by Ben Hewitt
Actually, we could afford more, so we obsessively began making double and sometimes even triple payments. This was not all my doing, obviously, and I should mention Penny’s role in all this. She was, as much, if not more so than I, the one pushing for rapid retirement of our debt. And she was, inarguably more so than I, willing to do whatever it took to make this happen. This was a period of unrelenting paucity and patience because, as it turns out, $50,000 isn’t really that much with which to raise a house, even if you’re supplying the bulk of the blood, sweat, and tears. By the time we had the roof screwed down and the windows installed, our pile of money/credit had evaporated, and any “luxuries” were eschewed in favor of rapid repayment. Kitchen cabinets? Who needs ’em! A finished floor in the living room? Hold yer horses, boy: Not until the loan’s paid off!11
Was there any rational reason to fight so frenetically against our burden of debt? Remember, this was the late ’90s, in the heady days of the Internet bubble. I mean, did the word “austerity” even exist back then? Probably, but if so, only in dictionaries and the specialized vocabularies of economists. During that period, Erik Gillard was but a child, really, not yet able to vote or buy a bottle of beer. Oh sure, there was the usual assortment of beard-toting anticapitalist curmudgeons scattered about, grumbling about globalization, corporatism, and mindless consumerism. But there’s no denying that the prevailing national mood was one of delighted optimism and giddy anticipation for a future that seemed, if anything, brighter than the present. Really, how else to explain the coincident rise of the sport utility vehicle, the model names of which bespoke a yearning to push with feckless abandon into the 21st century: Explorer. Navigator. Blazer. Pathfinder.
I’m not suggesting it wasn’t rational to absolve ourselves of debt; I’m only noting that there was little in the broader culture of the day that presented it as a sensible choice. Nor can I lay claim to any sort of intellectualized ethos in my relationship to debt. Our quest was not part of a quiet protest; we weren’t disavowing usury, or attempting to drop out of the capitalist system. Hell, I liked making and having money, and I was excited to realize that I might actually achieve “middleclassdom,” a socioeconomic status I’d long assumed would always prove elusive.
Therefore, to explain my acute aversion to debt, I can only return to the sense of near dread I felt every time our monthly mortgage reminder arrived at our little community post office. I’ve long had the habit of peeking through the small window of our mailbox door to see what clues I might discern from that limited vantage point. A child’s game, I know, but hey: We all need occasional reminders not to take life so damn seriously.
Now, it may have helped that I knew when, give or take a day or two, our mortgage slip was due to arrive each month (always on or around the 15th), but I never failed to identify the bank’s distinct cream-colored envelope, even before I saw the return address offset against the smooth paper. This positive identification was accompanied by an acute sense of physical and emotional discontent. What I felt was not quite nausea, and not quite depression, but something subtler. A distinct unease if you will, which lasted for as long as it took me to become distracted by more pressing concerns.
This sensation was particularly acute during the early years of repayment, when each check I sent did little to affect the totality of our debt load. I mean, even if I made a double payment, we were still looking at a $700 reduction. Now, 700 bucks ain’t nothing, but in the context of 50 large, it’s not a hell of a lot, and the difference between owing the bank $50,000 and $49,300 is hardly worth mentioning. Besides which, once interest was factored into the equation, a $700 payment only reduced our principal by a measly 200 bucks, if that. Things started to turn near the end of our payoff when, knowing we’d dipped into four-digit territory, my lingering feelings of dread mingled with something that felt almost like anticipation. At this point, each payment had a measurable impact on the remaining total. Seven hundred dollars from $5,000 feels like real progress, like a direct blow to the debt shackles that bind: Take that, sucka!
The closest I can come to a logical explanation for our obsession is this: I am fearful that I will someday find myself obliged to earn money at a job I don’t like in order to make good on the debt I’ve accrued. It occurred to me fairly early on in my adult life that the best and easiest place to allay my fear is at the outset of that treadmill. No debt = no need to service debt = not having to work to service the debt. It was math so basic, even I could understand it.
