The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  The trampoline (found in a dumpster) appeared to be perfectly normal until someone jumped on it and activated an EZ1 ultrasonic sensor below that read the distance between the stretched canvas and the ground. This caused a solenoid valve to release an appropriately sized spurt of gas from the top of a nearby metal stand with a lit wick at its tip. An LCD screen connected to the device provided data, such as the depth of jump based on the height of the trampoline and the amount of propane expected to be released. Our homesteader guests enjoyed a night of competing to produce the largest flame while bouncing up and down on the trampoline in our yard.

  Like the Brooks Brothers suit Mikey had hacked into a pair of illuminated pinstripe pants back in New York, the trampoline was a protest to a world left behind, a world fixated on the acquisition of wealth. He described it as “the least useful, most fun thing I could think of making.” Wall Street was fast fading from view.

  We planned to reconfigure the device later by turning it into a flaming doorbell. We reasoned that would be more practical. To transform it we needed only to swap the LCD screen for an old surveillance camera, to take a snapshot of the person who rang the doorbell, thus capturing their response to the surprise fire display. We planned to have the device e-mail us the photo so that we would know who was at the door. Sometimes geekery is not efficient or logical, though in this case, you must admit, it did have a practical, even if mischievous, application.

  Mikey’s controls for the fire trampoline include one LCD screen that shows the jumper in action and one that gives the trampoline’s start height, the jumper height, and the difference between them. The device also rates the jump with a score.

  A Cottage Industry

  I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.

  — Lloyd Dobler, played by John Cusack, in Say Anything

  Mikey and I delighted in the autonomous zone that small-town life offered us far and away from corporate logos and heavy commerce, but this life also offered no clear way to earn even the little income our lifestyle still demanded. When we were finished building our homestead’s infrastructure — garden beds, papercrete domes, irrigation systems, shade, and our PV solar system — we turned our attention to technology to help us devise a way to earn money. Still asking ourselves, Is there a way to live that does not require money? and Can we discover it before we run out?, we looked for a way to earn income that did not compromise our new lifestyle. Shopkeepers in town waited for customers to appear while carrying huge overheads and paying for utilities. We knew there had to be a better way. As homesteaders, we spend our time providing for our needs: making cheese, building, tending to gardens, and making medicines. These activities reduce our cost of living by more than five times. Our financial solution had to complement our homesteading lifestyle.

  In 2010 we started a web-based cottage industry, the Holy Scrap Store, with the idea that we would make a little extra of the things that we made for ourselves and offer it to others. I often thought of Helen and Scott Nearing; part of their income came from harvesting and selling maple syrup and maple sugar they made from sap tapped from trees on their Vermont farm. We took what was natural and particular to where we lived and turned it into economy.

  The Chihuahuan desert where we live is host to an unusual bounty of medicinal plants unique to its altitude and climate. By wildcrafting plants from the desert and relying on what we made out of them to help support us, we entered into a new relationship with nature and recognized our responsibility. We harvested where life was abundant, never taking more than was necessary, never cutting more than 20 percent from any one plant, and moving about from year to year, giving stands time to recuperate.

  Not much about our lifestyle really changed by having a cottage industry; we just produced a little more than we needed and posted it to the store. The teas that we favored in our home, made from local plants mixed with plants from our garden, we offered as medicinal blends. If I made lip balm or salve from the wax produced by the beehive in the garden, I made a little extra and put it in the store. I enjoyed the way that running the store diversified my skills and revived the graphic design skills that I’d picked up in college and had let go rusty. I designed product labels, merchandising materials, and the store’s site with great interest.

  It was at one of our annual homestead gatherings that Mikey decided to design electronic gadgets. Three hardware developer homesteaders standing shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen cringed, watching Libby struggle with a reptile timer to aid in the making of tempeh. Frustrated by the timer’s poor functionality and realizing that the right widget could offer a great deal to the process, Mikey said, “I can do better than this,” and set out to design a temperature controller to solve dozens of problems related to producing and processing food.

  First he used his temperature controller to transform our home energy use. We reduced the power consumption of our home’s largest energy sucker, our refrigerator, by replacing it with a chest freezer that we acquired for $50 at a garage sale. We turned the freezer into a refrigerator by plugging it into the temperature controller and setting the temperature. The conversion reduced our home’s power draw for refrigeration by 10 times by freeing up a big dose of the power produced by our PV solar system.

