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

by Doug Fine

  * * *

  GRILLED RATTLESNAKE DIJON

  1/8 teaspoon celery powder

  1/8 teaspoon ground coriander

  ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

  ¼ teaspoon black pepper

  1 teaspoon salt

  ½ cup onion, sliced

  1 medium rattlesnake, cleaned and cut in 1-foot pieces

  3 teaspoons Dijon mustard

  Combine the dry spices, salt, and onion and mix well. Sprinkle meat with the spice mixture.

  Once the meat is well coated, rub thoroughly with the mustard. Wrap and marinade for one hour.

  Grill over a hot flame until cooked through (10 to 15 minutes). Remove samurai outfit and enjoy.

  * * *

  TWELVE

  TOXIC TURBULENCE

  When it wasn’t snake poison, it was purple poison that was on my mind. I guess my fantasy image of clean living contributed to my continued stress about T.J.’s violet hands. I somehow tend to manufacture reality so that what I most fear appears in my life. Maybe it’s so I’ll get over the fear. Whatever the reason, my haunting premonition about purple primer proved correct as I continued turning the Funky Butte Ranch to solar power. Within a week of the rattlesnake’s appearance, the stuff was stinking up my life again. The chain of events leading to its return started a few hours after I frightened off the brave FedEx guy with my samurai routine.

  As I waited the nine minutes for my impressively misnamed “on demand” electric water heater to prepare my shower—sometimes I’d switch on the hot-water faucet and go for a run, in anticipation of warming water when I returned—I got a call from Herbie. Herbie was not an ex-hippie. He was a current one, a gray ponytailed sixty-three-year-old whom everyone in Silver City described as a “character.”

  Herbie got his rep partly because he lived in a rammed earth home that was something out of the movie Sleeper, and partly because he had “retired” from copper mine work into full-time progressive rabble-rousing. City council members had been known to resign on the spot when they saw his name on the public comment list on water use and sprawl issues. Also, he looked like a human birch tree (6 feet 8 inches, 115 pounds). Behind his activism was Herbie’s belief that the world is a place of love and opportunity rather than competition and greed. He wanted to help you as soon as he heard your story. And so his call that night was typical.

  “So you’re serious about solar-heated water?” he asked. He was referring to some wide-eyed hopes I had expressed during a lunch with him and his wife, Gail, a couple of weeks earlier.

  “Serious as the revisionists are about sugar-coating the Bush years.” It was time for the second stage of the Funky Butte Ranch’s solarization. Herbie’s timing couldn’t have been better.

  “Let’s do this then. Here’s what you need.”

  Herbie proceeded to rattle off a list of plumbing and mechanical parts so extensive and technical, I was very close to asleep when he finished.

  “Doug?” he asked, after what I guess must have been a long silence. “You still with me?”

  I snapped awake. “I didn’t start with you, Herbie. I don’t know what a three-quarter-inch threaded CPVC fitting is. I don’t know what any of this stuff is.”

  “OK, meet me at Mr. Ed’s customer disservice department tomorrow and we’ll pick up your parts together.”

  That’s just the kind of guy Herbie is. Not only was he helping me get the Funky Butte Ranch off coal and oil power, he had recalled an offhand comment I had made at our lunch about my efforts to avoid box stores.

  “I’m using my new carbon-neutral vehicle,” I had told Herbie and Gail. “To get to shops that sell me foreign stuff made and delivered with petroleum.”

  At this point I was doing everything I could to avoid hitting Wal-Mart and its preroasted chicken breaks. I was like an alcoholic, taking it one town trip at a time. But I still felt hypocritical. Just because a shop was local didn’t mean it stocked local products (or, for that matter, excelled at small-town customer service). To add insult to shoddy manufacturing, Mr. Ed’s, the Silver City hardware store, had a manager who made me feel like a criminal every time I tried to return, say, a broken Taiwanese screwdriver.

