More reading thoughts

"Back from the Land" is a very interesting book. For me, part of it is the nostalgia value - the tail end of this was happening when I was old enough to be laying down memories (discussions of things done in 1976: I remember 1976). And yeah, some of the stuff seems familiar: the clothes (some of the fashions were terrible, some of them really weren't so bad - secret confession, I like "granny dresses"), the large gardens, the whole "bash together something that works" mentality. There was a little of that going on in my family even though, as I said, my parents were not really "back to the landers" - they were rather, Depression Babies who had grown up more or less having to do that stuff.

I'll also note in passing, at least what I see in this book: the back-to-the-landers were almost entirely white. Oh, I suppose there were African-American people who did it, and there are a couple people interviewed in the book who likely have Hispanic heritage (then again: I know people here who have Hispanic heritage whose ancestors were in what is now the US before mine were and they're pretty solidly middle class). So I suspect this was mainly a middle-class, grew-up-in-the-suburbs thing.

And yeah. Now I'm thinking about the "generational contrasts" thing I was talking about yesterday. And yes, this is a very broad generalization because everyone experiences things kind of differently, but: it was commented in "Back from the Land" that a lot of the back-to-the-lander types had grown up in relatively comfortable, prosperous surroundings - they didn't know extreme want, and in a lot of cases their parents may have shielded them from some of the uglier realities of life. And they chose to rebel against materialism and go off and live the way their grandparents longed to get away from. And my generation, "X," at least the older ones of us - we grew up in the 1970s. We knew economic downturns. We heard "Turn off that light! You know we're not made of money!" and "I'm sorry, but that toy you wanted for your birthday is too much money, pick something else instead" or "We can't afford a big vacation this year so we're going camping in the state park near home." And we remember the oil embargoes, and turning down the thermostat in the winter, and having generic groceries. (I may have been more conscious of this last, growing up as I did in a VERY brand and status conscious milieu). And as we got older, we saw horrors on the news: the Jonestown massacre, the threat of nuclear war, Three Mile Island (even though that ultimately came to nothing, it was still concerning at the time). Serial killers. Kidnappings (that was a big thing in the region where I grew up and of course in the pre-cell-phone era, it was harder for parents to keep tabs on their kids).

And I wonder if, in some ways, Gen X - or at least my particular little slice of it - grew up more like the adults who had been kids during the Depression and World War II - who knew shortages and being a little cold in your house in the winter, and who had certain existential worries, and as a result, we perhaps turned out a bit more materialistic, or at least, less prone to go "Wha-hoo! I'm gonna go live where there's no indoor plumbing!"

It could also be my own particular family history, in that my parents are "Silent Generation" (rather than "Greatest Generation," as many of the Boomer and Xer parents were) and I absorbed some of the attitudes from them. And also the fact that my mother grew up in a house that didn't have running water until she was in high school, so I was only one generation removed from that, and I knew it wasn't in the least romantic (her stories of going to the outhouse at night....)

And yeah. Reading the book last night I realized that the whole back-to-the-lander thing would totally not be for me, as romantic as the idea of your work being so immediately tied to your survival, because I am really very materialistic. (That is one of my bigger faults, I think). All my Ponies. All my books. All the yarn and fabric I own. The fact that I will spend money on fancy soap and bath fizzers and special teas and all of that. And that stuff is important to me; in a way it is a fortification for me against what I perceive as the ugliness or unpleasantness of the outside world: how many times have I thought to myself, "The one thing that's getting me through this morning is the thought that I have time to go home at lunch and fix a nice big cup of 'proper' tea" or how knowing a Pony is winging her way to me makes a blue week a little better.

And granted: if I were all taken up with gardening, and chopping wood, and hauling water, and that was my full-time job, perhaps I would not have time to be dismayed at the state of the world and I might be less conscious of it anyway.

(Then again: some of the back-to-the-landers seemed to have their indulgences; lots of talk of the amount of beer consumed and weed smoked in the book. And I know beer isn't super expensive but neither is it free; I have no idea of the price of weed either now or in the 1970s).

