by Ben Hewitt
I do not mean to suggest that by not owning things, Erik is not attached to material possessions. Indeed, it often appears to me that he is more attached to his belongings than has become typical in our culture, in no small part because their monetary value is often usurped by either their utilitarian significance, or the relationships they represent to him. I am repeatedly struck by the unalloyed delight he finds in the small treasures of his life, as I described at the end of chapter one. Except to him, they’re not small. To Erik, a pair of shoes pulled from the fetid hollows of a city dumpster is as deserving of his gratitude as a pair of unblemished Nikes that have known not heel, toe, or sock. To Erik, a 96-square-foot home isn’t so much 96 square feet, as it is a home. He fills his space with art and found pieces of nature: a gnarled stick, worn smooth by the elements; a heart stone, propped on a shelf; tiles his friend Janice made and gave him, depicting an owl and something that might be a rising sun or might just be a random arrangement of shapes that imbue their resemblance from the perspective of the individual. In short, he surrounds himself with things that are useful to him or that bespeak a connection to nature and to his community. Perhaps, even, his connection to himself: the pride he takes in his personal toil and resourcefulness.
We speak of materialism as if it were something bad and even sinful, but sometimes I wonder if we have it all wrong. Maybe what we need isn’t less materialism, but more, to the point that we actually respect and even revere our material goods, rather than see them as disposable and constantly begging to be upgraded. Of course, it doesn’t help that disposability is purposefully engineered into the overwhelming majority of the products offered to us. To seek out true quality requires the determination to look beyond the convenient venues of big box retailers and online mass merchants; needless to say, it also demands a willingness to pay for the upgraded materials and craftsmanship such quality demands.
From this vantage point, Erik Gillard might be the most materialistic person I know. The majority of the things he owns, despite their often being well used or even run down, seem to actually mean something to him. He uses them, to be sure: I recall a day in midwinter when I bumped into him at the little food cooperative where he does the bulk of his grocery shopping. He was bundled in his usual ragtag assortment of frayed woolens, aboard his new-to-him bicycle, the one that had cost more than the sum total of the three cars he’s owned over the course of his adult life. The bicycle was coated in a scrim of ice and slush, and I was alarmed to see this: Mustn’t this be damaging? Would it not suffer premature wear at the hands of the elements? How could he be so callous?
But as he rode away, piloting his bike with one hand, while clutching a small bag of groceries in the other, his legs circling in a rhythmic, almost hypnotic fashion as the raw wind began to push against his face and oxygenated blood coursed through his muscles, I recognized a deeper truth that allayed my concerns.
Erik had bought the bike to use, not to have.
In my most candid moments, I sometimes wonder if I would have found Erik’s views on wealth and economics so compelling if our paths had crossed 2 years before, during the heady heights of the real estate boom, at a time when it seemed as if the Americanized version of prosperity, with its endless flow of cheap credit and ever–appreciating home values, knew no bounds. To be sure, even then I was afflicted by my debt phobia and fervently pursuing a lifestyle that would free me from its clutches.
Yet even I was swept into the current of the moment’s false optimism; work was plentiful and seemed to find me with little effort on my part. Like any good capitalist, I exploited this situation to my full advantage, rarely saying no and often overcommitting. I commonly worked weekends and there were no vacations. It was during this period that we extinguished our mortgage, and the irony—if that’s what it is—that the overblown state of our nation’s real estate and credit markets played a significant role in the retirement of our loans is not lost on me. These were some of my most financially fruitful years, and I gleefully harvested these fruits, before utilizing them to buy our way out of debt.
Of course, on some level I was clearly predisposed to be drawn toward Erik’s embrace of a more holistic wealth. Yet I cannot deny that almost immediately upon making his acquaintance, I found something comforting in the way he had structured his life, and I felt compelled to better understand how he made it all work. Very early in our friendship, against an economic backdrop that murmured “Greater Depression,” I saw that Erik might serve as something of a mentor to me and that furthermore, this mentorship could be an ideal antidote to my suffocating sense that the financial world was imploding. And with it, my only means of supporting my family.
