by Boyle, Mark
One of my first realizations was that none of these were now going to be possible, except seeing friends. And even that was going to be extremely difficult, living as I did eighteen miles away from them, with only a bicycle for transportation and darkness falling at 4.30pm. I love my friends but I wasn’t going to make a thirty-six-mile round trip in the wind and rain, up and down hills, in the dark, to see them every evening.
I tried to get into the city as often as I could. When I did, I regularly stayed with my friends Cathy, Eric or Francene; all three were really supportive of what I was doing. I’d met Cathy and Eric after they’d contacted me through the Freeconomy website, and Francene was Fergus’s ex-girlfriend. Much as I intellectualize that cities are inherently unsustainable models of living and that the pollution and stress that seems to go hand-in-hand with them are really unhealthy, I admit I love Bristol, largely because it’s home to some fantastically inspiring people. Many are involved in projects such as Transition Towns, a movement whose raison d’être is to build resilient communities by ‘transitioning’ from our dependency on oil to a more sustainable way of life.
In the first few weeks I had no idea what I was going to do for fun. I’d long since become used to the city way of life, where everything you could possibly imagine was sitting in a store window waiting for you, price tag attached. I felt isolated living in the country and the public transportation was terrible. Not that I could use the bus anyway, but it was also difficult to get my friends to come out to my trailer during the winter, as none of them are as fond of cycling as I am. My second realization figured out this problem – there wasn’t going to be much spare time anyway!
PUNCTURE PROBLEMS
Wanting to meet my friends as often as I could meant I was clocking up the miles on my bike. And because I hadn’t established good, efficient waste-collecting routines, I was soon averaging well over sixty miles a week. While much of this was in the country, it seemed that as soon as I got into the city I got a puncture. There’s never a good time to get these but at nine o’clock on a cold, wet, winter night, after a physically tough day, it’s even less pleasant. Within three weeks, I had used up the few patches I’d had before the start of my year and buying a new puncture repair kit wasn’t an option. I tried reinforcing the tires with old linoleum, so that sharp objects couldn’t pierce them, but the little bits that broke off the linoleum served only to compound the problem.
Searching for an alternative, I came across a company, Green Tyres, which made unpuncturable tires. They used solar energy to power their production and selected their original staff from the long-term unemployed. I really admired the ethos of the company and the fact that their product would prevent a lot of unnecessary resources being used for new inner tubes and repair kits. I wrote a blog about them, so that those who used money could benefit, even if I couldn’t. The director of Green Tyres, Sue Marshall, was so thankful she emailed to say she was sending me a few tires in the mail. This wasn’t a solution I had considered as a possibility, but it was a great reminder that if you trust in life and give without any thought of receiving, whatever you need will come your way when you need it. Which was lucky, as I was only one patch away from walking for a year!
THE ‘SLOW’ LIFE
Everything, it seemed, took longer. Take washing my clothes. In the past, I’d gather any clothes needing washing, throw them in the machine, take them out when they were done and stick them on the radiator: easy. Not any more. Before I could begin my laundry, I had to make my own soap. First, I hauled waste wood from the city, on the back of the bike, to make a fire. Next, I fired up the rocket stove to boil some water, into which I stuck some soapnuts (Sapindus mukkorossi, a plant native to Nepal), ‘foraged’ from a local eco-store that had gone out of business. I boiled the nuts up for about half an hour – constantly feeding the rocket stove with old broken-up vegetable boxes – and lo! I had myself some detergent. This was no ordinary detergent; not only did it clean just as well as supermarket brands, it was much more environmentally friendly and certainly not tested on animals. With no way of heating lots of water, I’d put the clothes and detergent in a my small, makeshift sink with some icy-cold water, scrub for forty minutes, rinse for twenty minutes and hand-wring as much water out as I could before hanging them up to dry. In winter, clothes can take days, if not the entire week, to dry outside.
BOOKS AND PAPER FOR FREE
Reading and writing are two of my favorite ways to spend time, especially in front of the wood burning stove in winter when the wind and rain are pounding against my trailer. Thankfully, you don’t need cash for either.
For books, the library is your obvious bet. Those in rural areas might find a mobile library visits. However, not everyone finds the library ideal. You have to hand the book back within a certain time or incur a fine and not everyone can read it in the allotted time. And the library may not stock the book you want (though you can ask them to order it), especially in small towns.
Websites such as ReaditSwapit (www.readitswapit.co.uk) and BookHopper (www.bookhopper.com) allow you to swap books you no longer want for books you would like to read.
I’ve also organized book-swapping evenings; an offline version of the websites, with the benefit of being much more personal. You can get rid of the books you don’t want, get ones you do and meet like-minded people all at the same time! If you want something completely different, take a look at Book Crossing (www.bookcrossing.com) – I’ll let you check out this little gem for yourself!
For writing paper, I use old cash register receipts from a store in the city; these are great for leaving notes and would otherwise be thrown away. You can also make perfectly good paper and ink from mushrooms.
