Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  We’d come to a sharp bend in No Name Creek. We stopped and lay down on the mossy banks, listening to it gurgle past. She took off her shoes, got up and wandered around, staring at the grass.

  I lay back and looked up through the trees, just barely showing their sticky buds, into a blue sky. After a while Leah came over and said, “I have a gift for you.”

  She led me over to a patch of clovers right at the creek’s edge. My eye caught it immediately. Amid the near identical plants, one stood out: a four-leaf clover.

  I touched it. “I can’t believe you found this,” I said. I’d never found one.

  “They’re everywhere once you have eyes for them.”

  Later beside No Name Creek, Leah dangled two caterpillars from their silk like tiny puppets over the book she was reading: My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. In it, psychologist Chellis Glendinning argues that our fast pace, technological and chemical addictions, and lifelong traumas are linked to our dislocation from the natural world. She uses examples from nature-based societies to show how to reconnect to the living world.

  As I boiled water in the 12 × 12, I watched Leah by the creek; she seemed lost in thought, staring past the caterpillars into the woods. Her shoes were off, bare toes curling into the mossy bank. I walked down to the creek with two steaming cups of chamomile tea and handed her one. She dropped one of the caterpillars onto a leaf and carefully accepted the cup in her two hands like an offering.

  I moved a finger to intercept the silk thread of the remaining caterpillar, and let it dangle before my eyes. We were both quiet for a while, lost in our own thoughts as the creek flowed by. I dipped a toe in. Still cold, but not the freezing water when I arrived in early spring. The day was half gray, with intermittent light streaming through the clouds; the sun mostly hidden. A breeze from the east suddenly brought the smell of the chicken factories, and I felt myself seize up a little, flattening and hardening to my surroundings. I made an effort to come more deeply into mindfulness, feeling the small perfection of the creek’s warming waters. A rebellious fragment of light broke through on the edge of a cloud, bejeweling the creek’s surface with a hundred diamonds.

  Then they were gone, and the surface was gray again. I looked at the inchworm dangling from the silk in my hand and said to Leah, “Think of how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things.” We talked about how animals don’t just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation. While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk — which per gram is several times stronger than steel — at room temperature in water. Humans manufacture ceramics with similarly high temperatures, but the abalone makes its shell in seawater by laying down a small layer of protein and precipitating the calcium out of the seawater around it. The abalone shell is “self-healing” because cracks within it actually strengthen the ends of the cracks so they don’t get bigger, unlike, say, an auto windshield. We’re just now learning to make dental ceramics this way.

  “Imagine we could design our built environment as gently as the caterpillar,” I said, noticing how the 12 × 12, from this angle, looked so slight that it faded into the natural background.

  Leah touched the silk thread, which the caterpillar makes benignly from the protein fibroin, and placed the dangling black caterpillar back on a leaf. “And think of its metamorphosis,” she said, “in its cocoon, a churning of natural juices, enzymes — and out comes a butterfly. Where are the toxics in that?”

  We decided to explore Siler City. Because I only had the one bike, we took her car. Along the four-lane highway, we passed WalMart and other box stores, finding Siler City’s Main Street abandoned. The box stores had turned the old downtown area into a ghost town: stores boarded up, hardly anyone on the street. The seizing up I’d felt by the creek, that nagging tinge of hopelessness, slid into me again. For a moment, I was certain that the world would slip, inevitably, into a genetically altered, overheated place of lost uniqueness and forgotten joy.

  But instead of being this negative state, I simply observed it. I was coming to realize that the ideal of warrior presence is not a constant state. Today, I consider it a peak that I scale up, often slipping off, but I can always see it there. Even those rare humans who have lived lives of total love write intimately about their fears. Mother Teresa, for example, revealed in her private diaries an entire lifetime of doubt, a current of negativity that she battled daily. Gandhi, too, wrote of his weaknesses, his feelings of greed. Martin Luther King Jr. said once: “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” If these heroes had to struggle daily to overcome the world’s negative mental-emotional force field, imagine how much more the rest of us must struggle to maintain warrior presence.

