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

by Doug Fine

  In mid-August we had some friends over, and ate a dinner comprised of food totally from the Funky Butte Ranch and our valley. Except for tamari. And mushrooms. And, well, beer. But we’re working on all three of these things.

  Lettuce, tomatoes, sprouts, peas, chard, broccoli, leeks, carrots, rosemary, basil, apples, peaches, eggs—everything was home grown or from neighbors that night. Even the honey on our Mimbres apples came from the next canyon over. And we were still feasting on the appetizers at this point: the corn, beans, and squash were a month away from harvest, though little silk-wrapped cobs were already forming on the cornstalks. Michelle and I started talking about building a greenhouse to cut the carbon miles out of our more tropical limes, avocadoes, and bananas.

  * * *

  One bushel of corn will sweeten four hundred cans of cola. But the human body has difficulty processing high fructose corn syrup, and many nutritionists see it as a major cause of obesity. Cane sugar is more expensive than corn syrup.

  * * *

  And come next spring, if all went as planned, I would be the valley’s ice cream man. My neighbor Pat had got herself a billy goat, which she was willing to lease to me for the necessary twenty minutes next fall. I thought the Pan Sisters could breed by then without stigma. Natalie would kid first. I felt a little like a pimp pairing her off like that, without even the opportunity to date for a while, but this was how it worked in the goat social scene. And I had a goat-milking tutorial visit scheduled in September with Heather, my fairy goatmother neighbor. This is something I’d have to be good at for at least the next two years, once Natalie gave birth. I already had takers for her off-spring. Who wouldn’t want a Natalie kid?

  Next summer I hoped to find myself playing a genuine producer in a consumer society. For most of the world’s people, this is pretty much par for the course. It’s a matter of survival. For a latchkey kid nurtured on Gilligan and Quarter Pounders, it’s a sign that truly anything is possible. Like an Exxon executive biking to work. And it only took me thirty-six years.

  * * *

  Curdled goat milk makes a great base for house paint.

  * * *

  I got the sense my reduction in carbon miles was already significant when one August morning I heard an invisible Michelle say, “We’re going to have to get a canner for all these veggies. Especially when the beans are ready.” She was weeding somewhere in a head-high cornrow.

  “Especially if the flood peaks again,” I said. If we couldn’t get to town for another forty-three days this coming fall, it was nice to know that the goats wouldn’t be the only species unlikely to starve.

  We ended the summer overwhelmed with bounty. I mean, how much chard does one ranch need? Michelle kept trying to find recipes that called for excessive numbers of peas, but in the end we seemed always to revert to pudding. I skipped to the garden every afternoon to gather fixin’s for the evening salad. It was hard to believe that eight weeks earlier, all seemed lost. The chickens and crops had been decimated, as had my morale. Right there in the garden, I gave a small prayer of thanks that in New Mexico, there is time to replant after carnage. Twice. There is, in fact, time for everything. Including life. Including love.

  * * *

  At least 4.8 acres of agricultural land is needed to maintain an American family of four on mainstream dietary standards. Significantly less land is needed for those on a vegetarian diet.

  * * *

  All I had to do now was chop some winter wood and plant the cold weather crops. In fact, it was with spinach seeds in my hand one September morning that I heard the distant crash up by the house. I looked around me. Wait, where were the Pan Sisters? They were here a minute ago. It was not a good sign if these most social of all creatures weren’t checking in every couple of seconds.

  I bolted up the hill past the barn with dread in my heart, and ended up collapsing in laughter. Melissa was actually using Natalie’s back as a launch pad to get at the last of the roses. No doubt she had plenty of time to practice her routine while my soaked mattress had been in this exact spot. She had flipped a small picnic table in her original assault (that was the crash), and had then evidently tried brute force, judging by the dent in my new, impenetrable metal chicken-wire fencing. Now she was going for Olympic-level gymnastics.

  “Nine point five,” I said, impressed. “I weighted your score for difficulty.”

  I was starting the goat ejection process when I realized something: I was happy. Happier than I can ever remember being in my adult life. I had rediscovered a childlike joy in the very real-life endeavor of living green.

  I hadn’t realized it during the battles with the weather, the contractors’ spacey schedules, and the Pan Sisters’ rose addiction, but I realized it acutely now: just by attempting to live with a little less oil in my life, I’d already won. It wasn’t important whether it hailed or whether the roses bloomed. Whether spiny amaranth (and twelve of its cousins) kept amazingly regenerating in the garden like a hydra, or if my first batch of goat ice cream tasted delicious. (OK, that one mattered.) But mostly the promising turn my life had taken was the result of my decision, quite simply, to try.

  As I arched awkwardly over the rosebush fence to smell the last flowers and scoop my goats out (with difficulty—their fat asses were getting almost too big to budge, their horns now genuine weapons), I chuckled at how hard I had fruitlessly fought to keep them from these bushes. With their gentle cud chewing and mischievous sense of humor, the Pan Sisters were teaching me to have the patience to realize that running a ranch and cultivating happiness are both a bit like getting in shape for a big running race, with all the progress, skipped days, setbacks, injuries, and major leaps forward.

