Twelve By Twelve Part 1

Twelve by twelve.

A one-room cabin off the grid and beyond the American dream.

by William Powers.

PREFACE.

AT THE BEGINNING OF 2007, I returned to America after a decade of aid and conservation work in Africa and Latin America. It was a rough homecoming. More than simple culture shock, I felt increasingly disillusioned. Though many of my projects abroad were successful, reducing poverty and protecting local rainforests, a destructive global system hammered at the broader picture. For example, n.o.bel laureate scientists have predicted that global warming could cause half of the planet's plant and animal species to become extinct in just a few decades. My creed - We can learn to live in harmony with each other and nature We can learn to live in harmony with each other and nature - was stressed to the breaking point. - was stressed to the breaking point.

I landed in New York City and began asking myself a daunting question: How could humanity transition to gentler, more responsible ways of living by replacing attachment to things with deeper relations.h.i.+ps to people, nature, and self ?

Fortunately, I stumbled upon someone with some clues: Dr. Jackie Benton. The first time I met this slight, sixty-year-old physician, she was stroking a honeybee's wings in front of her twelve-foot by twelve-foot, off-the-grid home on No Name Creek in North Carolina. She struck me as someone who had achieved self-mastery in these confusing times, but discovering how she'd done this would prove to be a riddle intricately connected to the house itself.

At once poet and scientist, Jackie slowly revealed to me a philosophy that is neither purely secular nor purely spiritual. People call her a "wisdomkeeper," a Native American term for women elders who ignite deeper questions in us. Wisdomkeepers differ from what you might call Wise Ones. Wise Ones lay it all out for us - here's your life's blueprint. Wisdomkeepers dig to the Latin root of the word education education, "drawing forth" what's already inside of us, and embody the curious original meaning of the word revelation revelation ( (re-velar): "to veil again."

Over the course of eighteen months, I exchanged letters with Jackie and visited her community several times. But most significantly - and, frankly, it still feels astonis.h.i.+ng to me - I came to live, alone, for forty days, in her tiny house in the spring of 2007. This book tells the story of what happened there. I didn't plan to live 12 12, and I certainly didn't plan to write about it. But as I told friends about Jackie and her biofuel-brewing, organic-farming neighbors, about the striking setting of the No Name Creek wildlands, and about the profound changes the experience wrung out of me, they overwhelmingly encouraged me to share the tale. So here it is, presented as a loose chronology of my time in the 12 12 - framed in two parts, twelve chapters each - along with twelve of Jackie's Socratic thoughts, placed periodically and marked with the symbol[image] . However, 12 12 solitude also helped me synthesize wisdom fro indigenous people I met during a decade abroad; I've included some of their stories as well, so the book ranges far beyond the house's dimensions. . However, 12 12 solitude also helped me synthesize wisdom fro indigenous people I met during a decade abroad; I've included some of their stories as well, so the book ranges far beyond the house's dimensions.

Jackie did ask one thing of me: that I change her name. Her path, she explained, is increasingly private. She is glad this story is being told - so long as it doesn't draw more people to the 12 12. Out of respect for her wishes, I've disguised her name and certain identifying details, such as the names of surrounding towns and neighbors.

Finally, I've included a brief appendix to suggest further reading and action, and I have an expanded and regularly updated version at www.williampowersbooks.com.

By sharing this journey in a very intimate fas.h.i.+on, I hope to help release fresh questions and insights about where we are, where we are going, and ultimately, how we might uncover hope for personal and global healing.

PART I.

TWELVE.

1. THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD.

"I KNOW A DOCTOR who makes eleven thousand dollars a year," my mother said. who makes eleven thousand dollars a year," my mother said.

I looked up, suddenly curious. "She's an acquaintance of mine," my mother continued, pa.s.sing me a basket of bread across the dinner table. "Lives an hour from here in a twelve-foot by twelve-foot house with no electricity."