But another comment the author made in the chapter I read last night: that it seemed to her that there was a restlessness and a desire for "more comfort" - she gave the example of the situation with water she and her at-the-time husband had: first, they had to haul it in "camp sinks" (which sound kind of like carboys) from a well. Two, ten-gallon "sinks" at a time, and it would get hauled on a sledge over the snow in winter. Then her husband tried to rig up some kind of a cistern system where they could fill it once a day and have a larger volume of water, though there was no way to be sure how much water was there. Then some kind of gravity-fed system with a pump (but water still had to be hauled to the system). Then a gravity-fed shower instead of a tub with water heated on the stove....and she expresses a little dismay at that, wondering if that was just the "consumer mentality" that they all decried, just translated into their back-to-the-landing. Or if humans are just that addicted to comfort that they will go to frustrating lengths to kitbash something that works marginally more easily. Or - and I like this interpretation best - we are merely curious apes, and of course we're going to tinker with stuff, because that's what we evolved to do and why we are successful.

But yeah. The whole water issue is a BIG reason why I couldn't do the "run away and live in an old cabin in the woods" thing. It's even a big part of why I don't camp - that horrible feeling, which I remember from when I was young and was kind of forced to camp (often because of field trips in college) of waking up in the middle of the night or towards morning, needing to pee, and having to make the decision: can I be comfortable enough lying here until it's light, or do I need to get up, put my boots back on in the dark, get the flashlight so I don't run into a skunk or something, and walk down to the pit toilet? Yeah. I don't miss those days.

I think the most attractive thing in the back-to-the-lander philosophy for me is the idea of the immediacy: that the work you do directly relates to your survival (or comfort, I suppose) - instead of me going and sitting at my desk or standing in a classroom for eight hours a day, and essentially exchanging those hours of my life for pieces of paper that can be used to exchange for goods and services (except how many goods you get for a given piece of paper seems to be declining, of late). I mean, yeah, I get it: my experiments in gardening have done little but yield me a few very expensive tomatoes and a couple handfuls of green beans (though the beans are worth it: the seeds are relatively cheap and garden green beans are better than any from the store). And I can imagine the frustration of watching a fruit crop come on just to realize your anti-bird netting isn't so very anti-bird after all.

But....there has to be some middle way. I don't know. I've felt more dissatisfaction with my job of late (not the teaching end of things, that's still fun). The rise of worry about the future of higher-ed. The rise of the idea that the students are our "customers" and so we better treat them "right" even when they make unreasonable demands. The whole "MOOCs are coming for our jobs" (or, more recently: "A large for-profit course management firm will end by hiring us to write 'content' for them for exactly one semester, and then fire all of us and say they own our IP" And I don't know.

I also wonder what the up-and-coming generations will do. Will the later Gen-xers and early Millennials, the ones who came up during the dot-com boom and who came from families that got rich somehow in that era (or the few lucky house-flippers who made the big bucks) trigger a new wave of "voluntary simplicity"?

And where does the "Tiny House Movement" fit into this? In some ways it's like hippie and hipster combined: from what I've seen of what it's become (the various shows that infest every "lifestyle" network on tv) there's a combination of "Oh we don't mind some inconvenience*" along with "We really care about how our life looks to outsiders and we want to seem really cool"

(*I remember one episode where it was a couple and either one or two kids - but they made their pre-teen son empty out the composting toilet even though he had not asked to live in a tiny house and that seemed really kind of unfair to me. The person who is MOST on board with tiny-house-dom and things like composting toilets should, I think, be the one whose job it is to deal with the collected waste of the family. Shudder)

So there's this weird mash-up of living without conveniences many of us take for granted, careful "curation" of image and possessions, and a certain smugness (The whole "We want to have experiences, not things" attitude. Great. Call me when you're 50 and you have arthritis in an ankle and are on a couple meds and things like free-climbing are not such a great idea any more...)

I dunno. Society is weird. I don't know where I fit in, maybe I don't, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.