  That’s what I heard in their Mmbahs now as they protested their latest, and certainly not last, rosebush eviction. “Eventually it will seem easy.” Or at least easier.

  I kissed the Pan Sisters as I herded them to their corral penalty box and thanked them for the lesson. And I realized that I didn’t regret any of the costs of learning it. Meaning the near-drownings. The purple primer baths. Four hundred hours of pointless rose fencing.

  Later that evening, Michelle called me outside as I was writing. She sounded worked up—or maybe she knew she had to holler loudly for me to hear over my solar-powered subwoofer. I grabbed my shotgun, expecting coyotes and a session of tap dancing around imaginary rattlesnakes. But I found her behind the studio, kneeling. “Look at these datura flowers.”

  I looked, although I just wanted to look at her. She was beautiful in the way that only people truly in touch with the Earth are beautiful. She smelled like the outdoors, even indoors. She said, “Some of them only blossom a single time, for one day, and never again.”

  I bent down to smell a creeping plant I had dismissed as a weed. It was, as Michelle described it, “the scent of the moon” captured within a lavender-white cone blossom that looked like the horn of a gramophone. And as I came back inside with pollen on my nose, I thought I was lucky to be given more than the one shot a datura blossom got. It had taken me a long time to get to this point. I made so many mistakes just in the past year, that if my life was a basketball game, I would’ve fouled out.

  Living local and green was not an all-or-nothing proposition. Each day I had another chance to make good choices, to move toward a healthy, independent, sustainable life. My first year’s effort was just an initial step.

  I was going to stay with it. Whether the green fad faded or gas got cheap again. And not just for planetary reasons, but for personal ones. I realized, as the monsoon peaked again, that this time I was flooded in with someone I loved, in what was already our home. My neighbor Sandy was right when she told me that mine was a two-person task, but not because it made the chores easier. Rather because it made life infinitely more joyful. Because it gave that crucial concept of home its depth. It gave me something manageable that I tangibly wanted to nurture into future generations. And I thought that’s the greatest good I could do.

>   Ice cream recipes can be found at (and sent to) http://www.farewellmysubaru.com.

  AFTERWORD

  MOTIVATED

  While my first year of oil reduction started as a deeply personal experience, I, like most people not living in solitary confinement, realize that climate change is a universal crisis. How can I not? Hardly a day goes by on the ranch without another frightening headline materializing on my computer screen: Eskimos’ islands washing away and Antarctic penguins vanishing. I’ve experienced the warmest year on record in New Mexico. In my electronic equipment alone, it’s hard to avoid feeling like part of the problem. The factories, the people, and the cows in this country contribute 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide, though at these rates, we’ll be overtaken by China and India by 2048.

  Americans have 1,148 cars per one thousand people. China had nine cars per one thousand people, but its economy is increasing 11 percent per year, and new drivers will be competing for a fixed pool of petroleum. Today American passenger cars account for 10 percent of the world’s fossil fuel use.

  In response, an entire industry of books predicts, in terrifying detail, a near-future without humans (or at least without society as we know it). James Howard Kunstler, for example, cost me a week’s sleep when he wrote in The Long Emergency, “the national chain stores will be dead. The supermarkets will not be operating. None of the accustomed large-scale systems we depended on for the goods of daily life will be operating as they did, if at all.”

  The message I think I’m supposed to take from these apocalyptic tomes was, Might as well have as good a time as possible. Nothing matters. We’re all screwed. Steal someone’s Ferrari.

  But as an inveterate optimist, I’ve decided to operate on the premise that the doomsday predictors are wrong. They always have been so far—about events like Y2K and the millennium and stuff. Though I did get very, very scared. That’s partly because journalists, like hen-pecking school-lunch aides, are often rightly accused of being quick to highlight massive problems and considerably slower to offer solutions. It’s all well and good to terrify people by pointing out that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could take out London and New York, but what could you and I do to keep the giant ice cube floating in the North Atlantic? I figure it’s gotta be a worldwide effort. One guy throwing up some solar panels isn’t going to reverse climate change.

  After attempting to live green for one year on the Funky Butte Ranch, here are the five most important conclusions I’ve come to:

  First, vote for sustainable candidates. In other words, make carbon reduction among your top voting priorities. I’m not a member of any political party (deep down, I cling to my Angry Young Man belief that a two-party system is hardly better than a one-party system, and I believe that a brief glance at lobbyist contribution lists bears this out). So I’m a card-carrying Independent. But the past seven years have shown that there’s a time to change the system, and there’s a time to make sure that the corrupt idiots who are causing the bulk of the world’s environmental problems get booted as far from state and national capitals as possible. I envision sort of the inverse of Karl Rove’s plans for a permanent Republican Majority. I see a permanent Sustainable-voting Majority.

