Farewell, My Subaru_One Man's Search for Happiness Living Green Off the Grid

by Doug Fine

  It was too late. I felt my belly drop to the ground, smoosh to two dimensions like a flat basketball, and then return to my body with the snap of an elastic band. There had to be a better direction to focus my gaze.

  So I looked up. This wasn’t a good call, either. Given the wind gusts not generally seen outside of Oz, the clouds had taken on an almost hallucinogenic speed. Unnervingly, they made it seem as though the windmill itself were swaying, giving me a wild, vertiginous feeling of impending death—like a falling dream. I clasped the windmill frame with both arms and tried to get my bearings. Then I closed my eyes for a moment and could hear my goats calling back to me in a weird, wind-carried harmony. I hoped I wouldn’t land on them if I fell. For my sake as well as theirs. Did I mention the growing horns?

  For a moment I stepped outside my body. Except for my abject posture of terror, I imagined I looked like one of the guys in those old photographs of the New York skyline construction. My hat had long ago blown off and was now somewhere in Texas.

  I sighed. I couldn’t even admit my fear, which made it worse. This time zone had exactly one honest and competent well guy. He was four feet to my left at the moment. His name was Jimmy O’ and his schedule was booked further in advance than the pope’s. The real pope, not Willie Nelson. Jimmy had blessed me with his expensive presence after literally six months of lobbying. It had been like planning a bar mitzvah, right down to the catering. We couldn’t reschedule just because the spring winds had chosen to move in this exact day. It could be months, even years before he’d come back. So instead of pleading for my life, I had to force myself to assist in the project. This meant saying things like, “Would you pass the three-eighth adjustable wrench, pardner?”

  I thought my act was working, though I was not having fun. And this trapeze performance was just for the solar panel array to power the dang pump. I hadn’t even reached the house yet.

  I tried to convince myself that hanging from a windmill thirty feet above the ground in a primordial windstorm is a great way to get some perspective, not just on your property, but on your life. And I could see most of both—from the view and from the whole “flash before my eyes” movie I was watching inside my head. The wind nearly carried me away toward Texas twice as Jimmy O’ and I tried to get the three one-hundred-twenty-five-watt solar panels attached to the windmill frame. The good news is that if we did manage to tighten the necessary bolts, the panels would likely stay in place for good: anything that could endure these gusts wasn’t going anywhere, ever.

  Forty-eight inches away, Jimmy O’ was as relaxed as if we were inside playing cards. He was actually whistling. I couldn’t tell if this was because he had spent his waking hours swinging from windmills for most of the past two decades, or because he had chained himself to the frame. Myself, I was “free climbing.” I hadn’t known that chains were part of the organic life uniform. In fact, this is one of the things I don’t understand about natural selection in general: how any organisms survive their first critical Darwinian mistake.

  Still, I was aware of how lucky I was to have at least some control over my water. The water supply for cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix is in serious jeopardy in the next twenty-five years as the reservoirs formed by the dams that supply them continue to dry up. Rivers like the Colorado often no longer even reach the ocean because of too many country clubs in Arizona. Basically, cities like Phoenix and Vegas are not sustainable at their current populations and shouldn’t really exist. Instead, they are among the fastest-growing areas of the United States.

  My Mimbres Valley, with its autonomous water table and fertile valley, had been an oasis in the arid Southwest for thousands of years. And it still was, but only until “too many straws are drinking from the water table,” in the words of one Realtor who was sinking a lot of those straws (also known as new wells in subdivisions). I didn’t know how long my well would continue to pull water at current growth rates.

  * * *

  Household use accounts for 1 percent of water use in the United States. Irrigation accounts for 39 percent. Worldwide, 1.1 billion people don’t have access to clean water.

