The Moneyless Man

by Boyle, Mark

  WIELDING THE AXE

  Stocking up on firewood isn’t the first job most people think of when they think of what needs doing in spring. You’re leaving the cold weather behind and the wood burning stove gets to take a well-deserved vacation.

  But just as you don’t have food in the fall if you don’t plant seeds in the spring, you won’t have a warm home if you don’t fell and store wood before the hot summer months. For wood to burn well, it must be seasoned. When you fell a tree, the wood contains a lot of water, as you know if you pick up a fresh log. Leaving it to dry through the spring and the summer means you’ll have some really decent firewood in the fall. If I’d been certain that I would return to my old life in the city once my moneyless year was over, I wouldn’t have bothered. I wouldn’t need the wood there, as there are strict regulations about burning it in cities. But at the start of the spring, I had no idea whether I was going to continue living without money if I made it to end of November, so I applied the precautionary principle and got it in regardless.

  Because the winter months had been so hectic, I’d neglected my wood-chopping activities and didn’t really get started until late February. The farm where I volunteered had an overgrown piece of land that hadn’t been looked after properly for years. It had plenty of trees overdue for felling and coppicing, meaning ample amounts of wood for me. I went on to the Toolshare scheme on the Freeconomy Community website and borrowed some tools. The people who lent them to me were more than happy to share, but I felt slightly uncomfortable. Most people who borrow tools know that if anything happens they can buy new ones. I didn’t have that luxury, so I was paranoid about damaging my borrowed tools. However, it did mean I looked after them really well.

  The tools I needed depended on what wood I was coppicing and the stage of growth it was at. Coppicing involves cutting down young tree stems to almost ground level, which, as well as giving you some wood immediately, encourages new shoots to sprout. For hazel and other young re-growth, billhooks (a traditional hand tool similar to a machete but with a hook at the end) were the fastest and neatest implement to use. Loppers (scissors on the end of a long pole) and a pruning saw were good for smaller stems and on older coppice I found a bow saw worked best. I managed to get all these from Freeconomy members in Bristol and Bath.

  My first job each morning was to get my tools together and select the trees I felt were the best to cut back. This was my favorite part of the day. The rising sun peeped its face over the eastern horizon of the valley a bit earlier each morning, thawing the light frost that carpeted the hills I roamed. The birds engaged in a singing contest, each trying to outdo the other. And the rabbits realized that Homo sapiens had woken up and wisely scampered out of my vegetable patch to the safety of the hedges. Little did they know I was vegan.

  Cutting down trees has, rightly enough, a terrible reputation. Humanity is chopping them down at an alarming rate at a time when we need more, in order to absorb the growing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But using your own fuel, grown a few feet from your home, is a much greener source of heating than piping it from Norway or transporting it from wartorn, distant, or fragile countries. We don’t only need to reduce food miles to avert the worst effects of climate chaos – we also need to start thinking about fuel miles.

  Once the wood had hit the ground, usually before lunch, my next job was to chop it up into smaller pieces, to enable it to season more quickly. Different woods (except ash, which you can burn immediately) take different lengths of time to dry out, but a year is enough for most. I didn’t have this luxury. With my supplies almost exhausted, I needed to have some ready within six months or I’d have a really cold end to my year. After splitting it with an axe, I took as much as I could into my trailer, where I stacked it next to the wood burning stove, giving it a chance to dry inside during the last few months of cold weather. The rest I covered with a tarp, waiting for the summer sunshine to dry it. Every day, I took wood from under the tarp to replace the wood I had burned the evening before.

  It was incredible how quickly the snow of January faded from my memory. I adored my days out gathering wood, which took me the best part of the last two weeks of February. For the first time in my life, I’d gone topless wood-chopping on Valentine’s Day. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for them), the only females around were eating grass in a nearby pasture. Claire had presumed I would be too busy to want to do anything. There is something about chopping wood that resonates with something primitive, but still very alive, deep inside. My female friends told me it was a male thing, a deep-rooted need to provide for our partners. Maybe, but after just three months of living without money, things weren’t going very well for me on that front.

  RELATIONSHIP PROBLEMS

  When I tell people that I live without money, the first things that spring to their mind are the physical challenges. However, they are only half the battle. I undertook the year not only to see if I could cope in a ‘bushcraft survivor’ type of way, but also to find how it felt, personally and emotionally, to live without money. And to be honest, it was very challenging, especially at the beginning.

  Just before I’d started the year, I’d begun going out with Claire. She was very supportive of what I was doing, but not looking to do it herself, partly because she had just begun a degree in Environmental Geography and needed to pay her way through that. She knew before we started going out that I was going to have a really busy year and she was happy to work with that. Practice, however, is always much more difficult than theory. The demands of moneyless living, coupled with the media interest, meant I was constantly busy. If I wasn’t doing the things that living without money calls for, I was writing or talking about them. And my decision not to get into motorized vehicles for the rest of the year didn’t help.