I noticed my father's empty seat next to her and felt my chest tighten. He was still in the hospital. We still weren't sure if they'd been able to remove the entire tumor from his colon. I'd come down to North Carolina from New York City, where I'd recently settled after several years in Bolivia, so that I could be with him as he recovered.

My mother went on: "She's a tax resister. As a senior physician she could make three hundred thousand dollars, but she only accepts eleven so as to avoid war taxes. Did you know that fifty cents out of every dollar goes to the Pentagon?"

"Hold on. So this doctor -"

"Jackie Benton."

"- Doctor Jackie Benton, she lives in a twelve by twelve twelve by twelve house? That's physically impossible. That bookcase is twelve by twelve." house? That's physically impossible. That bookcase is twelve by twelve."

"She doesn't have any running water, either. She harvests the rainwater from her roof. Haven't you heard of her? She's a bit of a local celeb."

I stopped eating and looked out the window. The rust-colored sky above my parents' condo hovered exquisitely between orange and red. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator, the rush of cars going by. That distinctive sky momentarily brought me back to Lake t.i.ticaca in Bolivia, beneath a similar red-orange glow, and the echo of a question a shaman had asked me: What's the shape of the world? What's the shape of the world?

Something moved inside me. I looked over at my mom and asked, "Do you have any way of contacting Dr. Benton?"

"I have her mobile number," my mom said. "She keeps it off but does check messages every now and then. People are always trying to reach her. And that's made her even more reclusive."

JACKIE DIDN'T CALL BACK. As the days turned into a week, I left several unreturned messages on her voice mail. Meanwhile, when I wasn't visiting my father in the hospital, I asked others in town about this mysterious doctor. She provoked a range of opinions and was called everything from "commie" to "saint." As I eventually learned, Jackie had been a communist in the early 1970s; once, while counter-protesting at a KKK rally in Greensboro, five of her communist friends were shot to death by Klansmen. The police knew who did it, but the good-ol'-boy perpetrators were never prosecuted.

Jackie went on to marry one of her leftist friends, had two daughters, and settled into a life of doctoring; she mostly worked in the state system, attending to African Americans and undoc.u.mented Latin Americans in rural clinics. As a mother, she taught her kids symbolic tax resistance as they grew up - like not paying the telephone tax and taking $10.40 off her 1040 form each year, with a note to the IRS saying it was to protest defense spending - while leaving her more radical activism behind. She divorced but remained close friends with her ex-husband. When her daughters went away to college, she continued to work full-time but lowered her income to eleven thousand dollars to avoid paying any taxes at all.

Even those who were offended by her admitted she was a child of the South, sprung from local soil, and most people spoke of her with respect, whether deep or grudging. After all, she'd given up all that money, dedicated her life to serving the poor with her doctoring, and survived on the radical edge of how simply one can live in America. She'd also developed a unique blend of science and spirituality, creating a kind of third way that appealed to secular and religious perspectives alike. "Jackie's a wisdomkeeper," one of her friends told me. When I asked what that was, she said, "Wisdomkeepers are an old tradition, goes back to the Native Americans. They're elder women who inspire us to dig more deeply into life."

If Jackie had any wisdom, she was guarding it. You couldn't exactly look her up on Google Maps. Her dirt road didn't show up on any map. More than that, she wasn't living 12 12 just as an expression of simplicity. She chose those tiny dimensions, as she chose her tiny salary, for pragmatic reasons: in North Carolina, any structure that's twelve feet by twelve feet or less does not count as a house. It's considered to be a tool shed or gardening shack - if it's even considered. If you live 12 12, you don't pay property tax and don't receive electric lines, sewage, or roads from the state. So I was leaving voice mail messages for someone who, from a certain official point of view, was invisible.

During that time, a family friend in Chapel Hill invited me to run in a local 5K race. He said, "Come on, it'll get you out of the hospital and give you a break from calling ... What's her name?"

"Jackie."

"Right. Plus you'll love the place where they're holding the race."

