Twelve by Twelve Read online

  More praise for Twelve by Twelve by William Powers

  “How much is enough? And what is really important? These are questions that William Powers runs into again and again in his time off the grid in the U.S. and overseas, but his humble and contemplative memoir handles them with freshness and honesty, recognizing that sometimes asking the questions is more important than finding the ‘right’ answers.”

  — Lester R. Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute and author of

  Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

  “A true story of rediscovery of and reconnection with fundamental truths and values. Enchanting and heartwarming, Twelve by Twelve is a modern-day Walden.”

  — Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy, president of the Heinz Center for

  Science, Economics, and the Environment

  “A compassionate yet powerful personal odyssey into the heart of what it means to choose to live with less in a world gone mad for more. William Powers’s Twelve by Twelve is not only a retreat of mind from which we all can draw sustenance as we gird ourselves to confront a world heading for catastrophe, it is also a template we can use to ask ourselves what, really, is important in our lives.”

  — Mira Kamdar, author of Planet India

  Praise for Blue Clay People by William Powers

  “A haunting account of one man’s determination and the struggles of a people living in a deeply troubled country.”

  — Booklist

  “William Powers is sensitive, reflective, and a fine stylist.”

  — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “In this painful and joyful narrative, William Powers provides a vital stratum of truth about life and foreign aid in the worst parts of the underdeveloped world.” — Robert D. Kaplan, author of Balkan Ghosts

  “A masterful storyteller … Powers has a keen ear for dialogue and dialect, and his prose is lovely and lyrical…. [His] honesty about his own flaws places him in the congregation rather than the pulpit.”

  — Providence Journal

  “Powers sketches scenes of transcendent beauty and grotesque violence, and writes with disarming honesty.”

  — Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Few authors sustain a tone of outraged hopefulness through a whole book. Dickens could, as could any number of gloomy Russians, but not many Americans. William Powers is an exception.”

  — Charlotte Observer

  “A searing memoir … recalls the literary travelogues of writers such as Mark Salzman and Bruce Chatwin.”

  — Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers,

  contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered

  “Blue Clay People is written in a clear style, with a narrative structure that keeps the reader’s attention.” — San Francisco Chronicle

  Praise for Whispering in the Giant’s Ear

  by William Powers

  “As an aid worker living in Bolivia, Powers did not just witness the change; he was immersed in the action, forced to juggle the country’s internal conflict with his environmental organization’s mission of saving the rain forest…. What results is a deeply personal and informative chronicle of Powers’ ambitions, the Indians’ ambitions and perhaps most importantly in a country as physically diverse and dramatic as Bolivia, nature’s ambitions.” — Publishers Weekly

  “A rip-roaring chronicle of the struggles and compromises, doubts and determination needed to implement the Kyoto accords — an international agreement setting targets for industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions — in Bolivia.” — Newsweek

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa’s Fragile Edge

  Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: A Frontline Chronicle

  from Bolivia’s War on Globalization

  New World Library

  Novato, California

  New World Library

  14 Pamaron Way

  Novato, California 94949

  Copyright © 2010 by William Powers

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, or other — without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Some names and identifying characteristics in this book have been changed.

  Text design by Tona Pearce Myers Illustrations by Hannah Morris, Morridesign.com

  Excerpt on page 213 from “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words by Galway Kinnell, copyright © 1980 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  Excerpt on page 214 from “Prayer” from The Past by Galway Kinnell, copyright © 1985 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  Excerpt on page 239 from The Quotidian Mysteries by Kathleen Norris, copyright © 1998 by Kathleen Norris. Reprinted by permission of Paulist Press, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Powers, William, date.

  Twelve by twelve : a one-room cabin off the grid and beyond the American dream / William Powers.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-57731-897-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Sustainable living—United States. 2. Alternative lifestyles—United States. 3. Self-reliant living. 4. Green movement—United States. 5. Environmentalism—United States. 6. Conservation of natural resources—United States. 7. Powers, William, 1971– I. Title.

  GF78.P68 2010

  333.72—dc22

  2010003839

  ISBN 978-1-57731-897-2

  Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

  New World Library is a proud member of the Green Press Initiative.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen.

  You need not even listen, simply wait. You need not even wait, just learn

  to become quiet and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to

  you unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

  — Franz Kafka

  There is another world, but it is in this one.

  — Paul Éluard

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART I: TWELVE

  1. The Shape of the World

  2. The Least Thing Precisely

  3. Thawing

  4. Chicken

  5. Warrior Presence

  6. Living Well

  7. Mom and Leah Visit

  8. Stan Crawford’s Garlic Farm

  9. Wildcrafting and Country Steak

  10. White

  11. Forgiveness

  12. Sacrifice and Seduction

  PART II: TWELVE

  13. Creative Edges

  14. The Idle Majority

  15. The Dragon

  16. Holding Hands with Extinction

  17. Suchness

  18. Solitude

  19. Soft Economy

  20. Humility

  21. Noise and War

  22. Allowing

  23. God’s Feet

  24. Toupee’s Song

  Postscript

  Appendix: Resources, Culture, Community

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  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, Nobel 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 — 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 relationships 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, “drawing forth” what’s already inside of us, and embody the curious original meaning of the word 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 astonishing 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 . 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 fashion, 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.

  I looked up, suddenly curious. “She’s an acquaintance of mine,” my mother continued, passing 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 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 Titicaca 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?

  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 undocumented 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 spawned 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 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 hit a flat note. Industrial agriculture creates a flat taste, and multinational corporations flatten our uniqueness into Homo 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 overfishing; 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?