Twelve by Twelve (9 page)

FOR JACKIE, SIMPLICITY ISN’T A PURITANICAL ASCETICISM.
It’s not about denial; rather, it’s a creative process. Jackie isn’t trying to inspire people to live 12 × 12. She told me once that those are the correct dimensions of
her
life, as a single person with grown children. Those who live with families, with kids and relatives, the majority of people, obviously require larger dimensions. So, where is the point of enough for each of us?

For me at the 12 × 12, “enough” definitely included a car. Absolutely. No doubt about it. Isolated deep in the country without electricity, water, phone, or an internet connection (though I did bring a laptop for writing), I needed a car for pragmatic reasons as well as to provide a kind of emotional escape valve from so much nature. Still, I found myself inclined to bike everywhere. I’d brought along a twenty-six-dollar used three-speed I’d picked up in a thrift
shop in Chapel Hill. Most days I’d bike up and down Jackie’s lane with Kyle Thompson; I also began using it to go to the post office in Pine Bridge, and the shop in Smithsville, four miles up the road, or ten miles into Siler City. The bike became a way to exercise my body and to lift my spirits. Instead of being cocooned in plastic and metal, insulated from the world, I was flying free, fully exposed to the sun and wind and the grit of life. Instead of the angry groan and poisoned cough of a combustion engine, I had silence and the constant respiration and heartbeat of a living world.

The car belonged to my parents — they had two and were happy to let me use one during my time in the 12 × 12. For the first few days I was glad to have it, using it to get around the rural area. Then, without even realizing it, I stopped driving.

The car sat idle for a full week, then another. With my bike I moved more slowly, and the world grew larger and more interesting. I biked country roads through the rolling farms and woods, and the landscape revealed itself to me in depth and nuance. But there was one problem. I was the only one biking out there in the middle of rural North Carolina, so I was an oddity. There are more vehicles in the United States than people. Not having a car is generally viewed as one step away from living out of a shopping cart. The stares I’d get as I biked down Old Highway 117 South ranged from blank to scowling. That’s when Mike Thompson taught me the North Carolina wave.

“It’s like this,” he said. He pretended to be holding handlebars and flipped two fingers and a thumb off the grip for a long second. And put them back.

“That’s it?” I said. “Nobody’s going to see that.”

Mike laughed. “Just try it.”

On my next bike trip to check email in the Smithsville Public Library, I flashed an NC wave to the first pickup that passed. The results were instantaneous: a flash of two fingers and a thumb while the driver gripped the steering wheel. I tried it again. Another NC
wave returned. As an experiment I tried a hand-in-the-air,
buongiorno principessa
wave a few times and was met immediately with suspicious frowns. The NC wave was a kind of secret handshake that proclaimed: I’m from here, too.

Buoyed by this new insight, I read my email at the little library, chuckling over a satirical article a friend sent me from
The Onion
:

CINCINNATI
— The blank, oppressive void facing the American consumer populace remains unfilled despite the recent launch of the revolutionary Swiffer dust-elimination system, sources reported Monday. The lightweight, easy-to-use Swiffer is the 275,894,973rd amazing new product to fail to fill the void — a vast, soul-crushing spiritual vacuum Americans of all ages face on a daily basis…. Despite high hopes, the Swiffer has failed to imbue a sense of meaning and purpose in the lives of its users.

Biking home, I asked myself: Did that car in front of the 12 × 12 imbue me with a sense of meaning and purpose? Blissfully, I exchanged NC waves with truck drivers and older men on porches. I noticed the sun, the wind, and my heart racing; pulse up (thump, thump, thump), the heart banging on my rib cage like sweaty, joyous palms on a drum, the butterfly spreading and drying its new, wet wings, and I was home quicker than ever. Up Jackie’s lane, waving across the pond to Mike in his bright red shirt, and wheeling into Jackie’s world. The slight, subtle abode, opening its door, smelling Jackie — her spices, her clothes — now mixed with my smells — my cooking, bread, cheeses, and the sweat on the previous day’s shirt.

AFTER A DECADE LIVING IN GLOBAL SOUTH
countries that often seemed as spiritually rich as they were materially poor, I couldn’t help asking myself about simplicity.

I came across the work of a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Martin Seligman, who had managed to cut rates of depression in clinical studies. He calls his method “positive psychology.”
In contrast with our mainstream therapy culture, which tends to focus on what’s wrong, Seligman focuses on what’s right — the factors that contribute to our general well-being, a state of inner joy and security. He found that three elements contribute to this: positive emotion, engagement, and a sense of meaning and purpose.

The first factor, positive emotion, is necessary but not sufficient. If it’s bought for the price of Prozac or a bottle of wine, it’s transient. To last, it must come out of the second two factors.

The second, engagement in the moment, is akin to how you feel listening to an amazing live jazz show or symphony orchestra, a sense of being “lost in the music.” This engagement can happen anytime, whether you are painting, gardening, or cooking. When you are in that state, if someone were to suddenly interrupt and ask what you were feeling, the answer would probably be: nothing. Absorbed in the moment, you’ve transcended the narrow ego and become, in a real sense, one with the task at hand.

The third factor, a sense of meaning and purpose, happens when that activity you’re so wrapped up in also contributes to a larger cause. In other words, complete engagement in shopping or NASCAR may give a temporary buzz, but it leaves an existential hangover.

Jackie, I noticed, cultivated the second two factors in her life. She was completely engaged in her permaculture, activism, and doctoring, and all of these contributed to a higher purpose. The first factor — positive emotion — then flowed naturally, as when she told me she wakes up with “tears of joy” in the 12 × 12. As love is seemingly without limits, so too are these more intangible factors. None of the factors of genuine well-being are closely linked to material possessions. All material possessions are subject to habituation, a waning interest with repeated uses. Think of that first bite of ice cream: bliss. The second, also delicious, but perhaps 80 percent of the first. The third, yumyum; the tenth, ho-hum. So the cliché that “money doesn’t buy happiness” is grounded in this phenomenon, habituation.