The upshot to all of this is that by the time my 37th birthday arrived, I inhabited a home that belonged entirely to Penny and me. The bank no longer had any stake in our house and land; so long as we kept up with our annual property taxes, no one could pile our belongings on the curb and kick us into the street. I would like to report that this marked a profound shift in our lives, but the truth is that things carried on pretty much as they had before. Because our mortgage payment had been entirely manageable, the sense of freedom realized by absolving ourselves of it was not as acute as we anticipated it might have been. Still, I can’t deny the satisfaction derived from dropping that last payment into the “outgoing” slot at the post office. That thin envelope carried more than a check and the stub from our payment reminder; it carried the not-insignificant weight of my debt-related obsession, and I knew that, barring some unforeseen turn of events, I would never again carry debt. Admittedly, that was only 4 years ago, so my fidelity to that pledge hasn’t yet had terribly many opportunities to be tested. But it also hasn’t failed me.
Look, I get it: The decision to eschew debt is an enormous luxury, afforded by no small amount of luck and good timing. The most obvious is the simple fact that we purchased our land before the onslaught of the real estate bubble. Even now, with that bubble in the latter stages of deflation, we couldn’t touch a comparable piece of property for anything close to what we paid. Score one for right place, right time. And then there were the less obvious factors from which we benefited: my paternal ancestors’ uncommon relationship to money, as well as the evolution of our skills relating to the pragmatic. Having dabbled in the trades, we possessed the rough knowledge necessary to put a roof over our heads, and what we didn’t know, we could glean from our network of friends, a benefit that is part and parcel of a less tangible but no less crucial factor in our successful quest to absolve ourselves of debt: We’d chosen to make a life in a region that does not revere excess. I’m generalizing, of course, but broadly speaking, northern Vermont is not a keep-up-with-the-Joneses sort of place. Indeed, at times it can seem as if overt displays of monetary and asset affluence are discouraged, and I think it seems this way because, in fact, they are. The rural hollows of my home state are imbued with a reverence for thrift and resourcefulness; it’s a place where people hunt not so much for sport as for food, and where the rust holes in our pickups are patched with duct tape and cast-off scraps of metal roofing. As a friend who moved to the region from the Dallas–Fort Worth area told me, “You have no idea what it’s like out there. You have no idea what the expectations are.” By “out there,” I understood that he meant not merely DFW, but America writ large. By “expectations,” I understood that he was speaking of the unspoken social pressure to maintain appearances. He’d come from a place where tape was for taping, and roofing was for roofing, and that “place” was the America inhabited by the overwhelming majority of her people.
There’s an obvious offshoot to the resourcefulness imbedded in my community: the acquisition of skills. More specifically, I’m speaking of the skills relating to the pragmatic and analog particulars of human existence in the 21st century, so many of which have been surrendered to the assumption that the economy of the future is one in which the majority will delegate the messier, sweatier essentials to either the unwashed minority or, if the techno-copians are to be believed, the manufactured technology that will result in the end of blisters and Band-Aids. Culturally speaking, the capacity to provide for ourselves the fundamentals
required for simple survival has eroded over time, along a trajectory that maintains an inverse relationship to monetary affluence. This is presumed to represent an increased “standard of living,” and seems rooted in the assumption that writing video game code and managing hedge funds are more financially viable and culturally laudable occupations than, say, building houses or growing food.
In certain outposts of our nation, including the outpost where we make our home, these assumptions have had trouble gaining traction. Which is to say that we are surrounded by people who know how to make things. And by “things,” I mean things you can hold, things you can eat, and things you can sleep in. I mean things that embody a physical form, that provide the building blocks of the essentials on which we all ultimately depend. Food and shelter are the most obvious, but they extend up the hierarchy of needs and wants and on into the realm of the not-strictly-essential-but-awfully-damn-nice-to-have: musical instruments, tools, and furniture are just a few that come to mind. I don’t mean to suggest that expertise in the trades is unique to rural Vermont, but this is undeniably a region occupied by more than its share of producers.
