Twelve by Twelve (12 page)

When I snapped out of my trance, I noticed something almost equally remarkable. No one else was watching the sunset. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were gathered at nearby gates, lost in their rituals: reading the
Denver Post
, watching the CNN broadcast, buying fast food for their kids. A few had their eyes closed, perhaps napping or engaged in soothing rituals like mine.

We took off into darkness, and I somehow forgot all of my little rituals. I was in shock. The cabin seemed to press against me. I looked down into the darkness, a million electric lights below, and knew that — in more ways than one — I’d left the planet.

I WAS BORN INTO THE BURGEONING ENVIRONMENTAL ERA,
shortly after the first Earth Day. One of my earliest memories is from July 4, 1976. I was five years old. My parents took my sister and me from our Long Island home into Manhattan to see the fireworks extravaganza for the American bicentennial. I can still see the color and feel the firepower that rose from those dozens of barges in the Hudson and East rivers, our collective national pride blooming so colorfully in the sky. As a kid, the Fourth of July always contained a hopeful feeling. It tasted like the promise of something, though I had no idea of what.

Eating hot dogs in fluffy white buns, drinking Coke, and watching fireworks, I knew my country was great. I’d help my dad hang
the stars and stripes in front of our colonial home, then watch him get the grill going. The stickiness of summer settled on our skin. The feel of salt on me from a day at our Long Island Sound beach, the taste of mustard — all of it felt to me like freedom. I’d watch my dad expertly flip burgers and roll the hot dogs on the grill, and I would picture my grandfather before him laboring for thirty years in the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, a subway connecting Manhattan with New Jersey; for forty years before that, my great-grandfather worked in a potato field in Ireland.

The mythology of my childhood: America got us out of serfdom, delivered a richness unimaginable to our ancestors back in the Old Country. Summer drives across the country, a large suburban house, my parents’ tenured professorships: all of this confirmed the myth. We epitomized the American Dream. And like most myths, it is partly true. I owe much of my intellectual and personal freedom to America’s political and economic system, and I am incredibly grateful for that. But over the years, it became apparent that the dream could end. Or that the dream was less attainable for some than others. What seemed to be unlimited economic growth took on darker shades.

As I grew up, Long Island was being paved over, the small farms and the remnants of wild forests near my house disappearing forever to become ten million uninspired cul-de-sacs. The Native Americans who used to live in those forests were long gone by then. I got to know them obliquely through the names of my town (Setauket), my nursery and elementary schools (Cayuga and Nassakeag), and the nearby river (Nissequogue); no one I asked knew what these words meant anymore. My friends’ parents worked for Grumman, a military contractor helping to produce nuclear weapons. Beyond the safety and prosperity of my upper-middle-class life was something I didn’t have a word for yet: ecocide, or the destruction of our planet by our current economic model. Until then, it had invisibly fueled our lifestyle, but the effects were now surfacing.

V. S. Naipaul, accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, said that all of his books were about his “areas of darkness.” Naipaul did not write about what he knew. He wrote about what he did not know, what was darkest in him, because it fascinated him so much more. He grew up behind walls in the Caribbean, in a comfortable middleclass Indian merchant family on Trinidad. Beyond the walls were colonialism, corruption, exile: his themes. In Naipaul’s masterpiece,
A Bend in the River
, Salim cannot find home. An Indian abroad, like Naipaul, he’s no longer at home on the African coast with his illiterate merchant parents, nor in India, nor in an immigrant area of London. He eventually comes back to Africa, not to the coast, but to the lonely interior, to a no-name town at a bend in the river. He finally finds home: nowhere.

On the surface, I come from somewhere: suburban Long Island, where I was born and lived until I went to college at eighteen. But is it possible to be
rooted
in a
suburb
, or is this oxymoronic? I’ve often reflected that those monotonous spaces clash with the notion of being somewhere specific. Suburbs are entangled in twenty-first-century globalism, in a single Flat World culture that has become a ubiquitous nowhere. My Long Island rootlessness flowed naturally into a kind of jet-fueled global nomadic life, in which I lost an essential part of adulthood: finding one’s proper place.

