by Ben Hewitt
It was in just such conditions that I arrived at the property of Erik Gillard, having parked my car at the edge of a snow-slick gravel road and set foot on a snow-slick path that unfurled beneath a canopy of towering pines. It was dusk, or nearly so, and the light possessed a spectral quality that was strangely welcoming, as if whatever ghosts might emerge would come only in kindness. The path was crossed at odd intervals by snarls of root; off to the right, a creek burbled along its wayward path, doing its slow work of eroding stone and soil. To my left, there was a small fenced-in plot where, the summer before, Erik had raised a few ducks. They were gone now. He’d eaten them.
I trudged up the path, drawing deep breaths of air and letting it settle into my chest, where it burned in a satisfying way. Snow fell through the pines, driven to a slant by the north wind. It was hard to tell if the storm was beginning or ending; it was hard to tell if it even was a storm. Perhaps it was merely a prelude for the winter to come.
At the end of the path I found Erik. He was bent over a pair of wobbly sawhorses, cutting through a wide board with a handsaw. His arm pistoned up and down and up again as he worked the saw, which made a sound that reminded me of water over gravel as its teeth removed a thin kerf of wood. The ground was littered with sawdust and cast-off pieces of board. A ladder leaned against a wall at a precariously compound angle: not just tilted out, as a ladder should be, but also tipped slightly sideways, as a ladder should never be.
Given the conditions, Erik wasn’t wearing much. While I was clad in heavily insulated coveralls, pac boots, and a thick woolen jacket, he wore only a threadbare cotton sweatshirt against the cold. Its hood hung behind him, catching flakes of snow that quickly melted into the fabric. His feet were tucked into a pair of McEnroe–era tennis shoes that looked entirely inadequate for the snow-covered sheet of ice below him. His hands were ungloved. On his head, he wore a baseball cap, perched at an angle that precisely matched the ladder’s ill-considered tilt. Was this an illusion? I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them again. Nope. No change.
I stood and watched for a minute, a span of time marked by scant progress on Erik’s part. To my admittedly inexperienced eyes, it looked as if the saw blade was caressing the wood, rather than cutting through it with the toothy abandon one might hope for. I could imagine myself, were I in Erik’s tennis shoes, being driven to such frustration that I would send the saw in a great skyward arc, to its final resting place in the stream.
But I already knew him to be a man possessing the serene demeanor of someone with very little to lose. He had no other pressing obligations: If the saw were inclined to caress, rather than to cut, he’d let the damn thing caress. His arm kept pistoning—up, down, up, down—and the wood gradually gave way before it. A flurry of sawdust mixed and fell with the snow, carpeting the ground in white and brown. I could smell the freshly cut wood. It smelled like summer.
Erik Gillard was building a house, although he may have been the only one to ever refer to it as such. I, for one, could think of more appropriate descriptors—words like “shed,” or “shack,” or (generously) “cabin.” It stood rather precariously atop small towers of cemented-together stone. Erik had pulled the rocks from the creek. It had taken 2 days to extract enough stone to form the pilings, and on the third day, he stayed in bed.
The house was two stories high, with a footprint of approximately 8 feet by 12 feet, although Erik was keen to point out that the bay window he’d installed had created almost an extra foot of floor space along much of the south wall. Certainly, the window generated a welcome bit of breathing room, but either way, I’d never seen so small a house. It was a caricature of a house, like something you’d inhabit in a dream where everything but you has shrunk and you can’t figure out how to fit into your tiny pants.
There was, as of yet, no heat source. Nor was there a front door. Erik did own a woodstove; it was tucked into a moldering yurt that sat a dozen or so feet downhill from the house. He did not own a front door but thought he might build one, and he wondered if I had any idea of how that might be accomplished, and fairly quickly: He hoped to move in sometime next week.
The house did not feature running water, nor would it ever. The toilet was a bucket and the bucket was situated outside, behind the structure—there, “structure” is a nice, unambiguously polite word for it—under two old doors that had been tipped against each other, forming a triangular shelter. I tried to imagine myself hunched under those doors on a cold winter’s morning, exposed to whatever elements the day saw fit to expose me to.
Frankly, the structure, which he hoped to complete for less than $5,000, was a substantial step up from his prior residence, a $400-per-month rental he’d shared with his friend David, a young man who’d made quite an impression on me when I’d visited Erik some months before. This was for two reasons. For starters, he’d had one of his front teeth capped in pure gold. In rural Vermont, this is not something you see very often. Indeed, it was my first gold-capped tooth sighting in all of my 40 years, and I must admit, I was utterly transfixed by the damn thing. It was like a campfire, or a car accident: No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t look away. Perhaps that was the intended effect.
Second, and almost as interesting, was David’s affinity for working out with a kettlebell. Kettlebells, if you’re not familiar with them, are nothing more than orbs of cast iron welded to a handle. They look, vaguely, like truck nutz—the die-cast testicles that fans of country music like to hang from the rear of their pickups. David had a preference for complicated circular motions, but first he would dip and bend, his breath deepening and rushing past the gold tooth, which glinted in the light of the room’s single bare bulb. Then he’d rise and begin swinging the 35-pound ball from side to side, a frenetic, almost violent activity that caused me to duck and wince. I could not help but imagine the kettlebell slipping from his sweaty hands and gaining momentum as it smashed through the air between us, on a trajectory that bode poorly for me.