As we drove in his SUV through Chapel Hill and onto the highway, he enthusiastically described the hills, forest, and lake of the race site, but I was baffled when we arrived at an industrial park. Sure, it was green. But the hills were landfills covered with sod, the lake artificial, the woods a monoculture. The place was sp.a.w.ned by AutoCAD, not Mother Nature. Like a bad toupee, it looked all the worse for trying to be something it wasn't.

I ran amid two hundred others past the high-tech military suppliers, between the human-made forests and lakes, and I realized it wasn't just the aesthetics of the place that bothered me, but what it symbolized: the Flat World.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman presents the phenomenon in a positive light in his best-selling book columnist Thomas Friedman presents the phenomenon in a positive light in his best-selling book The World Is Flat The World Is Flat. Technologies like the internet, he observes, are breaking down hierarchies. Thanks to bandwidth, companies can easily outsource certain jobs to India, China, and elsewhere; hence, people now compete on equal footing, according to talent, on a globalize economic playing field. World capitalism, guided by government incentives, will save us from environmental collapse, Friedman further argues, by inventing clean technologies to allow for the increased global consumption.

It's not an argument to be taken lightly. Though world inequality is unfortunately on the rise, the "flat" system has led to quick economic growth in certain countries like India and China. In our ever more interconnected world, environmental and human rights horrors can be more efficiently exposed. In theory, a world that's flat gives us previously unimaginable intellectual and economic freedoms, so why was I feeling the Flat World blues?

Friedman didn't invent a flat world, but rather his metaphor articulates a truth about the way we have come to imagine the twenty-first century. The metaphor carries a host of negative connotations: The world has. .h.i.t a flat note. Industrial agriculture creates a flat taste, and multinational corporations flatten our uniqueness into h.o.m.o economicus h.o.m.o economicus serving a One World Uniplanet. A once-natural atmosphere has been flattened by global warming: every square foot of it now contains 390 ppm of carbon dioxide, though up until two hundred years ago the atmosphere contained 275 ppm (and 350 ppm is considered the safe upper threshold for our planet). Rainforests are flattened to make cattle pastures; a living ocean is depleted and flattened by overfis.h.i.+ng; vibrant cultures are steamrolled to the edge of extinction. Have the well-rounded objectives of America's Founding Fathers - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - been flattened to a single organizing principle: the unification of greed? serving a One World Uniplanet. A once-natural atmosphere has been flattened by global warming: every square foot of it now contains 390 ppm of carbon dioxide, though up until two hundred years ago the atmosphere contained 275 ppm (and 350 ppm is considered the safe upper threshold for our planet). Rainforests are flattened to make cattle pastures; a living ocean is depleted and flattened by overfis.h.i.+ng; vibrant cultures are steamrolled to the edge of extinction. Have the well-rounded objectives of America's Founding Fathers - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - been flattened to a single organizing principle: the unification of greed?

When the 5K race was over, I left the awards ceremony and looked into the lifeless water of the lake beside Dow Chemical. Since returning to the United States, I felt something wasn't right with me. I'd been a squid out of ink, the joy squeezed right out of me. I closed my eyes and traveled back to Bolivia, to the banks of Lake t.i.ticaca and the particular moment I'd remembered while sitting with my mother.

It happened just three months back. Two friends, she American and he British, were getting married. They'd lived in Bolivia for years, working with the country's indigenous people, and an Aymara shaman was going to marry them. Before the ceremony began, I stood with the shaman as we admired the most extraordinary sky, a rusty orange-and-red blend, and the famous Andean lake, which was the size of a small sea, its unseen far sh.o.r.es in Peru. We stood at thirteen thousand feet, and the light cast a gossamer s.h.i.+mmer over three distant islands. Above them, the jagged Andes.

The shaman looked out over the landscape and asked me, "What's the shape of the world?"

Farther up the lake, I saw the bride and groom mingling with other Bolivian and American friends, all dressed in their finest. About half the Americans lived and worked in Bolivia; the other half were just there for the week. Honamti, the shaman, was dressed in an olive jacket and jeans and looked nearly iconic, his long hair tied back in a ponytail, an ambiguous expression in his dark eyes.