This is not to say I did not genuinely like the guy, because Erik is one of those people who are very hard not to like. He is approachable and unruffled, quick to smile and generous with laughter. He is not prone to broad swings of emotion, and his default countenance is one of reserved contentment. As he is with children—engaged and respectful—he is with adults, and despite living a principled life, he is one of the least judgmental people I’ve known. It is striking that, with the exception of those in the political and corporate sphere, I have never heard him speak ill of another person.
Look, the man is not perfect; I know that. Like all of us, Erik is beset with contradictions and inconsistencies. There are junctures in his life where his values are overwhelmed by his desire to participate in society. He drives cars that spew 20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air for every gallon of gas burned in his service. He does not fly—not solely for environmental reasons, but because he finds the whole process, the pat downs and body scans, intrusive and demeaning—but he has no qualms about hopping a diesel-powered train and traveling to the Midwest to visit Heidi’s family. He sometimes wears clothing hewn of synthetic fabrics that grace his back only via the very industrial supply chain he reviles.5 He acknowledges these compromises and accepts them because he does not want to live in isolation or without some semblance of the common comforts of the 21st century. He is not a monk.
Nor am I, and it seems important to note that this story is not about a life of ascetic sensibilities. There will be no cave dwelling or communicating via smoke signals in the following pages; no one will be wearing a loincloth and subsisting on morning dew slurped from the hollows of leaves. Indeed, this story is precisely the opposite. It’s an examination of a life that is profoundly abundant in ways that have become increasingly rare in contemporary America: freedom, community, choice, good health, and simple happiness.
It is also about the ways in which modern commerce, dependent on a monetary medium that by design establishes a profound disconnect between us and the natural world, creates the circumstances that ensure both wealth and poverty. Sadly, the wealth is too often in that which does not matter, and the poverty is frequently in that which does. And the irony of tragic ironies is that we are actually trading our real wealth for illusory riches.
My wager is that our culture is beginning to recognize that we have been on the losing end of this Faustian bargain. Somewhere in the back (maybe even nudging its way toward the front) of our collective consciousness is the recognition that all is not right with our relationship to money and wealth. We are beginning to understand that this dysfunction radiates outward, to our relationships to other people and to nature, and even inward, to ourselves. Somewhere is the sense that things are changing and that while this change may at times feel profoundly difficult, it is nonetheless as necessary as breathing. Having allowed so many facets of our well-being to become monetized and commodified, we are presented the opportunity to reclaim these building blocks of true wealth.
The first step, of course, is to simply recognize them. This might well be Erik Gillard’s greatest gift: to show us what these building blocks look like, and not merely in theory, but in the context of a real life. My premise is that the choices Erik has made—to live humbly, to eschew so many of the trappings of modern American life along wit
h the debt that, for most of us, necessarily accompanies them—do not bespeak a diminished quality of life. Indeed, they bespeak a vastly improved quality of life, defined at least in part (but not solely, not at all) by the freedom he enjoys. Freedom to work as little or as much as he desires at a job he loves because it fills his soul with wonder and joy, even if it fails to fill his pockets beyond the bare minimum necessary to sustain his modest needs. Freedom to indulge his whims and muses, at least to the extent those whims and muses do not require financial resources he does not have. Freedom to disbelieve the adage “time is money,” which strikes Erik as one of the dumbest things he’s ever heard. Freedom to consider what constitutes true wealth and, better yet, freedom to pursue this truth.
For the full 40 years of my life thus far, a figure I dearly hope represents no less than the approximate halfway point of the time allotted to my physical being, I have remained mostly blind to the ways in which our contemporary definition of wealth disregards and even erodes the true riches of both humanity and the natural world. My blindness is not an anomaly; it is merely a reflection of a greater cultural ignorance that has been generations in the making. Exchanging this blindness for sight, on both individual and collective levels, is not an event, but a process. The first step is simply acknowledging that we are free to do so.