The point is that much as money begets money, I have come to understand thrift begets thrift. And it does this, at least in part, because the pursuit of thrift demands a type of resourcefulness that almost inevitably leads to the quest for, and acquisition of, more skills. And as one becomes connected to the network of people who rely on these skills, one becomes exposed to an ever-broader array of talents and flat-out cleverness, allowing one to further elude monetary abundance. This is not so surprising, really. Still, we tend to think of opportunity resulting primarily from a relentless climb up the socioeconomic ladder. It’s interesting to me to consider the ways in which climbing down creates its own opportunities.
Therefore, and as my friend from Texas astutely points out, it has been no small advantage to have been raised in a community imbued with both a lack of interest in financial excess and the skills necessary to maintain that lack of interest. In other words, I was privileged to be socialized to thrift and resourcefulness, and to be born into a network of capable people to call upon when my own skills fall short, as they so often do. It is no exaggeration to say that without this network, it is extremely unlikely we could have built a 2,200-square-foot home for $50,000. This truth inevitably leads me to the conclusion that without this network, it is extremely unlikely we could have bought our way out of debt before either of us hit 40. Or even 50.
Yet, for all of this, it is astonishing to consider the extent to which I have allowed my sense of affluence to be dictated by financial circumstances. I describe my years as “good” or “bad,” with “good” or “bad” referring strictly to my income, as if all the other forces in my life are secondary. It is amazing to consider how much I have given myself over to the cultural mythology of money-is-wealth, wringing my hands over retirement funds and savings accounts that seem ever inadequate, even as my family’s day-to-day needs and wants are met, time and time again. I take jobs strictly for the money, even when the money meets no immediate or even medium-term need. In other words, I find myself working more to earn for no other reason that to accumulate, to strengthen my so-called safety net, even as doing so pulls me out of the flow of my life and into the choppy current of money.
It is probably clear by now that, speaking strictly in financial terms, we are not wealthy. But that’s hardly the point. The point is that even I, with my innate aversion to debt and immersion in a proud culture of “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” have succumbed. I have begun to believe that this acquiescence is in large part responsible for my failure to recognize the true wealth that surrounds me. And what it is really worth.
* * *
6 In the interest of full disclosure, I am a high school dropout, although I did complete two semesters of college after acquiring my GED. In a very real sense, my truncated, atypical educational path has actually enabled me to pursue the career of my choosing, since I was not in a position of student loan repayment and therefore did not have to seek out a high-paying but possibly unfulfilling line of work in order to service this debt.
7 This is a joke. I don’t think the car was any worse off than when it had left the Volkswagen factory. Which is to say, it was plenty unsafe, but not because of anything my father had done to it.
8 We did, in fact, speak to a bank about preapproval for a mortgage. But upon hearing they were willing to lend us upwards of $100,000, we were frightened into retreat. It was simply too much money for us to fathom, and far too much for us to owe.
9 Much more on this later.
10 By now you might reasonably be wondering where one meets the sort of woman who is content to inhabit a tent in order to save money toward land, and who goes into labor with her first child at a lumberyard. In short, Penny and I met on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where I had gone to spend a winter doing construction and where she was doing odd jobs. We met on a job site on a typically raw February day, when she showed up at 7:00 a.m. on her bicycle to dig a trench for the sprinkler system. It was raining and about 40°F and, furthermore, she had a shovel lashed to her bike with frayed rope. What kind of woman rode her bicycle in the near-freezing rain on an early February morning to dig a ditch for $12 per hour? Only one kind: the kind I wanted to get to know a bit better.
11 I feel compelled to point out that the loan has since been retired, and we still don’t have a finished floor in the living room.
