Almost Off the Grid

Here we are trying to find a way to escape the ravages of life in late-stage capitalism, a way to take a stand against the big box stores and passwords, the gmo food, the algorithm. People are being strangled, suffocated, all in the service of corporate greed and the grandiosity of Musk, Thiel and the other takers and hoarders. People want to say no to the system that watches and controls them, that governs every aspect of their lives, especially if they live miles and miles of blacktop from anything green, anything that’s not Target. It must be back to the land time again.

Back to the land back in the seventies had a kind of hayseed charm. Communes of people would drive two hours out of Brooklyn, set up housekeeping in some ramshackle Victorian with a wraparound porch and make a chart of whose turn it was to cook. It was a gentle, naive agrarianism that offered an alternative to the career ladder and gave us Ben & Jerry. But this was before the giant squid of the internet wrapped its arms around us. I remember the exact moment when the squid found me, when I felt the squeeze. My first husband and I had left the country to live in the war resister community in Sweden. When we went to open a bank account in Stockholm, they knew all about the debts we had left behind. I was stunned. How did they know we hadn’t paid our last electric bill? Now, of course, they know what you’re thinking about cooking for dinner. Leaving the culture in the rearview mirror is a more cutting-edge level of magic now, a whole philosophical posture that flourishes on both ends of the political spectrum. Around both my Minnesota family and my California family, starkly different politically, the quintessential American frontier ideal of self-sufficiency has taken hold.

Photo by Mathis Mauprivez on Unsplash

We just returned from three days in Grand Marais on the north shore of Lake Superior where we visited friends of my son and daughter-in-law who live in a yurt deep in the woods with an eight year old and two teenagers. The mother made a point of clarifying that they don’t live in the country. They live in the forest and eat out of a massive garden worthy of Monet, with flowers growing between plantings of greens and squash and herbs. But they are not vegetarians. We ate a lot of burgers and hot dogs with them. You can feel the careful thinking, the distillation of values that goes into each decision. There are chickens that lay eggs. There are two large snorting black pigs. Last season, they kept goats. Now the meat is in their solar powered freezer. They’re not against electricity. They’re against being dependent on the electrical grid. It’s a long, very long, way down a dirt road, more of a path really, to get out of the woods and onto the asphalt that leads to the town of Grand Marais where the children go to school. They are not homeschooled. They wash up in water heated on the huge wood stove under the brightly colored hand-stencilled beams and they trudge off to school to learn about Mesopotamia and isosceles triangles like other children. These people were gracious and open-hearted, seemingly comfortable with themselves and the decisions they’ve made.. They were not in the least evangelical about their lifestyle. They were intentional. If you asked a question…How do the chickens survive the fierce northern Minnesota winter?…they were happy to answer. The chickens move into their solar heated coop. How do you get around when the ground is glittering icy white in January? Fingers point to the snow shoes nailed up on the side of the shed. How do you know how to build a timber frame house, garden without pesticides, heat with wood, slaughter animals, create an artesian well, clear the land and on and on? YouTube, they said. We learn it all on YouTube. Probably the same place right-wing survivalists defending against the end times get their information. 

It occurred to me that a small fraction of all the people who feel the pressure of the system bearing down on them take this dramatic step of renunciation instead of dulling their anxiety with alcohol and television. They are the canaries who feel the loss of freedom, the homogenization of possibilities first and more acutely than the rest of us. Some of them may have been raised on the Whole Earth Catalog. Some of them may be anti-vaxxers, people who nurture a deep distrust for government, public education, western medicine. But there’s something being expressed out there deep in the woods that’s beyond the politics of the moment. Thoreau understood it. Orwell understood it. They understood that we have a primal need to be the sculptors and the engineers of our own lives.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In August, just in time for the end of summer, Toronto writer Paula Halpin will return with her evocative essay, Time and Tide. All subscribers are now welcome to read and comment on Many Voices posts.

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