Twelve by Twelve (21 page)

I didn’t realize that I was wearing PJs — a faded T-shirt and paint-splashed sweatpants — until I was twenty minutes down the train tracks. I stopped, embarrassed for a second, but then laughed out loud at myself. I was on a train track in rural North Carolina. Who was I going to meet? I did twenty stretch-shouts — an energy-boosting technique I’d picked up at the wonderful Kripalu yoga center in Massachusetts — and then let my gaze fall into the distance, where four or five textured clouds staked a claim to the southern horizon. They were probably down in South Carolina someplace. All that space between the clouds and me! I smiled broadly and closed my eyes, imagining myself taking flight from the tracks and soaring over ponds flush from last night’s storm, nose-diving through soft clouds.

The creek flashed below the railroad bridge, the fastest I’d seen it, thick with bubbles and pounding noisily against the bridge pillars. I found myself staring down into the creek, not thinking of a thing. Just listening. The sun climbed the sky. Still I sat there, listening to the creek. Eventually, when I felt like doing so, I got up and walked back along the abandoned train tracks toward the 12 × 12, realizing that my days were beginning to pass more like those of the Thompsons, the Pauls, Jackie, and so many others in the Idle Majority — in a blissfully subversive leisure. Jackie was shifting from overdevelopment to development. She is a talented physician who could have easily risen in wealth and status, and you could say she’s instead chosen to live in poverty, but that’s not entirely correct.

She lives in enough. She has abundant fresh food in her gardens, the music of a creek, a network of friends, neighbors, and family. She and other wildcrafters in Pine Bridge and throughout the rich world are choosing downward mobility — living well instead of forever striving to live better.

DON‘T BE SO PREDICTABLE

ONE DAY AS I WALKED
by the Thompsons’, a few of their younger kids ran up to me. They stopped and looked at me as if to ask, “What are we going to do?” So I picked up a handful of rocks and said, “I have ten rocks.” They watched as I counted the gray gravel.

They each picked up rocks and started counting them. Brett held out two. “You’ve got two dollars!” I said.

“How much do I have?” asked Greg.

“You’ve got some pennies and quarters in there … six dollars and twenty-five cents.”

“And me?”

“Five euros.”

“Huh?”

“The money in Europe is called euros. And look, Greg, you have twelve Mexican pesos.”

For an hour or more we explored the currencies of the world, and did a bunch of math to boot. The next day, Michele thanked me for homeschooling them.

“We were just playing.”

“Exactly,” she said, explaining that kids learn like adults learn — by following their bliss instead of having the three Rs force-fed in forty-minute blocks. She said she likes the traditional village concept of education, where children spontaneously pick up knowledge while working on the farm or interacting with neighbors like myself.

The Thompsons homeschooled five of their six kids using a freely adapted version of the Mennonite homeschooling curriculum. (Their eldest, Zach, attended a charter school because he was from Michele’s previous marriage, and her ex-husband insisted Zach receive a more traditional education.) There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to what or when they studied. I’d sometimes see Kyle and Greg relaxing for an hour on the porch in front of their pond, shirtless, their little tan bodies soaking up the morning sun: Intro to Idleness. Other times they’d be feeding the hogs, out in the forest, or biking. Then, for large spurts — once I saw Kyle at it for an entire day — they’d read intensely.

“What ya reading?” I asked Kyle that day. He showed me. Though he was only eleven, he was fully engrossed in an engineering text. I asked Michele about it, and she chuckled, saying, “That’s his gift. Kyle is always building things and it fascinates him. He wants to be an engineer, so I focus his homeschooling around math and science. When he feels like it he reads entire novels, but I don’t force it. It comes from him.”