  That decision, in many respects, was ridiculous. Claire often took her dogs for a walk along the coast. This was about forty miles away, well outside my cycling range. But she was going there anyway; the reasonable thing would have been to go with her and have a beautiful day together. However, I felt I needed to make a statement about oil, especially to those closest to me, and it would have been hard for people to take my stance seriously if I’d continued to use oil myself. Understandably, this put a strain on our relationship. She thought I was going overboard and maybe she was right. But I felt I had to stay true to my ideals.

  Before we knew it, the little petty arguments, often an indicator of bigger problems, were happening. We cared about each other, and she supported the way of life I was trying to promote, but the realities of going out with someone who has given up most material possessions didn’t quite match the romantic illusion, especially for someone who needed to keep one foot in the ‘normal’ monetary system. The pressures spring put on my time were greater than ever. The weeds suddenly came back to life exactly when I wanted to plant my seeds. So, in the middle of April, Claire and I decided to break up. It was painful for a while, as every split is. Days I should have spent planting the seeds for my summer’s harvest, I frittered away feeling sorry for myself and questioning whether I should pack it all in, sacrifice some of my ideals and have long, lazy weekends in bed with a girl I loved. But being moneyless helped me get over it more quickly than normal; I knew that unless I started breaking sweat again, I wouldn’t have much fresh produce to pick after June.

  This highlighted one of the ironies of my life. I spend most of my time doing stuff for people I never meet, let alone who care for me. Then I neglect those who are dearest to me, because I am too busy with the other stuff. How do you balance your responsibilities to those you deeply, personally, love and care for (who you can usually count on your two hands), while simultaneously trying to do your best for the people and the planet that’s negatively affected by the way we live here in the West?

  Breaking up in the middle of spring brought other issues. Summer is a time of romance, a time to spend the long, light evenings with a partner. I was back on the market with
one of the worst lonely hearts ads you could possibly imagine:

  DESPERATELY SEEKING

  MARK, 29, BRISTOL.

  Single white male, Irish, no money, no car, no television and no career (and little prospects of things changing). Has own house (14ft trailer). WLTM single vegan female, with penchant for moneyless living, into local organic food and permaculture, GSOH and model looks. Can take lucky woman dumpster diving for dinner at weekends, weeding in the evenings and solar showers together in the morning.

  Call Mark on 1–800–HOPELESS

  How I live my life raises some very personal dilemmas. I’ve chosen this way of life for myself, but will a potential partner still be interested if I decide I want to carry on? It can be pretty hard to find someone you adore at the best of times. Vegetarians, vegans and locavores (people who only eat food grown within a defined radius of their home), who decide to go out only with those who eat a similar diet, know how much this decision narrows down the list of potential partners. How much worse might it be if you are looking forward to a life without money? I often joke about it, but I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge it weighed on my mind from time to time. Even moneyless people want to fall in love!

  And as if things weren’t hard enough, my old chat-up line had become obsolete. In the past, if I was attracted to someone, I’d ask them out for a drink and we’d go for a glass of wine or a cup of tea or coffee. But I hadn’t yet brewed any alcohol and as I couldn’t hit the local coffeehouse for a double espresso, a cup of freshly-picked wild tea was the only thing on the drinks list for any girl I wanted to impress.

  TWO CUPS OF TEA ...

  Spring is a great time for foraged tea. My favorite has to be nettle and cleaver tea, as much because they both grow beside my front doorstep as for the taste. They make a fantastic brew, packed full of nutrition and anti-oxidants, high in iron, potassium and magnesium, and with traces of other minerals.

  For most British people, there are many ways to make a cup of tea: black or white, with or without sugar and of infinite degrees between weak and strong. However, if you consider the whole process of making tea, there are just two. The first is what I’ll call the ‘sane’ way of making tea. I’m assuming the overwhelming majority of the British population is sane, so given that this is the way it makes its tea, it stands to reason that this is the ‘sane’ method, or people would choose otherwise. It goes like this:

  1. Get people in India to grow some black tea. Plant it, weed it, harvest it, dry it, then sell it to a local wholesaler for a sum of money on which they find it increasingly difficult to survive (unless it is fairtrade).

  2. Send it 4000 miles by air or sea to the UK.

  3. Send it to a UK wholesaler or central warehouse by lorry.

  4. Transport from the warehouse to a retailer close to where you live, usually by van.

  5. Give the shopkeeper about 99p, not a lot when you consider the number of people involved in the process.

  6. Bring it home and turn on the stove, thus ordering the national grid to give you energy to boil the kettle.

  7. Grab yourself a mug and enjoy your cup of tea, perhaps while watching television at home, or maybe outside a café watching the cars go by.

  8. Feel awake and alert from the caffeine in your tea.

  9. Start feeling tired, in the short term as the effects of the caffeine wear off, and in the long term as the tannin in the tea stops your body absorbing certain nutrients.

  10. Urinate the tea, its toxins and your nutrients into your drinking water supply via your toilet.

  However, there is another way to make tea. This I call the ‘insane’ method, on the basis that the sane masses choose not to do it this way. It’s how I made my tea after the spring.

  1. Pick a handful of the abundant tea that grows freely around you. I’m fortunate; my tea grows wild within ten feet of my rocket stove.

