pepper. We shrugged awkwardly. “I bet you’re ready for a nice hot bath,” she said, trying to ease the tension. Then she remembered there was no bathtub at the 12 × 12 and backpedaled, “I mean…”

Back at Jackie’s, I’d forgotten to put the solar shower bag out to warm that morning, so I scooped cups of cold water over my body behind a bush and lathered up. Meanwhile, Leah wandered through Jackie’s gardens, trying to respect my privacy by not glancing my way. She squatted by Jackie’s bees and remained there, engrossed, for some time.

Leah and I had met a year ago. I was on a book tour, with readings every evening, media interviews, and daily travel, all the while getting up before sunrise each day to work remotely on my rainforest conservation project back in Bolivia. When Leah first called me, I was in the
Christian Science Monitor
studio in Washington, DC, having just finished an interview about Bolivia’s indigenous struggles for the rainforest with Terry Gross for the NPR program
Fresh Air
.

“I’m Leah Jackson,” she said, “producer of a radio program based in Chapel Hill.” Leah asked me some pre-interview questions, and a week later, she came to a reading of mine in Chapel Hill. Coming up to me afterward, she said she couldn’t fit me into her radio show, but she offered to buy me a coffee if she could ask some informal questions about my work. “One of those alumni interviews,” she said. We’d both gone to Brown University; she’d graduated eight years after me. We went to Cafe Driade, sipping cappuccinos in a small garden while she grilled me on everything from ways to avert species extinction to structuring op-eds.

At that time, her light blue eyes were almost hyperactive, shifting nervously as she flipped from one topic to the next. Her energy was scattered. She’d had two car accidents in the previous month, and she was restless after three years with the same show; she longed to be a reporter, not a producer, to have more control over her stories. She was also caught in a cycle of breaking up and getting back together with her boyfriend of two years, now a soldier in Iraq.

During the past year we had exchanged the occasional email, and when I came to Chapel Hill to visit my father in the hospital, we had met for dinner at Glass Half Full in the town of Carrboro, Chapel Hill’s funky little brother. I almost didn’t recognize her. She’d just returned from Senegal and Mali and was tan and more beautiful than I remembered. She talked passionately about the inequality she’d experienced in Africa, and the way Western corporations were raping Africa’s natural resources, colonialism under a new name. She came
across as self-assured, content with her job and life in Chapel Hill, the very same job she’d hated a year before. She had also permanently ended her relationship with her military boyfriend, started going to therapy with a spiritually inclined psychologist, changed her diet to organics, and begun a rigorous Zen meditation practice. Little in her external life had changed — same job, same little beater of a car, same apartment — but her perspective was completely different.

All wasn’t fabulous. The spiritual path brings perils; Leah now felt more sensitive to her own hyper-individualism, as an only child of divorced parents, shuttled throughout her Colorado childhood back and forth between the front range and western slope of the Rockies. “I’m well acquainted with saying good-bye,” she said. She also noticed how she tied her self-worth to stuff, living constantly at the edge of her budget, still immersed in the consumer pattern even as she awoke to it.

When I told her about my plan to stay out at the 12 × 12, her eyes lit up. She wondered aloud if she might come out to visit sometime, saying it might help her “sort some things out.”

I finished the shower and put on a light green button-down shirt and my faded blue jeans. Then we wandered down to the creek. She hadn’t stopped smiling, and as we crossed the creek and headed out into the forest, she said, “This is so brilliant out here. It’s perfect.”

We bent down in unison to admire a spider web. But nature is a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t kind of thing. The sunlight turned the web into a fragile tangle of shimmering swords. Then clouds passed over, the light dimmed, and the web was broken glass. “Thank you for popping into my life,” she said.

She talked about her ex, James. He was a West Point graduate who had been sent off to Iraq. His was primarily a desk job, but still. Their biggest fights had been about the war. He wanted to serve his country; she felt he was being used in service of a lie. She followed him faithfully to rugby matches around the state. He wanted to
marry her, said he’d try to get out of the military and into politics, eventually. She couldn’t picture a life moving from military base to military base, socializing with other military folks, taking their kids to rugby matches.

“So why did you stay with him that long?”

“After growing up in my family — divorce and a general lack of communication — he and his family showed me what a real family should be, what love is. Love is something that’s slathered on.

“In the same way, my job. The reason I’ve spent four years there really is because it’s a caring, supportive
team
. Everyone works together, supports each other. Between that and James’s family I’ve learned that it’s possible for me to have that kind of cooperation and love in my life.”

We’d come to a sharp bend in No Name Creek. We stopped and lay down on the mossy banks, listening to it gurgle past. She took off her shoes, got up and wandered around, staring at the grass.

I lay back and looked up through the trees, just barely showing their sticky buds, into a blue sky. After a while Leah came over and said, “I have a gift for you.”

She led me over to a patch of clovers right at the creek’s edge. My eye caught it immediately. Amid the near identical plants, one stood out: a four-leaf clover.

I touched it. “I can’t believe you found this,” I said. I’d never found one.

“They’re everywhere once you have eyes for them.”

Later beside No Name Creek, Leah dangled two caterpillars from their silk like tiny puppets over the book she was reading:
My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization
. In it, psychologist Chellis Glendinning argues that our fast pace, technological and chemical addictions, and lifelong traumas are linked to our dislocation from the natural world. She uses examples from nature-based societies to show how to reconnect to the living world.

As I boiled water in the 12 × 12, I watched Leah by the creek; she seemed lost in thought, staring past the caterpillars into the woods. Her shoes were off, bare toes curling into the mossy bank. I walked down to the creek with two steaming cups of chamomile tea and handed her one. She dropped one of the caterpillars onto a leaf and carefully accepted the cup in her two hands like an offering.

I moved a finger to intercept the silk thread of the remaining caterpillar, and let it dangle before my eyes. We were both quiet for a while, lost in our own thoughts as the creek flowed by. I dipped a toe in. Still cold, but not the freezing water when I arrived in early spring. The day was half gray, with intermittent light streaming through the clouds; the sun mostly hidden. A breeze from the east suddenly brought the smell of the chicken factories, and I felt myself seize up a little, flattening and hardening to my surroundings. I made an effort to come more deeply into mindfulness, feeling the small perfection of the creek’s warming waters. A rebellious fragment of light broke through on the edge of a cloud, bejeweling the creek’s surface with a hundred diamonds.