As I grew up, Long Island was being paved over, the small farms and the remnants of wild forests near my house disappearing forever to become ten million uninspired cul-de-sacs. The Native Americans who used to live in those forests were long gone by then. I got to know them obliquely through the names of my town (Setauket), my nursery and elementary schools (Cayuga and Nassakeag), and the nearby river (Nissequogue); no one I asked knew what these words meant anymore. My friends’ parents worked for Grumman, a military contractor helping to produce nuclear weapons. Beyond the safety and prosperity of my upper-middle-class life was something I didn’t have a word for yet: ecocide, or the destruction of our planet by our current economic model. Until then, it had invisibly fueled our lifestyle, but the effects were now surfacing.
V. S. Naipaul, accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, said that all of his books were about his “areas of darkness.” Naipaul did not write about what he knew. He wrote about what he did not know, what was darkest in him, because it fascinated him so much more. He grew up behind walls in the Caribbean, in a comfortable middleclass Indian merchant family on Trinidad. Beyond the walls were colonialism, corruption, exile: his themes. In Naipaul’s masterpiece, A Bend in the River, Salim cannot find home. An Indian abroad, like Naipaul, he’s no longer at home on the African coast with his illiterate merchant parents, nor in India, nor in an immigrant area of London. He eventually comes back to Africa, not to the coast, but to the lonely interior, to a no-name town at a bend in the river. He finally finds home: nowhere.
On the surface, I come from somewhere: suburban Long Island, where I was born and lived until I went to college at eighteen. But is it possible to be rooted in a suburb, or is this oxymoronic? I’ve often reflected that those monotonous spaces clash with the notion of being somewhere specific. Suburbs are entangled in twenty-first-century globalism, in a single Flat World culture that has become a ubiquitous nowhere. My Long Island rootlessness flowed naturally into a kind of jet-fueled global nomadic life, in which I lost an essential part of adulthood: finding one’s proper place.
Naipaul’s area of darkness is a colonial system that degrades the human spirit. My area of darkness is the price of my privilege, an ecocide that degrades and poisons the human being while it destroys our very host, Mother Earth. The global economy gobbles up authentic places and vomits up McWorld, increasingly turning our collective proper place, this planet, into a dystopia. I’m a child of ecocide, caught in a catch-22. How can I get on that plane — yet how can I not get on that plane — knowing that an estimated half of all species today could become extinct due to the effects of climate change? This is my area of darkness: a living earth, no longer underfoot.
WHILE HOEING THE GARDEN at Jackie’s, taking five-gallon solar showers, harvesting my own teas, throwing cedar chips into the composting toilet, I tentatively rekindled a relationship with the earth. Blowing out the last candle at night, awakening with the sun in the 12 × 12 loft, I remembered that electricity doesn’t come from a socket; tomatoes don’t come from a supermarket; water doesn’t come from a pipe. Everything comes from the earth. It’s fine to grasp this intellectually, but to once again touch, breathe, and eat this reality feels like reconciliation with a loved one after a long feud.
Through her 12 × 12 and afterward, Jackie became an earth mentor for me. Humans are nature become conscious, but civilization forgets this natural connection. Earth mentors not only maintain this consciousness but can spark it in others. At the eleventh hour of the environmental crisis, we probably need earth mentors to connect us to our host planet much more than we need gurus and tele-reverends to connect us to the cosmos beyond. Connect to the earth, to yourself, and you’ve connected with everything; try to connect to everything by other means and fail.
My time in the 12 × 12 was like an internship with Thoreau. It was as if I was with him on Walden Pond, feeling my thoughts thinking through his, my spade cutting earth next to his, our four ears, together, listening to jackdaws and jays. I felt the presence of Aldo Leopold, John Muir, John James Audubon, Loren Eiseley, and Ed Abbey, all earth mentors. Imagining these mentors by our side improves the quality of our connection with nature.
