Twelve by Twelve (11 page)

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 shell in seawater by laying down a small layer of protein and precipitating the calcium out of the seawater around it. The abalone shell is “self-healing” because cracks within it actually strengthen the ends of the
cracks so they don’t get bigger, unlike, say, an auto windshield. 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 cocoon, a churning of natural juices, enzymes — and out comes a butterfly. 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 passed 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
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,” piña coladas accompanying every sunset.

Out on the street we passed 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 pass more than a handful of people on the street. I thought of my neighbor José, 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
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 shifted 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
, 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 competition they had in her third-grade classroom: 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 accumulation 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
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 café, 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 José 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 space for the community — for hiking, fishing, 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 spaces 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 space 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 BUMPED 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
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, passed 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 massive tract of land abutting Siler City’s shell of a downtown. There he would develop an ecological community using permaculture principles — dense concentration of family houses surrounded by a large, thriving green space — but with a difference. Bradley would cluster 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 massive 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 spaces 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.

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.

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 passengers’ 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 unobtrusive yoga postures in an empty space near the kitchen. Before I know it, I’m there.

Not long ago, I had a layover in Denver’s über-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 glass. The effect: beautiful sunsets over the Rockies. During my layover I happened to catch one. My gate was near this wall of glass, and the sunset that afternoon washed the entire west wing in Technicolor orange, red, and clamshell pink. Outside, snowcapped peaks shone brightly through the color spectrum.