Twelve By Twelve Part 3

"Help it out," my mother urged. I stepped past the bush and pushed the sapling. It swayed under the efforts of the snake, and as it swayed forward I leaned into it. Our joint effort bent the sapling far enough for the snake to finally take courage. It leapt.

Suddenly the snake was suspended in the gap between the trees. In slow motion, this slender cord soared through the air, its body like the bends of a river. It landed, crouched in the pine needles, and then foot-by-foot graced its way up the pine until its head rose above the highest pine branch.

At the end of the day, my mother drove herself home in the car. I waved good-bye as she reversed onto Jackie's lane. The sound of the motor softened, then disappeared. The dust settled on the lane, and a blanket of silence covered Jackie's little homestead. The place where the vehicle had been wasn't empty; s.p.a.ciousness filled the gap, the elusive contours of enough in the ripening leaves of the forest.

I biked down to the bridge, gazed down at No Name Creek, lost in thought. My mother and I hadn't talked about theories of living better vs. living well or the perils of degrading and erasing subsistence cultures. It was the snake that changed her mind about the car. The silence and strength of it brought her back to those reverent five A.M. moments in the chapel, incense burning, when she was a young nun obedient to a vow of poverty. The snake didn't possess anything in this world, but still it rose to the tallest branch, proclaimed and celebrated its being. Do we really need so much more than that snake? Do we need Hummers and Sony Playstations? China cabinets and electronic sensors in our running shoes?

I TOOK LOTS OF LONG WALKS. Rambles, you might call them, without specific route or time frame. The day after my mother's visit, while rambling, I did an experiment. I tried to see the world around me in "color patches." In a book at Jackie's, I'd been reading about recovering cataract patients at the turn of the nineteenth century, and several used this expression to describe their first experience of vision after being cured. Each place they'd fix their eyes was another glorious set of colors. One patient was exhilarated by the fact that everyone looked different; another asked the doctor about the black stains on paintings. "Those are shadows," the astounded doctor explained. The world looked beautiful to me, seeing it as if through freshly cured eyes, one color patch after another. I looped around from the tracks onto the highway, back to Jackie's. My sense of whimsy sobered as the colors came to represent strewn garbage under my feet. Old ii' South's shoulder was littered with Coca-Cola, Fanta, and Diet Sprite cans; Jack Daniels and beer bottles; paper and Styrofoam cups; Snickers and Three Musketeers wrappers; cigarette packs. New gra.s.s sprouted around the colorful debris, tentacles enclosing it bit by bit until it would disappear from sight all summer, reappearing, if faded, in the dying gra.s.s of fall. It just seemed wrong. Spotting a plastic bag, I began collecting trash. Rambles, you might call them, without specific route or time frame. The day after my mother's visit, while rambling, I did an experiment. I tried to see the world around me in "color patches." In a book at Jackie's, I'd been reading about recovering cataract patients at the turn of the nineteenth century, and several used this expression to describe their first experience of vision after being cured. Each place they'd fix their eyes was another glorious set of colors. One patient was exhilarated by the fact that everyone looked different; another asked the doctor about the black stains on paintings. "Those are shadows," the astounded doctor explained. The world looked beautiful to me, seeing it as if through freshly cured eyes, one color patch after another. I looped around from the tracks onto the highway, back to Jackie's. My sense of whimsy sobered as the colors came to represent strewn garbage under my feet. Old ii' South's shoulder was littered with Coca-Cola, Fanta, and Diet Sprite cans; Jack Daniels and beer bottles; paper and Styrofoam cups; Snickers and Three Musketeers wrappers; cigarette packs. New gra.s.s sprouted around the colorful debris, tentacles enclosing it bit by bit until it would disappear from sight all summer, reappearing, if faded, in the dying gra.s.s of fall. It just seemed wrong. Spotting a plastic bag, I began collecting trash.

The bag filled quickly, and I grabbed another one that had snagged onto a bush. As I filled the new bag, I tried to connect the faces of the drivers and pa.s.sengers in the minivans, SUVs, pickups, and sedans pa.s.sing me with the rainbow of trash I walked through; I could not. All I saw were beautiful faces, and I began to wave. That slight nod, the lift of wrist and flash of those two fingers. Sure enough, the hands came out the windows, not to toss an empty Marlboro packet at my feet, but to snap an NC wave.

They chuckled at this fool. The dark pleasure of schadenfreude. They liked the fool for being carless, worse off than they. They liked him for picking up their trash. I didn't even have to initiate the NC wave. People started waving first, and I felt happy. It didn't matter that Dr. Pepper was dripping down my pant leg and onto my shoe through a hole in one of the bags. I found myself whistling and waving, everyone exchanging the greeting, until one person in one car didn't return my wave. In fact, the car stopped, turned around, and headed back my way, stopping beside me. The door opened - and out stepped Leah.

Lost in my long walk, I'd forgotten about her visit. She looked angelic, her blonde hair, freshly washed, falling over her shoulders. A corded wool sweater. Her blue eyes radiated intelligence along with dismay. She looked at me, horrified, this guy with a three-day stubble and sweat pouring off him.

I stretched out a hand to shake, then realized it was sh.e.l.lacked in Dr. Pepper. We shrugged awkwardly. "I bet you're ready for a nice hot bath," she said, trying to ease the tension. Then she remembered there was no bathtub at the 12 12 and backpedaled, "I mean..."

Back at Jackie's, I'd forgotten to put the solar shower bag out to warm that morning, so I scooped cups of cold water over my body behind a bush and lathered up. Meanwhile, Leah wandered through Jackie's gardens, trying to respect my privacy by not glancing my way. She squatted by Jackie's bees and remained there, engrossed, for some time.

