You Never Completely Lose

I’m short on word count, but it seems like all I can think to add to my draft at this point is just bloat. Maybe more amusing stories will emerge, but I’m going into the editing phase in the next few days, after a final read-through.

Anybody want to read a book?

Here’s a chapter…

You Never Completely Lose

You Never Completely Lose

I don’t have any special qualifications for living in the boonies. I’m from cities, whether I like them or not. It’s mostly not, but face facts: They’re much easier places to live. Want some light? Throw a switch. Want to be warmer or cooler? Crank the thermostat. Is a storm blowing through? No problem, you can watch it in comfort through the windows of your safe, warm house that somebody else built.

Life on a subsistence level in the desert is not like that.

Violence and death are everywhere, whether we like it or not. In the cities they’re usually kept discrete and polite. Violence is mostly walled off on the ‘wrong’ side of town, and death comes neatly packaged by morticians and funeral home directors. But in the desert, violence and death are very close to the surface. They are real and solid things, not the fuzzy irrelevant hypotheticals the city makes of them. One item on every day’s to-do list is “Don’t Die.”

Life in the boonies is inconvenient in seriously existential ways. Food is essential, but there are no quick drive-throughs here. Water is essential, but the taps don’t flow limitless and chlorine-scented. The very air you breathe can freeze you or burn you, and no electric company will come with endless heat and air conditioning to turn it all soft and safe. In the boonies, you have to think about these things.

There is something terrible about that. There is something beautiful about that. I often wish I was a better gardener, and a better shot.

I was in town with my neighbors D&L one winter day, buying fuel. Looked to the west and saw ugly clouds coming fast. It’s an ironic but fairly reliable rule that when the sky looks fair and friendly in the west, that weather’s not coming here but when it looks really threatening, it is. I mentally listed the things that needed doing before a storm and suddenly became very anxious to get home. Chickens put to bed, boys into the cabin, sure. But there was a whole trailer-load of fiberglass insulation that another neighbor wanted me to pick up, and I needed to get it under cover if it wasn’t to be ruined. I hadn’t thought there was any hurry. I blame it on that lying shitepoke of a weatherman.

So I ran around getting things done. Got rained on a little bit, then the rain seemed to go away. I got everybody squared away and sat down in the Secret Lair, thinking maybe the whole panic was for nothing. Then the sky closed in, and the wind started to roar.

And the rain beat on the walls. And the temperature dropped fifteen or twenty degrees. Then the horizontal snow blotted out all the world. The wire of the chicken yard beat against the cabin’s wall. It was the sort of lovely big storm that snug little cabins and comfortable fires are meant to keep away. The sort that, when you built it yourself and are aware of all its flaws, raise other kinds of thoughts entirely.

I was reminded of it last summer, during Monsoon. An appalling thunderstorm broke directly overhead. Again with the howling and the beating, this time with a backbeat of great electrical blasts any one of which could have reduced us all to charcoal, and not a thing to be done about it but to huddle indoors and hope one of those great lightning bolts striking the ridgeline doesn’t come here.

I’ve noticed more than once over the years a tendency toward atavism in my outlook on such things. Hiding in my Lair during a storm that I imagine might sweep away me and all my puny works, I find myself understanding if not sharing what I’m told were the beliefs of more primitive people: That the weather isn’t random at all, but really might be out to get me personally this time. Intellectually I know that’s complete nonsense. Emotionally, it’s not always a very hard sell.

I’ve lived in a place with harsher winters. But then I was snug in a built-to-code house with grid power and gas heat and acres of fine insulation. There never seemed anything to fear: The worst winter storm was just a nuisance, except under peculiar circumstances that meant I’d done something really immediately stupid. Nobody feared the weather, or wild beasts. In the city it only rarely soaks in that this stuff can kill you.

That’s the way I spent most of my life. “Nature” occasionally grew more interesting or inconvenient than I liked, but almost never an active threat. And perversely, I never really felt in charge of anything.

All sorts of wonderful things were at my disposal. Housing that was proof against any conceivable weather. Unlimited electricity, heat, and running water. Cheeseburgers. Victoria’s Secret catalogs. But I didn’t produce any of those things. I wouldn’t have begun to know how. I ate meat, but knew nothing about raising livestock. I ate vegetables, but didn’t know how to garden.

It struck me quite often that there was something dangerously infantilizing about that. I was completely at the mercy of the people who worked the power plant, or the water treatment plant, or the guys who drove the trucks that stocked the grocery store. I remember mentioning it to people I knew at work, once in a while. They tended to sidle away from me a bit nervously when I talked like that, as if not only had such thoughts never occurred to them, but it wasn’t quite right that they had occurred to me.

I’ve learned since then. I’ve gotten a lot deeper into the nuts and bolts of very basic living than I ever really intended. And here’s a bit of a paradox for you: I’m now physically vulnerable to being harmed by things that in suburbia wouldn’t have been more than a bother, but I’m also more in control of my own life than I have ever been at any previous time.

The first rule of living on the edge is this: You’re in charge. You’re responsible. If something goes wrong, nobody’s going to come and fix it for you. There’s no point grumbling and waiting for the guy with the wrench, because the guy with the wrench is you.

That brings things to a very basic and vital level. I used to be consumed with worry over things like who was undermining me at the office, or how badly a customer was going to screw me on draft revisions, or how to deal with the next-door neighbor who played his piano at 3 AM and drove my wife crazy. Seriously, I used to brood over things like that. Now I wonder if the chickens will lay enough eggs tomorrow. I worry about the state of my stovepipe. Will the water freeze? Will coyotes take my kitten? Will I have enough firewood?

There are two major differences between the old worries and the new ones. First, the new worries are worth worrying about. Those are things that can actually hurt me and mine. Second, I can do something about most of them. I can get more chickens, or kill or separate the one that’s upsetting the others. I can clean the damn stovepipe more often, insulate the pipes more heavily, go out and cut more firewood. The kitten, alas, was pretty much on her own.

Those old quotidian worries used to make me very unhappy, because I felt helpless against them. Now I’ve got worries about things that can actually hurt me, but they don’t make my unhappy because I can get off my ass and do something about them any time I need to. And if sometimes I find myself huddling in my hand-made cabin and hoping it stays up in a storm, twenty minutes later I’ll be congratulating myself because in fact it stayed up just fine – or in case of actual disaster I’ve got a plan and you’ll find me carrying it out instead of waiting for rescue.

Of course in a situation like this it would really pay to know what you’re doing. Alas, that’s not an advantage I brought with me, and I could show you the failures to prove it. But here’s the thing I’ve learned: Until the failure that actually kills you, you get an endless supply of mulligans. Give it another shot, nobody’s keeping score. If your goal is a big Craftsman house amid sunny fields of rolling grain, larders packed with good food, livestock contentedly grazing … you may never completely win that. But you’ll never completely lose until you stop trying or die.