Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Were there times when things didn’t work out so nicely? “A while back,” she said, “a young man with a good physique — I admire a man with a good physique — he saw me picking up aluminum cans, and he offered me a bag of them he had, and I accepted. Then he said he was out of cigarettes and asked a dollar for the cans. I gave back his cans. It wasn’t the dollar — it was a dollar for cigarettes.”

  When I’d kept her long enough from the pines where she would fall asleep to the desert air soughing through the branches and awake to the first squawks of the grackles, I asked about a man she’d mentioned in a letter, a fellow wondering how to retire on an annual thirty-seven-thousand dollars. “Oh, him,” she said. “I told him I could show how to live on seven-thousand dollars a year.” Thoreau: Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

  As I went to the door, she added, “I withdraw sixty dollars from the bank twice a month.” That was a little less than fifteen-hundred dollars a year, about four dollars a day. The cost of a franchise burger and fries (neither of which Ingold ate). “Oh!” she said. “Four dollars? That sounds like too much. Maybe I should cut back.” That might have been a jest.

  Tomorrow, I said, maybe you’ll show me how you do it, and she answered, “We could start by carrying water from the rain barrels.”

  14

  After the Fuse Blows

  WHEN JEAN WAS SIXTEEN and living in Tucson, she had her handwriting analyzed, a report she showed me. Its predictive commentary has proven to be remarkably prescient, except for a single evaluation: “She’ll develop material ambition later on, no doubt, when she will need to support herself.” But the graphologist’s last sentence, as enigmatic as a line from Emily Dickinson, should have put the lie to such an interpretation about materiality: “The girl’s handwriting reminds me most of the nuns.”

  Without drawing a comparison too fine, I saw Ingold as a secular and humanistic nun in an order of one, a woman of the cloth — from the thrift shop. Were she to wear a wedding band, her spiritual marriage would be to the Lord of Sustainability and His Doctrine of Simplicity in its eternal struggle against the dark powers of Wantingness. She once wrote me a few lines about all the ancient wisdoms reckoning contentment as a consequence of reduced cravings. Not long ago, I saw a Sunday-supplement advertisement from a nationally known company: THE URGE TO BUY IS GOOD! GIVE IN TO THE URGE! For Ingold, those are eleven words from Hell.

  While her views were broadly Christian, her interest was not in some imagined “personal” salvation but in a real and practical planetary salvation marked by husbandry, tolerance, and fellowship, where concern for survival supersedes confession of sin. She was not monastic or ascetic in a religious way, and, because connections were all-important, she was neither an eremite nor suited to a cloister. She belonged to the sidewalks and alleyways of life, once referring to herself as “an independent, walkabout person.” A friend of hers said, “For Jean, walking is sacred.” She went forth in simple, leather moccasins with the thinnest of soles, her small footprints usually invisible. You knew where she’d been only because there was no litter along her path. A woman of practicality in all things, she once mentioned in a letter another honored aphorism: The purpose of life is to lead a life of purpose.

  While Q worked on her book in the city library the next morning, Ingold and I planned to take a walkabout through her territory so I could see how she lived on fifteen-hundred dollars a year. At the time of our meeting, the federally recognized poverty level for a household was twenty-thousand dollars annually, but to speak of Jean in terms of “poverty” would be like talking about the poverty of ravens or sparrows or lilies of the field, for how could a woman having all she wanted, with money to share, be thought poor? She drew neither Social Security nor a pension and accepted no welfare. When her mother died some years ago and left her a modest trust fund, Ingold gave half of it to the Nature Conservancy in exchange for an annuity of about five-thousand dollars, more than enough to live as she chose. Still, she had found ways to supplement it without any sort of traditional employment. (“I’ve read about jobs that slowly kill people so they can buy health insurance.”) From a monthly income of no more than six-hundred dollars, she saved about four-hundred to add to the annuity or give or lend to a person or organization in need. To her, money should be at work in the service of others. Lest anyone view her as hoity-toity holy or even irksomely righteous, a self-plumed peahen of poverty, I’ll mention her “gift to self,” a trip to New Zealand to see a nation she thought might be living sensibly within its resources. (Righteous, by the way, Ingold defined as “right use,” reflecting the earliest meaning of the word.) She also once considered a face-lift but decided it excessively vain and wasteful.