Leah and I had met a year ago. I was on a book tour, with readings every evening, media interviews, and daily travel, all the while getting up before sunrise each day to work remotely on my rainforest conservation project back in Bolivia. When Leah first called me, I was in the Christian Science Monitor Christian Science Monitor studio in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, having just finished an interview about Bolivia's indigenous struggles for the rainforest with Terry Gross for the NPR program studio in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, having just finished an interview about Bolivia's indigenous struggles for the rainforest with Terry Gross for the NPR program Fresh Air Fresh Air.

"I'm Leah Jackson," she said, "producer of a radio program based in Chapel Hill." Leah asked me some pre-interview questions, and a week later, she came to a reading of mine in Chapel Hill. Coming up to me afterward, she said she couldn't fit me into her radio show, but she offered to buy me a coffee if she could ask some informal questions about my work. "One of those alumni interviews," she said. We'd both gone to Brown University; she'd graduated eight years after me. We went to Cafe Driade, sipping cappuccinos in a small garden while she grilled me on everything from ways to avert species extinction to structuring op-eds.

At that time, her light blue eyes were almost hyperactive, s.h.i.+fting nervously as she flipped from one topic to the next. Her energy was scattered. She'd had two car accidents in the previous month, and she was restless after three years with the same show; she longed to be a reporter, not a producer, to have more control over her stories. She was also caught in a cycle of breaking up and getting back together with her boyfriend of two years, now a soldier in Iraq.

During the past year we had exchanged the occasional email, and when I came to Chapel Hill to visit my father in the hospital, we had met for dinner at Gla.s.s Half Full in the town of Carrboro, Chapel Hill's funky little brother. I almost didn't recognize her. She'd just returned from Senegal and Mali and was tan and more beautiful than I remembered. She talked pa.s.sionately about the inequality she'd experienced in Africa, and the way Western corporations were raping Africa's natural resources, colonialism under a new name. She came across as self-a.s.sured, content with her job and life in Chapel Hill, the very same job she'd hated a year before. She had also permanently ended her relations.h.i.+p with her military boyfriend, started going to therapy with a spiritually inclined psychologist, changed her diet to organics, and begun a rigorous Zen meditation practice. Little in her external life had changed - same job, same little beater of a car, same apartment - but her perspective was completely different.

All wasn't fabulous. The spiritual path brings perils; Leah now felt more sensitive to her own hyper-individualism, as an only child of divorced parents, shuttled throughout her Colorado childhood back and forth between the front range and western slope of the Rockies. "I'm well acquainted with saying good-bye," she said. She also noticed how she tied her self-worth to stuff, living constantly at the edge of her budget, still immersed in the consumer pattern even as she awoke to it.

When I told her about my plan to stay out at the 12 12, her eyes lit up. She wondered aloud if she might come out to visit sometime, saying it might help her "sort some things out."

I finished the shower and put on a light green b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt and my faded blue jeans. Then we wandered down to the creek. She hadn't stopped smiling, and as we crossed the creek and headed out into the forest, she said, "This is so brilliant out here. It's perfect."

We bent down in unison to admire a spider web. But nature is a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't kind of thing. The sunlight turned the web into a fragile tangle of s.h.i.+mmering swords. Then clouds pa.s.sed over, the light dimmed, and the web was broken gla.s.s. "Thank you for popping into my life," she said.

She talked about her ex, James. He was a West Point graduate who had been sent off to Iraq. His was primarily a desk job, but still. Their biggest fights had been about the war. He wanted to serve his country; she felt he was being used in service of a lie. She followed him faithfully to rugby matches around the state. He wanted to marry her, said he'd try to get out of the military and into politics, eventually. She couldn't picture a life moving from military base to military base, socializing with other military folks, taking their kids to rugby matches.

"So why did you stay with him that long?"

"After growing up in my family - divorce and a general lack of communication - he and his family showed me what a real family should be, what love is. Love is something that's slathered on.

"In the same way, my job. The reason I've spent four years there really is because it's a caring, supportive team team. Everyone works together, supports each other. Between that and James's family I've learned that it's possible for me to have that kind of cooperation and love in my life."

We'd come to a sharp bend in No Name Creek. We stopped and lay down on the mossy banks, listening to it gurgle past. She took off her shoes, got up and wandered around, staring at the gra.s.s.

I lay back and looked up through the trees, just barely showing their sticky buds, into a blue sky. After a while Leah came over and said, "I have a gift for you."

She led me over to a patch of clovers right at the creek's edge. My eye caught it immediately. Amid the near identical plants, one stood out: a four-leaf clover.

I touched it. "I can't believe you found this," I said. I'd never found one.

"They're everywhere once you have eyes for them."

Later beside No Name Creek, Leah dangled two caterpillars from their silk like tiny puppets over the book she was reading: My Name Is Ch.e.l.lis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization My Name Is Ch.e.l.lis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization. In it, psychologist Ch.e.l.lis Glendinning argues that our fast pace, technological and chemical addictions, and lifelong traumas are linked to our dislocation from the natural world. She uses examples from nature-based societies to show how to reconnect to the living world.

As I boiled water in the 12 12, I watched Leah by the creek; she seemed lost in thought, staring past the caterpillars into the woods. Her shoes were off, bare toes curling into the mossy bank. I walked down to the creek with two steaming cups of chamomile tea and handed her one. She dropped one of the caterpillars onto a leaf and carefully accepted the cup in her two hands like an offering.