I’ve been blessed by having not just one earth mentor but two. When I was a younger man, organic garlic farmer and writer Stan Crawford of Dixon, New Mexico, took my hand and led me joyfully out of civilization. If the flattening world of corporate-led globalization sometimes sounds like really bad Musak turned up high, Stanley Crawford sounds like John Coltrane playing to a room full of friends.
I was twenty-four when I first met Stan, and when I looked up into his clear eyes I could practically hear “A Love Supreme” playing in the background — bouncing off the mesas behind his adobe house, out of his El Bosque Small Farm garlic fields, and off the tip of the phallic rock pillar beside them that he jokingly called Camel Cock (a wordplay on the camel-shaped Camel Rock up the road toward Santa Fe). There he was, gray-bearded and six foot three, esteemed author of Mayordomo, Petroleum Man, and the best-selling A Garlic Testament, good friend of literati like Barbara Kingsolver, John Nichols, and Bill McKibben. There he was in a pair of dirty overalls with a hoe in his hands. I followed him out into a field, to weed some rows, in silence, the cool winds coming off the Sangre de Cristos, the gurgle of the river running in front of the field.
Stan paid me six dollars an hour to work with him, two days a week. He first taught me the word permaculture and its basic techniques, and I applied those techniques the other five days on my own back-forty, a sprawling piece of land on the Rio Grande with a small vineyard, just a twenty-minute bike ride from Stan’s. I’d worked out a kind of sharecropper’s arrangement with the vineyard’s absentee owner. I had his singlewide trailer and an acre on which to farm my own blue corn and squash; he got a third of my crop plus two days of my time tending his vineyard.
I’d arranged both the vineyard-sitting and garlic mentorship through the Northern New Mexico Organic Farmers Association. I was ecstatic. Never before had I cozied up this close to the earth. After the suburban Long Island childhood and college in a big East Coast city, I’d come to Santa Fe to teach seventh-grade gifted and talented students at a Native American boarding school. But I was again in a city. Now I was bathing in the Rio Grande each morning before planting blue corn, tomatoes, quinoa, amaranth, and nearly two dozen other native and exotic food crops under a full moon, just as my Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo farmer-neighbors did to ensure a strong harvest in fall.
After my day spent planting, night fell. My hands were calloused from the shovel and hoe, my muscles sore and spent. The full moon illuminated the empty spaces that would become my blue corn, intercropped with beans (they pole on the corn) and squash (ground cover that suppresses weeds), and my contoured vegetable and herb beds. Permaculture, as I was learning from Stan, likes natural curves instead of straight lines, intensive planting, and mixing crops intelligently, such as fruit, nut, and hardwood trees. I’d put the theory into the ground, and now, under the moonlight, I saw just a blank page, an expanse of moist earth.
Stan inspired me. He’d found a playful balance in life between laboring in the open air for seven months and writing in his adobe studio for the other five. He and his Australian wife, Rose Mary (their two children were already through college), had purchased their acres in the late sixties, built their beautiful house brick by adobe brick by themselves, and lived, without bosses or time clocks, in creative freedom, largely outside the system.
People in the area labored with the earth and then played. Saturday nights, everyone gathered at the Foxtrot Tavern for an exchange of organic pest control tips and off-color jokes and for dancing to bluegrass and indie rock. Rural northern New Mexico couldn’t be farther from the tenured world of my parents, from the East Coast establishment. Dancing manically around me were farmers, winery owners, artists, writers, silver and turquoise jewelers, small-town teachers, and yoga instructors. “What do you do?” I asked one guy. His re
ply: “Water in summer, snow in winter,” referring to kayak and ski instructing. I’d just read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and felt some of that bohemian, spontaneous energy explode as the nights stretched on at the Foxtrot. More than dropout beatniks, Dixon’s folks were cooperating with nature rather than opposing it, sculpting, growing food and wine, painting, teaching, and making a living, if barely.
