Living Intimately with the Earth
But we have only begun
To love the earth.
…
only begun to envision
how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.
Denise Levertov
Like geese heading home, hippies flocked to the Pacific Northwest in the sixties and seventies. Our back-to-the-land ideas felt at home here where Native American traditions and the legacy of pioneers lie close to the surface. Still, promoting the dawn of the Ecological Age along with the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, we took human-earth relations to a new dimension. Living as siblings with beast and flower seemed like a good idea. We thought we would pull thorns from lions’ paws. We thought we would kiss frogs and befriend mice in the house and birds at the casement. But the cougar stalking our trails did not behave like Androcles’s lion; the princes who
sprang from our kisses were more like frogs than royalty, and Cinderella never mentioned scorpions in the bed and skunks in the house.
Nonetheless, the idea persisted, and I persisted in the idea. A good hippie, I moved to a steep mountainside in Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains in the early seventies, built a ten-by-twelve–foot house, and settled in to live without electricity, without a car, without a telephone, without modern conveniences, hoping to develop a “truly human intimacy with the earth and the entire natural world” that scholarly monk Thomas Berry tells us is needed. Eventually I added another and its upstairs. I acquired a car (though not a driveway), a telephone, and a small generator to run my sewing machine, printer, and laptop computer when the batteries failed.
And so I have lived, happily, all these decades. I have become so used to this life—kerosene lamps, wood heat, outdoor showers, cake batters mixed by hand, butterflies flitting in through open windows—that I forget it is different. This life suits me. Without electricity there are no motor noises: no hum of a refrigerator, rumble of a can opener, roar of a fan, click of a heater. In the silence, nature’s melodies waft in—crickets at night, songbirds at dawn, winter winds gushing down the ridge, rain nattering with leaves, grouse drumming up mates, the spotted owl calling from a different tree every night throughout the summer. Without electricity I know an orb of silence into which are tossed the clicks and clacks; whistles, hums, and chirps; sonatas and songs of nature.
Adjusting my habits to the seasons, I stay up late on summer-long days. In winter, when darkness swirls with friendly intent around the soft glow of kerosene lamps and candle flames, I turn in early. The December full moon, dappling fir and cedar shadows onto front-yard snow, gives a luster of midday. On new-moon nights stars shine through the skylights like Hopkins’s fire-folk sitting in the air. Night folds into corners of the house like draperies of dark velvet, needle-pricked with stars. Without electricity I know the poetry of the night.
Without electricity time slows, allowing the senses to open and receive. Why would I want a clamorous vacuum cleaner when I can sweep the house with a handmade broom that makes enough of a music that Stomp went to Broadway? Why would I make Christmas cookies with stiff electric beaters that deprive me of the rhythm of spoon against bowl and the feel of heavy batter becoming fluffy? Reminded of my grandmother at such times, I feel connected with an era when time was slower and life on the farm allowed closer human-earth relations than we have today.
Because time is slower, I have no need to dash to the house in my car. My house has never seen a motorized vehicle. Everything there—windows, groceries, firewood, books, nails—has come by hand (except for the brief time when I borrowed a neighbor’s burro to carry manure to the garden, as lovable a beast as it is impractical a transportation). I used to park my car below the house and walk home, five minutes uphill through the woods, rain or snow, sunshine, moonlight, or pitch dark. My mental checklist as I left the house on a winter day told me to close the damper on the stove, leave the water running in case of freezing temperatures, and take a flashlight. Living in a slower time frame did not have to include the painstaking pace of feet blindly sensing the trail through black woods on a moonless night. The driveway I put in later took me up the hill but not to the house. I still walked. The sense of intimacy with the natural world that is evident at my house—the way the earth welcomes the step and the woods embrace the dwelling—comes largely from the absence of vehicles. The creatures of the forest wander around the house without fear of cars.
If I do not quite see those creatures as siblings, I do think of them as neighbors. Scorpions in the house are scooped into a jar and released in the woods. Wasps and stinkbugs are deposited outdoors. Spiders are tolerated. But when skunks move in, the territorial imperative justifies trapping them harmlessly and trucking them miles away. I have seen deer nibbling my roses, foxes in my grapes, a coyote slinking off the trail, and a porcupine scuttling through the woods. I have seen opossums and raccoons, bush rabbits and jackrabbits, hawks and herons, and numerous frogs, toads, lizards, skinks, and snakes, always welcome. Twice in these thirty-five years I have seen a ringtail cat and once a fisher, a gorgeous sleek weasely thing corkscrewing around a tree. I have seen a cougar loping along the trail behind my house as though she had been there often and a bear ambling through the woods as I sat under the cherry tree embroidering a wedding gift. One night last summer I chased Mr. Bear from the grapes growing on the roof of the pantry—or so I thought. The next morning I saw that the grapes were untouched and that Mr. Bear had been tearing up the yellow jacket nest near the pantry —not a grape thief but a pest exterminator! My fervent gratitude lasted until he returned two weeks later and ripped three branches off my apple tree.
Thus I have lived for many years commingling the human world and the natural world. “Only in a viable natural world can there be a viable human world,” Berry says. I have devoted these past four decades of my life to giving viability to that natural world in my own life.
Then things changed. At the same time that I received a small inheritance from my parents the land adjacent to mine became available. My son urged me to buy it and build a new house. When I protested that I loved my house, he said, “We’ll build you a house you’ll like even better,” a house with electricity and therefore with a refrigerator, light good enough for sewing black cloth at night, and, best of all, a washing machine; a house that would retain heat with its good insulation and double-paned windows; a house with a well for reliable water, an indoor bathroom, and stairs instead of ladders (better in old age); a house designed by my son (who knows me well) and built by a longtime friend with an artistic touch.
I bought the land. The house is going up. Now, poised to leap from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, I feel strangely reluctant. Do I really want to trade hippy-historic and funky-charming for architecturally beautiful and indisputably convenient? It is probably a good trade, but only if I bring with me everything I learned in the old era: that if I open my double-paned window, I can hear, in the orb of silence, the spotted owl’s call; that if I leave my car at a distance, I can slow time down by walking; that if I turn off the lights, the fire-folk shine; that even though no hidden holes in the walls give entry to woods creatures, those creatures are still my neighbors, with whom I desire neighborly relations. I have long enjoyed the thought that my living the way I have for all these years has been good for the collective psyche of the human species, that I have kept alive a centuries-old torch vital for today’s human-earth relations. If I cannot bring that way of living with me to the modern world of electricity and toilets, then my faith in our ability to nurture those relations is lost.
But faith holds true. My intimacy with the earth is a part of who I am. Wherever I go, it is with me—across the ocean or across the continent, a hundred and fifty miles north to graduate school or a quarter mile down the road to my new little house on the mountain.