  * * *

  But for now, my new solar panels could function effortlessly once they were up. The system was, in fact, simplicity itself: the sun-fired silicon of the panels moves electrons that cause the pump to bring forth pristine Mimbres aquifer water at six gallons per minute. With just two hours of sunlight per day, the pump would fill the rusty old five-hundred-gallon holding tank that was nestled twenty yards away, up amid the boulders near the Funky Butte. From there, the ranch’s water would cascade carefree of gravity in underground pipes. It had a hundred and twenty feet to go to my house, shower, dish sink, and, if the winds ever calmed down enough for me to build it, to a super-efficient Israeli drip-irrigated planting area way down by the goat corral.

  Jimmy O’ and his son, T.J., had already pulled my energy-sapping old-school electric pump and replaced it with the solar one. We weren’t using the preexisting seventy-year-old windmill for more than an unintentional high-dive platform because Jimmy O’ told me that compared to solar power, ancient wind turbines were as high maintenance as a West L.A. girlfriend. I could believe it. The windmill blades creaked and moaned like a torture victim above us, and seemed at any time ready to fall, smashing the panels and decapitating me and the goats on the way down.

  Speaking of down, I was truly amazed to find myself still alive and safely on terra firma half an hour later. I actually kissed the ground.

  “Hey, the wind’s stopped,” T.J. noted pretty much the moment I hopped off the windmill frame. Of course the wind had stopped. It had made its point. I stretched, thinking, Man, if I survived that, nothing can hurt me. Just at that moment, Melissa ambushed me from a nearby rock platform, leaping twelve feet without a thought, like a buccaneer swinging aboard a ship. She landed on my right Achilles tendon, causing me to suffer my first significant fall of the day. And she was only trying to say hi. As I wriggled in agony against a barrel cactus, the goat lowered her nose to mine and then bit it softly. I noticed she had a rose petal tucked tastefully behind her left ear.

  “It’s working!” Jimmy O’ called a few minutes later when he had finished wiring the pump to the panels. I limped over and looked at the well control box he had attached to the windmill frame at ground level, and indeed, three green LED arrows were pointing encouragingly upward.

  Jimmy and I hiked uphill the sixty feet through a forest of razor-sharp mesquite bushes and I climbed the ladder to the water tank’s submarinelike hatch. I arced my body into the cavernous interior until only my feet emerged. Yep. Water was definitely cascading in from the entry pipe. But from the look and smell of the flaking walls of the tank, I wouldn’t be lacking for metal in my diet. It was like an Alzheimer’s factory in there.

  “Would you drink out of this tank?” I asked Jimmy O’ as I hopped down from the ladder.

  He climbed up and took a look. His voice boomed out through the metal. “Um. Maybe…I might. Sure. Why not? Just rinse it out a couple of times before you start drinking from it.”

  While Jimmy O’ SCUBA dove into my drinking water, another question had occurred to me. I waited until he climbed down, covered in rust. “So, Jimmy. Will I get enough water pressure in the house now that I’m on gravity and no longer using my old indoor pressure tank thingee?”

  From his reaction, I judged that I had asked a decent question. Jimmy O’ looked up at my tank and then down to the ranch house, calculating gravity in the Earth’s atmosphere. “Sure, you’ll be fine,” he said at last, but there was wavering in his voice. “I mean, you might have to run around in the shower to be sure you’re getting wet…”

  Still reflecting on that eerie prognostication, I noticed a truly horrifying smell as Jimmy O’ and I made our ripped-shirted way through thorns and goats back to the windmill. It was emanating from the spot near the well housing where T.J. was fusing two water pipes back together. He was doing this so water cou
ld flow toward my world again now that the new pump was buried. It was like the odor of something long dead mixed with something even longer dead. I didn’t want to be rude, in case T.J. had been eating a lot of greasy food of late, too, but when I approached, I noticed that the pipes, T.J.’s hands, and much of the surrounding desert were dyed a bright purple.

  “What’s that purple stuff you’re brushing on my drinking water pipes?” I asked nervously.

  “Oh, it’s just sort of a cleaner, kind of a solvent,” T.J. said cheerfully. “It’s called purple primer. Standard stuff.”

