Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  Why did something paradoxical in me, at that moment, long for something grand? For something that shouted the glory of human beings rather than being practically erased by the thick woods around it? Freud noted that people subconsciously struggle with two opposite but equal fears: being expelled by nature — cast out of Eden, as it were — and being absorbed by nature. This was the latter fear. By scaling down to only this speck of human space, Jackie had been enveloped by nature. No electrical wires, no plumbing. The bubbling creek now sounded almost ominous. I pulled off my shoes, heard the door creak open. I couldn’t see inside, didn’t want to. I wanted to be back in the plush interior of the car, jazz on the stereo, cruising on the highway back to Chapel Hill. But there was no turning back. I stooped down and entered the box.

  From the inside, instead of feeling cramped, the place felt surprisingly roomy. While Jackie brewed tea on her four-burner gas stove, I leaned back into her great-grandmother’s rocking chair and looked around. The space was so filled with the richness of her life that its edges fell away. It seemed to expand. Photos of her two grown daughters, of her ex-husband, even of her infamous Klansman father. Jackie said something that sounded a little shocking to me, but I’d later get where she was coming from: “Like a lot of Southern men of his era,” she said, “he was a damned racist but had a heart of gold.” Everything seemed forgiven. Excerpts from Buddhist and Taoist texts and snippets of poems and spiritual quotes filled the gaps between the photos of her life, a half dozen of them fastened to the ladder that rose up to a small loft, which contained a single window over her mattress and a set of drawers. Books filled a shelf covering one wall: a library of poetry, philosophy, spirituality, and — Jackie’s a scientist, after all — technical books on biology, physics, astronomy, soils, and permaculture. I didn’t see any on medicine other than a copy of Where There Is No Doctor, a manual I had occasionally used as an aid worker. The house had a faint scent of cedar from what she called her “splurge”: one of the walls was finished with pure, beautiful cedar from ground to ceiling.

  I now count the next few hours as among the most sublime of my life. Later Jackie would say that during our hours together the conversation would dive deep and surface again and again, that we’d go from smiling over the tea, the setting sun, and silence to talking about philosophy.

  All the while the 12 × 12, tiny as it was, expanded outward. Outward to her neighbors. Outward to her gardens. Outward to the forest. She talked about her dream: living not only in harmony with nature (“having the carbon footprint of a Bangladeshi”) but among a variety of social classes and races. Her two acres were part of a thirty-acre area. Of the thirty, twenty remained wild — through the intentional plan of an ingenious local eco-developer I’d learn more about later — common space she shared with four neighboring families: a Mexican furniture craftsman, a Honduran fast-food worker, an African American secretary, and the fascinating Thompsons across the road, who had moved to the country from a crack-infested trailer park and now struggled to make it as organic farmers.

  She talked about a New American Dream that stretched beyond these ethnically diverse thirty acres. Others in Adams County were resisting the Flat World, trying to imagine and live something different. This was one of the only counties in the United States adding small farms each year. Land in Adams was still inexpensive enough for the average person to buy, yet there was a large and growing urban market just up the road in Chapel Hill and Durham that increasingly demanded — and would pay a premium price for — organic and local foods. Nationally, their lives tied into the growing slow food, environmental, and antiwar movements, part of a more durable future.

  “You might say it all centers around a question,” she said as the sun was going down. “Where do you grab the dragon’s tail?”

  Two deer bolted through Zone 2, beyond the deer fence. I spotted them through the 12 × 12’s cedar-side window, slowly becoming aware of the natural activity around Jackie’s home. Meanwhile, she talked about her upcoming trip in the next weeks. She had an eighty-dollar Greyhound ticket out west. With a small group, she’d walk a pilgrimage across the desert to the Nevada Atomic Test Site to hold up a sign saying NOT IN OUR NAME. And then she’d be “Grey-dogging,” as she put it, further west to visit other activist friends. After thirty years of doctoring she’d taken a year’s sabbatical and was on a sort of pilgrimage to figure out if she would continue in medicine or strike out on a new path.

  It was time for me to go. But I wanted to absorb more. “Where do you grab the dragon’s tail?” I asked, feeling the Bolivian rainforest burning, the climate dangerously warming.

  She looked at me and said: “I think you should grab it where the suffering grabs you the most.”