I moved a finger to intercept the silk thread of the remaining caterpillar, and let it dangle before my eyes. We were both quiet for a while, lost in our own thoughts as the creek flowed by. I dipped a toe in. Still cold, but not the freezing water when I arrived in early spring. The day was half gray, with intermittent light streaming through the clouds; the sun mostly hidden. A breeze from the east suddenly brought the smell of the chicken factories, and I felt myself seize up a little, flattening and hardening to my surroundings. I made an effort to come more deeply into mindfulness, feeling the small perfection of the creek's warming waters. A rebellious fragment of light broke through on the edge of a cloud, bejeweling the creek's surface with a hundred diamonds.

Then they were gone, and the surface was gray again. I looked at the inchworm dangling from the silk in my hand and said to Leah, "Think of how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things." We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation. While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water. Humans manufacture ceramics with similarly high temperatures, but the abalone makes its sh.e.l.l in seawater by laying down a small layer of protein and precipitating the calcium out of the seawater around it. The abalone sh.e.l.l is "self-healing" because cracks within it actually strengthen the ends of the cracks so they don't get bigger, unlike, say, an auto winds.h.i.+eld. We're just now learning to make dental ceramics this way.

"Imagine we could design our built environment as gently as the caterpillar," I said, noticing how the 12 12, from this angle, looked so slight that it faded into the natural background.

Leah touched the silk thread, which the caterpillar makes benignly from the protein fibroin, and placed the dangling black caterpillar back on a leaf. "And think of its metamorphosis," she said, "in its coc.o.o.n, a churning of natural juices, enzymes - and out comes a b.u.t.terfly. Where are the toxics in that?"

We decided to explore Siler City. Because I only had the one bike, we took her car. Along the four-lane highway, we pa.s.sed WalMart and other box stores, finding Siler City's Main Street abandoned. The box stores had turned the old downtown area into a ghost town: stores boarded up, hardly anyone on the street. The seizing up I'd felt by the creek, that nagging tinge of hopelessness, slid into me again. For a moment, I was certain that the world would slip, inevitably, into a genetically altered, overheated place of lost uniqueness and forgotten joy.

But instead of being being this negative state, I simply observed it. I was coming to realize that the ideal of warrior presence is not a constant state. Today, I consider it a peak that I scale up, often slipping off, but I can always see it there. Even those rare humans who have lived lives of total love write intimately about their fears. Mother Teresa, for example, revealed in her private diaries an entire lifetime of doubt, a current of negativity that she battled daily. Gandhi, too, wrote of his weaknesses, his feelings of greed. Martin Luther King Jr. said once: "I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer." If these heroes had to struggle daily to overcome the world's negative mental-emotional force field, imagine how much more the rest of us must struggle to maintain warrior presence. this negative state, I simply observed it. I was coming to realize that the ideal of warrior presence is not a constant state. Today, I consider it a peak that I scale up, often slipping off, but I can always see it there. Even those rare humans who have lived lives of total love write intimately about their fears. Mother Teresa, for example, revealed in her private diaries an entire lifetime of doubt, a current of negativity that she battled daily. Gandhi, too, wrote of his weaknesses, his feelings of greed. Martin Luther King Jr. said once: "I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer." If these heroes had to struggle daily to overcome the world's negative mental-emotional force field, imagine how much more the rest of us must struggle to maintain warrior presence.

Leah and I wandered on foot into one of the few downtown businesses that wasn't boarded up, a Mexican grocery. We stopped in front of a wall filled with clear plastic bags of herbs, leaves, teas, and spices from Mexico. Leah picked up several, each eliciting a different memory from visits to her mom's home in Mexico. Her mom retired from financial planning at forty-eight and, with her third husband, bought a house with an ocean view. There, she'd been living for the past few years, neither happy nor unhappy. Leah said that her mom described this state as a "permanent vacation," pina coladas accompanying every sunset.

Out on the street we pa.s.sed a domestic violence counseling center, the signs in English and Spanish. "And there's Triple-A," I said.

"AA, you mean. Alcoholics Anonymous, not the automobile club."

"Of course," I said, squinting to discern an odd sign that read "Holy Congregation of the Bladder" in front of a tiny church that seemed recently opened. "What strange salvation," I said.

"Salvation from what," said Leah. "Urinary tract infections?"

Whatever was not boarded up seemed to be either an odd religious cult or a substance abuse program. We didn't pa.s.s more than a handful of people on the street. I thought of my neighbor Jose, who told me he'd walked backward into America. He'd crossed illegally at night through the Arizona desert and said he'd heard the federales federales counted the number of Mexicans who came in by looking at the footprints in the sand. "I walked in backward," he said, "so they'd think I was going back to Mexico!" Had I, too, walked backward into America? Compared to the slow-living subsistence cultures where I'd spent the past decade, Siler City seemed devoid of life. The town is more than half Latino - most are workers in the dreaded chicken factories - and Mexicans and whites alike drove along the Wal-Mart strip in oversized pickups, loading them with "Made in China" junk. counted the number of Mexicans who came in by looking at the footprints in the sand. "I walked in backward," he said, "so they'd think I was going back to Mexico!" Had I, too, walked backward into America? Compared to the slow-living subsistence cultures where I'd spent the past decade, Siler City seemed devoid of life. The town is more than half Latino - most are workers in the dreaded chicken factories - and Mexicans and whites alike drove along the Wal-Mart strip in oversized pickups, loading them with "Made in China" junk.