  I paused a beat to process the way that my supposedly green life was once again bringing me into the most intimate possible contact with the world’s most toxic substances. This gave T.J. time to add, “Also it kind of makes a chemical reaction so the pipes bond together. Sort of opens the pores on the plastic.”

  My stomach turned. What was the point of growing Mimbreno beans if I would be watering them with nuclear waste?

  “Is it…safe?” I ventured.

  “Oh, yeah, we use it all the time. It’s approved for potable use. See?” He proudly raised the label of the dripping canister. “Supposed to mess up your liver if you touch it, though.”

  “Oh.” I gingerly picked up an empty can of the stuff. The label advised “washing vigorously for fifteen minutes” in case of skin contact.

  Wait a second, I thought. It’s OK to drink this stuff, but it melts my most resilient organ if it so much as touches my fingers? Something wasn’t right here. T.J. might have read my expression, because he said, “Once it dries, you’ll never have to deal with it again.”

  But I wasn’t so sure. I had a lot of plumbing ahead of me now that solar power was bringing cold water to my house. If I was going to turn on my hot water solar, wouldn’t something have to bond those pipes, too? I decided not to fixate on it. My water supply was now green, even if the equipment to make it so ensured that it cost about a dollar per sip.

  ELEVEN

  MODERN SNAKE CHARMIMG

  Not only was I stressed about creating a personal toxic waste site, I had immediate troubles in the natural world as winter petered out. Jimmy O’ had warned me to keep a close eye on the water tank, because I hadn’t yet installed a “float valve,” a sort of sensor, that would automatically shut down the pump when the tank was full. On a sunny day (otherwise known as every day at this time of year), the tank was going to overflow by mid-morning if I didn’t shut the pump off manually. I could turn it back on at night before I went to sleep.

  It was with the glow of the green citizen that I approached the mesquite barbs and the water tank under the shadow of the Funky Butte on my first solar water afternoon. I’d had a busy morning manicuring goats and couldn’t get to the tank sooner. But I was smiling as I left the house: my luscious, chlorine-free drinking water was coming to me without a single drop of oil.

  The glow lasted until a rattlesnake the size of Chile blocked access to my water source. I noticed, at a distance of perhaps five feet, that the snake was actually shaped like the wine-producing nation, and was in as bad a mood as Chileans get whenever you bring up the subject of Argentina. When it detected my presence (about half a second before I became aware of its existence), the serpent reared up to a height of about twelve feet, rattled horribly, and showed me that it had not been suffering from any dental problems: its fangs were as nature made them—large, and hooked like scimitars. I don’t know why the creature was upset with me: I had no interest in the pack rats it was no doubt dining on under my long unused water-holding tank. And I told it as much.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked, backing painfully into a mesquite acupuncture session. “You can have the entire ranch rodent population if you want.”

  Then a thought hit me. It was probably my fault that the area was such a fine snake habitat at the moment. I was the one who had waited until the afternoon to check the tank, and the overflow had created a small pond around the whole area. I was up to my ankles in it at the moment. This was the only standing water for easily three miles in any direction. Of course all of New Mexico’s wildlife would be drawn to it, and this satanic viper would have to be stupid not to answer the dinner bell. Life does not exist in the desert if it doesn’t respond immediately to water. I had crafted a zoo. And I didn’t want myself, my goats, my dog, or my cat to be part of feeding time.

  In its current posture, the rattler looked like the kind of thing that is tattooed on the arm of people whose motorcycle handlebars are higher than their head. It was a caricature I would have dismissed as exaggerated if I had seen it in a film. As I backed away down the hill toward the windmill, inviting the snake to enjoy all it could eat, I thought how kind it was for God to have given this scariest of Earth’s creatures a giveaway noise to betray its position. I would’ve thought silence would be an advantage for something that needs to get close enough to my ankle to bite it.

  Terrified as I understandably was, I also felt a complaint rising: most folks, when they gripe about hassles with their solar power, speak of things like defective pumps, incompetent contractors, or insufficient panels to do the job. Me, I had actually pulled off the first part of my installation, and some sort of biblical demon had to immediately appear to throw a wrench into the proceedings.