  After the refrigerator conversion, we used the gadget that Mikey named Yet Another Temperature Controller (YATC) to make a fermentation chamber out of a small, nonworking wine refrigerator that a friend was throwing away. We plumbed the fridge with a light socket and bulb for heat, plugged it into YATC, and set the temperature to match our use, whether we were making tempeh, letting bread dough rise, or making yogurt. The temperature controller also transformed a simple $20 slow cooker into a sous vide device, which we also use to separate honey from wax and slow-cook meat and tough veggies. Able to regulate any device plugged into it to run hotter or colder, the temperature controller Mikey designed gives precision control to a hot plate, enabling it to hold specific temperatures for specialized uses such as chocolate-making. The temperature controller gave us back time, reduced our labor, and helped us achieve the goal of keeping our food living, unpasteurized, and enzymatically active. Our cheeses and honey meet the qualification of raw by having never been heated beyond the threshold in which microorganisms live.

  In keeping with the motto Make extra of the things we use, we added the temperature controller to the Holy Scrap Store. Embracing the open-source ethic, keeping knowledge free and sharing it, Mikey also posted the source code and hardware designs for the device’s circuit board to the web. Then he made YATC available both in finished and kit form, for those who wished to make the device themselves. As YATC began to sell, he looked for other homesteading problems to solve with technology.

  With the glee of a 12-year-old graduate of Willy Wonka University, Mikey went on to build a device that reads and responds to the moisture level in the earth by turning on our irrigation system when the soil is dry. While expensive store-bought gadgets triggered by timers water gardens during rainstorms, Mikey’s device releases precious desert water only when it is actually needed.

  When he found himself spending too much time tracking the location of clogs in Chance’s fuel lines, he designed the Greasy Mon, a device that reads heat levels at various points along the fuel lines. The Greasy Mon indicated clogged fuel lines by showing where the temperature increased and decreased, thus pointing to blocks in the line.

  When we wanted to sprout seeds and grow plants indoors, he designed an LED-based indoor grow light that reduced the light spectrum to the colors plants most need. He oscillated the LEDs at a rate unobservable to the human eye and to plants, and reduced the power draw.

  Recognizing the important role batteries play in off-grid life and aware of the toxic effect of batteries in landfills, Mikey next m
ade a device for restoring dead batteries. His soap dish battery desulfator that he calls Power in My Pocket (PIMP) revives free junk batteries headed for the landfill. The battery desulfator works by emitting a high frequency pitch to a battery; the sound breaks up the crystallization inside and brings back the battery’s vitality. Fewer new batteries would be purchased, toxic chemicals reduced, minerals left in the earth.

  Making homebuilt electronics.

  Making homebuilt electronics had us buying premade parts that we sourced from outside suppliers. At first Mikey designed the circuit boards at home and sent them out to be manufactured. He used premade casings purchased from vendors to house the finished products. Wanting to do more of the work ourselves, he purchased a computer numeric control (CNC) (see page 259). When the CNC machine arrived, he spent several days assembling the unit (he bought it in kit form) and several months mastering and perfecting its use. It required calibration and the learning of a host of new software. He reflected that having a job would have lengthened his learning curve and pushed back the goal of self-sufficiency. Today we home-manufacture many of his devices’ parts and packaging, including the circuit boards.

  As our cottage industry picked up speed I recognized a familiar invitation at our door. We were being invited to upscale. Money was making its round, and I imagined the familiar goblins saying, “How ’bout now? Betcha could use a little extra cash.” Ten years into my pledge, I was prepared for the temptation.

  Many times throughout my life my father asked me, usually when I picked up a new interest, “Can you make real money doing that?” I’ve explained our credo to my mom, but still each time Mikey makes a new gadget she asks, “Is he going to patent it?” Mikey would not patent his widgets, and we would not choose to upscale.

  It seems natural that each new generation is tasked with seeking a remedy for the wounds of those that came before. My parents were born during the Great Depression.

  “Ma! We have enough,” I tell her. She smiles and nods in agreement, as if to say she simply forgot.

  While considering the decision to expand our cottage industry, Mikey checked in with friends of ours who were running a successful home manufacturing business and had expanded theirs. They complained about having tons of money but no time. They were stressed out. They described larger and larger debt, bigger stakes, greater risk, more people to manage, more reasons not to sleep, more stress, and more hours spent working.

  To tease out some of the issues related to the decisions we faced, we split a laptop screen to view two blank pages and started two lists:

  Upscale

  Wealth

  Less time: more store-bought and lower-quality goods

  Stress: deadlines, paperwork, and activity of business

  Need for specialists like lawyers and accountants

  Monotony: life narrowed, less diverse experience of life, specialization. Disproportionate amount of time spent on a single thing.

  Requires survival mentality: selling, deal-making, competition, negotiations, strategizing to get the best of a situation for personal gain, competing. “Every man for himself” mentality.

  Time spent unenjoyably: red tape, liability, managing regulations. More time on phones and computers indoors, less time in nature.

  More acculturated knowledge. Less independence.

  Managing and employing other people. Artificial relationships.

  Business risk is tied to forces outside our control: worry, risk, more to lose.

