Twelve by Twelve (29 page)

Is this the world, I often reflect, that my daughter is to inherit? “All within me weeps.” This was the refrain of a Native American woman at another anti-nuclear rally in 2007. Hundreds of Americans gathered at the gates of the Los Alamos National Lab, an annual event. Along with the politicians and celebrities, a Native American woman rose to speak: her family came from the area, which was taken from her people by the US government to create the Los Alamos nuclear complex, the place where the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were put together. She described the destruction and suffering caused by those nuclear devices, the higher levels of cancer in her people, and the government’s plans for Complex
2030. When she finished, the protestors sat for a thirty-minute meditation, and they ended the day with the floating of Japanese lanterns, a tradition they follow every year in Hiroshima to remember loved ones lost in the nuclear holocaust. “All within me weeps,” she repeated.

Even more than protesting, Jackie suggests that if we wish to lessen the nuclear threat, we must first look inward and take responsibility for our interior space. Are the conditions — the anger, resentment, and fear — that cause humans to go to war and support violence inside of us? Can we regain faith in the goodness of human beings, including, most importantly, of ourselves? Then, can we express this faithfulness in action and love, perhaps by joining a peace study group or participating in nonviolent action? As the plaque on the Pettus Bridge in Selma proclaims: “When you pray, move your feet.”

Jackie’s brave response to darkness inspires me. So many of us get clobbered by the system and end up living what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation,” living, you might say, in Weimar and pretending that Buchenwald is not up the road. Social psychologist Eric Fromm astutely observed that the main reason people perpetuate evil systems is remarkably simple: they don’t love life. Sometimes I see it clearly in myself: a going-through-the-motions, an acquiescence, a living-with-it — but without the vital pulse of love. Jackie’s courage in the Nevada Desert arises out of a deep love for life.

ONE NIGHT I SAT WITH PAUL JR
. at his bonfire, in silence for a long while, thunder sounding in the distance. The candle went out in Paul Sr.’s 12 × 12, and then he came out and joined us. The flames cast a jagged glow on the left side of the old professor’s face, the right side in near blackness. “The neighbors turned us in,” he finally said. “They told the police we’re living in small houses.”

“That’s a crime?” I said.

“A misdemeanor. The inspectors came after the tip-off. You’re only officially allowed to live in a 12 × 12 if it’s for part of the year, not year-round. And we couldn’t prove a permanent address elsewhere. Because we don’t have any other address.”

According to that rule, Jackie wasn’t legal, either, and could be forced to move out of her 12 × 12.

Paul Jr. chimed in: “And they said our front and back porches made the houses ‘effectively bigger than twelve by twelve,’ so we have to install toilets, pay various taxes …”

“They’re also trying to make us install electricity,” Paul Sr. said. “Do you know it’s not legal to live without electricity in North Carolina? It’s not a choice you may make. it’ll cost us a fortune, and could sink us. Just like legal costs to defend an ecological vision are sinking Bradley.”

Paul Sr. got up, saying he was going to bed. The entire right side of his body was now illuminated by firelight, his left side fading into oblivion. “Hell is other people!” he blurted out. “What does it matter to them if we live simply? It makes me all tense inside. I believe in community, but …”

He paused. Paul Jr. was staring down at the beer in his hand, perhaps trying to think up a Carlos Castaneda rejoinder. His dad finally went on: “Do you know what? I can’t get beyond me. Do you think I haven’t tried group living? I’ve tried for so long to diminish my ego. It doesn’t happen. I’m Descartes’s child; I only exist at all because I think.” He hit his palm against his head. “With
this
brain!”

I thought of what Leah said:
Sin is when I’m at the center.
Paul Sr. looked off, to an invisible point out in the forest someplace. “Individualism is part of our cultural DNA. We’ll never escape it.”

I FELT AS IF A DARK CLOUD WERE PASSING OVER
the Thompsons as well. One day, after waiting for a booming military jet to fly over, I asked little Kyle if he wanted to go biking. He shook his head and said no.

This surprised me, even hurt a little. One of my great joys at the 12 × 12 was biking the dirt roads with Kyle, his Joycean flop of hair pressed back by the wind, flying along in silence to the post office. He always asked me to do things with him: fish, walk to the creek, bike. We’d tear down the dirt road together and lay down long, curving skids, then compare them. We’d laugh and exchange out-of-breath jokes.

There was an awkward pause. Finally, I said: “Some other time then?”

