The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  I love visiting our bees. Each time I am amazed at their tolerance. I’ve never been stung, though sometimes I am visiting to steal their honey!

  Tuesdays, Beverly the farmer delivers milk to a cooler that we leave by the door. Princess the cow provides the milk. Mikey and I make yogurt and several kinds of cheese with it: mozzarella, Romano, and a Mexican Chihuahua that tastes like cheddar. I say thank you to Princess, to the enzymes, the earth, heat, microorganisms, air, and Beverly.

  When my energy is low, I chew sticks from a native plant nicknamed Mormon tea. The nickname came about because the Mormons swore off stimulants yet enjoyed this plant. Turns out, ephedra is a stimulant. I sell ephedra tea and tincture in our online store. The local plant does not contain the same alkaloids that are in the illegal Asian variety — the plant that grows in New Mexico is not nearly as strong (though you should still use it with some caution).

  When I eat rich foods or too much food, I squirt a dropper full of ocotillo tincture in a cup of water and swig it. The effect is the same as Pepto-Bismol. I harvest the ocotillo plant in the spring, wearing welding gloves that protect my hands from the plant’s hard, sharp barbs. I take a stalk or two (never more) from plants growing on private land (with permission). Laws protect the species from being overharvested. I clip the fire-red tops and dry them in paper bags that I attach with clothespins to a wire tied between the two corners of my kitchen window. The flaming red tops make a refreshing blush-colored tea. Ocotillo, the sole genus in the Fouquieriaceae family, flowers in summer when one is thirsty for tea.

  One night I dreamed of potatoes as if I were underground, too. In the morning I got up and harvested the tubers on time. A couple of years later, while I was walking along the Pecos River, a scouring rush plant seemed to tell me that I should notice that it was a remedy for the bladder because it sits by fast-moving water and it grows in the shape of a hollow tube, much like the tubing that leads to the bladder. The same day a mullein plant asked that I notice its furry leaves, similar to the cilia in the lungs. Mullein is an expectorant when it is smoked or steeped in hot water and made into a tea.

  I stop writing things down because I understand that the book of nature is the truest book.

  I welded together a metal bed frame that was about to be thrown away. I layered soft sheets, blankets, and pillows over a piece of foam so that I can daydream on the bed in the garden. I like to think that Pippi Longstocking is a cousin of mine. My bed can’t fly, but it is magical. Guests love to sleep in that garden bed, and when they awake in the morning, they have a glow of happiness about them.

  At night, under a twinkly purple-black dome, I lie in the garden bed and watch satellites hurry across the sky. They flirt with me half asleep in the soft linen. Before I made the magic bed, I used to blow up an air mattress, put it on the roof, and sleep there with Mikey. In the morning, birds that seemed in the habit of flying a route inches over the roof nearly hit us when we sat up to meet the sunrise.

  I go to the highest spot in T or C and stand under the water tower to see the last house in every direction. A fox that lives nearby occasionally makes an appearance. After the last house in every direction begins the vast expanse.

  From the 108°F water that comes from a belowground hot spring and is piped into an 8-foot feed tank in my yard, floating and buoyant, I welcome new days and put to rest those that are finished. The sun makes its way over Turtleback Mountain from points south to points north, turning on the equinoxes and solstices. Late summer an impressive band of stars, the Milky Way, tips me off to my cosmic whereabouts. At twilight I see the last shades of blue and green turn purple-black in the same part of the sky that the sun rose in. The moon lifts. “East,” I say, confirming the direction. Thin crescent moons seem always to hover in the west. Like a drawn smile, the crescent receives illumination from the sun that can no longer be seen from the side of the planet I am on. I name what I know and promise to know more: the Southern Cross, Orion, the Pleiades, a nebula (a nursery of young stars), another shooting star, the space station. Soon, 30 miles away space flights will take people up to the lower atmosphere. I wonder if I will see them ascend and descend. I smile back at the crescent moon, thinking that I, too, want to catch the light like a bowl, and I consider the ways that I know to ascend and descend. I get a feeling that the universe experiences itself through me, and I yell out loud enough for my neighbors to hear, “This is my life.”