Is this what America is becoming? Are we as a society accepting a corporate personhood? Just as our personal legal liability has been s.h.i.+fted to the corporation, it seems that we have given ourselves up entirely to this arrangement, as though we are no longer liable for the maintenance of our own souls. Limited-liability living. It's impossible for me to believe that in our deeper, silent selves we really prefer the efficiency of Siler City's box-store strip to the humanity that used to exist downtown. I thought of the colonial plazas throughout Latin America, where people today stroll for hours, greeting strangers under palm trees; Gambia's kundas kundas, where extended families share everything; the bustle and color of outdoor markets I've walked through in India.

Of course the Global South is also being colonized by Wal-Mart - now the biggest retailer in China - and its corporate ilk. Nevertheless, substance and traditional cultures exhibit a resiliency that works against the trend, and they tend to be faraway places that are harder for the corporations to reach. We in the West are subject to marketing's relentless bombardment from birth. A South Carolina friend told me about a compet.i.tion they had in her third-grade cla.s.sroom: the teacher put them in groups of two, with the task of identifying as many corporate logos as possible. "That first time, we only confused the Black Hawks with Suzuki," she said. "By the end of the year, we could all name hundreds of corporate images. At the time, we thought it was so much fun."

We generally think that colonization is something that happens only in other countries, but aren't we in America also being colonized, constantly and relentlessly? Which is easier for corporate-political power: controlling people a continent away or those right next door? Americans watch an average of four hours of television a day. Our creative action is limited by an acc.u.mulation of regulations, taxes, and rules to an extent that eclipses much of our individuality. As Leah and I walked through the dead zone of what used to be Siler City, she talked about how she felt complicit in the way cities like this are changing. "I am am a consumer," she said. "It's not even software that I can remove. It feels like it's built into my hardware." a consumer," she said. "It's not even software that I can remove. It feels like it's built into my hardware."

Just as we were beginning to feel down, we began to notice a change. As we walked into the very heart of Siler City, like little wildflowers bursting through cracks in asphalt, stubborn shoots of life emerged between the boarded-up shops and nineteenth-century tobacco warehouses: a tiny cafe, a pottery studio, a shop selling paintings and sculpture.

This was Bradley's work. In my mind, I put the pieces together. Before she left, Jackie had mentioned Bradley Jamison several times. He taught permaculture at the local community college and was president of a company he started, Environmental Solutions, through which he bought up large parcels of land, a hundred or two hundred acres at a time, and made them available for eco-communities. The thirty acres that Jackie, the Thompsons, Graciela, and Jose lived on had been one of Bradley's purchases. His idea: Maintain a beautiful natural landscape by putting only a few houses fairly close together, and leaving the rest as shared natural s.p.a.ce for the community - for hiking, fis.h.i.+ng, meditation, gathering firewood. Bradley insisted that physically buying up the land was the only way to permanently hold back sprawl. And permaculture was the key to living sustainably on it.

Bradley also had a vision of how twenty-first-century urban s.p.a.ces should look, and he'd begun dabbling in Siler City, pressing the town to provide tax incentives to attract artists and small businesses. Leah and I wandered through this revitalizing s.p.a.ce and talked enthusiastically about it on the drive back to the 12 12. She dropped me off there as the sun was setting, saying she had an outof-town trip planned the next week but hoped to visit again. I told her she was more than welcome.

I b.u.mPED INTO BRADLEY A COUPLE DAYS LATER, while hiking near the spot where No Name Creek meets Old Highway 117 South. A pickup pulled over and a bearded man got out and shouted over to me.

A little startled, I began heading back into the woods along the path, and he continued after me. I spun around, calling to him from a distance: "Can I help you with something?"

"I own this land," he said. "Can I help you you with something?" with something?"

"Bradley?" I said.

He nodded, approaching me. He was nothing like I pictured. He had a shaved head, smoky beard, and red baseball cap, much too big for his head, that read "Libertarian Party." His body was tight, sinewy.

I explained I was living at Jackie's and he nodded, saying he was busy and only had a moment. He talked about how he allowed eleven-year-olds into his permaculture courses at the community college, saying, "If people want to learn sustainable living, why should the government tell us how old they have to be?" Then he extended his tiny hand, pa.s.sed me a business card ("Environmental Solutions, Inc., Bradley Jamison, President"), and he was gone.

Bradley was so busy, evidently, because his Siler City idea was evolving into something bigger. Along with encouraging eco-development in rural areas like Jackie's, he wanted to roll into towns. His most ambitious plan was to buy up a ma.s.sive tract of land ab.u.t.ting Siler City's sh.e.l.l of a downtown. There he would develop an ecological community using permaculture principles - dense concentration of family houses surrounded by a large, thriving green s.p.a.ce - but with a difference. Bradley would cl.u.s.ter the human settlements right around Siler City's dying downtown and thereby revitalize its businesses through ecologically inclined residents wanting to shop locally.

A related development trend was then going on in North Carolina's Research Triangle: Southern Village outside of Chapel Hill. I'd been there once, before coming to the 12 12. It's a ma.s.sive village - 550 single-family homes, 3'5 townhomes and condominiums, and 250 apartments - but none of it seemed like Levittown suburban monotony. The designers had created a beautiful town plaza: an organic co-op grocery, clothing stores, bookstores, and jewelry shops ringed it and seemed to thrive. Though it has the positive effect of allowing folks to feel more community and walk and bike everywhere, there are big drawbacks. Southern Village has no expansive green s.p.a.ces to speak of, just the thousand dwellings. It also duplicates Chapel Hill's downtown, thereby actually putting a bit of a strain on its economy by creating two competing centers. And it's very expensive. Very little affordable housing was included in the design, so Southern Village is populated with mostly white and Asian professionals, employees of the hospital and university. A little too lovely, too planned, Southern Village lacks the authenticity, charm, history, and spontaneity of an old tobacco town like Siler City.