* * *
5 I have even been told that, on occasion, he does not lower the toilet seat after use.
[ CHAPTER FIVE ]
IN WHICH I REVEAL ALL.
I WAS BORN on November 23, 1971, in a hospital in Saint Albans, Vermont, a small town situated in the midst of the state’s northwest corridor, a flat and fertile swath of land that pushes against the flanks of the Green Mountains to the east and empties into Lake Champlain to the west. This is dairy farming country, although less so now than it was then. When I was born, Vermont was home to more than 5,000 dairy farms; today, there are fewer than 1,000, and they continue to dwindle at a rate of a dozen or so per year. Still, the ever-consolidating nature of the dairy industry means that those 1,000 or so farms are home to a tremendous number of bovines, and Vermont boasts more cows per capita than any other state in the union.
My arrival fell on the day before Thanksgiving, which has no particular bearing on anything but the fact that once every 7 years or so (leap years mess things up a bit), my birthday falls on Turkey Day. I’ve always felt badly for those whose birthdays fall on holidays, but if one had to choose a holiday to be born on, Thanksgiving is arguably one of the best because Thanksgiving does not inherently honor the birth of anyone else. Moreover, unlike Christmas, there is no traditional exchange of gifts, a practice that understandably imbues all December 25 birthdays with a needling doubt and subsequent confusion: Is this a Christmas gift, or a birthday gift? Did I end up with the same amount of gifts, more gifts, or fewer gifts than I would have if I’d been born on a different day? You can see how this could be damaging.
I was my parents’ first child; at the time, we lived in a drafty old farmhouse set on 170 acres, at the edge of a gravel road not far outside the small town of Enosburg. The house was heated by a woodstove, which vented smoke through a chimney that curved alarmingly on its path from stove to sky. My parents were of the ilk that seemed forever intent on escaping something, although they never clearly articulated what, exactly, this something might be. They kept goats, drove a VW Beetle, and husbanded extensive vegetable gardens. Hippies are what they were, or maybe back-to-the-landers, although any distinction between the two terms seems less than precise. They were well schooled (Johns Hopkins and Cornell for my father; Grinnell for my mother), but seemed uninterested in the sort of professional-track careers generally assumed to be the outcome of such educations.
Indeed, their “careers,” such as they were, seemed purposely built to elude much, if any, recompense. My father worked with words; primarily, he wrote poetry and edited poetry anthologies, and if ever there were a profession less disposed to fiscal remuneration, I’d be curious to know what it is. Finger painting, maybe. My mother kept busy around the homestead and for a time milked cows at a farm up the road. At some point, when I was about 2, my folks sold the farmhouse and the sliver of land on which it sat and built a cabin at the boundary of field and forest, a good quarter-mile off the gravel town road. It was a small cabin, two rooms, really, with a loftlike second floor and a deck on the woods side. It did not have electricity or running water. If you needed to pee, you went outside. If you needed to take a dump, and it was January and 20 below, first you held it, then you held it some more, then you cursed, then you beelined for the outhouse.
I don’t remember feeling poor, but I know that we were. I mean, we always had plenty to eat and presents at Christmas and that sort of thing, but the day-in, day-out details of our existence were rooted in poverty. Cars broke and were not immediately fixed; clothes were patched and then, when the patches wore through, patched again. Clearly, it wasn’t a grinding sort of poverty, and I suspect it was not entirely dissimilar to Erik’s poverty, which is to say that it looked poorer from the outside than it felt on the inside.