  I go just beyond the boundary of man’s world and into the desert to find cures and things I need. The desert is a cure for more than what plants remedy.

  In summer months I bring my laptop to the garden bed. On hot nights, we sleep in the garden.

  A swift white barn owl passes overhead in the night sky without making very much sound. Sure, even-paced movements of strong wings displace otherwise still air. I struggle to catch a part of the event and wonder how close I would have to be to feel the sharp cut of air and resulting snap that follows the movement of the giant wings. I close my eyes to see through the eyes of the owl. Movement is of particular interest. I observe a mouse scurry past a cat, unnoticed in the dark in my neighbor’s yard, and I wonder if what I am seeing is true.

  Almost every night, coyotes squeal to announce a meal, maybe a rabbit, a hundred yards off. Downtown dogs harmonize to the call. Asses living on the only property across the river join in the sound. Sesame’s attentive ears stand up, though she stays sitting on the down pillow I made for her out of a blanket my grandmother had lugged to the United States from Russia. I imagine the scene is taking place where the vast expanse begins. Two houses, the river, then the coyote, the mountain, and Jornada del Muerto (dead man’s walk), as the natives call the land where Virgin Galactic is building its spaceport.

  While I soak in the hot spring in the afternoon, a band of noisy black birds covers all the power lines and rooftops in sight. I try to count the congregations of clattering geese that make enormous Vs in the sky. I have time to try. Everything that I love is free.

  The Digital Homestead

  Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.

  — Stewart Brand

  Seventeen illuminated laptop screens broke up the darkness of our living room. Thirty-four hands clattering away on the keyboards made a mechanical noise reminiscent of a small factory.

  In the kitchen I filled the china cabinet with clean dishes from lunch and noted that it was easier to host this annual meeting of digital homesteaders than it was to have a single houseguest. Somehow the homesteaders made our 1,200-square-foot home feel big enough to hold an army, even when we were huddled hip to hip. Quick to wash a dish, pick up a broom, move a couch, repair an appliance, fix a busted window, or haul wood, homesteaders perform household chores with a familial spirit. The yard is filled with pitched tents and vans parked in front of the old RV park power posts, but on cold nights guests creep into the living room and roll themselves up in a huddle of sleeping bags.

  At the kitchen table, video bloggers Jay and Ryan uploaded footage of the previous day’s skill-sharing workshop, taught by phycologist Andy Potter. Though Andy’s an algae scientist, he had taught a Dutch-oven cooking class that made enough frittata and peach cobbler to keep our bellies full all through the afternoon. Before the other homesteaders could post images of the feast to the web, Ryan announced that her video was online, along with the recipes and techniques.

  In the meantime, Asher busied himself by the blender preparing his contribution, a raw-food class on how to make a modified version of key lime pie with a date-nut crust. He began by demonstrating techniques for making lime-infused coconut butter, which he layered with strawberries and pears.

  Libby and Tristan took the mystery out of making tempeh (see page 244), a multistep process that combines high protein soybean and a fungus. First they modified a cooler by poking a hole in it for a lightbulb’s cord to fit. They installed shelving (oven racks they’d found in a free box by the du
mpster). Tristan found parts to complete the fermentation chamber in a scrap heap in the yard and, in no particular rush, he modified the cooler (see page 170).

  Cobblers, pies, tempeh: It’s not surprising that our annual gathering revolves around food, because our lifestyles do, too. Each evening one third of the group produced the night’s dinner for the rest. Those who did not cook cleaned up and restored the kitchen for the next meal.