  Leah and I wandered on foot into one of the few downtown businesses that wasn’t boarded up, a Mexican grocery. We stopped in front of a wall filled with clear plastic bags of herbs, leaves, teas, and spices from Mexico. Leah picked up several, each eliciting a different memory from visits to her mom’s home in Mexico. Her mom retired from financial planning at forty-eight and, with her third husband, bought a house with an ocean view. There, she’d been living for the past few years, neither happy nor unhappy. Leah said that her mom described this state as a “permanent vacation,” piña coladas accompanying every sunset.

  Out on the street we passed a domestic violence counseling center, the signs in English and Spanish. “And there’s Triple-A,” I said.

  “AA, you mean. Alcoholics Anonymous, not the automobile club.”

  “Of course,” I said, squinting to discern an odd sign that read “Holy Congregation of the Bladder” in front of a tiny church that seemed recently opened. “What strange salvation,” I said.

  “Salvation from what,” said Leah. “Urinary tract infections?”

  Whatever was not boarded up seemed to be either an odd religious cult or a substance abuse program. We didn’t pass more than a handful of people on the street. I thought of my neighbor José, who told me he’d walked backward into America. He’d crossed illegally at night through the Arizona desert and said he’d heard the federales counted the number of Mexicans who came in by looking at the footprints in the sand. “I walked in backward,” he said, “so they’d think I was going back to Mexico!” Had I, too, walked backward into America? Compared to the slow-living subsistence cultures where I’d spent the past decade, Siler City seemed devoid of life. The town is more than half Latino — most are workers in the dreaded chicken factories — and Mexicans and whites alike drove along the Wal-Mart strip in oversized pickups, loading them with “Made in China” junk.

  Is this what America is becoming? Are we as a society accepting a corporate personhood? Just as our personal legal liability has been shifted to the corporation, it seems that we have given ourselves up entirely to this arrangement, as though we are no longer liable for the maintenance of our own souls. Limited-liability living. It’s impossible for me to believe that in our deeper, silent selves we really prefer the efficiency of Siler City’s box-store strip to the humanity that used to exist downtown. I thought of the colonial plazas throughout Latin America, where people today stroll for hours, greeting strangers under palm trees; Gambia’s kundas, where extended families share everything; the bustle and color of outdoor markets I’ve walked through in India.

  Of course the Global South is also being colonized by Wal-Mart — now the biggest retailer in China — and its corporate ilk. Nevertheless, substance and traditional cultures exhibit a resiliency that works against the trend, and they tend to be faraway places that are harder for the corporations to reach. We in the West are subject to marketing’s relentless bombardment from birth. A South Carolina friend told me about a competition they had in her third-grade classroom: the teacher put them in groups of two, with th
e task of identifying as many corporate logos as possible. “That first time, we only confused the Black Hawks with Suzuki,” she said. “By the end of the year, we could all name hundreds of corporate images. At the time, we thought it was so much fun.”

  We generally think that colonization is something that happens only in other countries, but aren’t we in America also being colonized, constantly and relentlessly? Which is easier for corporate-political power: controlling people a continent away or those right next door? Americans watch an average of four hours of television a day. Our creative action is limited by an accumulation of regulations, taxes, and rules to an extent that eclipses much of our individuality. As Leah and I walked through the dead zone of what used to be Siler City, she talked about how she felt complicit in the way cities like this are changing. “I am a consumer,” she said. “It’s not even software that I can remove. It feels like it’s built into my hardware.”

  Just as we were beginning to feel down, we began to notice a change. As we walked into the very heart of Siler City, like little wildflowers bursting through cracks in asphalt, stubborn shoots of life emerged between the boarded-up shops and nineteenth-century tobacco warehouses: a tiny café, a pottery studio, a shop selling paintings and sculpture.