  “Where’s your receipt?” he asked. “Did you get this thing wet?”

  I don’t know what the Mimbrenos did for screwdrivers. But I felt compelled to stick with my plan to wean from Wal-Mart dependency. I guess I saw patronizing nonchain stores as a start—to sort of get in shopping shape for the time when there would be legitimate local choices in New Mexico. Plus at least at Mr. Ed’s I was enriching a resident of my county (Ed), instead of shareholders of an Arkansas corporation.

  Meanwhile, Herbie was proving to be my hot-water guardian angel. While we carpooled to Mr. Ed’s in the ROAT, he explained how the sun was going to all but eliminate my electric bill. His scheme was to build this kind of homemade solar water heater, called a “breadbox collector,” which he said we could erect outside my house in a day. He told me it would soak up so much heat that it would make my almost epically inefficient “on demand” water heater virtually unnecessary. That could bring my cost per sip of water all the way down to ninety cents.

  “Sun’s free, my man,” he told me as we drove. “And there’s plenty of it to go around.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve just put in a twelve-thousand-dollar order for more solar panels.”

  “Once the grid’s out of your life, though, you’ll start paying that back.”

  I did some math. “That’s true. The system should pay for itself in seventy-three years.”

  * * *

  It takes about $40,000 to $60,000 of solar equipment to power an average American home by the sun.

  * * *

  “Did you figure in federal tax incentives?”

  “Oh, right. Seventy-two years.”

  * * *

  The status of solar tax rebates is always changing. For the latest on state solar tax rebates anywhere in the United States, go to http://www.dsireusa.org/. And for the status of federal solar tax rebates, go to http://www.energytaxincentives.org.

  * * *

  But then Herbie said something that changed my life. It was something not fashionable to admit in civilized circles ten years ago, when most survivalists lived in Idaho, plotting the demise of people of my faith.

  “That’s one way of looking at cost,” he said. “But if there isn’t a utility around to pay any more, on solar you’ve still got yourself power.”

  I made a mental note at that moment, driving around Silver City making the driver behind me unconsciously hungry for Kentucky Fried Chicken: shop for enough spare parts to keep this life going for fifty or a hundred years into any kind of unexpected societal collapse. Extra panels, extra batteries, extra truck parts, extra vegetable seeds, and lots of ammunition to defend it all. And everything written by Borges, Douglas Adams, and Jonathan Lethem.

  Herbie laughed when he heard my resolve. “You should start dressing in khakis.”

  Herbie wasn’t just certain that our water heating device would work (he’d been heating his own water with a breadbox collector for decades), he was making sure we’d have a good time building it. He opened the passenger-side window and took a loud, deep breath of desert air.

  “This is how to spend a morning,” he said as though we were picking strawberries in a meadow, while I vainly tried to park the ROAT in the outlying reaches of Mr. Ed’s lot.

  “Buying PVC piping?” I asked.

  “Hanging with friends, converting a life to solar power.”

  In fact, while we shopped for Chinese-made but locally sold plumbing parts, some where in Mr. Ed’s aisle where the sign read “You break it, you bought it—we are not responsible for your negligence,” I watched Herbie seep nothing but total appreciation for everything that crossed his path. Whether it was a demeaning manager at Mr. Ed’s, the uneven way I had trimmed my beard that morning, or the tea-pouring method of the waitress at the Chinese place where he diagrammed our bread
box project while I lobbied the owner for waste oil access out back, he treated each person like it was his first encounter with the species.

  “Where’d you get that necklace?” he asked the counter woman at Mr. Ed’s. “I’ve never seen that shade of green before.” His words carried all the more effect because he delivered them in a sort of “psst buddy” street corner sotto voce.