  What would happen were she to become seriously ill? “If it’s my time to die,” she said, “I’d rather die. Often, it’s prolonging a no-longer-viable life that gets expensive and wasteful. A person can be just as greedy for more useless days as for more needless things or dollars.” But what if she received a bad diagnosis, say cancer? “Cancer? I’d consult a book called Eat and Heal. I have a copy. I’d go on a cleansing water fast and eat lots of raw garlic. When the time came, I’d accept the end. But preventative medicine is the best approach.”

  Speaking of money reminded her of the sixty dollars she’d received that morning for aluminum cans picked up on recent walkabouts. “Now I don’t have to make a bank withdrawal for the next two weeks — depending on how much bread the sandwich franchise gets rid of.” Because Ingold found those loaves the best in town, she tried to convince the manager to offer them in the shop at a reduced price instead of wasting them, but still, every Wednesday and Saturday several loaves usually went into the bin at the back door. “Last week he threw out an unopened container of avocado paste, and before that several unopened bags of baby carrots. All of it was in excellent condition.” (I had read recently that Americans every year throw away more than forty-five million tons of food; if we ate them, that would be about ten million elephants.)

  I paraphrased the French novelist Anatole France’s sentence, “It’s good to collect things, but it’s better to go on walks.” I said she did both at the same time, and she answered, “When I travel to other towns, I like to collect good ideas, innovative ones for improvements I can bring back home and try to get implemented here, even though there’s usually resistance. But I always believe a better world can happen.”

  Did any of the food she found ever make her ill? “I rarely get sick,” she said. “Maybe a cold, but you don’t catch a cold from a carrot. What makes America sick is too much food and too much of the wrong food that leads to obesity and high blood pressure and diabetes. And tooth decay.” Ingold took no medications, needed no spectacles, and had all her teeth, but she wanted to weigh ten pounds more, maybe twelve.

  We were talking as we filled a trio of four-gallon buckets from the rain barrels. America grew up on rainwater, I said, from barrels and cisterns, but this stuff looks a little corrupted. “It’s not for drinking,” she said. “I wash in it after I filter it through an old white blouse. For the table, I take a jug to the corner-store to buy a gallon of reverse-osmosis water. Twenty-five cents.” Unless the drought broke when the “rainy” season arrived, her next trip to the barrels would be the last for a while, and she would have to use the faucet in the bathtub.

  With the three buckets almost full, we started back, she with one and I with the others. In the desert heat it was labor, but her nearly seventy years and her pail of water scarcely slowed her. We paused once in the shade of a little mesquite, and she said, “Have you read about concerns that all the dammed-up water on Earth could alter the tilt of the axis or the rotation?” I had, and I thought, How many seventy-year-olds have more concern for the planetary axis than their own aging spinal one?

  We sat awhile in her room so she could pull from beneath the bed a carton of her photo albums, the material possessions having the greatest claim on
her. When she looked at an image of her father or mother or daughter or uncle Bill, she seemed to be looking deeply into what time had taken; her fingers lightly touched the pictures, almost in a caress, and she told who each was and about each a story. Her mother’s escape from Hitler’s Germany, her uncle William L. Shirer and his classic book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, her daughter in London, to whom she wrote regularly but who didn’t reply. Her greatest wish, she said, was for them to find reconciliation.

  There were snapshots of her horse, Misca, the one she used to ride into the Arizona desert, and she told of the time Misca stepped too close to a cholla, the “jumping” cactus, and got a bleeding flank full of spines, and how Jean picked up two stones and used them like tweezers to pull the barbs out of the wincing pony.