Naipaul’s area of darkness is a colonial system that degrades the human spirit. My area of darkness is the price of my privilege, an ecocide that degrades and poisons the human being while it destroys our very host, Mother Earth. The global economy gobbles up authentic places and vomits up McWorld, increasingly turning our collective proper place, this planet, into a dystopia. I’m a child of ecocide, caught in a catch-22. How can I get on that plane — yet how can I not get on that plane — knowing that an estimated half of all species today could become extinct due to the effects of climate
change? This is my area of darkness: a living earth, no longer underfoot.

WHILE HOEING THE GARDEN
at Jackie’s, taking five-gallon solar showers, harvesting my own teas, throwing cedar chips into the composting toilet, I tentatively rekindled a relationship with the earth. Blowing out the last candle at night, awakening with the sun in the 12 × 12 loft, I remembered that electricity doesn’t come from a socket; tomatoes don’t come from a supermarket; water doesn’t come from a pipe. Everything comes from the earth. It’s fine to grasp this intellectually, but to once again touch, breathe, and eat this reality feels like reconciliation with a loved one after a long feud.

Through her 12 × 12 and afterward, Jackie became an earth mentor for me. Humans are nature become conscious, but civilization forgets this natural connection. Earth mentors not only maintain this consciousness but can spark it in others. At the eleventh hour of the environmental crisis, we probably need earth mentors to connect us to our host planet much more than we need gurus and tele-reverends to connect us to the cosmos beyond. Connect to the earth, to yourself, and you’ve connected with everything; try to connect to everything by other means and fail.

My time in the 12 × 12 was like an internship with Thoreau. It was as if I was with him on Walden Pond, feeling my thoughts thinking through his, my spade cutting earth next to his, our four ears, together, listening to jackdaws and jays. I felt the presence of Aldo Leopold, John Muir, John James Audubon, Loren Eiseley, and Ed Abbey, all earth mentors. Imagining these mentors by our side improves the quality of our connection with nature.

I’ve been blessed by having not just one earth mentor but two. When I was a younger man, organic garlic farmer and writer Stan Crawford of Dixon, New Mexico, took my hand and led me joyfully
out of civilization. If the flattening world of corporate-led globalization sometimes sounds like really bad Musak turned up high, Stanley Crawford sounds like John Coltrane playing to a room full of friends.

I was twenty-four when I first met Stan, and when I looked up into his clear eyes I could practically hear “A Love Supreme” playing in the background — bouncing off the mesas behind his adobe house, out of his El Bosque Small Farm garlic fields, and off the tip of the phallic rock pillar beside them that he jokingly called Camel Cock (a wordplay on the camel-shaped Camel Rock up the road toward Santa Fe). There he was, gray-bearded and six foot three, esteemed author of
Mayordomo
,
Petroleum Man
, and the best-selling
A Garlic Testament
, good friend of literati like Barbara Kingsolver, John Nichols, and Bill McKibben. There he was in a pair of dirty overalls with a hoe in his hands. I followed him out into a field, to weed some rows, in silence, the cool winds coming off the Sangre de Cristos, the gurgle of the river running in front of the field.

Stan paid me six dollars an hour to work with him, two days a week. He first taught me the word
permaculture
and its basic techniques, and I applied those techniques the other five days on my own back-forty, a sprawling piece of land on the Rio Grande with a small vineyard, just a twenty-minute bike ride from Stan’s. I’d worked out a kind of sharecropper’s arrangement with the vineyard’s absentee owner. I had his singlewide trailer and an acre on which to farm my own blue corn and squash; he got a third of my crop plus two days of my time tending his vineyard.

I’d arranged both the vineyard-sitting and garlic mentorship through the Northern New Mexico Organic Farmers Association. I was ecstatic. Never before had I cozied up this close to the earth. After the suburban Long Island childhood and college in a big East Coast city, I’d come to Santa Fe to teach seventh-grade gifted and talented students at a Native American boarding school. But I was
again in a city. Now I was bathing in the Rio Grande each morning before planting blue corn, tomatoes, quinoa, amaranth, and nearly two dozen other native and exotic food crops under a full moon, just as my Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo farmer-neighbors did to ensure a strong harvest in fall.

After my day spent planting, night fell. My hands were calloused from the shovel and hoe, my muscles sore and spent. The full moon illuminated the empty spaces that would become my blue corn, intercropped with beans (they pole on the corn) and squash (ground cover that suppresses weeds), and my contoured vegetable and herb beds. Permaculture, as I was learning from Stan, likes natural curves instead of straight lines, intensive planting, and mixing crops intelligently, such as fruit, nut, and hardwood trees. I’d put the theory into the ground, and now, under the moonlight, I saw just a blank page, an expanse of moist earth.