  As I drove away, the sun was setting. I only made it fifty yards before slamming on the brakes. I looked over my shoulder. Most Americans seem to have a recessive melodrama gene, and I guess I’m among them; I couldn’t resist the urge to look back. Through a cloud of dust the 12 × 12 appeared hazy. Jackie’s brook, swaying winter wheat, “the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing.” I’m not sure how long I stared back at the tiny house, the seed that becomes a redwood, the atom that turns into a bomb.

  I TOLD MY SISTER OVER THE PHONE about my 12 × 12 visit, and she said: “Where do you put that?”

  At first I put it in one of those categories we all have: that time when that amazing thing happened. A one-off wonder. Something pure and illuminating that becomes a kind of touchstone. Frankly, I had no idea where to put it. I only knew that I felt a stirring at the 12 × 12, partly because of the way Jackie looked at me. She didn’t see a baffled global nomad; she gazed through that and saw what I might become.

  In any case, I reluctantly put the 12 × 12 away and prepared to head back to New York. My dad was recovering, walking around, even planning to start jogging again. So my sonly duties were done. That’s when the letter arrived.

  I found it at midnight — I wasn’t sleeping so well at the time — partly hidden in the pile of mail by my parents’ phone, addressed to me. I took a sip of red wine and breathed in deeply. The letter was weighty, like a fat college acceptance letter. I opened it.

  A slip of paper fell out; on it was a poem by Mary Oliver called “Mindfulness.” The poem ran down the page like a long, neat ribbon, each line containing just a few words. As I read it I felt the expansiveness I often feel when reading Mary Oliver’s poetry. She talked about her teachers: the world’s “untrimmable light” and prayers “made out of grass.” But one particular phrase really made me pause. Oliver said her life’s purpose, essentially, is to become fully absorbed “inside this soft world.”

  My heart now beating a little faster, I pulled the meatier pages out of the envelope, several loose-leaf pages of handwriting folded to fit into the small envelope. I unfolded them. “The sky is exquisite now. What a real joy to have you visit.” Jackie went on to lay out several pages of facts, calling it “info I forgot to pass on,” mostly the names of others in Adams County living in a way that challenged corporate economic globalization — organic farmers, permaculturalists, peak oil radicals, beekeepers, an “intentional community” called Blue Heron Farm, the Silk Hope Catholic Worker, a couple of families trying variations on her 12 × 12 experiment.

  From this info she forgot to pass on the fuzzy edges of a story emerged. On one level it sounded like what Che Guevara used to call gusanos (worms) that slowly, bite by bite, cause the whole apple to collapse from within. It was the story of two competing visions of how to reshape the Old South and, indeed, the globalizing world. But deeper than that was something more. An extraordinary physician, activist, farmer, mother, wisdomkeeper, and visionary, taking the time that night to notice the beauty of the sky and to handwrite me a long letter in cursive, by candlelight.

  As if guided by instinct I flipped over the Oliver poem. In cursive, across the back lengthwise, Jackie had drawn from the exact phrase that had practically jumped out of th
e poem at me, a phrase that hinted about the shape of the world. She’d written: “A soft world?”

  My heart beat increasingly faster as I noticed the letter had a postscript: “P.S. And I really forgot the most obvious: I’ll be away till summer, out West. You are absolutely welcome to come and stay in the 12 × 12 for a day or a week or a month or more, and any in and out combination. Just show up — I’ll let the neighbors know.”

  I put down the letter and knew I had to go. I had to face this challenge to find a way out of my despair; to learn to think, feel, and live in another way. The 12 × 12 seemed full of clues toward living lightly, artfully in the twenty-first century. If beauty, as Ezra Pound said, loves the forgotten spaces, maybe so too does wisdom. New York would have to wait. Unexpectedly, I was bound for No Name Creek.

  3. THAWING

  IT WAS DARK WHEN I DROVE UP to Jackie’s place. Toting a backpack, I groped my way along paths through a pitch black Zone 2 and into Zone 1, finally making it to the unlocked 12 × 12. I fumbled around for a light switch; naturally there was none. I managed to find matches and light candles. After exploring Jackie’s bookshelves and the tiny loft that held her — now my — single mattress, I wrapped up in a couple of blankets and sat in her great-grandmother’s goosehead chair for one hour, then two. I listened to the slight murmur of the creek, not completely sure of what else to do. As the quiet and darkness pressed in, so too did a mix of joy and trepidation.