Yes, it’s true, that place had a sink and a toilet, and a big old woodstove radiating delicious waves of heat. These were its strengths, but they were also its weaknesses, for the sink and lavatory were nearing the bottom of a long slide into decrepitude (Had these guys never heard of toilet bowl cleaner? Did they not understand what the flush handle was for?), and the floor around the woodstove was pitted with deep black burns caused by errant embers. Upon noticing these, I’d cast about for a fire extinguisher and, not finding one, had made studious note of the nearest exit.
And then there was the smell. It was a startling blend of kimchi, a fermented vegetable medley that was enthusiastically bubbling away on the kitchen table, and the gamey vapors of David’s kettlebell exertions. Some of it came from the bathroom, where the sharp, mineral-rich scent of urine originated. There was something else in the air too, but when it comes to such odors, there is a point at which you’re better off not knowing. I had reached that point.
All of which is to say that Erik’s new home, despite its obvious shortcomings, represented a strange form of upward mobility for the man. It was small, cramped even. When he nailed on a piece of siding, the whole place shuddered a bit, as if it could actually feel the nail piercing its woody flesh. His toileting was subject to the whims of nature; even his drinking water would need to be packed in. Legally, the place wasn’t even his, for it had been built on land owned by a friend. There was no electrical service to the site; my friend’s nights would be forever lit by the smoky glimmer of candle and lantern.
As I watched Erik ascend the ladder, freshly cut board in one hand and a hammer in the other, it occurred to me that the whole scene should have been fraught with a sense of desperation and longing. Who, in 21st-century America, could accept such conditions in the absence of these emotions? Who could poke his head into the doorless doorway and not feel as if he were squeezing himself into a child’s playhouse or perhaps a shelter for a small species of farm animal—goats or pigs, maybe? Who could stand out in the fre
ezing gloom of a late-November afternoon, noodling through a wide board with a blunt handsaw, who else but someone in the throes of chronic pathos? Even more puzzling: Why would a person accept these things, not merely in resignation, mind you, but with what appeared to be genuine enthusiasm?
Because to hear Erik talk about it, you’d think he’d just finished picking out what color countertops he wanted and deciding whether the entertainment room should be finished in cherry or pine. And what of the landscaping? A cobbled driveway, perhaps, lined by shrubbery? A flower garden, or just some window boxes? It was here, taking majestic shape before him. It was real, for he could reach out and touch it and even, just barely, stretch to his full length along its end wall. Best of all, it was his. I mean, sort of.
“I’m so, so pumped to have my own place,” he told me. He lowered his voice a few decibels, as if there might be something embarrassing in what would come next. “This is kind of a dream for me.” Erik turned his back to me and drove a nail into the hand-cut board. The house shifted slightly on its footings but quickly settled. And Erik reached for another nail.
In 2009, the year I first met him, Erik Gillard earned about $6,000 from a part-time job at a children’s wilderness camp. And managed to save a good bit of it. In 2010, the year he turned 26, he received a substantial raise, one that would put him on track to earn nearly $10,000 for the year. When he told me this, he sounded almost embarrassed, as if no one person should be entrusted with so much money. “Oh well,” he said. “I guess with the house, it’ll be good to have some extra cash around.” I considered sharing the particulars of my income, but thought better of it.
This may be giving away too much, too early, but I think it’s important for you to know that Erik is not a kook. Nor is he destitute, or desperate, or depressed. Indeed, he is the least of these things of perhaps anyone I know. He is healthy and strong, articulate and obviously intelligent. He does not smoke or consume alcohol, and he is careful about what he eats, in the sense that he does not eat very much processed food (in another sense, one that we will get to, he is not careful in the least). He does not even drink soda, or at least, I’ve never seen him drink a soda. He exercises regularly, though of course not at a health club. He is usually, but not always, clean. Frankly, sometimes he smells a bit ripe, the inevitable result of living without running water. He has a girlfriend, a sweet-faced and even sweeter-natured woman named Heidi. She is from Wisconsin and is the embodiment of northern Midwest charm. Often, she and Erik sing together. Her voice is lilting and ascendant; naturally, his is deeper, with a kind of innocent power. They’ve been together for 2 years now. It wouldn’t surprise me if they got married. It wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t.
Erik Gillard is a man of many skills. He is particularly good with children (this is good, given that his career, such as it is, depends on his being good with children), and he is tremendously proficient in the wild. He can build a fire with a bow drill, tan a deer hide using the animal’s brains, or construct a weather-tight shelter of twigs and leaves. He is an amazing and versatile visual artist: paintings, drawings, carvings. He does them all, and he does them well. He’s obviously no carpenter, but he built a house, or at least a cabin, anyway. He might have said, “I don’t know how to build a cabin,” which would have been fair enough, because he didn’t. But that’s not what he said.