  After college she worked as a “price economist” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, married, returned to the Southwest, worked various secretarial jobs in governmental and university offices, became a mother, saw her marriage end. (“He didn’t care for my environmental views. That was part of it.”) She helped him find a second wife, a woman her young daughter approved; but that marriage failed also — another strain for the daughter. Jean went to live and work on an organic farm north of Alamogordo, learned about xeric horticulture and wrote the newsletter for the New Mexico Citizens for Clean Air and Water. As time passed and her independence grew, her relations with men became more friendships than otherwise; two of her male friends I met spoke of her warmly. Perhaps the graphologist saw it years earlier: “Jean would be good in work where she could be by herself. She has a feeling of sympathy for the human race and for people in need — but that’s not really loving them.” The same might be said of the Buddha or Confucius or Clara Barton or certain holy figures from the Middle East.

  Q came by to take us to lunch, but Jean declined. As Q looked about the 117-square feet, I said, This is it — this is everything, and Jean added, “I like the challenge of seeing how little I need to be not unduly uncomfortable. It’s wonderful to feel light.” Q, something of a minimalist herself, said, “I admire that,” and Jean, in a near whisper — “Not everyone does.”

  The following morning I met Ingold on the grounds of the School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, almost at the center of her usual purlieus. The campus was lushly green in the desert valley, an oasis of birds and shrubs and tall pecan-trees that in season provided wildlife and Jean with provender — in that instance, nuts she turned into pecan butter to put on cast-off bread from the franchise shop.

  We walked several streets so she could point out some sources of her gleanings; at foot level there was purslane (her favorite green), plantain, salsify, dandelion, mallow, lamb’s-quarters, and a wild sweet potato with a tuber the size of the tip of her little finger. Farther from our route grew other edible and nutritious green “weeds,” with names to challenge the appetite of even the starving: sow thistle, prickly lettuce, ragweed (redroot), and a tumbleweed succulent when young. She said, “There’s a species of prickly pear cactus that provides a good fruit, but you have to burn the spines off. I haven’t tried it yet.”

  Overhead, Jean pointed out mulberry leaves for tea, crab apples for drying, and her favorite tree, a Chinese jujube that gave lovely little dates. Even more distant were pears, pistachios, a tiny arbor of Golden Delicious apples ignored by its owners, and a neglected grove of apricots bearing marble-size fruits with a palatable — if potentially toxic — seed she dislodged from the pits by putting them in a sock and hammering them open. “Sometimes a friend gives me government food she won’t eat, the healthful foods like dried plums or trail mix. Or dates. She eats the canned meat.” No grocery for you? I asked. “Oh yes,” she said. “I buy things I’m not going to find on a walkabout. Vegetable oil, rice, eggs, yogurt, buttermilk. Sometimes even produce when it’s good and priced right.”

  That menu suggested Jean was a vegetarian, but she allowed herself “several small bites of meat, poultry, or fish once a day — just enough to sample the flavor and texture.” But later she said, “Meat-eating is on a collision course with human population. Increasing human numbers will make every problem facing us insoluble. But it’s an unusual organization today that will even mention overpopulation, especially the big environmental groups.” On that topic, I said, they’ve lost their courage to talk about a world populace increasing by more than two-hundred-thousand humans every day. Until humanity decides to get a grip on its deadly proliferation, nothing — no other problem — can be solved. She considered, then said, “I’m afraid we’re going to let things slide so long, forced sterilization will become necessary.”

  Ingold was carrying a plastic trash bag folded small; on her return home, she would walk through Alameda Park: “I don’t go to picnic — I go to pick up. I like to think, wherever I live, the neighborhood looks better after a few of my walkabouts.” That reminded her: “When I was in your town a few years ago, a man in a new car saw me picking up litter, and stopped and tried to hand me twenty dollars. He was terribly insistent.” Was he buying off his conscience the way people do the homeless? She said, “Maybe it was just a thanks. I get them sometimes.”