“Maybe,” the eleven-year-old replied, looking suddenly older. “But probably not. I’ll be riding
that
from now on.”

He pointed up toward the disheveled woodpile, where the first fourteen ducklings of the season had cracked through their shells. Beside it was the first all-terrain vehicle, or ATV, I’d seen in Pine Bridge. He told me excitedly that it was the first of two ATVs their grandma was sending them from Florida. She’d traded a Bobcat — evidently another kind of machine — for the ATVs.

Later that day, while I watched the pink puff of a lime green chameleon’s chin on the side of the 12 × 12, something began to drill a hole in the blessed silence. Just a little prick at first, a distant whine that turned into a motorized anti-
om
as a screaming red ATV ripped through the greenery into my line of vision, not two feet from the deer fence. Mike was at the helm, his long goatee sailing back into the wind, little Allison in his lap, both giddy with fossil-fueled fun.

After Allison came Brett, Greg, and Kyle, each riding with their dad, roaring past the 12 × 12, my nostrils assaulted by the blue-black smoke spewing out of the ATV’s tailpipe. Coughing and covering my ears to muffle the motor noise, I fled deep into the woods, my inner struggle flaring up, thinking of Paul Sr. saying that “Hell is other people.” The enemy now was Mike.
You’re flattening the world for them
, I told him in my mind.
Why not let them ride quiet, pollution-free, exercise-promoting bikes? They look up to you, adore you. Why teach them motors are better than pedals?

I viscerally react to too-much-of-the-human, too much loud, intrusive, tacky technology. It’s connected to guilt — my own complicity in the use of technology, which increases human reach and power while also causing forests to be felled worldwide and the climate to cook. Not to mention my own blatant hypocrisy through enjoying the fruits of it all. When I heard the whine of those motors I flashed back to my ecotourism project in that Bolivian cloud forest. The slash-and-burn. The global economy coming over the hill. I felt as if the harmony I’d seen so clearly in Pine Bridge’s wildcrafting community actually rested on a rather fragile foundation: everyone making somewhat similar, compatible choices with how to use their part of the land. The ATV motors roared right past the 12 × 12 all that day and the next, erasing the peace.

Just when the ATVs stopped, I heard something else.
Rrrr-rrrr
, came the sound. It definitely wasn’t an ATV. Less whiny, deeper. Must be out on Old Highway 117 South, I figured, continuing to stare into the creek, just down the embankment from the 12 × 12, and thinking about the neighbors who turned the Pauls in to the authorities for living in small houses. But the sound increased.

I looked up. Nothing.

Then, a flash of mustard yellow, and the rusty scoop of a bulldozer, fifty meters or so through the woods.
RRR-rr-rr!
stuttered the machine, and a tree came crashing down. It seemed surreal. I pictured rainforest trees falling a continent away, the Andean bears, monkeys, and jaguars retreating deeper into their disappearing nature reserves. I ran through Jackie’s woods toward the machine. There were two men, one manning the bulldozer, the other on the ground. I waved my arms. The bulldozer lurched farther and knocked down another set of small trees, the forest falling. It was aimed directly at the 12 × 12.

“STOP!” I CRIED OUT
, stepping in front of the bulldozer.

The engine roared even louder. The man in the bulldozer removed his helmet, a big frown etched into his brow, and he waved vigorously for me to move. I realized, suddenly, that I’d been hearing the machine each day, between lulls in the ATV noise, but I had apparently been in denial. Now, facing that large, rumbling yellow machine, which was turning beautiful trees into stumps and ripping out the forest on a direct line toward Jackie’s 12 X12, I had no choice but to accept that Bradley must have made new plans.

The scowling man finally turned off the bulldozer. “Hi,” I said. No response. A mustached good ol’ boy. Below him, a Latino man was chainsawing the brush; he turned off his chainsaw as well.

“I’m living over there,” I said, nodding toward the 12 × 12, which from our angle was completely concealed by trees.

This concept sank in: property owner. “Howdy,” the mustached guy said.

“You all work for Bradley?” I asked.

“Uh huh,” he said, even friendlier now at the sound of his boss’s name.

“What’s the plan?”

“The plan?” the man said, squinting his eyes, suddenly suspicious.

What was Bradley doing? I knew he was trying to bring wild-crafting to scale, going against the powers-that-be to create innovative eco-communities. But what was this bulldozer for? I also knew that Siler City legal efforts to stop Bradley from building cooperative housing were sinking him financially, so perhaps, to cover his debt, he was now planning to develop additional lots in the thirty acres surrounding Jackie’s.