  It forced me into the same mind-set. And I wondered what it took to cultivate such a loving outlook day in and day out when there were rattlesnakes and hardware store managers on the prowl. I didn’t wonder long. Whatever plague of optimism and good humor infected my hippie friend, it was contagious. By the time we picked up essentially a skyscraper’s worth of plumbing parts, goat-proof glass, black spray paint, aluminum foil, and (despite my protests) purple primer, I caught myself smiling at everything, like I was a paroled prisoner on a sunny day. The secret was to find the light in everyone and focus on it.

  After Mr. Ed’s and the intentionally greasy lunch, Herbie had me drive the ROAT to J&S Plumbing Supply on the outskirts of Silver City. This place—who knew?—had a water boiler junkyard out back where contractors dumped old units when they bought new ones for clients. The owners were delighted to have us recycle two of the five-foot-long iron behemoths for some undisclosed purpose. They seemed used to Herbie’s antics, I noticed, as we heaved the old water boilers into the bed of the ROAT. They didn’t even care that Herbie’s friend Frank had joined us with a video camera, and was filming the whole project for public access television.

  Back at the Funky Butte Ranch that afternoon, it became clear that Herbie was right: the design for the solar breadbox really was amazingly simple. So much of a green life is, in principle. All it involved was creating a big outdoor box that would cook water before sending it into the house. Its design would say to the sun, “send lots of heat here.”

  We stripped the sheet metal sheathing off the forty-gallon boilers (horribly bloodying our hands in the process), then painted their rusty, bomblike cores black for maximum solar absorption. Next we encased both boilers in a giant, glass-fronted “breadbox” we had hammered into shape, setting the whole thing in a place with plenty of solar feng shui (out of the way and facing south-ish). Then we decorated the interior with toxically produced aluminum foil wallpaper, to reflect even more sun into the black tanks. The fourteen-foot structure looked like what it was: a giant toaster.

  All we had to do to finish the project was reroute the ranch house hot-water pipes to run through the connected tanks. It was as simple as that. Water would fill the tanks. The sun would do the rest. There was no doubt about that: inside the breadbox was like living under a magnifying glass—almost too hot to work in there at midday on the first day of spring as we spread aluminum foil. We even insulated the breadbox with the scary fiberglass stuff that had once lined the water boilers, so it’d keep the ranch’s water hot in the mornings and in winter.

  * * *

  Renewable sources of energy—solar, wind, and geothermal—will supply nearly half of the world’s energy needs by 2050.

  * * *

  This was the day I became a redneck—literally. It was that hot. This had been a long-term goal of mine anyway. A farmer’s tan was far more appealing than a Chaco tan in local taverns. If my neck was red, my hands were redder. What with the sharp metal work, by midafternoon my tools looked like they’d been involved in a gory homicide, and my fingers, already gatorlike from living in the desert, now appeared as though I had just won a vicious street fight. My drill carries a sort of Virgin of Guadeloupe–shaped bloodstain to this day, which I will market as a miracle if I’m ever in a pinch. There’s always money in miracles in New Mexico.

  Injuries aside, we had a grand old time spilling half our platelets. Herbie was excited to be teaching me about the technology that had kept his power bills measly for decades, and his personal energy kept us motivated under the sapping sun.

  “What drives a guy to spend his time building solar water heaters for friends?” I asked him.

  “I accidentally bought some real estate in the historic district in Silver City decades ago. Now I’m old, and the government sends me one check and the stock market sends me another one. I don’t need money, and I’ve got time on my hands.”

  “And blood,” I observed.

  “Hey, man, you are momentarily going to be showering and doing your dishes with water heated to a hundred fifteen degrees before it even reaches the house—that’s most of the way to a really steamy shower. For free. So my advice is, don’t sweat a couple of”—looking down at his own palms—“near-amputations.”

  Wiping off the gore on his shirt, Herbie rumpled my hair in a grandfatherly way. Then he said, “Another reason I’m here is I’ve got Stage Four prostate cancer. So I’m doing what I want to every day.”

  Herbie said this the way one might say, “Hey, would you hand me that bag of nails?”