  2. Pick up some bits of wood lying around to burn in the rocket stove to boil the tea.

  3. Light up the rocket stove using this foraged wood and boil the water with nettles and cleavers in it for about ten minutes.

  4. Grab a mug and look around you at the stunning landscape while you’re waiting.

  5. Pour the tea into the mug (and some into a flask for later) and enjoy it outside in the country.

  6. Feel refreshed and packed full of iron, calcium, magnesium and anti-oxidants.

  7. Urinate into the compost heap and activate the fertilizer for your future crops.

  It mystifies me that we buy, for example, dried nettle tea bags in a shop for a premium, then, through our taxes, pay our city council to chop down fresh nutritious nettles in the spring! An even better example is the people I’d see passing a huge rosemary bush at the entrance to a gigantic supermarket near where I lived in Bristol, who’d then buy the same herb, dried and in little plastic packets, at high prices! Can we no longer see the food that surrounds us, abundant and free? Or are we so disconnected from nature that we can only see it in a packet on a supermarket shelf?

  Not only is wild tea free, it is also much better for you, especially if you make it straight after harvesting and leave it to brew overnight. That way, it is fresh and retains many more of its health-giving benefits. Wild nettle tea helps your digestion if you drink it before meals, is fantastic for your skin, hair, and nails and is a perfect tonic if you are feeling physically drained. Given that moneyless living is all about using your body, it is quite useful to keep it healthy!

  LESS WEALTH EQUALS LESS HEALTH?

  During the winter and until the end of spring, my friends and family were, justifiably, concerned about my health. Not only could I not buy the nutritious food I’d become used to, but I also had no money for medicines if I did happen to get sick. My physical well-being was especially important, as I was, for the first time in my life, reliant on my body for my survival. Until the beginning of May, my mom phoned every week, from Ireland, to make sure I was still alive. But I think the fact I had made it to the spring, through the coldest winter of my life, reassured those around me that I might live to tell the tale.

  One of the truly great things about the UK is its – free – National Health Service. But this year, I wasn’t contributing, and I didn’t want to sponge off it. Having said that, I’d paid in for seven years without using it once, so I wasn’t exactly dependent on the service. I’m a big believer in being pro-active about health. Putting the best possible food and liquid into your body gives you the best chance of staying as healthy as you can. Because I was going to be even more physically active than usual, I was concerned that I might lose a lot of weight. This probably sounds appealing to those who pay money for gym memberships and diet books, to shed the pounds, but my battle has always been to keep the weight on. I weighed just under 154 pounds when I started the year and I really didn’t want to lose any more.

  Contrary to what I imagined, the opposite happened. By early spring, I felt fitter and healthier than I had since my early teens, when I played a lot of sport and I’d gained twenty-eight pounds. I’d followed a rigorous daily training schedule, from the very beginning, because I knew how physically demanding the year would be, and the last thing I wanted was to have to quit the experiment through physical exhaustion. Putting on so much weight by mid-spring was something I’d wanted to do. I believe that no matter what life we live, we are an advertisement for it. People judge the success and health benefits of whatever diet we’ve chosen both through how we look and how we behave. Unfortunately, society tends to judge on looks these days, so I knew that if I did lose loads of weight while living without money, this would send the message that without money, you won’t get all the food you need.

  This became even more important when I realized I was becoming a public experiment. Living without money doesn’t mean you will necessarily either gain or lose weight, any more than does any way of life or diet. In the six years I’d been vegan, people had always questioned me about my diet, usually with a genuine, well-intenti
oned concern for my well-being. I chose veganism for many reasons, one being that, over time, I’d found it a healthier, more natural diet. But you can be a healthy or unhealthy vegetarian just as much as you can be a healthy or unhealthy omnivore. The same applies to living with or without money.

  In years gone by, I’d often picked up a cold around March, when we usually experience a big shift in the weather. This year it completely passed me by, as did the much-vaccinated-against swine flu. An American moneyless comrade, who alternates between living in a cave and housesitting, told me he only got sick when he moved indoors. I have to say my experience tends to agree with his, in complete contrast to what I thought before I started the year.

  At the beginning of May, completely through my own carelessness, I did give myself food poisoning. Preparing for a bike trip into the city, I’d grabbed a loaf of bread that had been in the trailer for a few days. When I arrived, I noticed some black stuff on it, which I wiped off, thinking the loaf had rubbed against the soot on the old burned pot I used on the rocket stove. Big mistake; it was black mold. For the next three days, I suffered. I tried to rest as much as I could, but living the way I do means there is always something to be done. The experience gave me my first chance to see the difficulties of doing such an experiment on my own. And it made me wonder what I would have done if my illness had been more serious. Having no money means living without the security that I’d been accustomed to. Even a little money in the bank can buy you time to get back to health, but living hand to mouth means you don’t have that safety net. Fortunately, I have a lot of good friends and they helped me with my usual tasks. Deasy, the farm co-ordinator, who’d become a really good friend during my first six months, made me a couple of light meals while I rattled between the bed and the compost toilet. It was an excellent reminder that friends are the best security and that no matter how badly you behave during your life, the good ones are much harder to lose than money.