  Gavio produced a dinner game that started with a list of every guest’s favorite in-season food: pumpkin, asparagus, pomegranate, basil, okra, and so on. Then he led the group through a contemplative process, to reveal how the seemingly mismatched ingredients could be harmonized into a meal. (Gavio, by the way, was the one who taught us about the importance of kitchen technology. He insisted that without a large food processor and full-strength blender, we were doomed. He was right. Later we added a large food dehydrator, a stovetop smoker, a digital temperature probe, and many other techy tools to our arsenal of kitchen widgets.)

  Andy taught us how to cook in a Dutch oven.

  We do more than cook and eat. I taught a welding class, and Mikey led a battery workshop. After Libby and Tristan showed off their homemade rocket stove, Ryan made one out of scrap lying around our yard: a Christmas cookie tin and a soup can. Rocket stoves use combustion and a vertical chimney to burn a remarkably small amount of wood and create an unusually hot flame. Eric gave a presentation on passive homes, and Luke taught basic bike repair out in the yard. We shared and discussed videos about making and building with papercrete. This year everyone was particularly excited to see the leather glove that Eric repaired with a patch he had made out of a kombucha mother that he dried, cut, fit, and sewed where his bike glove had split. Phil was excited about his new laser cutter, a device that rapidly and accurately cuts a variety of materials. He burned Star Trek images into sushi rolls with it. Limor demonstrated a device she had made, a small and inconspicuous remote control. When its button was pressed, it emitted a signal that prevented cell phones from being able to make or receive calls. “A cell phone jammer,” she said with a mischievous smile.

  We’d first met Jay and Ryan the year we broke ground on our property. A mutual friend had introduced us, knowing they were vlogging (video blogging) about people living alternative lifestyles. They shot a number of short video pieces about Holy Scrap that were picked up by Make magazine and received 50,000 views. This buzz connected us to more like-minded people and kicked off our fascination with community development through the Internet. On Jay and Ryan’s advice, we started blogging. And when they returned to San Francisco, they pledged themselves to a lifestyle similar to the one we were creating. Within a year they had bought a property in Virginia, renovated it, and begun to grow food, raise bees, and become independent. Between visits we videoconference with them to share our progress, trials, and tribulations.

  Our yearly gathering happens because Mikey and I scour the web, looking for people living with similar ideals. We read and comment on each other’s blogs. We have in common more than just a lifestyle of making our own goods, living in the waste stream, and growing and preparing food: our homesteads are digital. We blog and have YouTube channels, Flickr accounts, and online stores. We use technology to solve problems. We share ideas and experiences through our blogs and online videoconferences.

  Mandy and Ryan appeared at our door with the recumbent bikes that they were riding coast to coast in search of an intentional community to settle in. Someone in town had told them, “You should go meet Wendy and Mikey,” and so they did. That night, we watched the videos they had shot at a dozen intentional communities from northern California to Arizona.

  In the evenings, a digital projector beamed media from laptops onto our living room wall for more presentations. We soaked in our hot spring and melted s’mores over the fire pit, accompanied by guitars, ukuleles, and things tapped and smashed together to create a clanking rhythm section. I led yoga each morning, and on breaks between skill-sharing workshops our guests scoured local thrift shops for vintage finds. Some packed suitcases with the goods they found and later resold them in eBay stores they maintain to help pay life’s expenses.

  Between skill-sharing workshops and meals we discussed the irony of our situation. The digital homesteaders gathered at our home use technology, tools, and equipment to create a lifestyle less entangled with money. . . and yet these things require money to obtain. We share a wish to live sustainably on the earth, and yet the production of the things we use comes at a cost to the environment. Our lifestyles are full of contradictions. The PV solar array that Mikey and I installed generates clean power for our home, but its manufacture left a carbon footprint. We use the clean power it produces to run machines made in factories that help us build out of waste materials. Much of what we know about homesteading, growing food, fermenting, composting, repurposing trash, and building began with tutorials found on the Internet. The friendships at our digital homesteader gathering were formed online.

