The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  Mikey and I had each other and a shared vision. We set out to make a life that freed us to create, explore, learn, play, eat, and live without too much compromise to our souls. We didn’t know at the beginning just how wonderful a world it would be. Nor did we know how soon after we made our new commitments we would see the old world come crashing down. In retrospect, our timing was excellent.

  Some of the techniques shared in this book are for people starting out in the commodified world. Without understanding the ways in which our commodified lives shaped us, we might have found ourselves thousands of miles from where we started but no different for having traveled there.

  The front door to our homestead is composed of scraps of metal from a shipping container and bits of rebar. The wall is made of paper mixed with cement and sealed with stucco. We made it in the shape of an arrow that points up, a reminder to imagine.

  Once out in the desert of southern New Mexico, as makers of things, we learned the meaning of the saying that life is as interesting as your interest in it. As we moved away from consumer goods and services and learned to replace them with what we could make ourselves, we became interested in and better versed in many types of knowledge: biology, chemistry, botany, construction, physics, herbalism, and electronics, to name a few. We found ourselves doing everything from textile design to car repair. We came to this lifestyle with no special skills or talents — just a bit of courage, inspiration, and genuine curiosity. You can bet we made plenty of mistakes (and you’re going to hear about some of them!), yet we were able to achieve most of what we’d set out to do. Today, we happily live on a homestead that we designed and constructed ourselves, grow and wildcraft our own food and medicine, make our own household goods and fuel, and produce our own power. Not because we’re super talented, but because we’re human beings, and human beings are inherently creative.

  There is no such thing as an uncreative person. This is too easy to forget in our current economic system, in which consumers don’t need to know very much. The less people know, the more finished goods they buy. Our current economic system doesn’t encourage deep thinking, because that leads to seeing the enormity of the cost of the human labor and natural resources that bring us cheap goods. But as makers of things, your quality of life actually hinges on your understanding of the larger world, and so a deeper interest in life naturally blossoms along with your skills. Once you become a creator rather than a consumer, a wonderful discovery awaits: You are more than you may have thought yourself to be. By connecting to nature, Mikey and I began to see how our lives meet up with the life of this world. My biggest hope is that this book will point you toward the very same spot.

  Mikey and I are hardly free of the commodified world. We rely on it still. We use technology to run our cottage industry and store-bought tools to build our homestead; we pump city water to our gardens and purchase readymade appliances. What changed is our thought process. We recognize compromises when we make them and strive to make better choices as our knowledge and skills advance. What we have to offer you is our story, process, and discoveries, along with the effect that our choices had on our lives. Creating a decommodified life is a life-long process. Perhaps one day we will hear your story along with new and better ways to meet the challenges we encounter.

  I wouldn’t claim that the lifestyle that Mikey and I chose is the way to live. It is a way to live. If we had kept our jobs and stayed a part of the mainstream economy, we would never have learned what we have. We wouldn’t have had the time.

  Our story is likely different from yours. But perhaps it offers something useful to people who are on the brink of changing their own lives. Fundamental to all our stories is that lives are imagined before they come into being. We hope you will imagine something beautiful. If we make the best of this time, perhaps history will call it the start of a renaissance. We are the first people alive to witness the condition of the entire world being for sale. If we become makers of things, we become the revolutionaries of our age.

  Our first paper dome survived monsoon season and met its first double rainbow.

  The lessons in this book are some of the most valuable lessons of my life. I offer them to you with the hope that what I learned can bring benefit to your life as well.

  Part One

  Life Imagined

  Life in the Waste Stream

  Waste is a design flaw.

  — Kate Krebs

  I peed into a large green plastic cat-litter container that I keep in the bathroom. With its lid tightened, I carried the amber fluid outside and increased its volume by five times with water from a spigot that juts out from under the swamp cooler on the side of the house. (Swamp coolers are common in New Mexico. They use less power than air conditioners and work by putting a bit of humidity into the air.) I poured the diluted pee around a young sapling, thinking about the nitrogen in it.