  Jackie told me how astonished she sometimes was to wake up in a Garden of Eden. I felt no such thing my first mornings there. I rose at dawn, climbed out of the loft, and made a strong cup of tea. Cocooned in a handmade quilt in the rocking chair, I stared out into the cold gray light: the steam from my tea fogging my glasses and the windows; No Name Creek hardly stirring beneath a partial sheet of ice; the new moon cold and hidden beyond the horizon someplace; the stark 12 × 12 slab of frigid concrete pretending to be a floor.

  Without Jackie there, the place seemed completely different. Instead of her contagious enthusiasm and intelligence, there was only me. Me and a bunch of plants, barely breathing. A late frost hit on my third night, causing hundreds of farmers throughout the county to lose their strawberries and tomatoes, but the diversity and native-plant focus of Jackie’s farm hedged against the suddenly frozen soil. Some of her plants froze to a crisp and died, but most of them held on.

  Whereas I’d seen only the flourishing-of-it-all in the light of Jackie’s charisma, I soon realized that, aside from the garden beds in Zone 1, the earth around me was mostly slumbering. Stick season, they call it, with the skeletons of birch and oak and the sticky buds of leaves to come. Stalks of winter wheat, hoary vines on the trellises, and last year’s asparagus. And silence.

  I walked down to the creek, listened to it murmur, stuck a finger in. Frigid. I yanked my frozen finger out. Beyond the creek, a rolling terrain with more late-winter woods, pasture, and a higher forest beyond the pasture, all of the landscape edged with a crisp gray sky. I stopped for a moment to pick an empty cocoon from a branch, noticing a crack where the butterfly had emerged and flown out into life. As the lifeless shell crunched between my cold fingers, turning to a dry, useless powder, I wondered what in the world I was doing here. Should I have come at all?

  I could be helping Liberian refugees, I thought, saving rainforests in Bolivia, or distributing malaria-preventing bednets. The things I was trained to do. Or if I was to be in America, I should be making myself useful, working twelve-hour days at the UN pressing for better refugee policies or sending out scathing op-eds and speaking at conferences. But this, pardon me, dead place just made me feel the deadness of the society around me even more. That dead pond in the industrial park; the techno-hospital’s fast food. Trapped in a looping mind, I reasoned that coming to the 12 × 12 had been a mistake.

  At night I’d sometimes light a little bonfire outside and listen to the hiss and sizzle, look into the orange coals, and stare at the stars, as cold up there as I was down below. The fire would die out, and I’d climb the 12 × 12’s ladder to Jackie’s loft and try to get cozy in her bed. I’d have no dreams at all. It was as if the nonlife, the frigidity of the place, was mirrored in my dreams. In that tiny house, snuggled in a vast forest, secluded in its upper loft, my spirit felt as fallow as the scene around me.

  A warm pile of eggs is what would begin to thaw me out. My eleven-year-old neighbor, Kyle Thompson, beckoned to me one morning as I walked up Jackie’s dirt road toward Old Highway 117 South. He asked me if I was living at Jackie’s, and I nodded. Without further introductions, he took my sleeve and led me over to the important business at hand: a disheveled woodpile, where a Muscovy duck squatted over her nest. With a stick, Kyle prodded the duck gently to reveal a large pile of eggs beneath her in a bed of hay and feathers. “We’re going to have fourteen ducklings,” he said, a little proudly.

  I looked at Kyle. His thick, dun-brown hair flopped above a pair of blue eyes. He had a couple of freckles under each eye and a slight tilt to his head. Though I later found out he wanted to be an engineer, and I had already discovered his love of animal husbandry, his facial expression suggested how I pictured the young James Joyce in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I looked back down at the eggs. Kyle spoke excitedly about the ducklings to come, but I was doubtful. Amid the frost-covered wood and gray background, they looked like cold marble, fossilized dinosaur eggs, things not destined to bring forth life.

  Kyle was practically the only person I saw during those frigid first days at the 12 × 12. The colorful cast of neighbors Jackie had described — Mexican furniture makers, permaculture pioneers, and even Kyle’s parents, the Thompsons — all seemed to be in hibernation. Even Kyle I didn’t see much; sometimes I’d spot him a football field’s length away, across the field and pond, looking expectantly into his woodpile, talking to the mother duck, trying to persuade life to happen. I was otherwise alone. I felt bare to the point of barren, just another skeleton, like the plants or the dark new moon.

