No Impact Couple maintained demanding professional jobs and an expensive city apartment while at the same time the pledge had them giving up many of the things that made these things tolerable. With a glass-half-full outlook, they appreciated what they could. With their apartment too hot to bear in the summer months, they enjoyed the extra time they spent in the city’s parks. They noted the extra exercise they got from walking instead of riding the subway. They stacked clay pots one inside the other and called the configuration pot in pot, a contraption copied from third-world cultures that used the odd formation as a crude form of refrigerated cooling. It didn’t work in their New York apartment.
When they gave up riding the subway because it ran on electricity from an energy source that had an impact, I started wondering about context. If a subway is shooting by your home and there is room on it for you, doesn’t it make sense to get on? A full subway seems less wasteful than an empty one. The energy has already been spent. When No Impact Family turned off the electricity in their apartment, the scene was bleak. In spite of their high-spiritedness, their lives continuously got more difficult.
I considered No Impact Family’s pledge and realized that the pledge itself produced a feeling of lack. Everything in civilization produces an impact, so there was no end to what they had to give up to fulfill their promise. Everywhere they turned, the world had the same answer: Give up more.
Over 2,000 miles away in New Mexico, Mikey and I converted a chest freezer to run as a refrigerator using a temperature controller he designed and made, thereby gaining a 10X reduction in the power drawn from our PV solar system. We used the gain to run additional appliances like an air conditioner that is needed during monsoon seasons when swamp coolers have no effect. With many of the lifestyle changes we made, what seemed at first a sacrifice later produced abundance. The only thing Mikey and I really gave up was crappy medical insurance, and we didn’t miss that at all (see page 125).
The life Mikey and I were living was abundant because we asked for what could be obtained. We let the world say yes to us, instead of inviting it to say no by prompting it for what it could not give. No Impact Family’s pledge likened them to the woman who asked the Swap-O-Rama-Rama organizer to pay her to volunteer, even though she knew that volunteers did not get paid. She asked for money and expected to be denied so that she could hear her view of lack confirmed. Civilization can never promise no impact, but nature can promise abundance.
By relying on waste, on what nature provides, and on ourselves, we gave the world a chance to demonstrate abundance. By becoming makers of things, we let our creativity become a transformative link between the free materials available to us and the finished goods that made our lives better.
The momentum of our lives was that things were always getting better. Though the world was essentially the same as it had always been, the same one that No Impact Family and the Swap-O-Rama-Rama volunteer lived in, we experienced abundance. The only thing that changed was that Mikey and I tuned ourselves differently; we made ourselves able to see what had been there all along. I realized that abundance is a truth and a point of view. It can be seen only if you come out to meet it.
Nature Unlocked
Each thing in nature is a question containing its own potential answer.
— Christopher Bamford, Green Hermeticism: Alchemy & Ecology
When I was a city dweller, I often wondered about the telluric energy beneath my feet — about gravity, the planet’s signature, a force that tethered me to a world of minerals and a hot molten core that spun fast with the giant sphere’s rotation. The Sufis taught me to feel it as an expression of love from the planet to the life it hosted. I delight in knowing that I don’t really know where I am. I have an address and a zip code on earth, but not among the stars.
In the desert, preparing for a day of foraging, I reflected on the days that Mikey and I used to spend in Central Park. Even though gravity is weaker where we are now at a 4,500-foot elevation, it is easier to feel standing on the parched New Mexico ground than it ever had been in New York City.
Sesame, our 40-pound red heeler with alert shepherd ears and a wide smile, wagged excitedly inside the cab. She knew from the configuration of objects in the truck bed — shovels, buckets, loppers, clippers, and gloves — and the choice of vehicles that we were going on a foraging trip. Few things are more exciting to a native dog than adventures in the desert. She let out a whimper as she paced the cab waiting for us join her.
We packed a picnic lunch that we planned to eat under the canopy of salt cedar trees that guard the bank of the Rio Grande at the spot where it bends toward Caballo Lake. I wanted to check on a stand of mullein, hoping to catch it flowering so that I could make ear oil, a remedy for the swimmer’s ear Mikey is prone to in the summer. The plant always flowers within weeks of swimming season.