Stan writes in A Garlic Testament about “the pound weight of the real,” the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I’d weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary’s farm expenses. They were constantly “snatching from the cash flow,” as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that’s exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area — I shear your sheep, you midwife for me — as well as a traditional communal relationship over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt canals called acequias. This wasn’t just pragmatism; I sensed a real passion and spirit that comes from subsistence. I saw it again all over the Global South, where living along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps you on your entrepreneurial toes and linked to others through reciprocity.
Sometimes other laborers joined us. On spring solstice day, twenty of us gathered at Stan’s to harvest garlic. (Garlic is planted in fall and harvested in spring.) It was one of those Ansel Adams days in New Mexico, with the lines of the mesas carving a sharp edge into the sky. Stan himself stooped a little, squinting out into all that beauty with an artist’s eye, a gently discerning gaze. Then he shrugged and bent down to pull the first garlic bulb out of the ground. We followed his lead. Pollen floated in the chilly air as we pulled up garlic all morning. At one point I threw a bunch of garlic a little roughly into the crate, and Stan said, “Careful with my babies.” We stopped at ten; Rose Mary and their daughter Katya brought a pot of miso soup into the fields, and we drank it out of cups. The picking conversation was often revolutionary. During a discussion about a proposed hazardous waste dump in the area: “Gandhi didn’t just talk about nonviolence in an evil system,” a salt-and-pepper grandma farmer said while pulling up garlic beside me. “He was all about noncooperation.”
Another friend of Stan’s, an artist from Santa Fe, talked about cultivating a posture of “maladjustment with Empire” in yourself.
“But everything is tainted,” someone else said, wiping dirt and sweat from her brow. “We’re feeding nuclear Los Alamos.”
“Right,” the artist said, “but you stay maladjusted to the general evil. That’s true noncooperation: not letting Empire inside you.”
Stan hardly participated in such discussions. He hovered a little over every situation, Miles Davis’s “So What” coming off the mesas; a softer, clearer place. But he wasn’t aloof; after all, he was touching the earth right there beside us. I reached down and touched it, too. When pulling lettuce from my own acres beside the vineyard, I reached down through the lettuce leaves, the lower part of the plant smooth like a lover’s inner thigh. Sliding my fingers deeper, to where the lettuce met the moist earth, I sank them a bit into those depths and then coaxed the whole plant loose. Made a salad out of it; took it inside. “Don’t let the Empire inside you. Stay maladjusted to civilization,” someone would say, and Stan nodded, or didn’t, pulling up another top-setting garlic plant, placing it into a pile, the pound weight of the real. I think Stan took pleasure growing dissent in his fields, along with garlic, chilies, and statis flowers. His life was so obviously maladjusted to Empire — why talk about it? His very presence, such a wise, well-known intellectual and novelist, hoeing a row right beside you, elevated everything in our midst.
The summer was coming to an end, and a new semester awaited me back at Santa Fe Indian School. I harvested the first of my squash, zucchinis, and blue corn and packed my little Nissan hatchback with them, driving it into the school parking lot and giving produce to the other teachers. They oohed and aahed, joking that they knew what I’d done with my summer. Teaching during the week, I continued to work at Stan’s on the weekends. I found that the experience with Stan and the anticivilization Dixon crew blended easily into my teaching. I was no longer the Ivy League expert here to impart knowledge; I was student to these young Native Americans. One day they told me their story of Jesus: Jesus, they told me, continues to fight an ongoing battle with Murosuyo, a Native American god. They duke it out in the sky and on the ground. The stakes are the fate of the earth. Just as Jesus seems to deliver the final death blow, Murosuyo tackles him in the heavens, and they fall together through the clouds and into a lake, and so it continues. I found it fascinating that their culture and environment are still hanging on today through Murosuyo’s efforts. My teaching became an exchange of ideas.
I played Super Bowl commercials in the classroom, and together my Native American students and I “deconstructed” them. This was, in part, an idea encouraged by the state of New Mexico. The Green Party, powered by thousands of off-the-gridders like those I’d befriended in Dixon — who lived in pockets throughout the state — had increased their power in the state legislature and had worked with citizens’ groups to pass mandatory “media literacy” for all New Mexico schools. I went through the in-service training and then explored, with my twelve-year-olds from the Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo reservations, the ways marketers manipulate us by linking their brands to emotions like love, belonging, freedom, sexuality, and fear.