[ CHAPTER SIX ]
IN WHICH I CONSIDER MATTERS OF APPROPRIATE SCALE, INDUSTRIALISM, EMBEDDED ENERGY, THE CREATION OF MONEY, AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE NATURAL WORLD. OH, AND ROCKS. THOSE, TOO.
FOLLOWING MY morel hunt with Breakfast and Erik, only a few weeks of spring remained. They passed quickly, as Vermont spring weeks are wont to do. Every few days, after tending to farm chores, I struck out from my home and allowed myself to be swallowed by the dense forest that extends from our property to the north and west. Despite deliberate searching at the base of numerous dead elm and apple trees, I found no more morels.
At first, this was disappointing; my share of the take from my excursion with Breakfast and Erik had lasted for exactly two meals. To cook the mushrooms, I melted generous portions of sweet butter in a pan and dropped the morels into the melted fat to sizzle and shrivel as the heat forced moisture from their cells. I’d sliced them thin and diagonally, for no other reason than this was how I’d seen good cooks slice things, and they cooked quickly, filling the air with an immersive aroma that was both earthy and fruity. They came out of the pan hot, glistening, and shriveled, and even when cooked, they somehow exuded a pleasing wildness. My family ate them bare-handed, licking warm butter and the essence of mushroom from our fingers.
The boys clamored for more mushrooms; to appease them, I learned to identify other species of fungi in the damp softwood stands to the north of our home, where golden chanterelles, spiny hedgehogs, and barrel-capped boletes proliferated. It became rare for me to return home with a less-than-full baseball cap, and on occasion I was even forced to fashion a satchel from my T-shirt, although I never achieved Erik’s sanguinity in the face of the blackflies. Once, when battling a particularly bloodthirsty swarm of the little buzzing bastards, I dumped an entire shirt-load onto the forest floor. After that, I carried a paper bag for my stash, although, I had to admit, it lacked panache.
In any case, I reveled in my newfound foraging skills. The notion that I could feed my family simply by slipping into the woods for an hour or two was immensely pleasing to me; it struck a primeval chord that seemed to resonate in some ancient part of me I hadn’t even known existed. One of the things I’ve always loved about growing food is that it feels real. When I push my hands into the cool soil to unearth a fist-sized potato that I planted only months ago from the previous year’s seed stock, I am unearthing one of the most essential and tangible assets known to humanity: food. And by having sown, tended, and harvested the c
rop myself, I am free of the layers of commerce that generally mediate these exchanges in contemporary America. The only commerce—if you want to call it that—is between the soil, the spud, and me.
Still, there was something about foraging that both expanded and elevated this sense of freedom. There was no meddling with nature’s process; no soil to be turned, no weeds to be pulled, no fat potato beetles to be popped between the thumb and forefinger. There was only the forest and I, and as I walked beneath the lush canopy of trees, I felt at once tuned in and relaxed in a way that eludes me during my workaday tasks. Everything was acute and vibrant: colors, smells, the calls of birds, the scurrying of squirrels, and even the sensation of my feet pressing into the soft bed of needles and leaves. And what of that sense of the ancient, that primeval chord that rang quietly but clearly every time I focused my vision on the land, in search of nourishment? It was subtle, and so deeply historical I couldn’t put a finger on its origins, but I wondered if perhaps it represented the true foundation of my humanity; the millennia of hunting and gathering that preceded me. We tend to think of agriculture as being the foundation on which our societies are built, but of course cultivated crops have been around for only a fraction of human history. The general anthropological consensus is that we have practiced agriculture for a mere 5 percent of our existence.
Some days I did not gather mushrooms but instead simply wandered, rambling aimlessly across the land. It was startling to realize how little I knew about my surroundings, how little time I’d allowed myself to get to know the land to which we had held title for 15 years. I roamed up, down, and across our property, sometimes following old skidder paths, sometimes pushing through the thorny underbrush, my hands raised in a protective “x” across my face.