Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  This surprised me, even hurt a little. One of my great joys at the 12 × 12 was biking the dirt roads with Kyle, his Joycean flop of hair pressed back by the wind, flying along in silence to the post office. He always asked me to do things with him: fish, walk to the creek, bike. We’d tear down the dirt road together and lay down long, curving skids, then compare them. We’d laugh and exchange out-of-breath jokes.

  There was an awkward pause. Finally, I said: “Some other time then?”

  “Maybe,” the eleven-year-old replied, looking suddenly older. “But probably not. I’ll be riding that from now on.”

  He pointed up toward the disheveled woodpile, where the first fourteen ducklings of the season had cracked through their shells. Beside it was the first all-terrain vehicle, or ATV, I’d seen in Pine Bridge. He told me excitedly that it was the first of two ATVs their grandma was sending them from Florida. She’d traded a Bobcat — evidently another kind of machine — for the ATVs.

  Later that day, while I watched the pink puff of a lime green chameleon’s chin on the side of the 12 × 12, something began to drill a hole in the blessed silence. Just a little prick at first, a distant whine that turned into a motorized anti-om as a screaming red ATV ripped through the greenery into my line of vision, not two feet from the deer fence. Mike was at the helm, his long goatee sailing back into the wind, little Allison in his lap, both giddy with fossil-fueled fun.

  After Allison came Brett, Greg, and Kyle, each riding with their dad, roaring past the 12 × 12, my nostrils assaulted by the blue-black smoke spewing out of the ATV’s tailpipe. Coughing and covering my ears to muffle the motor noise, I fled deep into the woods, my inner struggle flaring up, thinking of Paul Sr. saying that “Hell is other people.” The enemy now was Mike. You’re flattening the world for them, I told him in my mind. Why not let them ride quiet, pollution-free, exercise-promoting bikes? They look up to you, adore you. Why teach them motors are better than pedals?

  I viscerally react to too-much-of-the-human, too much loud, intrusive, tacky technology. It’s connected to guilt — my own complicity in the use of technology, which increases human reach and power while also causing forests to be felled worldwide and the climate to cook. Not to mention my own blatant hypocrisy through enjoying the fruits of it all. When I heard the whine of those motors I flashed back to my ecotourism project in that Bolivian cloud forest. The slash-and-burn. The global economy coming over the hill. I felt as if the harmony I’d seen so clearly in Pine Bridge’s wildcrafting community actually rested on a rather fragile foundation: everyone making somewhat similar, compatible choices with how to use their part of the land. The ATV motors roared right past the 12 × 12 all that day and the next, erasing the peace.

  Just when the ATVs stopped, I heard something else. Rrrr-rrrr, came the sound. It definitely wasn’t an ATV. Less whiny, deeper. Must be out on Old Highway 117 South, I figured, continuing to stare into the creek, just down the embankment from the 12 × 12, and thinking about the neighbors who turned the Pauls in to the authorities for living in small houses. But the sound increased.

  I looked up. Nothing.

  Then, a flash of mustard yellow, and the rusty scoop of a bulldozer, fifty meters or so through the woods. RRR-rr-rr! stuttered the machine, and a tree came crashing down. It seemed surreal. I pictured rainforest trees falling a continent away, the Andean bears, monkeys, and jaguars retreating deeper into their disappearing nature reserves. I ran through Jackie’s woods toward the machine. There were two men, one manning the bulldozer, the other on the ground. I waved my arms. The bulldozer lurched farther and knocked down another set of small trees, the forest falling. It was aimed directly at the 12 × 12.

  22. ALLOWING

  “STOP!” I CRIED OUT, stepping in front of the bulldozer.

  The engine roared even louder. The man in the bulldozer removed his helmet, a big frown etched into his brow, and he waved vigorously for me to move. I realized, suddenly, that I’d been hearing the machine each day, between lulls in the ATV noise, but I had apparently been in denial. Now, facing that large, rumbling yellow machine, which was turning beautiful trees into stumps and ripping out the forest on a direct line toward Jackie’s 12 X12, I had no choice but to accept that Bradley must have made new plans.