"The world?" I finally said. "It's round."

"How is it round?" Honamti asked.

I showed him, putting my two pointer fingers together in front of me and drawing a downward circle.

"That's how most people imagine it," he said. "But we Aymaras disagree."

He was silent for a long moment. Alpacas and sheep grazed in the distance, shepherded together by an Aymara woman in a colorful, layer-cake skirt. A pejerey leapt from and plunged back into Lake t.i.ticaca, sending out rippling circles. "We say that the earth is round, but in a different way," Honamti finally said, and he traced an upward circle, the opposite of how I'd drawn it, beginning at his belly and finis.h.i.+ng at his heart. He traced the shape slowly. Amazed, I watched it spring to life in the landscape. His upward stroke began with the lake, curved up the sides of the Andes, and finished gloriously with the dome of the sky.

"And it's also round like this." This time he traced a circle that began at his heart and went outward toward the lake, finis.h.i.+ng two feet in front of his body. And the earth took that shape, as the lakesh.o.r.e curled into the base of the distant mountains and then into the sky's horizon, a perfect outward circle.

"And it's also round like this." Keeping his hands two feet in front of him, he traced a slow circle back into himself. The circle finished at some hidden place inside, the outward world circling into our inner world.

Somebody called over to Honamti; the ceremony was to begin. But before the Aymara man turned to go, I asked him, "Which of the three is it? What's the shape of the world?"

He answered by repeating: "What's the shape of the world?"

I opened my eyes: the lifeless Dow Chemical lake before me, Honamti's question/answer echoing in my head. Did the world have to be flat? Was it too late to imagine other shapes?

"YOU'RE A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY," my father said, looking up at me from his sickbed.

I looked out the hospital window: three smokestacks blew gray smoke into a gray sky. The backs of adjacent six- or seven-story gray-brick buildings. Beside me, the muted beeping of an IV drip; the smell of fast food and Ben Gay. Fluorescent lights and the television's flicker illuminated my father's slightly ashen face.

Suddenly, and despite the dreary surroundings, I felt a rush of love for him. He'd given me gifts of stability, diligence, and an appreciation for the power of ideas. He was telling me, his thirty-six-year-old son, that I was a man without a country not in criticism but out of love. He was right: acute culture shock had pushed me into a kind of exile.

I touched him on the shoulder, pushed the hair back off his forehead, remembering something from my childhood. One year, during the Fourth of July barbecue, he taught me how to grill London broil. On that humid day the forested s.p.a.ces around our Long Island home were alive with box turtles. This was before urban sprawl defined the island, before our magical woods were cleared for McMansions. My sister and I found a turtle and brought it home and set it loose. Billy Billy, my dad called over to me, I want to show you something I want to show you something. As I watched his hairy forearm expertly flip the meat, I loved him. The sound of fireworks in the distance; a red, white, and blue flag up on its pole, where my father raised it every public holiday. I felt organically connected to my home, my family, and our prosperous society; to the yard, the turtle-filled woods, the smell of meat grilling.

The sound of sizzling meat drew me out of my reverie, back to the hospital room: a Wendy's ad on TV, reminding me of the hospital's preferred food option. My father dozed off to the sizzle of burgers and a corporate jingle, and I walked through the labyrinth building, past hundreds of patients, to the source of many of their health problems and heart disease: greasy hamburgers. UNC Medical Center had outsourced meal service to Wendy's.

I brought a tray of burger and fries to a table by the window. Outside was a parking garage, its asphalt stacked five stories high, packed with vehicles - the source of many of earth's health problems. I checked my voice mail; still no response from Jackie. I considered calling her again but decided against it - I'd already left three messages. Beyond the parking lot, a monoculture of pines and the highway to the mall. I tried to feel feel something for the landscape, but it lacked shape. something for the landscape, but it lacked shape.