  Voluntarily Limited Growth

  Abundance

  Grow and prepare healthy fresh food; make hand-made, high-quality goods

  Slower pace: moderate time spent on paperwork and working with artificial systems

  Simplicity: Understand and manage all aspects of our lives ourselves

  Maintain a diversity of interests and skills. Continue to grow.

  A lifestyle of generosity and sharing, free of the constraints of profit. Can make decisions based on preserving life rather than supporting industry. Relationships are natural and not contrived for mutual gain.

  Time spent enjoying life, traveling, playing. Time spent in nature and outdoors.

  More natural knowledge about life: plants, planet, people, and the common sense. Independence.

  Participate in community and friendships rather than artificial relationships based on financial structures. Don’t have to be anyone’s employer or boss.

  Less worry and risk: Life is not subject to swings of market.

  We decided to let our cottage industry reach a ceiling defined by our being able to handle all its aspects ourselves, from our 1-acre homestead. The only help we would take on would come in the form of child labor. Well, sort of. Mikey tutors friends’ children on how to work with electricity and electronics. Some sessions resulted in built gadgets. We chose not to patent, outsource, promote, or seek channels of distribution and not to engage in activities that led to more people driving to work, more paper moved, insurance bought, lawyers engaged, sunsets missed, and sleep lost. We chose time over money: by limiting our own growth I could still teach yoga, build the giant metal flower I imagined mounted to the signpost in front of our property, and live the life we had worked hard to create. We would continue to make cheese, build things, and take Sesame on long walks along the Rio Grande. Mikey would be free to develop new skill sets, make things for pleasure’s sake, help friends with their technical problems, and find solutions, making life a little better all the time. We chose to preserve the sensuous life of growing, processing, cooking, and eating food; soaking in the hot springs; daydreaming on the iron bed in the garden; and counting birds in the sky.

  Mikey and I decided that if our cottage industry store failed or faded, if something in the world changed and made it irrelevant, we would simply find something else to do.

  Working with Mikey has helped Ashe know that in the future he will become an engineer. Mikey says he has surgeon’s hands.

  Wisdom

  The essence of milk is butter, the essence of the flower is honey, the essence of grapes is wine, and the essence of life is wisdom. Wisdom is not necessarily a knowledge of names and forms; wisdom is the sum total of that knowledge which one gains both from within and without.

  — Hazrat Inayat Khan

  While writing this book, many times I noticed that the knowledge I have to share was not passed down to me through the cultural milieu, even though many of the problems that Mikey and I went about solving are as old as humanity. The knowledge I gathered to fulfill the pledges I made was pieced together from the Internet, people I found living outside the margins of mainstream culture, hard-to-find and out-of-print books, trial and error, and contemplative practice. I wondered why my formal education failed to pass on fundamental knowledge about how to live. What I felt missing was my relatedness to my species, my relationship to life and how to live within it, essential knowledge. This kind of knowledge, amassed across the arc of time, seems to have dropped off in the last hundred years. I felt like I was an odd fit in the world. My upbringing in the suburbs of Long Island and adult life in the city did not help me find the knowledge I craved. Throughout my education I had learned how civilization worked, but no one taught me how to live on the earth.

  As Douglas Rushkoff points out in Life Inc., “The techniques for proper breastfeeding used to be passed down from mother to daughter, but now there is a market for lactation consultants. As a result, one of the most intimate human functions has become commodified.” For at least a half-century people have learned about media, brands, and commerce. Not how they work, but how to work them. They learned about systems within systems: coupons, warranties, return policies, credit cards, and things related to the economy. As part of the first generation to witness the whole world for sale, fully commodified, and nature under genuine duress, we are finding that the knowledge relied on by previous generations cannot solve the problems that new generations face.

  All my life I have observed a nervous and
fearful humanity. I wonder what this condition tells us about the time we live in. Over half a century ago, journalist Edward R. Murrow said,

  There is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.

  I wonder if people are afraid because they know that they don’t understand the real world? Acculturated knowledge is shallow, and the landscape of commerce is not necessarily logical, fair, reliable, sensible, or just. The footing is unsteady.

  When we know that we are safe with ourselves we feel calm and happy. We are naturally wired with a need to know that we are qualified to care for ourselves. The suspicion and fear I see tell me that the knowledge we carry is not the right kind; it is not good enough. Many of us do not trust ourselves with ourselves.

  I’ve noticed that many in the generations who welcomed in the commodified world rely on a mysterious they for information about how to live. “They say ginkgo is no longer good but B12 is essential.” “They say we should spend twenty minutes a day in the sun with no sunblock.” I hear the snake-oil salesmen saying, “Hurry hurry!” while waving bottles of potions in the air. In this atmosphere people are left to guess about the motives of the mysterious they and hope that their best interests are somehow being served. In a society based on capital, the motives should be well understood. If our culture has no genuine source of wisdom, people have no choice but to be scared. Without wisdom we are marooned.