When we arrived we saw cows trolling the riverbank near our favorite spot. Across the river a sweat lodge I once helped build remained hidden by a tangle of juniper and cedar trees. Walking over to check on the tiny dome of bent willow that I had once covered in thrift-shop blankets, I saw a pile of large lava rocks that still marked the center of the lodge. A dirt circle hard-packed from use could be detected inside the lodge. A larger fire pit for heating the rocks remained just outside the lodge door. Next to it lay a set of antlers for lifting hot stones and moving them from the fire outside to the pit inside. I thought about the sweat lodge leader, who since the last sweat had fallen off the wagon and was wanted by the police for a crime whose details I hoped never to learn. In the Wild West, people sometimes walk a line between terror and transcendence.
I returned to one of the tasks of the day: to gather 10 buckets of sand from the river’s edge and to cut enough long, straight salt cedar branches to make the west wall of a shade structure we’d just finished building. After the day’s effort we planned to bring the bounty home; mix the sand with clay, compost, and camel poo; and add it to the garden beds in our yard. It was not quite spring and our seed was not yet set, but the mesquite trees threatened to spurt fresh growth and that meant the last frost was near. It was time to prepare for the challenges of spring, such as high winds that might last six or eight weeks, giving struggle to person and plant.
I love the mix of natural and industrial materials we used to build our patio.
The shade patio had taken us three months to complete. We designed it using SketchUp, then priced, ordered, and scavenged the materials. Each piece of 4-foot metal box tubing was carefully cut with a chop saw and welded together to produce three freestanding arches that, once mounted in the ground and sunk into cement footers, were welded together. Clamps were devised and used to hold them up, levels checked and rechecked, cement mixed. There was the sanding of rough metal edges, welding, and a final coat of Rust-Oleum that we applied reluctantly, weighing its toxicity against the value of what it preserved.
Compromises come up often. Meet each one with the best knowledge available at the time.
The structure’s ceiling was made of lengths of ponderosa pine spaced a few inches apart and tied down by hand with baling wire. As the sun traverses the sky, the pine produces a handsome peekaboo effect of stripes of shade and sun on a stained cement slab below it. I stained the slab a natural earthen color with powdered umber that I mixed with water and stabilized with a cement sealer.
In the summer months, below the ponderosa pine, I hang a giant 20-foot by 12-foot shade cloth that I sewed together in the living room after clearing out almost all the furniture to make room for it. Its canopy diffuses harsh UV rays. The entire structure was made for a few hundred dollars and should stand sturdily in place for decades. I compared it to what that much money could buy — a flimsy premade structure that probably wouldn’t last more than a season or two before being destroyed by the wind and left, with fractured legs, next to a dumpster.
Nature is abundant if you know how to look at it. We could have gone to the hardware store and bought a covering for
the patio wall, maybe R-panel, but what fun would that have been? Sesame would not have gotten to roam free on the grassy plains and visit the cows by the river, and we would have missed a perfectly good picnic and spring view of the mountains.
In town, mesquite trees drop sweet, protein-rich, caramel-flavored pods on the ground. They are hardly noticed by most, a regular annoyance to some. Mikey and I recognize them as food and wait for the right moment when the trees release the pods with a gentle tug. With cloth sacks we catch the bounty. We choose stands with sweet, fat purple-streaked pods that produce the taste we like best and host the least amount of bugs. (The flat almond-colored variety lacks sweetness and contains a little beetle that survives freezing temperatures and extreme heat.) On daily walks with Sesame we sample still-tethered pods and suck on them to critique their flavor while waiting for the trees to mature. At home, we freeze the loot in a chest freezer for several days and then solar-dry the pods at temperatures over 106°F to ensure that bugs and their eggs are eradicated. When the pods are snap-brittle, we pick through them, breaking off parts where a hole indicates the entry of a critter. Then, with a $1 garage-sale coffee grinder, we turn the cleaned pods into mesquite flour that stores all winter. We make all our baked goods with a ratio of one-third mesquite to two-thirds white (or other) flours. Though mesquite flour sells for 20 times the price of white flour, it is free to us. It requires only awareness, labor, and some time.