Worse, doubt gnawed at me that the past decade of my professional life had been for naught. I'd labored incredibly hard as a humanitarian aid and conservation worker in places like Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Bolivia. Part of my job was to help people living on the borders of the rainforest improve their lives economically while defending their forest. I've got a toolkit: ecotourism, sustainable timber, nontimber forest products, shade-grown organic coffee, political organizing and advocacy. In the end, the logic goes, if the rainforest pays, it stays. If these folks earn their living from it, they'll protect it from the multinationals coming to cut it down, whether for mahogany, for soy and sugar plantations, or for iron, gold, and diamond mines.

I have helped create rainforest-protecting munic.i.p.al reserves, indigenous areas, and community forests that have successfully resisted logging, mining, and industrial farming. But these efforts have been trounced by the global trend. Have I been merely rearranging the deck chairs on the t.i.tanic t.i.tanic? From 1998 to 2008 the world's rainforests have disappeared at a rate of an acre every two minutes, approximately 1 percent a year. At this rate, in forty years we will have destroyed the last of them.

When I fly over the rainforest into these places, I feel the irony. Planes spew dangerous global warming ga.s.ses into the stratosphere that hasten the desertification that fuels rainforest decline. I don't want to get on the plane, and yet, I have to get on the plane.

I get on the plane. Below, there's West Africa's Upper Guinea Rainforest. There's the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon, Central Africa's Congo River Basin Rainforest, Central America's Monte Verde cloud forest, and the final remnants of India's forests collapsing under the weight of a billion people.

Still, it's marvelous that we have some rainforest left. Sometimes, especially in the so-called megadiverse nations like Peru, Bolivia, and Indonesia, the strange green animal below stretches 360 degrees as far as I can see, bulging slightly in the middle distance, then softening out to the thin line of the horizon. That olive and lime green pelt sometimes looks so exquisite that I ache to reach down from the air and stroke it. It's like the back of an enormous animal we thought extinct but that still lives, reclining below in soft curvature.

But when this animal's side comes into view, I see the burns in its fur - ten-acre clear-cuts fed by logging roads like snaking arteries thick with virus. Sometimes fresh fires still burn, but I can't hear the monkeys' screams of terror under the plane's engine. When the fires are gone, there's a pure black deadness to the skin - and it's time to land amid the charcoal, the stumps. A million species flee or die; only one species moves in.

"ON THE HILLSIDES OLD CROPS DEAD AND FLATTENED ... murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of h.e.l.l." ... murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of h.e.l.l."

Granted, Cormac McCarthy's The Road The Road was probably the worst possible thing to read during my reentry to America. But there I was anyway, a few days later, reading the novel in my parents' condo parking lot. I recalled that McCarthy suggested his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel is not about some distant future dystopia; it's really about the present time. was probably the worst possible thing to read during my reentry to America. But there I was anyway, a few days later, reading the novel in my parents' condo parking lot. I recalled that McCarthy suggested his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel is not about some distant future dystopia; it's really about the present time.

Boy, did I need some comfort food. In the supermarket across the road, I walked down an endless ice cream aisle and finally found it: Ben and Jerry's, something I never see in Africa or Latin America, and a real treat. But something was different. On the back of the pint of Phish Food was one word: Unilever. The Vermont duo had sold their erstwhile eco-company to the world's biggest food conglomerate, responsible for denuding the Brazilian rainforest and poisoning field laborers with chemicals.

I put the pint back. As I walked through that windowless, sterile mega-market, with piped-in music, the exit seemed to recede into the distance. I finally reached the door, only to escape into the sprawling parking lot. I didn't belong here - not in fast-food hospitals or condos; not in industrial-park 5K runs or malls. The wisdom I thought I'd gained over the past decade couldn't make sense of the dark direction the world seemed to be taking and of my own complicity in it. Perhaps the shaman was wrong. The world had lost its shape, and I was losing mine.

I felt a vibration in my pocket. My phone. "h.e.l.lo," I said.