Bradley's dream wasn't to create a Southern Village from scratch, but rather to adapt and reshape what already existed, so that people could feel the nurturing cycle of personal authenticity, robust community, and connection with nature. Residents of Bradley's eco-Siler City, once it was completed, could grow their own food organically, exchange it in farmers markets, create and sell art in the new galleries as part of the growing tourism economy, and perform any number of services virtually over the Web, while still living in and maintaining a wild, beautiful place.

There was just one problem. The town council and other powerful people in the community had launched a legal effort to stop Bradley from doing this. To them, his vision sounded like an effort that would hold back development. These were people who could no longer hear the earth beneath the asphalt. People, I had to admit, not unlike me.

8. STAN CRAWFORD'S GARLIC FARM I'VE BURNED INCREDIBLE AMOUNTS of fossil fuels trying to save the planet from environmental destruction. I have globe-trotted incessantly: Asia, Africa, South America, Europe. It's the irony of my profession: corporations are destroying the environment globally, so we have to save it globally. That's the battleground. You might say a bit of jet fuel has even slipped into my bloodstream. The very bread I eat, the clothes I wear right now, are powered by humanitarian jet-setting: To earn my keep, I think locally and act globally. of fossil fuels trying to save the planet from environmental destruction. I have globe-trotted incessantly: Asia, Africa, South America, Europe. It's the irony of my profession: corporations are destroying the environment globally, so we have to save it globally. That's the battleground. You might say a bit of jet fuel has even slipped into my bloodstream. The very bread I eat, the clothes I wear right now, are powered by humanitarian jet-setting: To earn my keep, I think locally and act globally.

I get to airports early. Then there's nothing to do at all, and the waiting becomes a kind of freedom. If I can find an empty gate, I sometimes do yoga. Catch up on some reading. Listen to beautiful music. Breathe. Then board the plane. Blocking out the other pa.s.sengers' stress, the announcements about oxygen masks, and the pilot's ritualistic announcements of feet-above-earth, I do a twenty-minute silent meditation, relaxing my entire body. Then more sublime literature, music, maybe some un.o.btrusive yoga postures in an empty s.p.a.ce near the kitchen. Before I know it, I'm there.

Not long ago, I had a layover in Denver's uber-modern new airport, which lies twenty miles outside the city on the high plateau where the Midwest meets the Rocky Mountains. The architects brilliantly pointed one of the airport's wings due west, and the west-facing wall is constructed almost entirely of gla.s.s. The effect: beautiful sunsets over the Rockies. During my layover I happened to catch one. My gate was near this wall of gla.s.s, and the sunset that afternoon washed the entire west wing in Technicolor orange, red, and clamsh.e.l.l pink. Outside, snowcapped peaks shone brightly through the color spectrum.

When I snapped out of my trance, I noticed something almost equally remarkable. No one else was watching the sunset. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were gathered at nearby gates, lost in their rituals: reading the Denver Post Denver Post, watching the CNN broadcast, buying fast food for their kids. A few had their eyes closed, perhaps napping or engaged in soothing rituals like mine.

We took off into darkness, and I somehow forgot all of my little rituals. I was in shock. The cabin seemed to press against me. I looked down into the darkness, a million electric lights below, and knew that - in more ways than one - I'd left the planet.

I WAS BORN INTO THE BURGEONING ENVIRONMENTAL ERA, shortly after the first Earth Day. One of my earliest memories is from July 4, 1976. I was five years old. My parents took my sister and me from our Long Island home into Manhattan to see the fireworks extravaganza for the American bicentennial. I can still see the color and feel the firepower that rose from those dozens of barges in the Hudson and East rivers, our collective national pride blooming so colorfully in the sky. As a kid, the Fourth of July always contained a hopeful feeling. It tasted like the promise of something, though I had no idea of what. shortly after the first Earth Day. One of my earliest memories is from July 4, 1976. I was five years old. My parents took my sister and me from our Long Island home into Manhattan to see the fireworks extravaganza for the American bicentennial. I can still see the color and feel the firepower that rose from those dozens of barges in the Hudson and East rivers, our collective national pride blooming so colorfully in the sky. As a kid, the Fourth of July always contained a hopeful feeling. It tasted like the promise of something, though I had no idea of what.

Eating hot dogs in fluffy white buns, drinking c.o.ke, and watching fireworks, I knew my country was great. I'd help my dad hang the stars and stripes in front of our colonial home, then watch him get the grill going. The stickiness of summer settled on our skin. The feel of salt on me from a day at our Long Island Sound beach, the taste of mustard - all of it felt to me like freedom. I'd watch my dad expertly flip burgers and roll the hot dogs on the grill, and I would picture my grandfather before him laboring for thirty years in the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, a subway connecting Manhattan with New Jersey; for forty years before that, my great-grandfather worked in a potato field in Ireland.

The mythology of my childhood: America got us out of serfdom, delivered a richness unimaginable to our ancestors back in the Old Country. Summer drives across the country, a large suburban house, my parents' tenured professors.h.i.+ps: all of this confirmed the myth. We epitomized the American Dream. And like most myths, it is partly true. I owe much of my intellectual and personal freedom to America's political and economic system, and I am incredibly grateful for that. But over the years, it became apparent that the dream could end. Or that the dream was less attainable for some than others. What seemed to be unlimited economic growth took on darker shades.