The point I am trying to make is that Erik is not a loser. In one sense, he is the poorest person I know. It may already be obvious that in another sense, he is the wealthiest. It is not hard to quantify his poverty; it shows itself in the cold, objective numbers of his salary and bank account. It is more difficult to take measure of his wealth, which does not present itself in such ready terms.
That we carry assumptions about the poor, that we stereotype, generalize, and perhaps even discriminate, likely comes as no surprise. One of those generalizations is that people—and in particular, Americans—don’t want to be poor, that poverty makes them feel bereft, lesser, hollowed out, victimized. One of the things that intrigues me about Erik Gillard is that for him, poverty seems to have the opposite effect. The less he spends, the less he needs to make. And the less he makes, the less money that flows through the river of his life, the more fulfilled he seems to feel.
Why is this? Is there something wrong with him? I’m pretty sure not, but I intend to find out for certain. How did he get this way? Does he ever have regrets?
Or what if I have it exactly backward: What if it is not his poverty that brings him happiness, but his wealth? Because already it is becoming clear to me that Erik considers himself extraordinarily wealthy. Do not think that he is delusional, or simply contrarian; instead, understand that he does not view money as an emblem of wealth, nor any material asset that would demand he subjugate himself to its accumulation. It’s not that he doesn’t like stuff; indeed, he has possessions that he likes very, very much. Loves, even. But they tend to be things that have been given to him by friends or family, or that he has created himself, and thus it seems reasonable to wonder if what he likes about these things is not the objects themselves, but the relationships they represent.
In other words, they are symbols of their underlying value. Which is rather strange, if you think about it: because that’s exactly what money is.
I often wonder if the tale of Erik Gillard’s self-imposed frugality might serve as a fable. It is hard not to consider his life in the context of our nation’s economic plight and its relationship to money and thrift.
There’s no need to dwell on the obvious, but it is nonetheless worth noting: America is, for all intents and purposes, broke. Now, one might argue that our nation still enjoys an abundance of intellect and ingenuity, still draws from a deep pool of resourcefulness and grit. On these points, you’ll hear no argument from me; these have always been our nation’s strengths, and I believe they always will be.
But when it comes to money, the numbers don’t lie. Our country has exhausted its savings and has resorted to spending its future income. Everyone seems to acknowledge that as business plans go, this one is not particularly sound. Yet we seem to have been struck dumb by the force of our desire for it to not be so, and rather than act, we continue shuffling toward an unspoken consensus about whether or not to fight for a way of life that we love dearly, but which we know has no future.
Why is it so hard to imagine a different way? Maybe it’s because most of us have known nothing but expansion; the last of our Depression-era grandparents have passed on, leaving only stories that fade into the march of time, become diluted and fragmented by the long sweep of plenty. We know there have been times in our nation’s history when money has been exceedingly scarce; between 1930 and 1933, during the onset of the Great Depression, the US money supply contracted by nearly one-third. The sudden loss of so much monetary wealth had devastating implications, of course. But it did something else: It focused attention on wealth outside the monetary realm. How many times have you heard or read a Depression-era account that includes this statement: “We didn’t have any money, but we were rich”?
Still, that was 75 or more years ago, and much is forgotten over three-quarters of a century. Among other things, we forget that it hasn’t always been this way. And with nearly 8 decades of relative stability and bounty having interceded between the Great Depression and early-21st-century America, we stop being able to imagine that it might not always be so.
Of course, the past 5 years have begun to alert us to this possibility, but the truth is the erosion began nearly a half-century ago. “I can’t imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s,” Bill Bryson writes in his memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. He goes on to support his assertion with a list of statistics that, given our current woes, is almost cruel in how devastatingly it illustrates our country’s fall from grace over just the past few decades. Perhaps most tellingly: In the ’50s, 99.93 percent of the vehicles on American roads were built
in America, by Americans. Even the gas we pumped into our fleet of Buicks and Oldsmobiles was a product of the homeland, for in 1950, the United States imported just 8.4 percent of its oil. Nowadays, GM sells more cars in China than in the nation of its founding. Which is probably a good thing, considering that we now import nearly 70 percent of our oil.
This downward spiral is not confined to our highways. Of the major countries composing the Organization for the Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—including Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Scandinavian countries, and the United Kingdom—the United States owns the dubious distinction of possessing the highest poverty rate, the lowest score on the United Nations’ index of “material well-being,” the highest homicide rate, and the largest prison population in both absolute terms and per capita. And that’s just to name a few of the categories in which we fall flat on our flag. It’s important to remember that each and every one of these dubious distinctions was in the making long before our current economic predicament. In other words, even as Americans have in aggregate become richer, we’ve become poorer, too.
It’s not hard to imagine why someone like Erik Gillard might wonder if there’s a better way, and if he can make a satisfying life in the margins of an economy and culture that seem destined for a reckoning. It’s not hard to imagine why he might view the pursuit of the modern American Dream, with its big house, big car, and big debt, as something futile, vulnerable, and even damaging. If he can find happiness in the absence of these things, why shouldn’t he? If he can feel pride and even joy at the raising of a $5,000, 96-square-foot house on a piece of borrowed land, why would he ask for more? Is Erik Gillard 22 times less happy than me, in my 2,200-square-foot home? The answer, of course, is no.