Enjoy this diary from jvantin1, who was having trouble queuing the diary last night.
You don't choose doom. Doom chooses you. An event happens—Y2K, Katrina, scattered reports of bird flu, maybe a blizzard that strands you for a few days in the frigid dark, without milk and cigarettes. Whatever the event, it transports you to a desolate crossroads--one crudely hand-lettered sign marked Business As Usual, the other Certain Doom—and you take the road less traveled.
That's why in early 2008, months before Lehman went under, I began to prepare for the end. Not of the world. Just America.
Newspapers had yet to run their first photo of a forehead-clutching stockbroker. Occupy Wall Street simmered in some young person's brain, awaiting its time.
But I didn't know that. By mid-2008, I'd cashed in my IRA to buy a place with a few acres—a goal I met just this year. I didn't know what "homesteading" was. I just wanted to save my family from the marauding hordes.
Yeah, I know.
It took time, but my doom fever broke. A lot of stuff happened in between. Long story short, I'm post-doom—aware of the potential for collapse, but immersed in the epic adventure, and miracle, of the here and now. Which brings me to the life-changing book.
I found Back to Basics: How to Learn and Enjoy Traditional American Skills (1981, Reader's Digest Books) on my parent's bookshelf during a weekend visit. It belonged to my dad, a lifelong Democrat, optimist, dyslexic, and artist. He suited up to support his family, but on the weekends, he turned everything he touched into art. He made wine from grapes he grew in his own tiny vineyard in our back yard. He installed a wood stove in our family room and loaded it with wood he chopped himself. He carved wood and stone. He baked bread. He brewed beer.
He didn't teach me any of these skills, not that I asked to be taught. In my adolescence, I took to my room to write bad poetry, brood, and drink. (I pilfered my dad's booze and stashed it in old salad-dressing bottles; it always tasted of vinaigrette.) When we weren't throwing shoes at each other, my mom and I cruised the mall on her credit card. Our meat–God knows where it came from, but we bought it at the supermarket. (Our fruit and vegetables, too--my dad didn't garden until he hit his 60s.) We lived on a country road, but I preferred to explore my own dark interiors.
Thirty years later, when my dad gave me the book, I was 45, had killed every plant I'd ever owned, and couldn't build a fire. Like Napoleon Dynamite, I had no skills. But I had this 456-page tome about how to live the simple life.
Back to Basics is organized into six sections: including how to buy and build on land, use alternative forms of energy (wood, water, wind, sun), raise vegetables, fruit, and livestock, preserve your harvest, learn traditional skills and crafts. It's a how-to-book, and man, the editors delivered—hundreds of projects and recipes, with countless charts, tables, diagrams, and step-by-step photos.
Fortunately, as the foreword notes, "While Back to Basics is a book for doing, it's also a book for dreaming." All books that capture you give you ample dreaming room. With this one, I can pick the projects I have the time and money to pursue and learn at my own pace. I still pore over the simple stuff—say how to make a round garden of corn, pole beans, and squash, like the Native Americans did, but it's fun to read about how an old-fashioned gristmill worked, or how to make a dulcimer. I even love the cover—so homey, so unsophisticated, so yellow.
For me, B to B was the right book at the right time. I read it in bed, devoured it the way a foodie savors a good cookbook. Whether you want to raise a barn, build a stone wall, or keep bees, it's all there.
But more important, this book also gave me a vision of how I wanted to live. Back in 2008, as I stockpiled rice and beans, it hadn't occurred to me that it was okay to want to live in a tiny house heated with wood rather than a suburban McMansion and turn your front lawn into a garden. That book helped me realize that I wanted a different kind of life than the one corporate America lays out for us, and that I am happiest when covered in dirt.
I haven't mastered all the skills in the book, or even five of them. In fact, should I be released into the wild, I'd perish, probably a mile from a McDonald's. But for now, the grid is still up and the malls are still half-full, so there's still time to learn.
In late May, I moved into a 1300-square-foot house with a half-acre of fertile, flat land. I consulted Back to Basics. Then I stuck a few tomato, cucumber, and squash plants and a few several berry bushes into the ground and waited for them to die. Surprise! Every day, I woke up to newly red cherry tomatoes, a zucchini the size of a newborn that I hadn't seen three days before.
We've planned our spring garden—ie, most of the front yard--and will preserve what we grow. (We practiced canning with store-bought stuff.) We'll use less than a tank of oil this winter, and I may turn the wood ash into lye for homemade soap (page 370). And because the house was so cheap, I'll most likely be able to pay it off in 10 years. Fuck you, Bank of America!
Am I Grizzly Adams? Nope, and I never will be. But for me, Back to Basics is a Bible of sorts. It shows me that another kind of life is possible, and how to reach for it. It helps me disconnect, if ever so slightly, from a corrupt and toxic system.
As I write this, the Occupiers surge in the streets, and we're all living our version of "doom"—smaller paychecks, tighter budgets, scaled-back dreams, uncertainty about the future. But when you zoom out a bit, life is what it's always been: a gorgeous, fucked-up mess. Back to Basics showed me that I am more resourceful and powerful than I ever would have imagined. And so are you.
What audacity. The One Percent would be pissed. I love it.