Jackie was pursuing a kind of positive psychology, not a preachy austerity; still, did her neighbors feel judged by the existence of such simplicity right next door? The Thompsons, after all, had an ordinary-sized house, three bedrooms in all, plus a nice-sized living room, a TV, and all the other electrical appliances.

Even so, looking at things through Long Island suburban eyes one day, I wondered how Mike and Michele plus six kids — eight people — could live comfortably with just three bedrooms. Until one day, while chatting with Michele Thompson on her porch, she said rather curiously: “I don’t know why we built such a big house.”

I didn’t say anything, looking over at a colorful Muscovy taking noisy flight from the pond. I looked at the house again. Too
big
? Quite the contrary, it was a prefab house, not that big at all. “We all sleep together in one room anyway,” Michele continued. “So that’s two bedrooms too many.”

Inadvertently I frowned slightly. It just seemed weird that eight of them would sleep in a single room. Seeing my reaction Michele explained, “We sleep with the baby and littlest one in our king-sized bed, and the others either squeeze into the bed with us, or curl up together in their sleeping bags on the carpet below! Now that Zach’s fourteen he sometimes sleeps in one of the other rooms, and Kyle has been known to join him. But there’s always at least one of the three bedrooms empty.”

What was a little odd, perhaps, from one perspective was perfectly ordinary from another. Most of the world’s families sleep together in a single room. From the Gambian
kunda
to Tibetan
mongour
, necessity and tradition has Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and the Baby Bears all together in the same den. In Turkey, a census showed the most common place married couples had sex was the kitchen — one of the few spaces they could sequester away for some privacy. Going back just slightly in human evolutionary time, we find
Homo sapiens
sleeping together in communal tents or caves, not just with eight
members of the nuclear family, but in clans of thirty or forty. So the Thompsons, by homesteading, were simplifying their material lives and increasing their sense of warmth and togetherness in a way that is quite natural in 99 percent of human history and even in most of the world today.

DID I REALLY NEED THE CAR?
Two weeks had passed without using it, and I began to wonder.

I recalled my years living and traveling in villages and cities throughout Africa, India, and South America, enmeshed in communities of people who lived outside modernity, who walked and biked — and swam — everywhere. In large cities like La Paz, Bolivia, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, less than 2 percent of people own cars, mostly because they can’t afford them. When I lived in those places, I watched the locals and tried to emulate them. Squeezing five to a tiny taxi in La Paz you could cross the city for a quarter. Rapport usually developed among fellow passengers in such tight quarters, leading to some fascinating conversations.

In the Bolivian Amazon, the indigenous Chiquitano people have no cars, and barely any roads — the river is their highway. They engage in what I came to call Amazon swimming, where they combine pleasure and function into a seamless activity. Instead of swimming directly up the Amazon tributaries to do the chore at hand — weeding a field, visiting a relative — they backstroke in a lazy, curvy pattern, sometimes chatting with a friend as both swim. They might stop midway to eat wild pineapple springing up on the river bank somewhere. I began to do this in Pine Bridge, taking the circuitous route down dirt roads for diversity or going out of my way to visit new neighbors and friends.

All the while, in front of the 12 × 12, that one-ton monstrosity of metal, plastic, and rubber sat as a nagging reminder of Western excess. I got in it once and turned the key, the motor roaring to life, blue
smoke shooting out of the tailpipe. I turned it off and walked down to No Name Creek. Before I even reached the banks I knew what I was going to do. I knew that having that car in that place at that time was too much. I’d crossed the elusive threshold of living well. In this situation, the car didn’t add anything. In fact, it rather complicated my life. Each day, one more unnecessary decision: drive or bike? With fewer options, I’d feel and be freer. And, anyway, why did I have to get anywhere faster than two wheels or two feet could take me?

I called my mom and told her. Silence.

Finally, she said, definitively: “You’re keeping the car.”

I tried to explain, but she told me there was no public transport in the area. I said I could take the bike ten miles to Siler City, lock it up, and get a bus from there, but she insisted.

“You’re
keeping
the car,” she said, “and that’s my final word.” I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get her to take the car back. I figured the only way to convince her was to bring her out to the 12 × 12 so she could see for herself.

THE STRENUOUS CONTOURS OF ENOUGH

I DROVE BACK TO CHAPEL HILL
and picked up my mother, and we drove back to Jackie’s. Instead of relaxing in the deep countryside, however, she grew increasingly anxious as the quiet isolation swallowed us, and particularly as we turned onto Jackie’s dirt road and parked in front of the 12 × 12.

“Now you’re
really
keeping the car,” she said, a horrified look on her face as she regarded the miniature house on No Name Creek. I remembered my own first reaction: embarrassed for Jackie that she lived in such cramped quarters.

In awkward silence we walked through Zone 1 and entered the house. My mother sank into the old rocking chair and soon remarked at how surprisingly roomy the place felt. We brewed tea from rainwater, picked mushrooms and asparagus for the evening meal, and watched the bees — as Jackie had predicted, they were now “swarming like a freight train” around the hive. After her initial wilderness shock, my mom blended rather easily into 12 × 12 life. Perhaps it was because she had a reference point: she’d served as a Catholic nun for fourteen years. Amid Jackie’s material simplicity, my mom talked
about entering the convent at age eighteen. She’d wake up joyfully in her cloister at five AM each day to pray in silence. When she left the convent at age thirty-two to marry my father, she had almost no material possessions.