Not only washing clothes took extra time; everything did. Making a cup of tea took about twenty minutes. I decided it was sometimes more pleasurable to just not drink tea. Going to the toilet was equally time-consuming. First, I had to make sure the coast was clear; I didn’t want to upset local people who might arrive on the public path near my compost toilet just as the belt of my pants hit my ankles. Then, my hole in the ground inevitably seemed to be full at exactly the wrong time, and I’d have to spend ten minutes, with tightly-clenched buttocks, digging a hole half the size of my leg while praying I wouldn’t have an accident and have to re-start the whole clothes washing process.
When it got cold, I couldn’t turn the central heating on. There’d be wood-chopping, kindling-gathering, paper-finding and fire-starting before the fire even got going. Then it took a further thirty minutes to warm the trailer. There isn’t, unfortunately, a timer on a wood burning stove. It all sounds like a nightmare, but it’s wrong of me to portray it like that. There are a lot of environmental benefits in this way of life, which I believe outweigh the inconveniences:
Time to wash clothes with money: 10 minutes. Time to wash clothes without money: 2 hours 15 minutes.
Water used to wash clothes in a machine: 25 gallons. Water used to wash clothes by hand: 3 gallons.
Water used in a flush toilet each day per person (according to American Water Works Association Research): 18 gallons. Water used in a composting toilet each day per person: 0 gallons.
If the people of the US successfully made the transition to compost toilets, not only would every household save 34,000 gallons per year (American Water works Association Research Foundation) we’d also have a lot of great compost, to put back into the soil to replace everything that we’ve taken out.
Average household energy bill: $1,400 per year (more than my entire sustainable home cost!). My average monthly energy bill: $0. (This difference is like a person on the minimum wage having two weeks off work during winter.)
I discovered that I had no such thing as a work life–social life–private life balance. I just had life. Instead of doing an evening class paid for by the money I earned in a normal job, my learning came from being out in nature. I became acquainted with the sounds of local birds and learned more about squirrels thro
ugh observing them than I ever could on the internet. I realized that Jew’s ears mushrooms have a fondness for elder trees and that there’s a big difference between burning elder wood and alder wood.
My favorite times were when it rained heavily. I’d listen to the rain crashing on the roof with a real appreciation for the shelter that was keeping me dry and protected, and for the tree that supplied me with the wood that was now keeping me warm against the wind. Not to mention my thankfulness to the guy who made the wood burning stove. Such gratitude increases as you get closer to nature and the things that you use; the more degrees of separation you have, the less you appreciate them.
Because of what I was doing and the exposure it got, I did a lot of writing. I’d dreamed of living with nature for years; years when I had complained that I could never find the right space to think, read and write. Sitting in front of the wood burning stove, watching the embers glow and looking at the moonlight filtering through the trees, was perfect. My thoughts were clearer and I wrote articles in half the time it would have taken in the city.
It wasn’t all nature and coping with my, perhaps inevitable, feelings of isolation. There were free movie nights in the city and most weeks I’d go to Freeskilling. These evenings were so much fun and very informative, and gave me a real sense of doing something communally. They were also a great way for local people, who couldn’t afford to pay £10 ($15) or more for a workshop, to learn the traditional skills they would need for a sustainable future. Through Freeskilling, I got to meet loads of new friends every week and learned new skills at the same time. After each session, we would often go back to somebody’s house, rambling into the early hours about what we had learned and how we wanted to put it into practice. I organized the evenings with two local Freeconomists, Lucy and Amanda, with whom I became good friends very quickly. While neither had any inclination to live without money completely, both were passionate about skill-sharing and the need to rebuild our crumbling communities through sharing resources. Their enthusiasm and energy was a great source of inspiration.
Living the slow life is definitely more time-consuming, but I’d rather have it consumed this way than in watching a reality TV show in the room we call ‘living’. If we want to be truly sustainable in the long term, I really believe that this is what we need to do. The modern conveniences we have grown to love, the washing machines, dishwashers, and cars, come from an industrialized society, with the pollution and environmental destruction that go hand in hand with it. If I didn’t really believe this, I wouldn’t put myself to so much trouble.
My only frustration, I suppose, was that people around me hadn’t, understandably, really grown to appreciate how much more demanding this life was, both of my energy and my time. They expected me to live the fast life alongside my slow life, go to meetings in the city two or three times a week and do all the things I had to do. Sometimes I wished they could swap places with me just for a couple of days. But I had made my bed; there was no point moaning about the state of the sheets.
8
CHRISTMAS WITHOUT MONEY
Christmas began as the celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, a man who, by historical accounts, spent the last years of his life preaching simplicity. And to some people it still is. However, for the majority of people in western society, what it has become is far removed from what it was originally. The festive period has now become the most important shopping time of the year for most retailers. According to Deloitte, in 2008 the average Briton spent £655 on gifts, socializing and food. That’s over £36 billion for the nation – and 39% of it was on credit. UN figures show that during the twelve days of Christmas 2008, worldwide, 207,360 kids (the equivalent of the population of a small city) died of starvation.