Mesquite is an unusual tree. A hardwood nitrogen-fixing legume native to arid regions of the Southwest, it sends out 200-foot taproots to find water. In the worst of droughts, mesquite survives on water too deep to nourish most other trees. Mesquite packs calories in the form of sugar and protein. It is both medicine (topical/internal) and food (flour and molasses): a gluten- and soy-free, high-fiber, calcium-rich treat. The entire pod is edible, with calories that have a balanced amino acid profile.
During summer, the native prickly pear cactus produces a succulent burgundy-red fruit called a tuna, which grows at the end of a thorny green pad. As we do with mesquite, we choose prickly pear cactus plants in advance and watch them mature. Taken early, before the sugars are fully present, the fruit is bland. But wait too long, and we risk losing the bounty to other wildcrafters. The time to pluck the tunas is in the morning when the plant’s oxalic acid is low. (Oxalic acid contributes to kidney stones but can be avoided altogether by harvesting at the right time of the day.)
Mikey loves harvesting mesquite. We visit stands often and taste the pods, waiting until they’re sweet before picking them.
When harvesting prickly pear cactus, we gather only what we can process in a day or two, then go back for more. Wearing welding gloves, Mikey reaches out with a pair of tongs, grabs a fruit from the plant, and twists until it falls into a cardboard box that I hold below.
Never touch the fruit! Its tiny hairlike thorns can take days to find and remove from the skin. At home, we suspend each fruit over a flame with a pair of metal tongs. After the thorns are burned, the fruit is dropped into boiling water to sit for less than a minute. On a wooden cutting board, we split the tuna open and peel back its skin, which we compost. We purée the mush inside, fill ice cube trays with the concentrate, and freeze. When we add prickly pear juice to homemade kombucha, it makes a happy, bright pink carbonated drink that tastes exactly like watermelon Jolly Rancher candy. And it’s a natural probiotic to boot!
Other times of the year, we harvest the prickly pear’s flat green hand-sized pads and break them down in a bucket mixer filled with water. We strain out the fiber by pouring the mix over a screen and keep the goo inside. The clear jelly makes an antibacterial, water-resistant paint and sealer. The homemade paint that we make with it replaced our need for elastomeric paint, a toxic commercial product that costs about a hundred bucks for a 5-gallon bucket. Prickly pear paint is free and compostable.
Every year Mikey, Sesame, and I visit a sandy spot near Elephant Butte Lake where stands of soapberry trees consider fruiting. They fruited three years ago and not since. “Maybe this year,” we say to each other as we head out to check, ready with cloth sacks.
The only berries to be found between fruiting years are at the very tops of the highest branches, amber from age. Soapberries replaced our need for laundry detergent; they’re rich in saponin, a chemical compound that foams like soap and has antibacterial properties. About a dozen berries in a muslin sack wash 10 loads of laundry and cost nothing more than a trip to a pretty spot by the lake. When we visit the stands, we take our time, find the lake’s edge, and watch a sunset before making our way home.
Since the soapberry stands are near where the yucca grows, we arrive prepared to dig yucca root, which dives deep in sandy ground. Like soapberry, yucca contains saponin. We harvest and dry the root for its soapy attributes and make hair conditioner and a remedy for arthritis. We add hair conditioner and the remedy to our Things We No Longer Buy list. When the yucca is in bloom, we pick its iridescent pale sprite petals and add them to salads. Once the yucca flowers bloom, it is hot enough for the rattlesnakes to be out and our visits to these areas near an annual end. After summer, when the snakes are back in their ancient winter dens, we return.
When I forage, I feel as though the cashiers of the world are saying, “You don’t have to pay anymore! Everything is free.” It’s like a waiter tipping you. It’s like getting in your car and discovering that someone filled your tank while you were asleep. All of nature is a gift. Our common gift.