A silence on the other end. Not a long silence, but one full and round with expectation. Finally: "Hi, this is Jackie."

2. THE LEAST THING PRECISELY.

JACKIE SQUATTED BEHIND TWO HEIRLOOM TEA BUSHES, covered with golden honeybees. They explored her skin, her hair, the folds of her white cotton pants and blouse. I could see her stroking the wings of one of them. She was so absorbed in it that she didn't even hear me pull up.

The drive out to her permaculture farm was a collision of the Old and New South. The Research Triangle - which includes the cities of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham - and its McMansions, pharmaceutical plants, and research universities, like Duke and the University of North Carolina, disappeared as I crossed into Adams County, where Jackie lived. The wide highway narrowed to a single lane with occasional potholes, and the rolling green landscape evoked the Civil War setting of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain Cold Mountain. Plantation houses collapsed into themselves, and the old tobacco fields around them lay fallow. Jackie had moved into one of these abandoned, to-be-defined s.p.a.ces.

She was partly obscured by the tea bushes. At a distance, all I could see was part of her face and a ponytail of salt-and-pepper hair. I got out of the car and, still unnoticed, walked in her direction. Though it was early April, barely past the last frost, under Jackie's hand two hundred varieties of plants sprang from the ground in manic glory. Later, I'd learn their names by heart: Jack grape and Juneberries; hearty kiwi and Egyptian walking onions. Lettuce sprang up in a neat rectangular bed, and the winter wheat rose skyward. All of Jackie's flora was in motion under a slight breeze, smeared together as if in an impressionist painting, with the muted purples, oranges, and reds against a background of green and brown.

This area was a clear-cut when she moved in, Jackie had told me over the phone. Over the four years of living here, she'd been helping nature heal. Now you could barely make out the gleam of No Name Creek through the thickening vegetation. But I could hear it. It gurgled and bubbled through her two acres. There were some whippoorwills calling out, but otherwise I was drawn by the sound of the creek. It seemed to whisper secrets.

I was so absorbed by the setting, I didn't hear Jackie approach, but suddenly there she was, standing not six feet from me, regarding me with a kind of Mona Lisa half smile. She didn't say anything for a long moment; neither did I. She wore a lined navy blue windbreaker, too big for her, and white cotton drawstring pants. I knew she'd just turned sixty, but she gave the impression of fifty. Health and agility sprang from her whole body and shot from her blue eyes. She wasn't bold or a.s.sertive, far from it. She looked at me almost timidly, her eyes downcast.

I noticed several bees still clinging to her jacket, one in her hair, and another on her wrist. As we shook hands, the bee on her wrist made the short jump to my forearm. I stared at it without moving. With a little pull on my hand, Jackie led me over to some rainwater pooled by the tea bushes. We crouched there, and the bee flew off my arm and landed beside the pool. Above us sat a bee box. Jackie told me her Italian bees produced forty pounds of honey a year, enough to give to friends. "Listen to how quiet the bees are," she said. "In a month they'll be swarming, and it'll sound like a freight train." We stayed crouched there for a while, the air around us fragrant with raw honey. A slight buzz mingled with the murmur of the creek. We were surrounded by Juneberries, figs, hazelnuts, and sourwood. The bee that had been on my forearm was now sipping from the pool. Jackie reached down and stroked its wings as it drank. "Sometimes I wake up in the morning out here in the silence, and I get tears of joy."

During the next hour, she led me through her permaculture farm. She pointedly described permaculture as "the things your grandparents knew and your parents forgot," adding that the word is a conjunction of both permanent agriculture permanent agriculture and and permanent culture permanent culture. She said permaculture can be defined as a holistic approach to sustainable landscape, agricultural, and home design. Our conversation consisted of my gawking in amazement and she gently, intelligently explaining the science and poetry of it all. She'd laid out the land in zones.