  No drinking water was flushed.

  Some people call urine liquid gold because its value in nitrogen is greater than gold to life. I am happy to preserve all I can, and keep the waste I create on my 1-acre homestead. I try to do so with more than my pee.

  In the kind of navy blue jumpsuit a gas station attendant wears, silk-screened with Holy Scrap on the back, Mikey was outside busying about a not-so-sturdy table in the yard. His jumpsuit was less stained than the white Dickies overalls I wore, which is typical for the two of us. Mikey labors only after strategizing ways to avoid labor, and he employs every possible machine before resorting to muscular effort. I growl my way through tasks on might and will until progress comes. His navy uniform reminded me of the Con Edison uniform he had worn to the office during his final days working for an investment bank. In prankster fashion, he had shown up to work in a variety of odd outfits: the Con Edison jumpsuit, a Chuck E. Cheese shirt complete with nametag, and the uniform worn by employees of the sandwich franchise Subway. Wall Street was far away from us now, though Mikey solved life’s problems with the same intensity that the Wall Street bank had once demanded of him.

  Mikey circled the makeshift workbench to compare the contents of three jars marked with masking tape and Sharpie: caliche from south of town, red clay from veins on our property, and Monticello mud from a rural community 60 miles away. Days earlier, he had mixed the clay samples with water and shook them hard before letting them settle. When they did, the clay and sand separated in bands. The sample with the highest clay-to-sand ratio stood out from the rest: the caliche was the winner. We’d use that as a substitute for a portion of the Portland cement used to make papercrete, the material we build domes out of, including a future guesthouse and a place to store the batteries of our photovoltaic (PV) solar array.

  In many ways it was a typical day. Some of our vision was complete: a remodeled home, gardens, a flagstone patio that wrapped around a fire pit, and one earthy-looking dome. I imagined our acre as a temporary autonomous zone not smothered by civilization. A sign that once read Robina Trailer Park stood tall in the front of the lot, indicating a time when commerce took place here. My imagination transformed the sign into a giant metal flower that hung over the sidewalk out front to shade passersby from the harsh desert sun. For now the words were barely legible, covered in thin white paint. The flower would live in the realm of my imagination a bit longer. Permission to make non-utilitarian objects of beauty would come when the guesthouse dome was finished and the outdoor shower, shade structure, and workshop built.

  Still, each day, bit by bit, living in the waste stream, we make manifest what our imaginations have already committed to memory.

  To match my stained overalls, I wore a pair of ratty brandless sneakers that I picked up on bag day when a whole bag of thrift-shop loot was just five bucks. I’d replace my sneakers soon enough with another bag-day pair headed for the landfill.

  I saved this wheelbarrow from the trash, welded the wheel casing back on, and used it to carry loads of rocks to build a fire pit.

  Living in the waste stream feels to me l
ike paying homage to materials already taken and energy already spent. Consider my tattered sneakers: the fuel used in their production, the machines built for their assembly, and the complex systems designed to distribute them. Imagine the people who participated in the processes: their commutes to work and back again, the children and pets who waited at home, the things they could have done instead, the phones answered, the sunsets missed. I did want a new pair of sneakers, but somehow squeezing every last bit of life out of the ones I already owned made the activities and resources they’d required seem less wasteful. The weight of this was heavier than my lust for new stuff. Extending the life of any thing is good manners.

  I know that compared to industries, corporations, and governments, an individual is insignificant. In measurable terms my actions hardly matter. But feeling tiny does not have to end at why bother. Feeling tiny does not dampen my desire to uphold a standard of waste etiquette. Caring and respect for life always stave off helplessness.

  I grabbed an impact drill and attached another scrap of 2 by 10 that I’d pulled from a dumpster to a break in the garden bed. Nothing purchased, not this time.