  This doesn’t mean I’m advocating always voting for Democrats. Although that party, which took majority control of both houses of the U.S. Congress in 2006, got off to a good start. One of the first things the House of Representatives did after the Dems took control was to pass a bill canceling the absurd billions in tax breaks for the un-sustainable (and ridiculously profitable) oil companies, and transferring the incentives to sustainable technologies like wind and solar. Such a move would have been unthinkable if the GOP was still in control: they are generally more in bed with Big Oil and its associated industries. True, the Senate failed to act on their side of the bill that would, among other provisions, extend solar tax credits. But it was the GOP Senators who threatened the filibuster that killed the bill.

  Still, I recommend against blind party voting. Some rust belt Democrats fight fuel-efficiency increases for fear of pissing off the flailing Big Three ROAT makers. What goads me even more is that some magazine must have put me on a “progressive” mailing list, resulting in enough “Vote for Hillary” junk mail to clear a medium-sized rainforest. So I recommend finding out which of your local candidates—whether it’s for the city council or the U.S. House of Representatives—is serious about sustainability. Really ask the candidates: what do you plan to do to make the U.S. (or our city, or school district) carbon-neutral?

  When we’re explaining this to any friends still hoodwinked by the fear rhetoric of the old model politicians, I think it’s best to frame carbon reduction as a way to build a stronger America. Sacrifice doesn’t have to figure into the equation, unless you love your Hummer as much as your children. In their essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” authors Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus make the point that, “Talking about the millions of jobs that will be created by accelerating our transition to a clean energy economy…moves the environmental movement away from apocalyptic global warming scenarios that tend to create feelings of helplessness and isolation among would-be supporters.” In other words, we can only continue to be a consumer-based, private-enterprise-loving society if our model for success is sustainable. Carbon-reduction is patriotic.

  Second, think, every day, about the carbon miles you rack up (or avoid) in your diet. Our food choices account for 30 percent of our carbon emissions. Relocated Hmong refugees in Minneapolis have proven that viable gardens can be planted in sidewalk cracks in federal housing complexes. If penniless hill people can become local eaters in a strange land, surely you and I can in a familiar one. This is possible absolutely anywhere. In Alaska, a Tlingit elder once told me that despite the cold climate, in order to starve in the seafood-rich sub-Arctic ecosystem, “you have to be very, very lazy.” There’s even a fellow raising chickens on a roof in Brooklyn.

  If some of us can’t hack more than a small garden due to our overscheduled lives, we can demand that our local market stock foods grown not just organically (since most pesticides and fertilizers come from petroleum) but locally. That keeps Chilean apples in Chile. We might discover that we have to eat seasonally (apples are a fall fruit in the Northern Hemisphere), but lo and behold, we’ll find that every season has its bounties.

  And for every food dilemma, every region has its options. I recently discovered that I don’t need cane sugar from the tropics to sweeten my yogurt. Desert agave syrup is a delicious natural sweetener from my area. Likewise, a New Englander can use maple sugar. If every American eats seven meals per week from local sources, Barbara Kingsolver writes in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the nation would use 1.1 million fewer barrels of oil per week. That would hurt no one but oil refiners and shipping companies. And maybe some orchard corporations in Chile. And the odd cardiologist.

  Third, drive on something other than fossil fuels, to help create a viable market for biofuels. Beyond the obvious (and legitimate) do-gooder techniques of carpooling to work and biking once or twice a week, the past year has shown me that driving on an alternative fuel, despite the Kung Pao learning curve I’ve described in this book, is pretty much a breeze: as long as they plug their nose, no one knows I’m pumping something other than diesel or unleaded into my Ridiculously Oversized American Truck. My Vegetable Oil mechanic, Kevin Forrest, says it takes about four to six months to pay off a VegOil conversion in lower fuel costs.

  Now, biofuels aren’t a panacea. The science of their use is in its infancy, but I wouldn’t buy into the backlash propaganda that tries to convince us that all biofuels lack real efficiency compared to petroleum products. I have to believe that harvesting waste oil is better than churning unleaded. And switchgrass, grapeseed oil, and algae all seem like real possibilities. In reality, I suspect some new biofuel will emerge as the sustainable winner.

  Fourth, fight sprawl in your community. Sure, in a busy world i
t’s easier to mollify our consciences by sending checks to large organizations that are trying to save panda bears in China, but the secret to sprawllies in the reality that most of us remain uninvolved in the well-being of our own backyards. Most people can’t name their local county officials; you can bet that developers can. I saw this time and again in covering local government: some horrible development erases an open space, and everybody grumbles and wonders how it happened. We actually have to attend meetings to demand that box stores stay out, and that developers use sustainable building and water supply techniques.

  We are responsible for our own backyard. For the Biblically-inclined, this mandate reverberates loudly in Ezekiel: “Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet?” We can insist on legitimate green certification in all commercial and residential structures in our communities, the way we’ll hopefully demand locally-grown and fair trade food at the market. I don’t know why this sounds so radical to some ears. Europe is a decade ahead of the U.S. in this area. Holland is running trains on vegetable oil, and all new buildings in Spain already have to meet solar power standards. As for water efficiency, Israel thrives in a desert.