  What was I to do? “Not do, be,” Jackie had told me. In her invitation note, she mentioned that she was not asking me to house-sit or farm-sit. Her guidance was clear: I was simply to sit. It would become apparent that, for all the variety and fruitfulness of her gardens, they were mostly on autopilot. She planted and arranged in ways that minimized weeds by not having rows, and she used plants that needed little water. Permaculture, to Jackie, was to be a blessing, not a burden. Her motto for her gardens was the same as the motto of her house: Think small. No, not labor in her fields but rather labor with her fields — and also observe the fields. I realized how fortunate I was to be able to take this leisure time; I’d been frugal during years of work abroad and had savings. So now, like much of nature, so still, just sitting, the minerals, the trees, the water in the pond, I too began to feel my anxious mind slow down as the days passed and I tuned into nature, slipping into what the Chinese call wu wei, an alert inactivity. This is not considered sloth but a kind of “waiting” in the esoteric sense of the word: present, attentive, as when Jesus said to “be like a servant who does not know at what hour the master will return.” An outward nondoing; an inner readiness.

  The world was numb; I was numb. But numb isn’t dead. Kyle called me over to the woodpile, pointing out the very first hairline crack in one of the fourteen duck eggs. I finally felt that something might actually happen. That if I waited patiently enough, the world might reveal itself to me.

  ALL THE SURPRISES AT JACKIE’S helped to gradually thaw me out. Perhaps there’s a “cure” in the practice of curiosity. With no electricity, piped water, or any of the conveniences we are so accustomed to, I was forced to see everything anew. The first puzzle: How in the world was I to bathe?

  Jackie didn’t leave an instruction manual, an “Idiot’s Guide” to living in a 12 × 12. There was no shower, of course, and the creek was still too darn cold. But so was the rainwater Jackie harvested from the two gutters running off the 12 × 12’s roof. I took one
bucket shower, cursing as I cupped freezing rainwater over my head, before I discovered a five-gallon rubber diaphragm on her back porch labeled “Sun Shower.” The directions were on the side of it, and I followed them, filling up the rubber bag and letting the morning sun heat it. Midday or evening, I strung it up in a tree beside the 12 × 12 and felt the positively hot water stream over my body, which became a sensuous daily pleasure. I appreciated every bit of that hot water, and it was all the lovelier knowing that its energy came directly from that day’s sun, producing no dangerous greenhouse gasses. And the runoff watered the gardens; nothing wasted down a drain.

  I began to appreciate water. It felt so immediate. Instead of being invisibly piped into my home from some deep aquifer or distant reservoir, it fell from the sky into the pair of fifty-five-gallon tanks beside the house. When I arrived they were full; when I left, ditto. All of my dishwashing, laundry (I followed Jackie’s lead and used only biodegradable soaps), bathing, and cooking water simply came out of the sky, passed through my hands, and then went directly back into the earth to water the food I ate.

  Less appealing was the dilemma of the toilet. Instead of a flush toilet, I discovered that Jackie used a five-gallon composting toilet under the porch out back. It featured a regular toilet seat, but there was no chemical-filled cesspool belowground — just a standard white bucket. Throw some fresh-smelling cedar chips in after every use, and there was absolutely no foul odor. The conundrum occurred when the bucket started to fill. And fill. How to dispose of it?

  I fingered along the spines of Jackie’s scientific books, until I came to one with a rather nonthreatening title: The Humanure Handbook. For twenty-first-century homesteaders like Jackie, it’s the bible of composting toilets. So many designs! True to her simplicity, Jackie’d chosen the simplest model, the concealed five-gallon bucket, the contents of which, The Humanure Handbook informed me, I was to simply compost. Yes, in fourteen weeks human feces are soil just like any other soil and can be ploughed back into your garden. So I carried the bucket over to the compost pile, intending to follow the Handbook and dump it right over my eggshells and carrot peels. But at the last minute I couldn’t go through with it. The science notwithstanding, I felt queasy over the aesthetics; I grabbed a shovel and buried the contents deep in the woods.