  The scowling man finally turned off the bulldozer. “Hi,” I said. No response. A mustached good ol’ boy. Below him, a Latino man was chainsawing the brush; he turned off his chainsaw as well.

  “I’m living over there,” I said, nodding toward the 12 × 12, which from our angle was completely concealed by trees.

  This concept sank in: property owner. “Howdy,” the mustached guy said.

  “You all work for Bradley?” I asked.

  “Uh huh,” he said, even friendlier now at the sound of his boss’s name.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “The plan?” the man said, squinting his eyes, suddenly suspicious.

  What was Bradley doing? I knew he was trying to bring wild-crafting to scale, going against the powers-that-be to create innovative eco-communities. But what was this bulldozer for? I also knew that Siler City legal efforts to stop Bradley from building cooperative housing were sinking him financially, so perhaps, to cover his debt, he was now planning to develop additional lots in the thirty acres surrounding Jackie’s.

  “Ya’ll cutting a road all the way to the creek?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Bradley just gives the orders for a day at a time.”

  “I see,” I said. Just what they need to know.

  “But I believe this here is meant to be a walking path,” he added.

  Sure, I thought. A walking path as wide as an interstate. I walked away, along the creek to the railroad track bridge and along those abandoned tracks, wondering if there was anywhere at all beyond the Flat.

  I began having nightmares. Once again the aging former Nazi man living in the woods was visited by a younger man. I saw it all as if from the trees, and then that quick zoom and I’m looking right at the old Nazi; I am him. He has (I have) the same warts, wrinkles, and odor; it’s now the stench of chicken factories.

  I woke up soaked in sweat, lit a candle up in the loft. That absurd 12 × 12 slab of bare cement below. I imagined falling down onto it from the loft, with a thud. Despite all the inner progress I’d made, I wondered if it could stand up to the ATVs and the bulldozers racing toward the 12 × 12. They’ll give No Name Creek a name, I thought, my spirits sinking further. Storybook Creek they’ll call it, and Jackie’s nameless road will be Cinderella Lane. The loop into the Thompson farm: King Arthur’s Court. In the forest beyond José’s, new roads, Mark Twain Lane and Robin Hood Road, this soft place domesticated into a thematic suburb: into the no-place I’m from.

  At the same time that as I was witnessing this destruction, I met Julie and Yvonne at the Thompson farm. They’d rolled up in their old van to drop off a few Muscovy ducks for Mike. They were both heavyset, with fat rolling off of every joint, and they had bravado about farming. Julie said they were partners and lived in a shed with no electricity, “but we have Netflix”; a solar battery pack powered their DVD and TV. I told them I might bike over sometime to visit.

  They didn’t tell me not to stop by, but — come to think of it — they didn’t agree either, and when I arrived I figured out why. Theirs wasn’t a farm at all; it was a garbage dump. The carcasses of a half dozen vehicles rusted away, plastic wrappers caught on the edges. “Not for Human Habitation” was stamped all over their home. Actually, it wasn’t a house at all; it was a shed. They’d bought it for three thousand dollars at Shed Depot.

  The animal smell was terrible. If the Thompson farm was a pleasant chaos of goats and fowl, this was an anarchic mess, a cacophony of Narragansetts scraping the hard ground with their feathers, geese honking, ducks quacking, hogs grunting, four dogs in a barking frenzy. Julie emerged from the shed.

  We talked amid the drone of animals. “I was going to clean that up,” she said of the trash a
round us. “We’re still getting set up here.” It had been two years.

  Tea wasn’t an option. They had nowhere to sit down, just their bed and an overflowing table in their Shed Depot abode. So we stood and talked. “We don’t exist as far as they are concerned,” Julie said, gesturing out toward the powers-that-be. “We tried living in the system, tried to change it. But the blight’s too deep.”

  By “not existing” she meant they paid no taxes, weren’t on any census list. They managed a hardscrabble existence from the eggs and meat of their animals. It was a kind of anarchist, lesbian-punk, fuck-you to all of society. To the empire. To complicity. Suddenly I pictured Jackie, and a thought crossed my mind: She’s naive. She’s now finishing a walk across the Nevada desert to a US nuclear test site. Could anything be more absurd? Why bother with useless little meditative pilgrimages across a desert?