  This was Bradley’s work. In my mind, I put the pieces together. Before she left, Jackie had mentioned Bradley Jamison several times. He taught permaculture at the local community college and was president of a company he started, Environmental Solutions, through which he bought up large parcels of land, a hundred or two hundred acres at a time, and made them available for eco-communities. The thirty acres that Jackie, the Thompsons, Graciela, and José lived on had been one of Bradley’s purchases. His idea: Maintain a beautiful natural landscape by putting only a few houses fairly close together, and leaving the rest as shared natural space for the community — for hiking, fishing, meditation, gathering firewood. Bradley insisted that physically buying up the land was the only way to permanently hold back sprawl. And permaculture was the key to living sustainably on it.

  Bradley also had a vision of how twenty-first-century urban spaces should look, and he’d begun dabbling in Siler City, pressing the town to provide tax incentives to attract artists and small businesses. Leah and I wandered through this revitalizing space and talked enthusiastically about it on the drive back to the 12 × 12. She dropped me off there as the sun was setting, saying she had an outof-town trip planned the next week but hoped to visit again. I told her she was more than welcome.

  I BUMPED INTO BRADLEY A COUPLE DAYS LATER, while hiking near the spot where No Name Creek meets Old Highway 117 South. A pickup pulled over and a bearded man got out and shouted over to me.

  A little startled, I began heading back into the woods along the path, and he continued after me. I spun around, calling to him from a distance: “Can I help you with something?”

  “I own this land,” he said. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Bradley?” I said.

  He nodded, approaching me. He was nothing like I pictured. He had a shaved head, smoky beard, and red baseball cap, much too big for his head, that read “Libertarian Party.” His body was tight, sinewy.

  I explained I was living at Jackie’s and he nodded, saying he was busy and only had a moment. He talked about how he allowed eleven-year-olds into his permaculture courses at the community college, saying, “If people want to learn sustainable living, why should the government tell us how old they have to be?” Then he extended his tiny hand, passed me a business card (“Environmental Solutions, Inc., Bradley Jamison, President”), and he was gone.

  Bradley was so busy, evidently, because his Siler City idea was evolving into something bigger. Along with encouraging eco-development in rural areas like Jackie’s, he wanted to roll into towns. His most ambitious plan was to buy up a massive tract of land abutting Siler City’s shell of a downtown. There he would develop an ecological community using permaculture principles — dense concentration of family houses surrounded by a large, thriving green space — but with a difference. Bradley would cluster the human settlements right around Siler City’s dying downtown and thereby revitalize its businesses through ecologically inclined residents wanting to shop locally.

  A related development trend was then going on in North Carolina’s Research Triangle: Southern Village outside of Chapel Hill. I’d been there once, before coming to the 12 × 12. It’s a massive village — 550 single-family homes, 3’5 townhomes and condominiums, and 250 apartments — but none of it seemed like Levittown suburban monotony. The designers had created a beautiful town plaza: an organic co-op grocery, clothing stores, bookstores, and jewelry shops ringed it and seemed to thrive. Though it has the positive effect of allowing folks to feel more community and walk and bike everywhere, there are big drawbacks. Southern Village has no expansive green spaces to speak of, just the thousand dwellings. It also duplicates Chapel Hill’s downtown, thereby actually putting a bit of a strain on its economy by creating two competing centers. And it’s very expensive. Very little affordable housing was included in the design, so Southern Village is populated with mostly white and Asian professionals, employees of the hospital and university. A little too lovely, too planned, Southern Village lacks the authenticity, charm, history, and spontaneity of an old tobacco town like Siler City.

  Bradley’s dream wasn’t to create a Southern Village from scratch, but rather to adapt and reshape what already existed, so that people could feel the nurturing cycle of personal authenticity, robust community, and connection with nature. Residents of Bradley’s eco—Siler City, once it was completed, could grow their own food organically, exchange it in farmers markets, create and sell art in the new galleries as part of the growing tourism economy, and perform any number of services virtually over the Web, while still living in and maintaining a wild, beautiful place.