I showed a commercial with an SUV conquering a mountain, and an Apache student, Monique, correctly labeled the lie: “Freedom!” she cried out.
“Love and belonging,” another student suggested, noting that the male driver was accompanied by a beautiful woman and rosy-cheeked children.
A Hopi student raised his hand. Frowning, he grew angrier as he spoke. His point, eloquently delivered, was that “crossing our sacred grounds with that noisy thing” did not mean love or belonging. He said that, to be more truthful, the gas-guzzler should be driving past the retreating glacier that its greenhouse gasses were melting.
I found these media literacy sessions as deliciously subversive as the chatter in Stan’s fields. Thanks to citizen pressure, the very nation that produced more global warming gasses than any other was arming a million New Mexico students with the intellectual tools to reject consumerism.
AUTUMN ARRIVED. On one of my last days at Stan’s (before the tractor was oiled and tools stored for the winter), a half dozen of us harvested a fall crop of squash and basil for the farmers market. Stan and Rose Mary cut basil on either side of me. I could hear the brook whenever the gentle wind stalled; the sky was a powder-puff blue, the mesas a ridiculous paste of orange, and I felt whole and alive, cutting wrinkly basil leaves, placing them in my wooden crate, the lively smell.
Stan seemed elsewhere, “Kind of Blue” on the breeze, perhaps already in his next novel. Clip-clip went his shears. How many basil sprigs had he chopped in his thirty years of farming? Clip. The breeze picked up and I couldn’t hear the brook, just the swaying trees above, and the smell of chemise and sage mixed with the basil. Stan stood up to his full, lanky height and ran earth-covered long fingers through his beard, looking out into the direction of the wind as if for a sign. Then he sighed, almost imperceptibly and went back to clipping.
In Stan’s fields an idea germinated in me that would much later coalesce into a kind of general principle: be in Empire, but not of it. As the years went on, even as a Yankee pragmatism kept me cinched to Empire, I’d try to follow this, walking up to the edge of radicalism. I wouldn’t jump over, but the heat of the flaming edge, in Dixon, in Chiapas, Mexico, in Bolivia, in Liberia, and especially on the banks of No Name Creek, kept alive the embers of noncooperation, a healthy maladjustment to ecocide.
The long workday ended. Stan went to the till to fish out my wages. Wages that I could certainly use with my low teacher salary and high S
anta Fe rent. But wages I couldn’t accept for the community of this fall day. “Stan, I won’t take your money for this work,” I said, in twenty-four-year-old earnestness. “There’s nothing I would have rather been doing today.”
Stan looked at me from his heights, his blue eyes suddenly animated, and he patted me on the shoulder and invited me to a late lunch of foods from his farm. I’d later realize that this, more than anything else, is what Stanley Crawford cultivated at El Bosque: an awakened, generous human spirit and, therefore, a new earth.
MALADJUSTED TO EMPIRE
9. WILDCRAFTING AND COUNTRY STEAK
AS THE DAYS AT JACKIE’S PASSED, and the cold earth softened, buds and tendrils began finding their shape, and I increasingly thought about heroes. My heroes are mostly people you never hear about. They quietly go about creating a durable vision of what it means to be an American and a global citizen. These are the people whose spirits nourished me as I hoed the rows at Jackie’s place, people like Stan Crawford, Bradley, and Jackie herself. As the world flattens, they give hope. They are what I call wildcrafters, people shaping their inner and outer worlds to the flow of nature, rather than trying to mold the natural world into a shape that is usable in the industrial world. Wildcrafters leave a small ecological footprint. They don’t conform to any outward program, manifesto, or organized group, but conform only to what Gandhi called the “still, small voice” within. I consider much of the dispersed “antiglobalization,” pro-sustainability movement to be connected to wildcrafting. Wildcrafters inhabit the rebel territory beyond the Flat.
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