As I grew up, Long Island was being paved over, the small farms and the remnants of wild forests near my house disappearing forever to become ten million uninspired cul-de-sacs. The Native Americans who used to live in those forests were long gone by then. I got to know them obliquely through the names of my town (Setauket), my nursery and elementary schools (Cayuga and Na.s.sakeag), and the nearby river (Nissequogue); no one I asked knew what these words meant anymore. My friends' parents worked for Grumman, a military contractor helping to produce nuclear weapons. Beyond the safety and prosperity of my upper-middle-cla.s.s life was something I didn't have a word for yet: ecocide, or the destruction of our planet by our current economic model. Until then, it had invisibly fueled our lifestyle, but the effects were now surfacing.

V. S. Naipaul, accepting the n.o.bel Prize in Literature, said that all of his books were about his "areas of darkness." Naipaul did not write about what he knew. He wrote about what he did not know, what was darkest in him, because it fascinated him so much more. He grew up behind walls in the Caribbean, in a comfortable middlecla.s.s Indian merchant family on Trinidad. Beyond the walls were colonialism, corruption, exile: his themes. In Naipaul's masterpiece, A Bend in the River A Bend in the River, Salim cannot find home. An Indian abroad, like Naipaul, he's no longer at home on the African coast with his illiterate merchant parents, nor in India, nor in an immigrant area of London. He eventually comes back to Africa, not to the coast, but to the lonely interior, to a no-name town at a bend in the river. He finally finds home: nowhere.

On the surface, I come from somewhere: suburban Long Island, where I was born and lived until I went to college at eighteen. But is it possible to be rooted rooted in a in a suburb suburb, or is this oxymoronic? I've often reflected that those monotonous s.p.a.ces clash with the notion of being somewhere specific. Suburbs are entangled in twenty-first-century globalism, in a single Flat World culture that has become a ubiquitous nowhere. My Long Island rootlessness flowed naturally into a kind of jet-fueled global nomadic life, in which I lost an essential part of adulthood: finding one's proper place.

Naipaul's area of darkness is a colonial system that degrades the human spirit. My area of darkness is the price of my privilege, an ecocide that degrades and poisons the human being while it destroys our very host, Mother Earth. The global economy gobbles up authentic places and vomits up McWorld, increasingly turning our collective proper place, this planet, into a dystopia. I'm a child of ecocide, caught in a catch-22. How can I get on that plane - yet how can I not get on that plane - knowing that an estimated half of all species today could become extinct due to the effects of climate change? This is my area of darkness: a living earth, no longer underfoot.

WHILE HOEING THE GARDEN at Jackie's, taking five-gallon solar showers, harvesting my own teas, throwing cedar chips into the composting toilet, I tentatively rekindled a relations.h.i.+p with the earth. Blowing out the last candle at night, awakening with the sun in the 12 12 loft, I remembered that electricity doesn't come from a socket; tomatoes don't come from a supermarket; water doesn't come from a pipe. Everything comes from the earth. It's fine to grasp this intellectually, but to once again touch, breathe, and eat this reality feels like reconciliation with a loved one after a long feud. at Jackie's, taking five-gallon solar showers, harvesting my own teas, throwing cedar chips into the composting toilet, I tentatively rekindled a relations.h.i.+p with the earth. Blowing out the last candle at night, awakening with the sun in the 12 12 loft, I remembered that electricity doesn't come from a socket; tomatoes don't come from a supermarket; water doesn't come from a pipe. Everything comes from the earth. It's fine to grasp this intellectually, but to once again touch, breathe, and eat this reality feels like reconciliation with a loved one after a long feud.

Through her 12 12 and afterward, Jackie became an earth mentor for me. Humans are nature become conscious, but civilization forgets this natural connection. Earth mentors not only maintain this consciousness but can spark it in others. At the eleventh hour of the environmental crisis, we probably need earth mentors to connect us to our host planet much more than we need gurus and tele-reverends to connect us to the cosmos beyond. Connect to the earth, to yourself, and you've connected with everything; try to connect to everything by other means and fail.

My time in the 12 12 was like an interns.h.i.+p with Th.o.r.eau. It was as if I was with him on Walden Pond, feeling my thoughts thinking through his, my spade cutting earth next to his, our four ears, together, listening to jackdaws and jays. I felt the presence of Aldo Leopold, John Muir, John James Audubon, Loren Eiseley, and Ed Abbey, all earth mentors. Imagining these mentors by our side improves the quality of our connection with nature.

I've been blessed by having not just one earth mentor but two. When I was a younger man, organic garlic farmer and writer Stan Crawford of Dixon, New Mexico, took my hand and led me joyfully out of civilization. If the flattening world of corporate-led globalization sometimes sounds like really bad Musak turned up high, Stanley Crawford sounds like John Coltrane playing to a room full of friends.

I was twenty-four when I first met Stan, and when I looked up into his clear eyes I could practically hear "A Love Supreme" playing in the background - bouncing off the mesas behind his adobe house, out of his El Bosque Small Farm garlic fields, and off the tip of the phallic rock pillar beside them that he jokingly called Camel c.o.c.k (a wordplay on the camel-shaped Camel Rock up the road toward Santa Fe). There he was, gray-bearded and six foot three, esteemed author of Mayordomo Mayordomo, Petroleum Man Petroleum Man, and the best-selling A Garlic Testament A Garlic Testament, good friend of literati like Barbara Kingsolver, John Nichols, and Bill McKibben. There he was in a pair of dirty overalls with a hoe in his hands. I followed him out into a field, to weed some rows, in silence, the cool winds coming off the Sangre de Cristos, the gurgle of the river running in front of the field.

