ecospirit

Honestly, though moved by the testimony of the Abujhnabadi lifestyle, I would not want to live there.  And the closest members of our species I have known who would are a neighbor about whom I previously posted and a  man who grew up in Mountain Brook, Alabama, as I did during my teen years. My neighbor is the grandson of the man who founded the Darlington (SC) Speedway.  The family farmed, but they had time and plenty of inclination for racing fast cars. For a good dramatization of the issues around attempts at simplicity amidst modernity, see the “Captain Fantastic” movie.

The second example is a man who turned his back on the family steel business in Birmingham and came to live with us in the Southern Mountains.  He lived through the winter in the unheated, uninsulated barn, operating his foot-powered lathe as a Gandhian experiment in self-sufficiency.  He hand-dug a root cellar into the cutaway ridge behind the main cabin.  Though he was initially part of our dinner routine, he dropped out after awhile, not wanting to be part of such excess of labor and time over taste, retreating to eating his sun-cooked leftover grains and raw greens on the porch steps. 

Kirk eventually went back to college, and ended up getting a masters in waste management from Johns Hopkins.  When I last saw him, he was living in a modest house in the suburbs of Boston with his wife and adopted children.  In his brief career, he redesigned the metropolitan waste management system for both Baltimore and Boston, working for minimal disturbance to the ocean, before his untimely death from a rare disease. In each case, having a wife and children broadened and complicated the moral issues involved with lifestyle.

We love country living.  But we also love the option to travel. One son and his small children live in Yosemite, which means one of us is required to travel, if we want to see each other. Sometimes we train one way and fly the other.  When  took Amtrak both ways, and it took ten days. 

My other son’s family is in Asheville, 50 miles away. It’s a bit farther by the Blue Ridge Parkway, which he has bicycled a few times.  But then we can’t ferry goods between houses.  And he really doesn’t have the time, with a demanding job in the bike industry.  I don’t have the stamina to cycle up the many steep mountain grades.  In Abujhnabad, I’d be long dead (74).

Yes, there’s travel, near the apex of a life of discovery and enrichment, rather than one that is settled.  Remember, these Central Indian tribals don’t even care to go to the neighboring town, because they rarely need anything that isn’t right there in the forest of Bastar. A retired contractor friend once told me about two generations of local builders who wondered aloud why anybody would want to leave Yancey County. They never had.

Several years ago, when we went for a splendid vacation in Alaska, upon our return the house sitter asked why we would want to go anywhere else, having  a homestead like ours.   I noticed that he had taken all of our lawn chairs and placed them in a quarter-circle around the house on the side of the Black Mountains. Since he told me that we must have “the cleanest cat on Earth,” I figured that these were the stations of his day, where he must have sat with the cat contentedly in his lap. They had bonded deeply while we were away.  But housepets would be unimagined among the practical Abujhmadis.

I grow food, mostly in a community garden on bottom land.  The head honcho loves his fancy tillers from England and Italy, but I’m starting to experiment with less tilling.  I used to pride myself on eating most produce either from my garden or a local CSA for things I have difficulty growing (like salad turnips!).  After summer’s cornucopia, the delight of vegetable gardners, we continue to rely mostly on winter storage vegetables, but we are eating produce now from many other places. For a decade, we would not purchase produce grown beyond a 100-mile radius, but we no longer abide by this stricture.

I like variety in eating styles, either what Geeta and I cook, or restaurant choices, supplemented by Trader Joe’s frozen delicacies. I prefer frozen bush beans to canned ones.  I freeze enough pesto in the summer to last throughout the year.  No, I don’t use pine nuts, but pecans and walnuts. But they don’t grow here, either  (one pecan tree is planted on communal land nearby. If we’re lucky it might start bearing when I’m 85).

The Central Indian tribalists, like virtually all primary peoples, use some drugs, either from the bark of certain trees or fungi.  The also ferment some indigenous fruits.  Everyone partakes, including juveniles, who also smoke.  We are primarily wine-drinkers, and were happy more than a decade ago to discover NC wine country in the Yadkin Valley.  We now regularly make the pilgrimage for tasting and replenishing the cellar.  It’s about 2 and a half hours away.  It’s more expensive, made in small batches from small holdings, but it’s “local.”  Most of the rest of the wine we drink is French, which has a smaller carbon cost than California wines.

As for other spirits, if we were beer drinkers, being close to Asheville would be a great boon, and Asheville’s breweries are the source of virtually all the beer we drink (including at our son’s house, who is a beer-drinker).  With the demise of our neighbor the apple brandy moonshiner, we now drink mostly peaty Scotch from Islay, bourbons and ryes from Kentucky and Tennesssee. 

And yet, and yet, with all modern humans’ attraction to variety, adventure, and the maximum of comfort and pleasure, there is still something in us that responds to diminishing wildness. Studies were done in the 70’s and early 80’s of young people going on guided wilderness trips.  They were interviewed by psychologists before and after.  Many of those who had stayed in the wilds the longest, at least three days and up to two weeks or more, experienced a deep sadness upon return to houses and stores, roads and cars and cleared land.  They yearned to be back in the wildwood. See “The Wilderness Effect,” Robert Greenway, in Ecopsychology, 1995.

This yearning is significant, very kin to the feeling I had when I discovered the Abujhnabadis.  But as modern humans, these wilderness trips are enabled by the gear produced by industry and marketed by the recreational class.  And the food these adventurers subsist upon is not homegrown, and highly processed. 

So, yes, we feel more alive when we are able to escape to temporary Edens, but all of this is contained within the fences of modernity. Civilization has now replaced the wild, and the wild places left are like zoos, dependent upon scientists and politicians for their survival.  To quote Joe Hollis yet again, we have replaced natural diversity with human diversity. We love diversity, but few of us experience any except the human kind.  Even trips into the wilderness for many are mostly another form of diversion from our daily, habitual grind, grist for the mill of experience. We love diversity, but few of us experience any except the human kind.  Even trips into the wilderness for many are mostly another form of diversion from our daily, habitual grind, grist for the mill of experience.

When will we ever learn? Or is that precisely the problem?  We are good at learning, adapting, leaving the old ways behind.