  There was just one problem. The town council and other powerful people in the community had launched a legal effort to stop Bradley from doing this. To them, his vision sounded like an effort that would hold back development. These were people who could no longer hear the earth beneath the asphalt. People, I had to admit, not unlike me.

  8. STAN CRAWFORD’S GARLIC FARM

  I’VE BURNED INCREDIBLE AMOUNTS of fossil fuels trying to save the planet from environmental destruction. I have globe-trotted incessantly: Asia, Africa, South America, Europe. It’s the irony of my profession: corporations are destroying the environment globally, so we have to save it globally. That’s the battleground. You might say a bit of jet fuel has even slipped into my bloodstream. The very bread I eat, the clothes I wear right now, are powered by humanitarian jet-setting: To earn my keep, I think locally and act globally.

  I get to airports early. Then there’s nothing to do at all, and the waiting becomes a kind of freedom. If I can find an empty gate, I sometimes do yoga. Catch up on some reading. Listen to beautiful music. Breathe. Then board the plane. Blocking out the other passengers’ stress, the announcements about oxygen masks, and the pilot’s ritualistic announcements of feet-above-earth, I do a twenty-minute silent meditation, relaxing my entire body. Then more sublime literature, music, maybe some unobtrusive yoga postures in an empty space near the kitchen. Before I know it, I’m there.

  Not long ago, I had a layover in Denver’s über-modern new airport, which lies twenty miles outside the city on the high plateau where the Midwest meets the Rocky Mountains. The architects brilliantly pointed one of the airport’s wings due west, and the west-facing wall is constructed almost entirely of glass. The effect: beautiful sunsets over the Rockies. During my layover I happened to catch one. My gate was near this wall of glass, and the sunset that afternoon washed the entire west wing in Technicolor orange, red, and clamshell pink. Outside, snowcapped peaks shone brightly through the color spectrum.

  When I snapped out of my trance, I noticed something almost equally remarkable. No one else was watching the sunset. Hundreds, if not thousands, of peo
ple were gathered at nearby gates, lost in their rituals: reading the Denver Post, watching the CNN broadcast, buying fast food for their kids. A few had their eyes closed, perhaps napping or engaged in soothing rituals like mine.

  We took off into darkness, and I somehow forgot all of my little rituals. I was in shock. The cabin seemed to press against me. I looked down into the darkness, a million electric lights below, and knew that — in more ways than one — I’d left the planet.

  I WAS BORN INTO THE BURGEONING ENVIRONMENTAL ERA, shortly after the first Earth Day. One of my earliest memories is from July 4, 1976. I was five years old. My parents took my sister and me from our Long Island home into Manhattan to see the fireworks extravaganza for the American bicentennial. I can still see the color and feel the firepower that rose from those dozens of barges in the Hudson and East rivers, our collective national pride blooming so colorfully in the sky. As a kid, the Fourth of July always contained a hopeful feeling. It tasted like the promise of something, though I had no idea of what.

  Eating hot dogs in fluffy white buns, drinking Coke, and watching fireworks, I knew my country was great. I’d help my dad hang the stars and stripes in front of our colonial home, then watch him get the grill going. The stickiness of summer settled on our skin. The feel of salt on me from a day at our Long Island Sound beach, the taste of mustard — all of it felt to me like freedom. I’d watch my dad expertly flip burgers and roll the hot dogs on the grill, and I would picture my grandfather before him laboring for thirty years in the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, a subway connecting Manhattan with New Jersey; for forty years before that, my great-grandfather worked in a potato field in Ireland.

  The mythology of my childhood: America got us out of serfdom, delivered a richness unimaginable to our ancestors back in the Old Country. Summer drives across the country, a large suburban house, my parents’ tenured professorships: all of this confirmed the myth. We epitomized the American Dream. And like most myths, it is partly true. I owe much of my intellectual and personal freedom to America’s political and economic system, and I am incredibly grateful for that. But over the years, it became apparent that the dream could end. Or that the dream was less attainable for some than others. What seemed to be unlimited economic growth took on darker shades.