Stan paid me six dollars an hour to work with him, two days a week. He first taught me the word permaculture permaculture and its basic techniques, and I applied those techniques the other five days on my own back-forty, a sprawling piece of land on the Rio Grande with a small vineyard, just a twenty-minute bike ride from Stan's. I'd worked out a kind of sharecropper's arrangement with the vineyard's absentee owner. I had his singlewide trailer and an acre on which to farm my own blue corn and squash; he got a third of my crop plus two days of my time tending his vineyard. and its basic techniques, and I applied those techniques the other five days on my own back-forty, a sprawling piece of land on the Rio Grande with a small vineyard, just a twenty-minute bike ride from Stan's. I'd worked out a kind of sharecropper's arrangement with the vineyard's absentee owner. I had his singlewide trailer and an acre on which to farm my own blue corn and squash; he got a third of my crop plus two days of my time tending his vineyard.

I'd arranged both the vineyard-sitting and garlic mentors.h.i.+p through the Northern New Mexico Organic Farmers a.s.sociation. I was ecstatic. Never before had I cozied up this close to the earth. After the suburban Long Island childhood and college in a big East Coast city, I'd come to Santa Fe to teach seventh-grade gifted and talented students at a Native American boarding school. But I was again in a city. Now I was bathing in the Rio Grande each morning before planting blue corn, tomatoes, quinoa, amaranth, and nearly two dozen other native and exotic food crops under a full moon, just as my Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo farmer-neighbors did to ensure a strong harvest in fall.

After my day spent planting, night fell. My hands were calloused from the shovel and hoe, my muscles sore and spent. The full moon illuminated the empty s.p.a.ces that would become my blue corn, intercropped with beans (they pole on the corn) and squash (ground cover that suppresses weeds), and my contoured vegetable and herb beds. Permaculture, as I was learning from Stan, likes natural curves instead of straight lines, intensive planting, and mixing crops intelligently, such as fruit, nut, and hardwood trees. I'd put the theory into the ground, and now, under the moonlight, I saw just a blank page, an expanse of moist earth.

Stan inspired me. He'd found a playful balance in life between laboring in the open air for seven months and writing in his adobe studio for the other five. He and his Australian wife, Rose Mary (their two children were already through college), had purchased their acres in the late sixties, built their beautiful house brick by adobe brick by themselves, and lived, without bosses or time clocks, in creative freedom, largely outside the system.

People in the area labored with the earth and then played. Sat.u.r.day nights, everyone gathered at the Foxtrot Tavern for an exchange of organic pest control tips and off-color jokes and for dancing to bluegra.s.s and indie rock. Rural northern New Mexico couldn't be farther from the tenured world of my parents, from the East Coast establishment. Dancing manically around me were farmers, winery owners, artists, writers, silver and turquoise jewelers, small-town teachers, and yoga instructors. "What do you do?" I asked one guy. His reply: "Water in summer, snow in winter," referring to kayak and ski instructing. I'd just read Jack Kerouac's On On the Road the Road and felt some of that bohemian, spontaneous energy explode as the nights stretched on at the Foxtrot. More than dropout beatniks, Dixon's folks were cooperating with nature rather than opposing it, sculpting, growing food and wine, painting, teaching, and making a living, if barely. and felt some of that bohemian, spontaneous energy explode as the nights stretched on at the Foxtrot. More than dropout beatniks, Dixon's folks were cooperating with nature rather than opposing it, sculpting, growing food and wine, painting, teaching, and making a living, if barely.

Stan writes in A Garlic Testament A Garlic Testament about "the pound weight of the real," the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I'd weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary's farm expenses. They were constantly "s.n.a.t.c.hing from the cash flow," as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that's exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area - I shear your sheep, you midwife for me - as well as a traditional communal relations.h.i.+p over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt ca.n.a.ls called about "the pound weight of the real," the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I'd weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary's farm expenses. They were constantly "s.n.a.t.c.hing from the cash flow," as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that's exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area - I shear your sheep, you midwife for me - as well as a traditional communal relations.h.i.+p over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt ca.n.a.ls called acequias acequias. This wasn't just pragmatism; I sensed a real pa.s.sion and spirit that comes from subsistence. I saw it again all over the Global South, where living along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps you on your entrepreneurial toes and linked to others through reciprocity.

Sometimes other laborers joined us. On spring solstice day, twenty of us gathered at Stan's to harvest garlic. (Garlic is planted in fall and harvested in spring.) It was one of those Ansel Adams days in New Mexico, with the lines of the mesas carving a sharp edge into the sky. Stan himself stooped a little, squinting out into all that beauty with an artist's eye, a gently discerning gaze. Then he shrugged and bent down to pull the first garlic bulb out of the ground. We followed his lead. Pollen floated in the chilly air as we pulled up garlic all morning. At one point I threw a bunch of garlic a little roughly into the crate, and Stan said, "Careful with my babies." We stopped at ten; Rose Mary and their daughter Katya brought a pot of miso soup into the fields, and we drank it out of cups. The picking conversation was often revolutionary. During a discussion about a proposed hazardous waste dump in the area: "Gandhi didn't just talk about nonviolence in an evil system," a salt-and-pepper grandma farmer said while pulling up garlic beside me. "He was all about noncooperation noncooperation."

Another friend of Stan's, an artist from Santa Fe, talked about cultivating a posture of "maladjustment with Empire" in yourself.

"But everything is tainted," someone else said, wiping dirt and sweat from her brow. "We're feeding nuclear Los Alamos."

"Right," the artist said, "but you stay maladjusted to the general evil. That's true noncooperation: not letting Empire inside you."