  If there was a rock bottom of cynicism and despair for me at Jackie’s, I’d reached it.

  Sitting in that garbage dump of a yard, I felt the cumulative weight of Kusasu’s extinction, the elimination of the world’s rainforests, the military jets booming overhead on their way to Iraq, Complex 2030’s new generation of nukes, and the bulldozers about to flatten the forest around No Name Creek. And things were worsening for José and other local Latinos. The Easter anti-immigration protests turned out to be mercifully small that year, but they had new worries: AgroMart, an industrial agriculture conglomerate, was spraying North Carolina crops with pesticides so haphazardly that its Mexican field laborers were being exposed, allegedly causing Latino babies to be born without limbs. Because the workers were undocumented, they had little leverage to protest. What’s more, the state’s industrial hog industry was growing by the day, and the number of industrially produced hogs in North Carolina had surpassed the number of people. Could warrior presence stop a blight this deep? Wildcrafting on the creative edge? It all began to seem hopelessly quixotic.

  Then I noticed something at Julie and Yvonne’s, the chicken factory smell. To my horror, beyond a line of trees and over some barbed wire, maybe thirty yards away from where I stood with Julie — rose a chicken factory, white and windowless. It spewed the smell of suffering, the beakless-featherless-boneless chickens dwelling in darkness right beside her shed of a home.

  I felt faint and found my way to a rusty chair and sat down. This was how bad it could get. Yvonne and Julie had tried to live in the system and been defeated, instead creating out of their lives a dark contemporary art piece, throwing society’s blight right back in its face. Is this what would happen to the likes of the Thompsons, the Pauls, even Jackie? Perhaps trying to live on the edge in America is so difficult that eventually, one day, you just free-fall into nihilism.

  ABANDON ALL HOPE OF FRUITION.

  This was one of the cards in Jackie’s stack that I always found incongruous with the rest. It seemed far too negative for Jackie. A chicken jumped into my lap, and I petted its stiff feathers. Another jumped up next to it for a little love. And amid the despair I was feeling I began, vaguely at first, to get something key to Jackie’s philosophy that had eluded me up until then. Abandoning all hope of fruition suddenly began to make sense, a necessary puzzle piece.

  “They lay eggs in our laundry basket,” Julie was saying about the chickens, but her voice drifted to me as if in slow motion. I’d become absorbed by the beauty of their animals. The friendliness of the angora goats and even the hogs; such a profusion of birds and they were constantly at our feet. They lived along with Yvonne and Julie inside the shed — as well as outside, as they wished — and expressed a “suchness,” their proud animal simplicity forming a fierce contrast with the domestication of the chicken factory right next door, where tens of thousands of birds lived in crippled, deformed, genetically modified imprisonment. Three Narragansetts, ablaze in color, pressed against my thighs; Julie petted a goat under the chin, and it pressed tighter up against her huge breasts as if to suckle. Guinea hens at her ankles, along with a cat and a beagle. She stroked a chicken. I stared at the Gold Kist factory, lost in an unusual texture of thought, the swirling sense of a profound growing realization.

  Later that evening I lay on the grass under the stars at Jackie’s. Abandon all hope of fruition. Just give up and accept the world, factory farms and all? No, that couldn’t be what it means. As I considered this, two airplanes soared above, just an inch apart. No big deal, planes are common, even out here, little more than heavenly static. These two planes, though, were inching forward along the exact same line. Suddenly a shooting star appeared, white hot, and threaded right through those two planes. Of all places in that vast sky, nature’s light blazed between the two dots of human-made light. I sat up in wonder, the shooting star’s trail fading to black.

  As if an afterthought, one of Pine Bridge’s ubiquitous fireflies illuminated the shooting star’s tail, tracing a bit of its fading glory before turning itself off amid some heirloom tea bushes.

  Just as I thought the show was over, a satellite — an even fainter afterthought than the firefly — followed the airplanes, in triangular tow behind them. Just a dot, trailing across the screen of the sky like a period.