“Ya’ll cutting a road all the way to the creek?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Bradley just gives the orders for a day at a time.”

“I see,” I said. Just what they need to know.

“But I believe this here is meant to be a walking path,” he added.

Sure
, I thought.
A walking path as wide as an interstate.
I walked away, along the creek to the railroad track bridge and along those abandoned tracks, wondering if there was anywhere at all beyond the Flat.

I began having nightmares. Once again the aging former Nazi man living in the woods was visited by a younger man. I saw it all as if from the trees, and then that quick zoom and I’m looking right at the old Nazi; I am him. He has (I have) the same warts, wrinkles, and odor; it’s now the stench of chicken factories.

I woke up soaked in sweat, lit a candle up in the loft. That absurd 12 × 12 slab of bare cement below. I imagined falling down onto it from the loft, with a thud. Despite all the inner progress I’d made, I wondered if it could stand up to the ATVs and the bulldozers racing toward the 12 × 12.
They’ll give No Name Creek a name
, I thought, my spirits sinking further. Storybook Creek they’ll call it, and Jackie’s nameless road will be Cinderella Lane. The loop into the Thompson farm: King Arthur’s Court. In the forest beyond José’s,
new roads, Mark Twain Lane and Robin Hood Road, this soft place domesticated into a thematic suburb: into the no-place I’m from.

At the same time that as I was witnessing this destruction, I met Julie and Yvonne at the Thompson farm. They’d rolled up in their old van to drop off a few Muscovy ducks for Mike. They were both heavyset, with fat rolling off of every joint, and they had bravado about farming. Julie said they were partners and lived in a shed with no electricity, “but we have Netflix”; a solar battery pack powered their DVD and TV. I told them I might bike over sometime to visit.

They didn’t tell me not to stop by, but — come to think of it — they didn’t agree either, and when I arrived I figured out why. Theirs wasn’t a farm at all; it was a garbage dump. The carcasses of a half dozen vehicles rusted away, plastic wrappers caught on the edges. “Not for Human Habitation” was stamped all over their home. Actually, it wasn’t a house at all; it was a shed. They’d bought it for three thousand dollars at Shed Depot.

The animal smell was terrible. If the Thompson farm was a pleasant chaos of goats and fowl, this was an anarchic mess, a cacophony of Narragansetts scraping the hard ground with their feathers, geese honking, ducks quacking, hogs grunting, four dogs in a barking frenzy. Julie emerged from the shed.

We talked amid the drone of animals. “I was going to clean that up,” she said of the trash around us. “We’re still getting set up here.” It had been two years.

Tea wasn’t an option. They had nowhere to sit down, just their bed and an overflowing table in their Shed Depot abode. So we stood and talked. “We don’t exist as far as
they
are concerned,” Julie said, gesturing out toward the powers-that-be. “We tried living in the system, tried to change it. But the blight’s too deep.”

By “not existing” she meant they paid no taxes, weren’t on any census list. They managed a hardscrabble existence from the eggs and meat of their animals. It was a kind of anarchist, lesbian-punk,
fuck-you to all of society. To the empire. To complicity. Suddenly I pictured Jackie, and a thought crossed my mind:
She’s naive.
She’s now finishing a walk across the Nevada desert to a US nuclear test site. Could anything be more absurd? Why bother with useless little meditative pilgrimages across a desert?

If there was a rock bottom of cynicism and despair for me at Jackie’s, I’d reached it.

Sitting in that garbage dump of a yard, I felt the cumulative weight of Kusasu’s extinction, the elimination of the world’s rainforests, the military jets booming overhead on their way to Iraq, Complex 2030’s new generation of nukes, and the bulldozers about to flatten the forest around No Name Creek. And things were worsening for José and other local Latinos. The Easter anti-immigration protests turned out to be mercifully small that year, but they had new worries: AgroMart, an industrial agriculture conglomerate, was spraying North Carolina crops with pesticides so haphazardly that its Mexican field laborers were being exposed, allegedly causing Latino babies to be born without limbs. Because the workers were undocumented, they had little leverage to protest. What’s more, the state’s industrial hog industry was growing by the day, and the number of industrially produced hogs in North Carolina had surpassed the number of people. Could warrior presence stop a blight this deep? Wildcrafting on the creative edge? It all began to seem hopelessly quixotic.