Living With Less

by Sylvia Fox

For the past 10 years - more if you include summers - Michael and I have chosen to live what my parents would have called a 'bohemian life' that meant living with limited utilities, limited comfort.

In 2000, we impulsively sold our home in Sacramento, California and bought a 48’ cruising sailboat with plans to unplug, untie and live a less traditional lifestyle. The impetus, in hindsight, was having our youngest child move out to go to college. 

As I wiped a tear away while I said goodbye, my other thought was ‘My turn!’

And off we went --- sailing out under the Golden Gate Bridge, turning left and heading south until the butter started to melt.

But over the last decade, whether we were cruising California and Pacific Mexico aboard our 48' Maple Leaf sailboat, Sabbatical, or living in a home we later built in a rural surf village on a Pacific beach in Mexico or spending summers in our 100-year-old lake cottage in rural upstate New York, we found we had to constantly monitored our usage of what most Americans take for granted: water, sewage, gas, and electric. And garbage.

We had to know what we had, what we used, what we stored because of the lifestyle we had accidentally chosen when we stumbled into our grand adventure.

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Driving Myself Crazy Searching for the Ecological Solution

by Susanna Starr

Since speaking on the cell phone is prohibited when you’re driving in Santa Fe, I pulled over to answer mine, which rang just before approaching Beaver Toyota. So, it was the most logical thing to drive into the parking lot of a large car dealership.

After getting off the phone, I was approached by a nice looking young salesman who asked if he could show me something. Without having any previous thought as to purchasing a vehicle, I responded by saying, “Only if you have a used hybrid that’s not a small car.” A small car would never fit my lifestyle. My modus operandi is to throw all kinds of stuff into my vehicle -- bags of compost, stacks of newspapers for recycling and lots more.

It was a rather flippant reply, since I was there by accident rather than intention. But truth be told, for some time I was feeling upset about the outrageous cost of fuel that my much-loved Land Rover was using due to the obscene rise in fuel costs, with the government for supporting the oil companies, and with the oil companies for notoriously exploiting the American consumer for many decades. So maybe, just maybe, I was somewhat primed for a change.

Meanwhile, the nice looking young guy smiled and said, “I just got in a two-year old Highlander – it hasn’t even been washed yet.” I told him that I wasn’t really serious and he said, “Why don’t you just look at it”? I looked over at my friend who was sitting next to me and he just shrugged. For him that was a major understatement, since he is well known for his love of buying vehicles. He’ll buy one for himself or help anyone else who shows the slightest interest in buying a car or truck, new or used. Now, however, he took great pains not to influence me in any way.

What could I do but at least look?

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Step Back from the Baggage Claim

Change the World, Start at the Airport

by Jason Barger

It’s funny what a glass of wine can lead to. My wife and I had just put our two young boys to bed when the words “I think I may write a book” leaped from my mouth. The words almost surprised me and my wife had no idea where this was leading. The next thing I knew, the traveling adventure had begun.

My family dropped me off at the airport in our hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Over the next seven days I traveled from Columbus to Boston to Miami to Chicago to Minneapolis to Seattle to San Diego - 7 cities in 7 days without leaving the airport the entire time. I was sleeping on floors, eating rubbery chicken nuggets, and yes, watching people. I soaked in nearly 10,000 minutes of observations of humanity at all four corners of the United States. Yes, I’m strange - but, Life is a trip!

With over 87,000 planes in the skies over the United States on any given day, airports are one of the most unique spaces in our mobile world today. So many different people going different directions with different agendas. The airports are a place filled with great excitement, frustration, sadness and anxiety. In order for us to get from point A to point B, we must navigate our way through the obstacles, delays and cancellations that show up along our path. As a metaphor for the rest of our lives away from the airport, how do we choose to travel through daily life in our world? So, I needed to go and see what I would observe.

Oddly, the baggage claim was calling me.

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Learning to Navigate Airport Security

by Andrea Gross

My four-year-old neighbor, a cute kid with the nicely old-fashioned name of Billy, knocks on my door. "Wanna see what Mommy gave me?"

"Sure," I say. (His mother is looking across the yard to make sure her child has safely navigated the few feet of space between our front doors. Can't be too careful these days.)

Billy is carrying a huge box, nearly as big as he is. He hands it to me, I wave to his mother, and we go into my living room.

He unpacks the box. "It catches 'terrists,'" he tells me. And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature airport security check point station. I kid you not.

It has seven parts: a baggage x-ray machine, a people metal-detector, three plastic people, a rolling carry-on suitcase that fits in the x-ray machine, and a chair for the person who watches the suitcase in the x-ray machine. The people consist of the following: a traveler, a TSA agent, and a policeman with a gun.

The possibilities for creative play are obviously endless. Traveler tackles policeman. TSA agent gets trapped in metal detector. Policeman shoots x-ray machine. Child has nightmares.... (All people are white and male, but that's a discussion for another time.)

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A Year on the Ground: Abandoning air travel? Sticking to the ground? Am I crazy?

by Sallie Bingham

Racing by the turnoff to the Albuquerque airport, I jeer (in my head, sparing the Roommate reluctantly riding shotgun with Jack the puppy) at the ducks-in-a-line cars turning off, each one sporting a single head as in a two year old’s toy car, heading toward the mile of glinting metal and glass, the far-out parking lot, where I used to leave my car to avoid paying literally hundreds of dollars at the packed airport garage.

Beyond the garage, the familiar litany of irritations waits: the kiosks that have largely replaced desk personnel, and which routinely refuse my credit card or ask for airport acronyms only a terminal supervisor would know, the ridiculous security parade, where I numbly shed articles of clothing that have nothing to do with any imaginable threat (how long ago was the tennis shoe bomber caught?), the unexplained delays and cancellations, the miserably cramped seats, the disappearance of blankets and pillows, the outrageous sums charged for horrible snacks, and now even for luggage.

This time, I’m driving—1150 miles from my home in Santa Fe to my son’s in Los Angeles.

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Ditching Stress — An experiment

by Andrea Gross

This is the year I diet. Not by going low-cal: been there, done that. This year I'm going low stress. I'm cutting down on stress as surely as last year I cut down on carbs.

It won't be easy. Stress gives me the same high as chocolate and, try as I might, I can't see the glory in taking a vacation in order to relax. But magazines say it's healthy to turn off your mind and revel in doing nothing. I spent 10 years writing for these magazines, so I have a hard time believing them, but what the heck....If Obama can spend an hour a day playing basketball, I can spend a week a year de-stressing. (This works out to Obama being approximately 168 times more important than I am, which seems to me, if anything, an understatement.)

But it's a concept that comforts me during my first hour on the beach. I'd prepared well — brought along a beach chair, towel, sunscreen, hat, snacks, and Wally Lamb's 752-page book, The Hour I First Believed, which proves to be too heavy to hold without straining my wrists. I put down the book and wish I had my computer, the nifty laptop that miraculously connects to the web even in the middle of nowhere. But I left it home, in deference to a hubby who said that after forty years of marriage he deserved four days of Nothing to Do.

I even left my cell phone home. Well, I'd cheated a little on this point. I traded mine, which rings or vibrates with comforting regularity — see, I am important — for my dad's. His never rings because he won't turn it on. "It's only for 911," he says. So I brought along his phone and gave the number to my four kids, so I could maintain the fiction that, in case of real emergency, one of my nearly-forty year old kids call for Mommy. Everyone else, I figured, could wait. I'm not that important, after all. I can check out for a week, and the world will still turn.

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