What was traditionally a time to relax with family and friends has gradually become a huge source of stress for many people. The American Psychiatric Association estimates that between 10% and 20% of Americans suffer from Seasonal Depression, with a 10% increase soon after Christmas, most of it due to the financial hangover of its aftermath. It’s an expensive party in more ways than one.
Given the amount of pressure, subtly applied through huge advertising campaigns, to buy the biggest and best Christmas presents for your family and friends, many people questioned the rationale of becoming moneyless at the exact point of the year when it seems everyone else can’t spend enough. It did feel a bit strange, but to be honest, not buying presents didn’t really bother me; my adult friends knew what I was up to and weren’t expecting anything. And I think the fact I demanded they buy me nothing in their turn reassured them I wasn’t playing Scrooge. I was concerned about my nephews, but I decided it would be a good chance to explain to them why Uncle Mark wasn’t as kind and generous as Santa Claus (who, for a guy that travels the world using a reindeer and sledge, sure has one hell of a carbon footprint).
What did bother me was the thought of not getting home to spend Christmas with the people I love. The family had gone to relatives’ houses almost every year I could remember and my folks loved having us together for Christmas. Did leading what I deemed to be an ethical life mean I would have to upset my mother?
My main hope stemmed from a phone call I’d received from a television show in Ireland on the first crazy day of my year. They wanted me to come and be interviewed on a daytime lifestyle show, Seoige, presented by Gráinne Seoige, voted Ireland’s sexiest woman. This was upmarket bartering. Guests were usually paid quite handsomely for their ten minutes of work, but this wasn’t an option for me, so I politely declined. They also offered me return flights and trains and buses in between. In 2006, I’d vowed to never fly again, so I told them that if it did happen, I would only go by ferry. And as one of my principles was to accept only as much as I needed in life and no more, I felt that even a train or bus ticket would have been too much.
For most of December, Seoige was merely a possibility. My other idea was to cycle to Fishguard (my nearest ferry terminal for Ireland), hitch a ride with a truck driver and cycle all the way to the northwest. But few truck drivers take hitchhikers now, because of insurance complications. The more I contemplated this option, the harder it seemed. Doing it with money would be hard enough; without money it would be perilous at this time of year.
Christmas approached and I had no concrete solution to getting home to my folks. I was increasingly frustrated with the limits that living this way was putting on me. But just when I thought it wasn’t going to happen, I got a call from RTE to say they wanted me on the show and would email me round trip tickets. This was the solution to my only real obstacle – getting across the Irish Sea. Everything else I was fairly confident I could pull off without money, but the Irish Sea is a long swim. I decided to hitch the whole road trip, from Bristol to the northwest of Ireland. If I was lucky, it would take me two days; if not, Christmas Day would probably see me walking up a deserted main road, without food or shelter. I wouldn’t even have a working phone; without credit, I couldn’t receive calls outside the UK.
I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. Food was the main issue; I decided I’d better collect and make enough for three days. You never know how long hitchhiking is going to take – sometimes you can wait hours (though that has never happened to me). It was only about a four hour journey to Fishguard, but I knew I needed to get there before sunset, which would be at about 4.30pm. Getting a lift in the dark is difficult and sometimes a bit dangerous, depending on what type of road you’re dropped off on. Sometimes you can get dropped off at the wrong end of a city. That was my worst case; it would have meant walking for miles, with a heavy backpack and without a map, to get to the next hitching point.
I started in good time on December 23, leaving at 10.30 in the morning to catch the ferry from Fishguard at two o’clock the following morning. Starting my journey the day before Christmas Eve was an interesting experiment. Before setting off, I wondered whether the Christmas spirit of old would prevail. Would everyone who saw me want to he
lp me on my way or would they be too stressed and busy even to a see a hitchhiker on the side of the road?
My hitchhiking experience tells me that you have to get into the right head space. When your body language portrays confidence, openness, optimism and happiness, getting a ride seems like child’s play. When you’re a bit depressed, it feels like no one wants to know. I got into the groove, got smiling and got out on the road. This wasn’t hard, as I love the adventure of hitchhiking. On the bus or train you know that you’ll get on at A and get off at B and rarely speak to anyone in between; hitchhiking, you never know what is going to happen. If you can get over the uncertainty, it really puts the excitement back into travel.
TIPS FOR HITCHHIKING
Location, location, location. A great spot makes the difference between waiting five minutes and waiting two hours. Find a place where you can be seen easily, where the traffic is moving at less than 45 miles an hour and where a car has enough time and space to pull in safely. No driver will risk their life to pick you up.
Look happy. Few people want to share their car with someone who looks miserable! Smile and be friendly.
Wear some bright clothing. It also helps if you look clean and approachable. Have clothes to match all sorts of weather.
Keep luggage to a minimum.
Know your route. Know the roads you want to take and avoid freeways; it’s illegal and difficult to hitchhike on them in most countries. Some people like to use a sign to show their destination but I don’t bother.