  In fact, that’s what he did say. “I’m doing what I want to every day. Would you hand me that bag of nails?”

  “Here ya go,” I said, stunned. “So, I mean, how do you feel?”

  “I feel great. I was supposed to go three months ago. I’m still here.”

  To say this all caught me off-guard is an understatement. Herbie read my face, and said, “I told you because I know you’ll take it the right way. Let’s stay on task.”

  He went on to assure me that by sunset, my electric water heater, which at the moment ran at a level equal to Bangladesh’s annual energy output, would almost never have to kick on. I was getting greener by the minute. And learning lessons about how to live.

  It was the putrid smell of purple that made me realize we had issues when we climbed into the ranch house attic to plumb the breadbox into my hot-water lines. I caught my first waft as soon as Herbie cracked a can. It was the smell of lifestyle contradiction. As soon as I realized what was ahead, I bolted back down the ladder to change into my Haz Mat suit, which was basically my antirattlesnake armor plus a surgeon’s mask. Just like the Mimbrenos never wore. I was determined to keep purple primer off my person.

  But there was no way. The way the can was designed, once you miraculously pried it open, it was impossible to keep from dousing your fingers. After Herbie passed me the can and I food-colored myself, I tried adding kitchen gloves to my ridiculous disguise, but the mighty solvent ate right through the latex—in fact fusing it to the open sheet metal cuts all over my hands.

  I jumped up spasmodically the first time this happened, and Herbie looked over at me with patient amusement. I honestly didn’t think this guy had ever suffered a moment of worry in his life—it’s why he looked fifteen years younger than he was. For a fellow like me, it was like being a race car driver and hanging out with an Amish farmer: worry was in my life almost every day. If only from goat assaults on my latest rose bush defense.

  To allay my fears, Herbie held up his purple palms, and said gently, “Ah, a little violet in your diet won’t hurt you. I’ve been working with this stuff my whole life. It hasn’t killed me yet. It was hamburgers, not purple primer that got my prostate.”

  “The primer eats the liver, is what I heard.”

  “Myth. You’ll be fine.”

  No matter what T.J. and Herbie said, I still wasn’t convinced that something so purple was harmless. They had to believe it. They swam in the stuff. And purple primer was just one toxic in my life.

  In our petrochemical society, we swim in more toxics than any other culture in history. There were 1.4 million new cancer cases in the United States in 2006. I’ve always been freaked out by the C word, ever since my supermarket shopping days on Long Island. I’d hear my family discussing the latest carcinogen reported in the New York Times, and I’d seek out that Red Dye #6 or chicken skin in the supermarket aisle, marveling that poison could be sold unmarked over the counter.

  What made it all the more scary was that new things were always revealing themselves as deadly. One day you think milk is good for you
, the next the added growth hormones in it could kill you. (Whether vitamin D caused or cured cancer changed several times during my childhood.) That “benign” spray blanketing the neighborhood in a fruitless assault on gypsy moths? Actually, sorry, turns out it wasn’t so benign. By my teenage years, I had no choice but to go through life with a constant, nervous “temporary exposure won’t kill me” philosophy. Meanwhile, my grandmother survived two types of cancer, my mother one. I didn’t want to have to keep the record going.

  And this was why I was obsessing about purple primer. It was a symbol of every toxic substance I wanted out of my world. By the time Herbie climbed down out of the attic a few minutes later to feed more water pipe up to me through a hole he had bashed in my wall, my nerves were frayed. My mask was slipping off my face, treating me to the primer’s incomparable bouquet. Also I had an itch on my neck. If that weren’t enough, it was easily 236 degrees inside my Haz Mat suit. I couldn’t take care of any of it, on account of the organ-eating material on my hands. The truth is, I was scared. I really didn’t want any carcinogens creeping into the Funky Butte Ranch. Hopefully the Big Macs of my childhood—about seven per week—weren’t already planting a time bomb in my own prostate.