  What did it mean, “artificial” light streaking in one direction, “natural” light plying the opposite route? Airplane versus firefly, industry versus nature, Man versus God? Heavens no. I stood up from the hammock, walked down to No Name Creek, which cupped starlight in its eddies, and I knew that there really isn’t any opposition at all. It was a mystical feeling, even deeper than the one I’d experienced that night with Leah, when I felt the house slip inside me. Looking into that sky, I wondered if all of those lights were part of the same One Life, and the apparent duality an illusion.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, Leah and I danced at the Shakori Hills summer music festival. At one point we stopped, out of breath, to eat bowls of curry, and then jumped back up for a band from Mali playing kora harps, negoni lutes, and a balafon-style xylophone. The crowd swelled as the melodies did. Black, white, some Latinos, all kinds of colors, a spring gathering. It was Earth Day. The wordless music spoke of birth and death, light and dark in the same breath, and my body moved, the hips loosening, ankles and neck more rubbery, shoulders straightening and falling, torso, hands, fingers — each part of my body found a different piece of that layered rhythm.

  “It’s like the blues. Malian music,” Leah said. “It’s got this pulse of joy.”

  “And sadness.”

  Leah kept dancing, while I went to the side of the lawn and sat down for a moment. As the sun set in brilliant orange, present in that seamless moment, I felt what Jackie had years ago: I must go beyond shame and blame, not just with myself and my personal imperfections, but in relation to the impact my species is having on the planet. I have to let go of my Nazi dreams, my guilt over ecocide, and all of the rest of the negativity that keeps me in a cramped, dim self. This means allowing myself, and the world, to be. When I see unworthiness, anywhere, I’m to trace it. To allow doesn’t mean to condone. Jackie had found a more precious jewel still on the other side of allowing, which spoke clearly to me about the nature of resistance to injustice — transform the enemy, not by fighting head-on with blame and anger; this just makes the enemy more powerful. Instead, be so present in the reality that you manifest an entirely different reality. The question is how to transform our anger into the energy of compassion, so that we can see the true cause of suffering. Then we can see more clearly how to root out that suffering.

  Allowing is the way to experience the other world inside of this one. It lets us accept all of life’s complexities so that we can come from a place of love at all times, even in a chicken factory, at a nuclear test site, and even, as psychologist and former concentration camp prisoner Victor Frankl observes, in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It’s essential to peaceful, creative resistance and transformation.

  On the drive back to the 12 × 12, Leah at the wheel, we passed new subdivisions with enormous, energy-consuming houses in
a space that used to be forest. I watched my inner reaction. Neither of my “normal” reactions was present anymore, no rage, no guilt. Still, I remarked aloud to Leah about the destruction.

  “Are you sure?” Leah said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of what?” I’d forgotten that ARE YOU SURE? was one of Jackie’s cards — the one, in fact, I’d put out that very morning.

  Leah stopped the car at the edge of a ridge, cut the engine, took my cheeks in her hands, and pointed my eyes forward, saying slowly, forcefully: “Are you sure?”

  From our now slightly higher vantage point, I looked out over a green forest canopy, stretching to the horizon. Just beyond the development hugging the road were rolling hills, forested smack down to South Carolina. We looked at each other for a moment and then back over this natural scene, which still contained so much green. Couldn’t this, at least possibly, emerge as the face of globalization? Our consciousness grows and wildcrafter farms and forests fill the old slave plantations?

  I took Leah’s hand loosely, feeling a little dizzy. Patterns of light streaked across my mind: airplanes and comets, satellites and fireflies, the message in the sky coming through more clearly. I had the questions wrong. My questions implied a good and bad, a right and wrong. I thought of Lao-tzu: “Do you want to change the world? I do not think it can be done. The world is perfect and cannot be changed.”

  I looked out over a suddenly perfect landscape, saw the Soft within the Flat within the Soft. My greatest teachers are my sufferings. Global warming, hyper-individualism, rainforest destruction, and racism, these things had led me to Jackie’s place, forced me to struggle. The Buddhists put it eloquently: “no illusion, no enlightenment.” I momentarily grasped nonduality, that at the deepest level everything is exactly as it should be at any given moment — including one’s own gradual awakening through the force of apparent evils.