  Although she would, from time to time, check for forgotten change in the coin return of a public phone, she usually would not accept money offered her. It was more than a matter of pride: refusing money in America gets remembered along with — she hoped — the act of somebody doing a lowly task to upgrade the public weal without being paid for it beyond recognition (even if sometimes of a disdainful sort). Yet in her was no self-congratulation, no sanctimoniousness about a fearless lone-woman stewardship. She was doing simply what she wanted to do.

  In spite of her always being alert to her appearance and never looking unkempt, always keeping her thrift-shop outfits neatly coordinated, her litter sack could nonetheless cause people to take her for a bag lady, a judgment making it easy for them to explain her to their convenient satisfaction. After all, where’s the pigeonhole for an educated and attractive woman working alone to clean up after the rest of us? Ingold did not mention it, but I saw it: an occasional person deprecating and depreciating her efforts, palliatives against anyone disturbing the smugly comfortable who are incapable of considering two words — rethink excess.

  At one point, Jean stepped off to pick up a couple of beverage containers — an aluminum one to resell, but the plastic one in Alamogordo was only trash. I watched her small buckskin moccasins leave ever-so-faint imprints in the dusty alley. There was a woman who had walked away — steadily if slowly — from a life of artificial wants made to look like needs. She would never speak of it this way, but I will: Jean Ingold’s monkey wrench of nonconformity was tiny, but she never hesitated to throw it into the greased machinery of crapulent consumerism.

  I had no plan to live exactly as she did, in part because she depended on the overflow of a prodigal nation. What I saw in her life was an alert to superfluity, a demonstration of the ancient and universal wisdom of controlling material desires by enhancing the life of one’s heart and mind, the grand goal of every major religion and spiritual path ever put before humanity. Perhaps I’m unaware of one, but I can’t recall any way of the spirit that demands perfection (Matthew’s “Be ye perfect” gets a better reading from Luke: “Be ye merciful”). Most of the paths, it seems to me, say more simply, “Wake up! Do better! Connect!” Ingold’s habits set a marker to measure how near or far I might be from such a course, how close to a broadly sensible material existence. For me, the mirror she held up reflected not so much her achievement as the distance I believed I had yet to go. Her life was a burr in my conscience, and I was in her debt for it.

  Before he died, her father wrote twenty-seven-year-old Jean to urge her to choose a life she wanted rather than to merely drift into one. Said he, a former analyst with the Securities and Exchange Commission, “I would not advocate as a supreme goal a comfortable, affluent life in the suburbs. Even poverty itself would not be bad if you were making some sacrific
e for an ethical objective. But sheer, purposeless poverty I can’t accept.” Forty years later, I believe Father Shirer would accept his daughter’s walking away from a pampered life and the emptiness of possessions into a fulfilling one of considered and deliberate frugality.

  The night before I said good-bye to her, I was up in the foothills near La Luz, with the Sacramentos at my back. I looked across the Tularosa Basin to watch for a new weapon of luminescence to get shot up toward the Oscura Mountains. Somewhere out there under the white gypsum sands was the ancient lake the old inhabitants foresaw one day rising again, and southward was Lake Lucero, now a dusty alkali barren waiting for rain, a withered flat more like a fallen Lucifer than the Morning Star. I was straining to see into the dusk, as if my vision were impaired.

  Down there too were Jean Ingold’s 117-square-feet sitting on the edge of a vast field of lights and darks, some natural, some humanly made, some of beauty, some of terror. Perhaps it was her proximity to that Armageddon that made me remember another of the adages she liked: After your fuse blows, let your light shine. A day earlier, hearing herself say it, Jean looked at me and said, “But do we even have fuses anymore?”

  IV.

  Into the Northeast

  Into the Northeast

  On Motoring 329

  1.In Hopes Perdurable Reader Will Not Absquatulate 331

  2.Hoisting Jack 336

  3.Spontaneous Bop 345

  4.Ten M To B 352

  5.Building a Time Machine 358

  6.Finding the Kaiser Billy Road 366

  7.A Tortfeasor Declines to Take a Victim 375

  8.Forty Pages Against a Headache Ball 385

  9.No More Than a Couple of Skeletons 393