My father, in particular, has always been thrifty, and at times downright miserly. Even as he progressed from the realm of poetry to more lucrative pastures, eventually earning a solid middle-class income, he remained the sort of fellow whose happiness is largely disconnected from finance. Instead, he finds his joy in both quiet observations of the world around him and a variety of esoteric pursuits that, beyond their eccentricity, share the singular commonality that they cost almost nothing. Here is my father, carefully balancing a raw egg on its end, a feat of derring-do that demands a long and disciplined nurturing of skill. That, and a mop. There he is, growing monster pumpkins, carefully cultivated orbs of orange flesh that have no purpose but to be admired, before collapsing in on themselves as they decompose into the very soil from which they came. Listen to him as he speaks backwards (sdrawkcab skaeps eh sa mih ot netsil); watch him grow artichokes in central Vermont, a climate wholly unsuited to the task (the horticultural equivalent of downhill skiing in Miami). For a time, he was buying old, unrecognizably crusted and degraded coins on eBay and polishing them at home. This hobby did not seem to last as long as his others, I suspect because it cost too much to keep up.
At the risk of being accused of pop psychology, I can’t help but consider my father’s backstory and wonder about the bearing it must have had on his view of things relating to money.
My father was born in 1943 and reared alongside his brothers in Montclair, New Jersey. His father, Frederick Hewitt, had had the good fortune to inherit upwards of $5 million from his parents; this was back in the 1920s, when a million bucks was, well, a hell of a lot of money. It still isn’t peanuts, of course, but understand that according to the consumer price index, $1 million in 1920 would these days be the equivalent of almost $11 million. Which is to say, my father was born into an exceptionally wealthy family.
This situation did not last for long because over the final years of my grandfather’s life (he died when my father was still a boy), he pretty much blew the whole wad. Actually, he blew more than the whole wad, eventually sinking so deeply into debt that his wife was forced to return to work as a nurse, 7 days per week, in order to simply pay the interest on his debt. The stock market and alcohol are reputed to have played starring roles in my grandfather’s financial ruination, as was his habit of making unsecured loans to pretty much anyone who asked. Upon his death, each of his three sons received a modest inheritance of $10,000, courtesy of my grandfather’s life insurance policy.
Financially speaking, I contend that this represents a fairly profound fall from grace. Psychologically speaking, I contend that a childhood environment of such economic schizophrenia is extremely likely to make an impression of some sort.
In any event, my father spent his modest share of his father’s life insurance payout on the old farmhouse and the 170 acres where I spent the first 6 years of my life. Perhaps this purchase was r
eflective of a need to convert liquidity and all its attendant risks to what is arguably the most tangible asset one can assume: land. Maybe my father was afraid that if he didn’t spend his money on something of durable value, he’d follow his father’s lead and spend it on many somethings of less certain worth. Probably he just wanted a piece of land and a roof over his head.
In my 6th year, my parents moved to a small town a few miles outside the state capital of Montpelier where my father had taken a job at the Vermont Arts Council the year before. As it had for so many of their peers, the appeal of hyper-rural, self-subsistence living had worn thin. The subzero forays to the outhouse, and the long walk from where the decrepit VW was parked at road’s edge to the small cabin, half-lit by the smoky flames of kerosene lanterns. The isolation and its inevitable companion, loneliness. It is my observation that few can sustain the romanticization of these things, the veneer of which is slowly worn away by realities on the ground. There was nothing dictating my parents’ ascetic lifestyle beyond their own sense of how life should be lived, and they would not be the first to refine that sense so that it aligned with indoor plumbing and light switches.
After a year of caretaking a sprawling, decidedly spooky and defunct country inn, my folks bought themselves a house, complete with a pair of eminently flushable toilets (one on each floor!) and a mortgage. By today’s standards, the price was laughably low—$55,000 for a well-constructed and fairly new Cape-style home, situated on 3 acres of mixed hardwoods. Back then, the area was strictly working class, rooted in the trades; it has since largely morphed into a bedroom community of white-collar professionals and modestly successful artists. It’s not so much left leaning as it is left horizontal, a community of unapologetic liberals with a predilection for natural fibers, organic produce, and NPR–stickered Subaru station wagons.