Baby steps

It's no great secret that we want to get 'off the grid', certainly by the time we retire. Originally, we envisioned a solar and wind-powered cottage-type place on water. 

The water's important. For Eva, water is primal. She is fully herself in and around water: an accomplished swimmer, she proved to be such a good lifeguard that an entire "Junior Lifeguard" program was created to accommodate her before she was of legal age to be a lifeguard. Water grounds Eva; it relaxes her, rejuvenates her, reconnects her...pick your spiritual term.

 

I derive all the same benefits out of a body of water so long as I don't actually have to immerse myself in it. Swimming is not a strong suit of mine: even a simple front crawl rapidly degenerates into doggy-paddling, and the effort necessary to keep myself afloat is far too much like work to be remotely relaxing. But by all means give me a view of the river. Let me sit on the dock, as I do at my dad's place, and mentally edit out the houses lining the shore until I'm left with wilderness and water gently lapping. Add in the call of a loon and I'm putty.

Getting off the grid is even more important, as far as I'm concerned. It speaks to a real need for independence within me. Never mind the financial savings--by the time we retire, (I hope) money won't be a problem. But I've always been dependant on someone for something. I don't drive, for instance. I have what can only be termed a driving phobia: I'm absolutely certain that if I drive, I'll die, probably taking at least one other person with me. Maybe not immediately, maybe not even within the foreseeable future, but eventually. I've touched on this phobia of mine before, and will do so again, because the lack of a car in this car-obsessed culture has defined me as much as anything else I can think of. 

Independence ranks just below stability in my personal needs hierarchy. So the idea of unplugging from society's go-juice and creating my own is mighty attractive. 

We've come upon a realization over the past couple of years that has slowly matured to the point where action became necessary: There are other grids besides the electrical.

Our civilization is plugged in to all kinds of things besides that socket in the wall. The financial system is a kind of grid. So is consumerist society. Time itself, for many people, is rigidly allotted and defined. Like the light switch, you tend to take these other things for granted until they fail. Most people don't even seem to contemplate their failure or to realize there are alternatives.

I've been seeing the signs of economic collapse everywhere over the past couple of years. At first, when the housing bubble was still being blown up, people laughed at my warnings that we'd seen this sort of thing just prior to the Great Depression. When oil spiked, I thought that would be it: the slide would just get greasier and greasier until we careened off the bottom and broke our economic necks. Now that the price of oil's receded, there are folks heaving huge sighs of relief: whew, Martha, we dodged another one. 

But we haven't, not by a long shot. The credit crisis is still unfolding, and nobody knows just how long the string of bank failures in the U.S is, or what might be at the end of it. Couple that with China looking to unload U.S. dollars in the wake of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and it's not hard to imagine a total meltdown. The Fed among others is working feverishly hard to stave that off. Who knows? They might even succeed.

But I doubt it. That doubting has led me to consider what we'd do, what we should do, if economic calamity actually comes to pass. And that in turn led to the epiphany that localization and self-sufficiency has its benefits even in good times.

So we've taken some baby steps, no less important for being so small. I ride a bike to and from work now. It's been fifteen years since I rode, and all the old tricks are coming back to me. Carry a plastic bag to tie around the seat in case of rain. Should that rain materialize, it's not a good idea to ride fast, first, because water will shoot right up your butt, and second because you'll find you have no brakes. A long uphill slog with limited traffic can be vastly preferable to a flat stretch filled with traffic. You know, stuff like that. I've cut my commuting time by a third and still have a ways to go--some Olympian whizzed past me yesterday as I was conquering that long uphill slog. For an instant I felt a stab of totally insane hatred: he was pedalling so effortlessly.  Still, even at my pace, biking is faster than bussing. And it feels undeniably good to be doing this myself, to be getting to work on my own, for free. Eva doesn't have to drive eight miles out of her way. 

We're in the process of abandoning our bank for a credit union, and let me tell you I wish I'd thought of this sooner...we could have saved ourselves untold thousands of dollars by now. Still, better late than never. Giving the finger to the big monolithic bank feels pretty damn good, too. 

And here's the thing we're most excited about: Eva discovered a local conglomerate of farmers that raise and sell all manner of things: Black Angus beef just this side of organic, chickens, milk, preserves, you name it. All at prices much better than you'll find in a grocery store.  We've purchased a quarter of a cow and half a pig, and are working towards getting the bulk of our groceries at similar places. One of the largest farmer's markets in Canada is a stone's throw from our door. As George Monbiot notes here, local fare trumps the supermarket every time. It has to: because grocery stores can't select for taste, not when much of their produce is shipped in from Timbuktu. It sounds self-defeating coming from somebody who works in a grocery store, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Right now, that vision of a retirement place on the water is competing with a small hobby farm and, I think, losing. The idea of raising and growing our own food still seems like a hell of a lot of work...but then, so does pedalling a bike up that long uphill slog. And so I realize I've finally begun to learn one of the biggest lessons my stepfather tried so hard to instill in me: work is often its own reward, and the harder the work, the greater the reward.