Stan inspired me. He’d found a playful balance in life between laboring in the open air for seven months and writing in his adobe studio for the other five. He and his Australian wife, Rose Mary (their two children were already through college), had purchased their acres in the late sixties, built their beautiful house brick by adobe brick by themselves, and lived, without bosses or time clocks, in creative freedom, largely outside the system.

People in the area labored with the earth and then played. Saturday nights, everyone gathered at the Foxtrot Tavern for an exchange of organic pest control tips and off-color jokes and for dancing to bluegrass and indie rock. Rural northern New Mexico couldn’t be farther from the tenured world of my parents, from the East Coast establishment. Dancing manically around me were farmers, winery owners, artists, writers, silver and turquoise jewelers, small-town teachers, and yoga instructors. “What do you do?” I asked one guy. His reply: “Water in summer, snow in winter,” referring to kayak and ski instructing. I’d just read Jack Kerouac’s
On
the Road
and felt some of that bohemian, spontaneous energy explode as the nights stretched on at the Foxtrot. More than dropout beatniks, Dixon’s folks were cooperating with nature rather than opposing it, sculpting, growing food and wine, painting, teaching, and making a living, if barely.

Stan writes in
A Garlic Testament
about “the pound weight of the real,” the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I’d weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary’s farm expenses. They were constantly “snatching from the cash flow,” as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that’s exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area — I shear your sheep, you midwife for me — as well as a traditional communal relationship over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt canals called
acequias
. This wasn’t just pragmatism; I sensed a real passion and spirit that comes from subsistence. I saw it again all over the Global South, where living along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps you on your entrepreneurial toes and linked to others through reciprocity.

Sometimes other laborers joined us. On spring solstice day, twenty of us gathered at Stan’s to harvest garlic. (Garlic is planted in fall and harvested in spring.) It was one of those Ansel Adams days in New Mexico, with the lines of the mesas carving a sharp edge into the sky. Stan himself stooped a little, squinting out into all that beauty with an artist’s eye, a gently discerning gaze. Then he shrugged and bent down to pull the first garlic bulb out of the ground. We followed his lead. Pollen floated in the chilly air as we pulled up garlic all morning. At one point I threw a bunch of garlic a little roughly into the crate, and Stan said, “Careful with my babies.” We stopped at ten; Rose Mary and their daughter Katya brought a pot of miso soup into the fields, and we drank it out of cups. The picking conversation
was often revolutionary. During a discussion about a proposed hazardous waste dump in the area: “Gandhi didn’t just talk about nonviolence in an evil system,” a salt-and-pepper grandma farmer said while pulling up garlic beside me. “He was all about
noncooperation
.”

Another friend of Stan’s, an artist from Santa Fe, talked about cultivating a posture of “maladjustment with Empire” in yourself.

“But everything is tainted,” someone else said, wiping dirt and sweat from her brow. “We’re feeding nuclear Los Alamos.”

“Right,” the artist said, “but you stay maladjusted to the general evil. That’s true noncooperation: not letting Empire inside you.”

Stan hardly participated in such discussions. He hovered a little over every situation, Miles Davis’s “So What” coming off the mesas; a softer, clearer place. But he wasn’t aloof; after all, he was touching the earth right there beside us. I reached down and touched it, too. When pulling lettuce from my own acres beside the vineyard, I reached down through the lettuce leaves, the lower part of the plant smooth like a lover’s inner thigh. Sliding my fingers deeper, to where the lettuce met the moist earth, I sank them a bit into those depths and then coaxed the whole plant loose. Made a salad out of it; took it inside. “Don’t let the Empire inside you. Stay maladjusted to civilization,” someone would say, and Stan nodded, or didn’t, pulling up another top-setting garlic plant, placing it into a pile, the pound weight of the real. I think Stan took pleasure growing dissent in his fields, along with garlic, chilies, and statis flowers. His life was so obviously maladjusted to Empire — why talk about it? His very presence, such a wise, well-known intellectual and novelist, hoeing a row right beside you, elevated everything in our midst.