  The fact that I now had a snake farm was a problem that wasn’t going away, as I needed to check the water tank twice daily for the month it would take me to get the float valve delivered and installed. If I couldn’t even approach the area, my pond was only going to grow, and lure more snakes. I thought this over as I retreated to the house, trembling. When my heart rate returned to something close to normal, I called Lacy.

  Since he was a lifelong New Mexican whose daughter owned several pet reptiles, I thought my neighbor would have some suggestions for how to deal with the situation other than massive gunfire. Unfortunately, because he was a lifelong New Mexican, I never knew when I’d catch Lacy in one of his congenital New Agey moods. He was firmly, mystically in one of those moods this March afternoon when I called with panic in my voice. When I apprised him of the situation, Lacy said that a reptile in one’s path is an “interesting spiritual message rife with meaning in this spring season.”

  My heart sank. There is almost nothing more useless than a New Mexican in a metaphysical mood.

  “What you need to do,” he told me, “is ask yourself why the snake is coming into your life right now. Between you and your water no less. The elixir of life. What is it trying to tell you?”

  I could hear Indian flute music in the background, and truth be told, I was looking more for practical advice than philosophy. Something about using a twenty-foot fishing net doused with chloroform.

  “It’s trying to tell me it’s going to bite my fucking leg off if I try to turn off my pump,” I said.

  Lacy started saying something about a snake’s forked tongue representing the dual paths we face at any moment when I chose the path of hanging up. I decided to do some Googling on rattlesnake removal before he started talking about which crystals were appropriate for this situation. Web surfing, though, proved even less helpful than Lacy’s Whoo Whoo approach. I came up with a confounding Wiki-age barrage of conflicting advice as to whether to do anything at all.

  One site consolingly advised me not to worry about capturing and relocating a rattler because “they are sluggish, compliant, and slow to strike. Just use a stick and secure the snake in a garbage can.” Another blog informed me that rattlers are among the fastest, most aggressive snakes, and the best course of action is moving to another county.

  I decided to err on the side of the more dangerous interpretation. The next morning I went to check on the tank’s water level wearing a protective outfit that consisted of padded chain-sawing chaps, a bike helmet, thick winter boots, and a machete. On my doorstep I drew the four-dollar Wal-Mart weapon with a satisfying whang, and feeling at the same time overheated, ridiculous, and like a latter-day samurai, I made my stand at the
windmill.

  Gathering up twenty fist-sized rocks, I proceeded to lob a preemptive barrage of artillery at the aged metal-tank area as I slowly climbed the hill, weapon drawn. I don’t think I scared any reptiles, but I did make some profound dents in my water storage source.

  The funny thing is, I never saw the giant snake again—but this didn’t reduce my fear level. The main effect of knowing that there was at least one oversized, pissed-off rattlesnake on my property was that for weeks every noise, from a distant breeze singing in the cottonwoods to a friend zipping a jacket behind me, sounded like a rattler approaching. I wore the suit of armor daily, and nearly decapitated several bushes.

  * * *

  The rattlesnake’s rattle can be heard from a distance of up to sixty feet. Rattlesnakes are deaf.

  * * *

  This is pretty strong evidence of hysteria on my part—there is no mistaking a snake rattle for anything else in nature. Outside of a Bush press conference, it might be the planet’s most terrifying experience to see the rattlesnake’s hate and hear the noisemaker to accent it. But irrational though my reaction might have been—I nearly scared off the FedEx guy when he arrived to find some kind of maniac in chaps and armed with a machete greeting him to sign for a package containing a drip irrigation system—there is something about the unflinching totality of reptile emotion that makes me not so interested in learning to negotiate its nuances (if there are any). Mammals, I can understand—even a mountain lion has some kind of thought process. But when it comes to poisonous snakes, I’d rather they just go away. I could only assume that the snake I named “Chile” had moved on permanently. But I kept an eye out for it until well after my new float valve allowed my swimming pond to dry up. For several months my machete was never more than a few seconds away from me.