Zone 2 lay just beyond the fence and, along with her bees, held the crops that were inherently deer and rabbit proof and did not need to be enclosed in fencing: a profusion of native and wild elderberries and blackberries; several pawpaws, the largest edible fruit native to America, which is as plump as a mango; five Southern heirloom apple trees ("Four from Lee Calhoun," Jackie told me, "the dean of Southern heirloom apple lore."); three pecan trees from the yard in Alabama where she grew up; and two medlars, which produce apple-like fruits. "I got them because I was so enchanted by the shape of the plants," Jackie said. "They were cultivated in medieval walled gardens, and eaten at feasts in those days. I use them today for medlar jam." Zone 3 was her forest, which she used for collecting wood, edible mushrooms, and edible plants like pokeweed, and for bathing and meditating by the creek. I asked her about Zone 1, and she said we'd get to it later.

As she told me about the teas she grew, about her homemade jams and boysenberry wines, about the s.h.i.+takes she'd planted on a pile of logs, about the rainwater she harvested, I thought of something from Nietzsche: "How little suffices for happiness! ... the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance - the least thing makes up the best happiness." All of these tiny things - a bee, a creek, a tea bush - were causing me to loosen up, relax, and feel joy rush through me, the asphalt inside me beginning to crack.

Finally we made it into the core of her farm, Zone 1, stepping inside a green plastic deer fence. A membrane more than a frame, it un.o.btrusively circled a half acre or so of her two acres and harbored dozens of gardens full of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. There was Brugmansia, or angel trumpet, and Virginia bluebells, native persimmon for wine and preserves, cornelian cherry, mint everywhere, spicebush (for the spicebush swallowtail b.u.t.terfly), and Dutchman's pipevine (for the pipevine b.u.t.terfly). But at the center of Zone 1 something stopped me. Was it a house house? The edifice was so slight that, viewed from a certain angle, it seemed as if it might simply vanish, like looking down the sharp edge of a razor blade. Wait a minute. Sure, I'd seen the structure several times already during our tour (hadn't I?), but it hadn't really sunk in. It just seemed like a little shed or something in the background. She actually lives in there She actually lives in there, I thought, suddenly feeling like I'd crossed a line by even coming here. I wondered why she hadn't even mentioned the house yet. Was she embarra.s.sed?

I was now looking at a different person. Where I'd seen this remarkable physician with the world's greenest thumb, I now saw a pauper. Something deeply ingrained in me reacted violently to the situation. She has nowhere else to go She has nowhere else to go. She continued to talk about the joys of homesteading, but all I could do was nod, mutely, and steal peeks at the horrifying sight of the 12 12.

"Would you like to come in for tea?" she asked.

Part of me did not. But she led me toward that terrible, tiny house. To choose to live in anything that small was insane. As we neared it the place looked far smaller than I'd imagined. I'm six feet tall, so it was exactly twice my height at the base. As we approached the house it seemed to shrink, and I imagined the awkward moment when we would both squeeze in and drink the tea standing up, painfully forcing conversation. Four winters had weathered its brown walls. As we stepped onto a minuscule porch, she asked me if I'd mind taking off my shoes.

Why did something paradoxical in me, at that moment, long for something grand? For something that shouted the glory of human beings rather than being practically erased by the thick woods around it? Freud noted that people subconsciously struggle with two opposite but equal fears: being expelled by nature - cast out of Eden, as it were - and being absorbed by nature. This was the latter fear. By scaling down to only this speck of human s.p.a.ce, Jackie had been enveloped by nature. No electrical wires, no plumbing. The bubbling creek now sounded almost ominous. I pulled off my shoes, heard the door creak open. I couldn't see inside, didn't want to. I wanted to be back in the plush interior of the car, jazz on the stereo, cruising on the highway back to Chapel Hill. But there was no turning back. I stooped down and entered the box.