Stan hardly partic.i.p.ated in such discussions. He hovered a little over every situation, Miles Davis's "So What" coming off the mesas; a softer, clearer place. But he wasn't aloof; after all, he was touching the earth right there beside us. I reached down and touched it, too. When pulling lettuce from my own acres beside the vineyard, I reached down through the lettuce leaves, the lower part of the plant smooth like a lover's inner thigh. Sliding my fingers deeper, to where the lettuce met the moist earth, I sank them a bit into those depths and then coaxed the whole plant loose. Made a salad out of it; took it inside. "Don't let the Empire inside you. Stay maladjusted to civilization," someone would say, and Stan nodded, or didn't, pulling up another top-setting garlic plant, placing it into a pile, the pound weight of the real. I think Stan took pleasure growing dissent in his fields, along with garlic, chilies, and statis flowers. His life was so obviously maladjusted to Empire - why talk about it? His very presence, such a wise, well-known intellectual and novelist, hoeing a row right beside you, elevated everything in our midst.

The summer was coming to an end, and a new semester awaited me back at Santa Fe Indian School. I harvested the first of my squash, zucchinis, and blue corn and packed my little Nissan hatchback with them, driving it into the school parking lot and giving produce to the other teachers. They oohed oohed and and aahed aahed, joking that they knew what I'd done with my summer. Teaching during the week, I continued to work at Stan's on the weekends. I found that the experience with Stan and the anticivilization Dixon crew blended easily into my teaching. I was no longer the Ivy League expert here to impart knowledge; I was student to these young Native Americans. One day they told me their story of Jesus: Jesus, they told me, continues to fight an ongoing battle with Murosuyo, a Native American G.o.d. They duke it out in the sky and on the ground. The stakes are the fate of the earth. Just as Jesus seems to deliver the final death blow, Murosuyo tackles him in the heavens, and they fall together through the clouds and into a lake, and so it continues. I found it fascinating that their culture and environment are still hanging on today through Murosuyo's efforts. My teaching became an exchange of ideas.

I played Super Bowl commercials in the cla.s.sroom, and together my Native American students and I "deconstructed" them. This was, in part, an idea encouraged by the state of New Mexico. The Green Party, powered by thousands of off-the-gridders like those I'd befriended in Dixon - who lived in pockets throughout the state - had increased their power in the state legislature and had worked with citizens' groups to pa.s.s mandatory "media literacy" for all New Mexico schools. I went through the in-service training and then explored, with my twelve-year-olds from the Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo reservations, the ways marketers manipulate us by linking their brands to emotions like love, belonging, freedom, s.e.xuality, and fear.

I showed a commercial with an SUV conquering a mountain, and an Apache student, Monique, correctly labeled the lie: "Freedom!" she cried out.

"Love and belonging," another student suggested, noting that the male driver was accompanied by a beautiful woman and rosy-cheeked children.

A Hopi student raised his hand. Frowning, he grew angrier as he spoke. His point, eloquently delivered, was that "crossing our sacred grounds with that noisy thing" did not mean love or belonging. He said that, to be more truthful, the gas-guzzler should be driving past the retreating glacier that its greenhouse ga.s.ses were melting.

I found these media literacy sessions as deliciously subversive as the chatter in Stan's fields. Thanks to citizen pressure, the very nation that produced more global warming ga.s.ses than any other was arming a million New Mexico students with the intellectual tools to reject reject consumerism. consumerism.

AUTUMN ARRIVED. On one of my last days at Stan's (before the tractor was oiled and tools stored for the winter), a half dozen of us harvested a fall crop of squash and basil for the farmers market. Stan and Rose Mary cut basil on either side of me. I could hear the brook whenever the gentle wind stalled; the sky was a powder-puff blue, the mesas a ridiculous paste of orange, and I felt whole and alive, cutting wrinkly basil leaves, placing them in my wooden crate, the lively smell. On one of my last days at Stan's (before the tractor was oiled and tools stored for the winter), a half dozen of us harvested a fall crop of squash and basil for the farmers market. Stan and Rose Mary cut basil on either side of me. I could hear the brook whenever the gentle wind stalled; the sky was a powder-puff blue, the mesas a ridiculous paste of orange, and I felt whole and alive, cutting wrinkly basil leaves, placing them in my wooden crate, the lively smell.

Stan seemed elsewhere, "Kind of Blue" on the breeze, perhaps already in his next novel. Clip-clip Clip-clip went his shears. How many basil sprigs had he chopped in his thirty years of farming? went his shears. How many basil sprigs had he chopped in his thirty years of farming? Clip Clip. The breeze picked up and I couldn't hear the brook, just the swaying trees above, and the smell of chemise and sage mixed with the basil. Stan stood up to his full, lanky height and ran earth-covered long fingers through his beard, looking out into the direction of the wind as if for a sign. Then he sighed, almost imperceptibly and went back to clipping.

In Stan's fields an idea germinated in me that would much later coalesce into a kind of general principle: be in Empire, but not of it. As the years went on, even as a Yankee pragmatism kept me cinched to Empire, I'd try to follow this, walking up to the edge of radicalism. I wouldn't jump over, but the heat of the flaming edge, in Dixon, in Chiapas, Mexico, in Bolivia, in Liberia, and especially on the banks of No Name Creek, kept alive the embers of noncooperation, a healthy maladjustment to ecocide.

The long workday ended. Stan went to the till to fish out my wages. Wages that I could certainly use with my low teacher salary and high Santa Fe rent. But wages I couldn't accept for the community of this fall day. "Stan, I won't take your money for this work," I said, in twenty-four-year-old earnestness. "There's nothing I would have rather been doing today."

Stan looked at me from his heights, his blue eyes suddenly animated, and he patted me on the shoulder and invited me to a late lunch of foods from his farm. I'd later realize that this, more than anything else, is what Stanley Crawford cultivated at El Bosque: an awakened, generous human spirit and, therefore, a new earth.

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