A Yuppie Heads 'Back to the Land'

When Doug Fine decided to move cross-country from his native New York to an arid rural outpost 20-plus miles from the nearest town, he brought along "four big goals" for the coming year, which were:

1. Use a lot less oil.
2. Power my life by renewable energy.
3. Eat as locally as possible.
4. Don't starve, electrocute myself, get eaten by the local mountain lions, get shot by my U.N.-fearing neighbors or otherwise die in a way that would cause embarrassment.

That's one behemoth of an ambitious plan for a man who admits right up front: "I like my Netflix, wireless email and booming subwoofers" and who can't imagine living without toast, ice cream or toilet paper. How, then, on earth to achieve it?

On the first page of his book about that year, Farewell My Subaru (Villard, 2008), Fine -- a journalist who has written for Wired, Salon and other venues -- recounts a scene in which his inexpertly parked Subaru Legacy slid backward down a grade and barely missed crashing into an outbuilding. This incident occurred "a few days after I moved into the sprawling, crumbling, 41-acre New Mexico spread" where Fine had come to live. "Moved into" is a coy way of putting it. Presently, he mentions that he owns the place, that he bought this vast tract of land to go green on.

And while it's exciting in a fairytale way, this notion of legally owning your surroundings as far as the eye can see and transforming them into a solarized organic Xanadu, it lends the undertaking a certain "well ... but" dimension. Well, we all aspire to sustainability, but how many of us could actually afford to buy 41 acres? Well, property in rural New Mexico is less expensive than in much of the United States, but how many of us could afford taking a year or more off work just to see whether we could hack it? Well, getting off the grid is great, but who among us has the bodily stamina to manage, while living solo, animal husbandry and organic gardening and the aerobic, acrophobic, bloodletting workouts (think: windmills, wrenches, tanks, pipes, panels and pumps) required to transition a ranch from electrical to solar power?

Fine bought solar panels "to power my new, fabulously expensive solar-powered well pump. The pump came from Denmark, where they don't employ slave labor and where they don't retail at Wal-Mart. Poor people in Chad don't own this pump. The boutique device was ... buried a hundred forty feet below the ground" -- at further expense, presumably. These expenses just pile up. In order to get "serious about kicking unleaded once and for all" -- quite an aspiration when the nearest town, and thus the nearest supply outpost, lies across "spine-rattling New Mexico dirt roads" and requires fording an actual river -- Fine had to ditch the Subaru and buy a four-wheel-drive diesel Monster Truck. Purchased secondhand, the Ford F-250 -- it dwarfs Hummers on the freeway -- was still "quite a bit over Blue Book." Replacing its standard fuel system with a biodiesel fuel system that allowed it to run on food grease salvaged from restaurants cost another crate of ducats: The website for Albuquerque Alternative Energies, where Fine had his conversion done, lists the charge as $4,000 plus installation.

Add the price of building materials, fencing, animals, feed ... and the whole project, to borrow Fine's own adjective, starts to sound a bit boutique. Which isn't to say that it isn't still admirable in principle.

After a suburban childhood and young adulthood spent backpacking around Third World war zones as a reporter, Fine yearned to know "whether it was possible, whether I was firmly on the way to independent, local, oil-reduced surivival or doomed to the fate of those, like most of my family and friends still, who believe that the current McGlobal Economy is eternal" -- i.e., that "unlike any society that came before, we'll figure out a way to keep this Super Bowl-watching, espresso-drinking, GPS-guided-car-driving party going no matter what the ice caps, a couple of Jihadists … and some nasty microbes in the Hot Zone have to say. It's the societal equivalent of not thinking about dying."