As it turns out, there are some twenty-five hundred homeschooled kids in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area alone, and overall, homeschooled kids have admission rates into college equal to those of traditionally schooled kids. Homeschooling isn’t for everyone. For starters, it means at least one parent must be home. But it reflects a wider pedagogical trend, in which education is returning to the original Latin derivation of the word
education
— meaning “to draw out.” For example, new European models of “holistic teaching” or “facilitation” consider the instructor to be a
coach in the child’s own spontaneous exploration, particularly of the local communities and nature. Waldorf schools point in this direction, too. The factory education model that drives most US public schools, with its rigid time schedules and standardized testing, parallels the factory economy of twentieth-century workplaces. In the twenty-first century, the internet is softening the edges of that industrial way of working, providing the opportunity to invent more fluid ways of educating children.

Homeschooling blends well with wildcrafting — life on the creative edge of the system — because freeholders like the Thompsons have greater control of their time. Having escaped from the nine-to-five, they are free to live and educate themselves a bit like the world’s Idle Majority does.

“WHY DON’T YOU RENT THAT HOUSE?”
Kyle asked me one day while I was talking with his mom. He pointed to a two-story farmhouse that I’d hardly noticed until then. It lay in a clearing across the Thompsons’ pond, right off Old Highway 117 South. Puzzled, I studied the house, and then looked to Michele.

“The thing is, they’ve gotten so attached to you,” she said, “that they want you to rent that house when Jackie gets back.”

The house wasn’t particularly inviting. In fact, it looked a tad creepy. All the trees around it felled, too close to the highway. “Who owns it?” I asked.

“Bradley.”

“Of course,” I said. Bradley seemed to have a hand in everything. I wondered, momentarily, how someone so landand property-rich could avoid the temptation to “sell out” his ecological values.

“Well, to be honest, we’d all love it if you’d rent it,” Michele said.

“That’s kind of you,” I said.

“Will you deal drugs out of there?” six-year-old Greg asked.

“Greg!” Michele reprimanded. “I’m sorry. It’s just that … well,
the girl who’d been living there. Cops busted her with fifteen thousand dollars in crystal meth.”

I shifted from one foot to the other. I knew crystal meth, cocaine’s poorer cousin, was common in both urban and rural areas of North Carolina, since it was so cheap to make. It was so common, in fact, that people, when giving you a tour of their home, would routinely joke, “and this is the meth lab.” But I never would have imagined it being produced one house over from the 12 × 12.

“We’d seen men coming in at all hours of the night,” Michele continued, “and so we thought she was a … you know. But turns out the whole place was a giant meth factory.”

The wind shifted direction. Cutting through the smell of the Thompsons’ place — the smell of a farm — was a hint of the oppressive, dead scent of one of the nearby industrial chicken factories.
A giant meth factory?
Just through the woods from Jackie’s beehives, heirloom teas, and honeysuckle; right on the banks of No Name Creek. I felt a little queasy.

Michele seemed to notice and went on, “We’d much rather you moved in than another Section Eighter. Just don’t move in until after the ‘meth-busters’ get here. The squad that detoxifies the house.”

I looked down at her the faces of her kids, the same ones who had recently been learning math and world currencies with me. I said, “As in, ‘Who ya gonna call?’”

“Meth-busters! Exactly. It’s in the police department. The drug is so toxic that it gets into the walls, floors, drains, everywhere. The ‘meth-busters’ use even stronger chemicals to get rid of it.” My queasiness began to turn to nausea. “After that,” she said cheerily, “it’ll be ready for you to move on in!”

As if meth-next-door wasn’t enough, a “cheeze” scare suddenly hit Adams County. It was headlined in the local paper after the drug — a cheap blend of heroin and Tylenol PM — killed several high school kids in Texas, and rumor had it that North Carolina dealers
were adding it to their repertoire. I noticed the Thompsons eyeing José’s and Graciela’s kids, with their dark hair and skin and baggy pants, with even more mistrust, perhaps seeing possible cheeze dealers — the very ones they’d left the trailer parks to escape.