  My life’s rhythm of moving things from the category of waste to the category of use has a tempo I enjoy. Each transformation produces a tangible result: a fence for privacy, a bed in the garden, a patio, a swinging gate, a shade canopy. They make our lives better. Every day I express gratitude for the labor that made my heart expand and pump blood through my veins, my muscles awaken and grow, and my bones lubricate in their joints. I remember the atrophy I felt sitting in a cubicle in a New York City skyscraper and the desire in my cells to use myself differently.

  Waste liberates me from fashion, and I celebrate that emancipation every day. I am surprised at how relieved I feel each time I put on the same white Dickies overalls. From time to time, Mikey finds me in the yard to say, “Look — I dressed myself!” and spins before me to show the textile wonder he has put together, a hodgepodge of unmatched textures and colors gathered at clothing swaps and thrift stores. Our clothing wears the signs of our labor: stained, torn, and burned, each piece is a reminder that we have chosen a life in which labor and leisure are intimately connected. Every stain or tear contains a story, a moment that we treasured on our adventure.

  The junky vehicles parked in our yard are of a piece with the rest: a dented pickup truck, a car that we nicknamed Chance that runs on waste vegetable oil (WVO), a biofuel-burning Beetle, and a little electric car that we bartered for. They require the legal minimum in insurance. If someone stole one of them or if a car got more dents, it would not touch my life very much. Value in an abundant life is different from value in a wealthy life: this abundance comes with freedom from worry.

  When the small hot springs spa hotel across the street removed a wooden fence that had been standing in place for decades, the wood was thinned, boards were missing, and no hint of paint was left. The desert’s dry heat had eaten up the wood’s density, leaving 6-foot by 8-foot sheets of fence as light as cardboard. Noticing the dismantled fence, Mikey and I crossed the street to grab the obtainium. That’s a word coined by Chris Hackett, the owner of the Brooklyn metal shop where I learned to weld. Obtainium is the prize found in the waste stream.

  We grabbed the lightweight bounty and put it up behind our garden, where it closed off the rear of our property. “Perfect!” we said to each other with a smile of satisfaction. Nothing was purchased, no cycles kicked off. Another gift.

  Sunday evenings we peruse alley dumpsters in our electric car. On Tuesdays, Mikey picks up WVO from a local restaurant and filters it at home by pouring it through the legs of jeans given to us by a local thrift shop because they were too dirty or torn to sell. Then he fuels two of our cars with the golden liquid and keeps some for solvent and stain. From the restaurant, he also grabs empty wine and beer bottles. Some we crush to make a nonwicking foundation for our buildings. Others we repurpose into flooring or use to make bottle windows in our domes. The rest we clean and refill with homemade wine, mead, or kombucha (a nutritional beverage — see page 238).

  When we are actively building, we visit the recycling center weekly to fill our Toyota’s flatbed with newspaper and cardboard that we use for making pulpy papercrete insulation, garden liners, or any number of things. Throughout the year we pick up free mulch from the town’s tree trimmings.

  Spring is the season for our annual pilgrimage to a nearly 3,000-pound camel named Stanley. When we arrive, Carol, the love of Stanley’s life, instructs her doting husband to use his front loader to fill our truck bed with Stanley’s poo. Stanley jumps up and down, an impressive gesture for an animal who weighs more than a Honda I once drove across the country. Stanley shows our dog Sesame, Mikey, and me that he is happy about our having come to visit. We give his mama three bucks for a dozen eggs, wave hello to the pet ostrich kept around to eat the rattlesnakes, and head home to shovel shit for our garden with surprising joy.

  Mikey and I consider ourselves gleaners. We’re not unlike the microorganisms that clean the marrow from the bones left by the turkey vultures that pick through what’s left behind by the coyotes that live across the Rio Grande. In nature everything has its place. Nothing wasted.

  This load of camel poo is valuable. With a little compost and sand, it’ll make a fine soil for our garden.