  Reconciling these seeming opposites led us to discussions about process, context, and the time we live in. Marginalized, living remotely, without the tie of connectivity offered by technology, we might each be able to reduce our own small footprint more than we already have. But we share a desire to have an effect on more than our individual lives. Technology helps us solve problems and share solutions.

  Like Burning Man’s temporary city built on goods bought with money produced under the might of capital, our solutions are born out of the context of our time. Black Rock City’s gift economy created an example of sharing that impacted people the world over. Swap-O-Rama-Rama is an online community. Cities all over the world could not have used its model for repurposing textile waste if not for global connectivity. Some solutions designed to repair a modern world come with the aid of the technology it spawned.

  Mikey and I believe that a world reclaimed by individual makers will be a better one than the world run by corporations because individual makers are not commodified. Corporations are bound by law to make decisions that produce the greatest profit for their shareholders. Profit-driven corporations disperse decision making across departments and formulize the process so that decisions with destructive outcomes are made by no single person. In corporations you’ll find people saying things like I just file the paperwork, I only check the pipe fittings, I install the computer systems, I just run the wiring, I only manage the budget, and My only job is purchasing the hardware. Ask the same individuals if they would dump toxic waste into a river and they’ll likely say no. But as employees of a corporation that dumps toxic waste into a river, they all play a tiny part even if they don’t realize it.

  In contrast, individual makers are directly connected to outcomes. Free of the mandate of profit, they make decisions differently. Individuals have the luxury of considering life. A fundamental question we must ask is, Who has the power to make decisions that impact us all?

  People alive today are tasked with transforming something already built, failing, and destructive into something better. We are past the moment in which fretting over each plastic bag matters. We don’t have the hundred years that is needed for consumer behavior to add up to having an impact. Fretting over the plastic bag distracts us from the abuses of those who manufactured the bag. Industrial waste, the burning of fossil fuels, and the resources consumed by corporations, supported by governments, and driven by capital, outweigh individual consumer behavior immeasurably. Bill McKibben reported in a July 2012 article in Rolling Stone that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, after giving 90 percent of its political cash to the Republican Party in 2010, filed a brief with the Environmental Protection Agency urging it not to regulate carbon. In response to the question What if the scientists turn out to be right? a Chamber representative said, “Populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations.” The U.S. Chamber suggests that in Darwinian fashion humanity adapt to a world whose signature is c
ontinual destruction. “Thanks to the size of its bankroll, the fossil-fuel industry has far more free will than the rest of us,” McKibben concluded. Of corporations invested in hydrocarbons, such as Shell, BP, Exxon, Chevron, and Peabody, he wrote, “They hold the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they’re planning to use it.” In the same article, he quotes Naomi Klein: “Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business — pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops — and we pressure them to change those practices. . . . For the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.” Vananda Shiva, author of Stolen Harvest, describes the push/pull of industry and nature by saying, “Nature shrinks as capital grows.” She, too, believes that the “abuse of the earth is the ecological crisis.”

  As creatures of this earth we share in the right to use and protect our common treasures: water, air, and soil are yours to use (or not) to make things better. Individuals make better decisions than corporations. You can consider more than profit. You can consider context, balance, harmony, and life. When you make decisions wisely, things get better all the time.

  The Least Useful Most Fun Thing

  To understand pleasure is not to deny it.

  — Krishnamurti

  Not all of our techy projects were designed for practical purposes. While our guests napped and milled about between workshops, Mikey fired up a plasma cutter in our sun-baked yard. He tinkered with a scrap piece of 4-inch square by 6-foot metal tubing that he planned to use to shoot fireballs from a trampoline. He first debuted the strange toy at Fiesta, an annual townwide event featuring a quintessential small-town parade of Shriners driving midget cars in fast-spinning circles, a proud sheriff’s posse on horseback, and lots of floats. T or C’s annual Fiesta weekend also featured a rodeo, a karaoke contest, and quirky games like the racing of rubber duckies down the Rio Grande. Thanks to Mikey, Fiesta also included one fire trampoline.