After that, on my walks and bike rides, I began seeing a different North Carolina. I noticed more despair on the porches of roadside trailers and run-down houses, heads hanging low, eyes staring blankly into the awakening landscape. Every day one hundred million Americans take drugs, and this statistic hit me viscerally, with a former meth factory next door and cheeze scaring my neighbors. The 12 × 12, perhaps because of the abundant energy I was absorbing from nature and the physical exercise of biking and walking, had inspired me to limit caffeine and alcohol in my diet. I had only the occasional coffee or glass of wine now. This made me even more sensitive to all the pain, anger, and estrangement being deadened by drugs.

“IAM A DRAGON
/ Fire is one of the things I favor /And sometimes acid.”

I was reading aloud to Leah outside the 12 × 12.

“Now we know who ‘the dragon’ is,” Leah said.

“Do we?”

This was Zach Thompson’s poetry. The thirteen-year-old had passed me a copy of the poem along with a sixty-page novella called
Fallen Dragons
that he’d written for an English assignment. When Leah saw it in the 12 × 12 she said, “Ooh, I love reading thirteen-yearolds’ fiction,” and dug in. At one point she laughed and said, “Check this out: ‘Two hundred feet and closing, the dragon spread his wings, and his two clawed feet spread. An innocent buck looked up, but too late. The dragon’s massive claws wrapped around him like a soft taco wrapped the meat, lettuce, and hot sauce.’ ” She giggled, and continued, “His teacher — one Mr. L — took a red pen and crossed out ‘like a soft taco wrapped the meat, lettuce, and hot sauce.’”

We read the rest of
Fallen Dragons
aloud, a tale of hatred, blood shed, and destruction, in which the protagonist — a dragon curiously without a name — kills everything in sight. We wondered about the inspiration for this angry, violent persona. The poem “I am” gave clues.

“Start again,” Leah said, and I read:

I am a dragon,
Fire is one of the things I favor
And sometimes acid.
I terrify people.
They just don’t
know, Know who I am
I am a dragon.

I am the drums, loud and obnoxious,
But I help people with the anger
I talk to them when they beat me.

I am me,
This poem is me
So you think you knew me,
So what do you think of the real me?

We talked about who the dragon might be. It seemed to represent blight. I only knew the Thompsons in their hopeful present phase, pursuing a dream of living as organic farmers. But Zach probably still had the trailer park horrors vividly in mind, horrors that now seemed to be following his family into Pine Bridge. Just beneath the dream was the flattening, the deadening; the nameless dragon.

I BIKED TO THE QUICK-N-EASY
in Smithsville to call Leah on the pay phone. Fluorescent lights; the hot dogs rolling in a glassed-in
oven; a dozen types of malt liquor; a bounty of chewing tobacco. I was studying the drink selection when an African American woman, maybe early thirties, came up beside me with two daughters. “You want the blue one?” she asked her toddler. Her older daughter grabbed a Coke, and she a king-sized Dr. Pepper. “You from around here?” she asked me.

I told her I was staying at a friend’s up the road for a while.

“I know everyone here, and I said to myself, ‘Who’s that guy?’ ”

We introduced ourselves. She was Pam. She said, “Me, I’ve never lived outside of Adams County, only traveled once to Myrtle Beach.”

Her older girl jumped in: “You’ve been to Busch Gardens!”

“Oh yeah, there too.”

“These your kids?”

“Nicole … and Darleen,” she said, beaming. “Darleen’s thirteen, going to the eighth-grade prom, but they treat it like a high school prom. You should see her in her dress. She’s like, like a beauty queen.”

“
What
was ninety-nine cents?” A customer was complaining loudly about his receipt to the cashier.

“This,” the cashier said, pulling a beef jerky out of his bag.

“Says sixty-nine. The bigger one is ninety-nine.”

“Oh.”

“I know, I’ll just trade it for the bigger one.”

“I’m always tryin’ to shit somebody,” said the attendant.

Pam turned away from me and joined their conversation, saying with a friendly grin: “She did it on purpose!”

“Yeah, I know she did. Ninety-nine! Now we’re square.”