  Jump and the Net Will Appear

  Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

  — Victor Hugo

  Mikey and I are not native New Mexicans. We’re city folks. At least we were until a few things happened that triggered an insatiable craving for something different from what the city offered us. Before we bought an acre of land and started living out of the waste stream, we lived in Brooklyn. Our lifestyle had a lot to do with our careers. We bought new goods and contributed to the waste stream. In New York we assembled a strange puzzle, searching for why we felt incomplete. Then we asked ourselves what we were going to do about it. We had never lived in any world but the one that we began to call the default world. Our default world had demanding jobs, crazy commutes, debt, limited free time, and other things that we learned to see as compromises to our happiness. We looked at these things anew and from odd angles, and then made unusual decisions.

  When I learned to reclaim my creativity and use it to make a world of my own envisioning, things got really exciting and everything seemed possible. Even a quirky, junk-made, off-grid homestead in New Mexico and an abundant life without a standard job.

  In the spring of 2001, I quit my job right after I had courted a cigarette company. I caught a glimpse of how dangerous the skills of my profession could be when I crafted a crop circle media campaign for the company. My idea was that real crop circles would be made and photographed, and the pictures leaked to the press. The designs would mimic the corporation’s logo, obscuring it just enough that the media would believe the contrived crop circles to be real and report them to an unassuming public. Once the press spread the image far and wide, and after the corporation attained hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of free advertising, I would advise the cigarette company to accept credit for the prank. Yikes. If I was going to wield mojo, it ought to be for better ends than this.

  So in what seemed like a midlife crisis, I unburdened myself of the title Creative Director of Green Galactic. I was immediately relieved. I would not have to hype another DJ, schmooze another writer, promote another plastic widget, or make another famous person more famous. I would never sucker the public into studying a cigarette company’s logo without realizing it.

  It would not have mattered if I were a nurse, an electrician, a librarian, or a photographer. I had already been an employee of Burger King, a graphic designer, a bassist, and a maid before settling into a career in marketing. Every job had come with heavy compromises. Why? My hunch was that it had something to do with money.

  I hit the road in my metallic gold Honda to try to figure out what I should do. I knew I risked finding it impossible to retur
n to life as I had known it. But continuing in my current course seemed harder than taking a chance.

  First, I headed to Nevada, lured by a discovery I had made a year earlier of a 1.5-mile diameter wonder world called Black Rock City. It’s thrown up each year in the Nevada desert for the Burning Man festival. The next festival was months away, but I planned to volunteer at 80 Acres, the year-round site for storage and the building of Black Rock City’s infrastructure. I wanted to give something back to the community that a year earlier had helped me find permission to seek a new way of life.

  At first when I discovered Burning Man, I had a hard time believing that for over a decade people had been building Black Rock City, making pilgrimage to it, and deconstructing it. I wished I had known. At times, the temporary city had contained 40 radio stations, two daily newspapers, a post office with its own zip code, several hair salons, a roller rink, an opera, an ice-cream truck, an airport, and many other desired things. I approached it shyly at first, unable to fathom that the whole city was built for the giving of gifts, that its economy is a gift economy.

  People climb Star Seed, an installation by New York City–based artist Kate Raudenbush, during an intense dust storm at Burning Man 2012.

  It was the discovery of the gift economy that untethered me from my idea of myself. That’s what happens when you catch a glimpse of something important. You can’t pretend you didn’t see it.

  You have to move forward and find out what it wants from you.

  Burning Man, you may have heard, is a lot of things to a lot of people. I was drawn in by the large-scale art that required miles of open desert and reached the height of city buildings. Nowhere else had I seen seasoned career artists given equal space and equal billing with first-timers. It seemed fair. Many times throughout my career I had watched creative people with the money to hire publicity and marketing teams advance successful careers while artists with more talent and less money blurred into the background. The business of art is anything but fair. But in Black Rock City, the only way to achieve social rank was to make something and what contained the greatest value was given away. A gift.