The fruits of the soapberry tree are quite distinct, with their translucent skin and pebbly surface. They can be used as soap when shaken with water.
One day I loved the rosemary bush so much that I could not throw away what I pruned. I piled up what I meant to compost as though secretly intending to keep it. A few times I walked by the pile and caught a whiff of the piney smell. I trimmed what I had already cut from it a second time, this time picking the loveliest sprigs, I brought them inside and placed them on the kitchen table, not knowing what for. Later, sitting in front of the pile, I twisted the sprigs together, thinking that I’d never liked wreaths. They seemed old-fashioned in a way that I wasn’t. While making this wreath, I thought about knowledge. The knowledge I used to make the rosemary wreath was not acquired in the usual way. I knew how to make a wreath, I reasoned, because I loved the rosemary. I was its student. No one showed me.
When I tore my calf muscle running on a mesa, I limped home and picked comfrey, yarrow, calendula, and yerba mansa from the garden; chopped them semifine; and put the mix in a pot of boiling water on the stove. Then I steeped it for 10 minutes and scooped it onto a small washcloth that I cooled a little before wrapping my leg in it. I thanked the garden, the worms that live in it, the bugs and microbes, the charcoal from the fire pit that I’d mixed into the soil. I noted the carbon before thanking the compost, the heat, the rainwater, and the life of this earth. I thanked my friend Catherine for teaching me the recipe and then thanked the sun and thought about how everything alive is a solar cell or a solar converter because everything that lives has taken in the sun’s light or heat in one form or another.
Over-inspired by the New York Times best-selling book Born to Run, I injured my calf muscle. I made a healing poultice from ingredients in my own garden: comfrey, yarrow, and yerba mansa (as well as a calendula flower just to tell my ripped muscle that it was loved).
Each year before the ant population grows to the size of armies, I offer yoga class in my garden. I remember that there are reasons to know cycles, read signs, and remember nature’s timing. I stop holding yoga class at the first sight of lively fine red lines of ants that cross the cement slab like tiny rivers. At least one time each summer I look down and see that I am wearing a red ant sock. I shake it off like a sundancer in a ceremony and then spray on the tincture of the creosote plant that I make each year to calm the feeling of attack.
The first year that we had a garden, Mikey and I grew what probably would have amounted to about 33 cents’ wor
th of cilantro in raised beds that we made out of scraps of wood we plucked from a dumpster. The third year, the garden produced more than we could eat ourselves, and we saved food for winter. Now I look at my garden every morning. I am always surprised by its activity. It shows me that everything alive is in a constant state of change. We added several more beds. The following year we learned to dehydrate, can, and freeze, and sold the eggplant we grew to a health food store two blocks away. Last year I thought that if no other food existed we might survive. Every week this past year I picked fresh flowers for the house and for the houses of friends. For the first time we grew medicine.
Some nights we light a fire in a pit that took me eight hours to dig out. I lined the edge of it with lava rocks that I found while visiting Ted Turner’s ranch south of T or C. The wood I burn in the pit comes from the desert just past where the vast expanse begins at the edge of town. We burn mesquite because it smells best. Juniper smells lovely but is harder to come by. We smoke tofu, meat, and fish with the woods we prune from our own fruit trees.
Honeybees that I find in the house hitchhike on my finger to the door, where I encourage them to go outside. I use the honey from their hive to sweeten tea and baked goods; it reduces my susceptibility to pollen allergies. I chew the wax comb as though it’s gum. I make lip balm and salve from the wax. One day I will make candles.
In the guest room, a plastic bubbler lodged in the opening of a gallon glass jug of mead releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into my house, the byproduct of yeast eating the sugar in the honey. As I watch the CO2 exit the bubbler, I think about it entering my lungs. My respiration transports oxygen to where it is needed in my body. I exhale humidity. I have noticed that the color of our honey is darker when the mesquite trees are in bloom.
The Good Life Lab Page 10