From the inside, instead of feeling cramped, the place felt surprisingly roomy. While Jackie brewed tea on her four-burner gas stove, I leaned back into her great-grandmother's rocking chair and looked around. The s.p.a.ce was so filled with the richness of her life that its edges fell away. It seemed to expand. Photos of her two grown daughters, of her ex-husband, even of her infamous Klansman father. Jackie said something that sounded a little shocking to me, but I'd later get where she was coming from: "Like a lot of Southern men of his era," she said, "he was a d.a.m.ned racist but had a heart of gold." Everything seemed forgiven. Excerpts from Buddhist and Taoist texts and snippets of poems and spiritual quotes filled the gaps between the photos of her life, a half dozen of them fastened to the ladder that rose up to a small loft, which contained a single window over her mattress and a set of drawers. Books filled a shelf covering one wall: a library of poetry, philosophy, spirituality, and - Jackie's a scientist, after all - technical books on biology, physics, astronomy, soils, and permaculture. I didn't see any on medicine other than a copy of Where There Is No Doctor Where There Is No Doctor, a manual I had occasionally used as an aid worker. The house had a faint scent of cedar from what she called her "splurge": one of the walls was finished with pure, beautiful cedar from ground to ceiling.

I now count the next few hours as among the most sublime of my life. Later Jackie would say that during our hours together the conversation would dive deep and surface again and again, that we'd go from smiling over the tea, the setting sun, and silence to talking about philosophy.

All the while the 12 12, tiny as it was, expanded outward. Outward to her neighbors. Outward to her gardens. Outward to the forest. She talked about her dream: living not only in harmony with nature ("having the carbon footprint of a Banglades.h.i.+") but among a variety of social cla.s.ses and races. Her two acres were part of a thirty-acre area. Of the thirty, twenty remained wild - through the intentional plan of an ingenious local eco-developer I'd learn more about later - common s.p.a.ce she shared with four neighboring families: a Mexican furniture craftsman, a Honduran fast-food worker, an African American secretary, and the fascinating Thompsons across the road, who had moved to the country from a crack-infested trailer park and now struggled to make it as organic farmers.

She talked about a New American Dream that stretched beyond these ethnically diverse thirty acres. Others in Adams County were resisting the Flat World, trying to imagine and live something different. This was one of the only counties in the United States adding adding small farms each year. Land in Adams was still inexpensive enough for the average person to buy, yet there was a large and growing urban market just up the road in Chapel Hill and Durham that increasingly demanded - and would pay a premium price for - organic and local foods. Nationally, their lives tied into the growing slow food, environmental, and antiwar movements, part of a more durable future. small farms each year. Land in Adams was still inexpensive enough for the average person to buy, yet there was a large and growing urban market just up the road in Chapel Hill and Durham that increasingly demanded - and would pay a premium price for - organic and local foods. Nationally, their lives tied into the growing slow food, environmental, and antiwar movements, part of a more durable future.

"You might say it all centers around a question," she said as the sun was going down. "Where do you grab the dragon's tail?"

Two deer bolted through Zone 2, beyond the deer fence. I spotted them through the 12 12's cedar-side window, slowly becoming aware of the natural activity around Jackie's home. Meanwhile, she talked about her upcoming trip in the next weeks. She had an eighty-dollar Greyhound ticket out west. With a small group, she'd walk a pilgrimage across the desert to the Nevada Atomic Test Site to hold up a sign saying NOT IN OUR NAME. NOT IN OUR NAME. And then she'd be "Grey-d.o.g.g.i.ng," as she put it, further west to visit other activist friends. After thirty years of doctoring she'd taken a year's sabbatical and was on a sort of pilgrimage to figure out if she would continue in medicine or strike out on a new path. And then she'd be "Grey-d.o.g.g.i.ng," as she put it, further west to visit other activist friends. After thirty years of doctoring she'd taken a year's sabbatical and was on a sort of pilgrimage to figure out if she would continue in medicine or strike out on a new path.

It was time for me to go. But I wanted to absorb more. "Where do do you grab the dragon's tail?" I asked, feeling the Bolivian rainforest burning, the climate dangerously warming. you grab the dragon's tail?" I asked, feeling the Bolivian rainforest burning, the climate dangerously warming.