Year's Best SF 17

Kaylee’s thinking about Jane’s story. It turns out that living like this—conserving water, composting, recyling everything, composting, driving as little as possible, generating some of her own electricity, growing most of her own food, buying most of the rest locally (“Except tea. I could give up tea only if there were none to be had.”)—is consistent with trying to reduce the impact of people on climate change. But Jane had been living like this long before anyone had thought to worry about global warming. The reason is that when Jane was in college she had met an old couple who were living completely off the grid, except they had an old car they used to go to cultural events sometimes. They had no electricity, no phone or indoor toilet. Their cistern was higher than the house, so they didn’t need a pump. They would never have even noticed a power outage. “They would have noticed a tornado,” Kaylee had said darkly, and Jane had nodded ruefully. “They were lucky. A huge tornado came quite close to their place about forty years ago, but it missed them.”

The term for that sort of life was homesteading. “They did things I could only dream about—grew and put up all their own food, for instance, plus picked berries and nuts and wild greens. And they kept goats for milk and cheese, meat too.”

Kaylee is intrigued. “Why don’t you have goats? You’ve got plenty of room.”

Jane sighs. “I always meant to have some. Tennessee fainting goats—they’re a cashmere type. But before I could get that far I broke my wrist, and that’s when I found out that you can’t have livestock if you live by yourself. Somebody has to be able to take over if you get injured or sick. Orrin had Hannah, you see, that’s why it worked for them—plus Orrin was tough as nails. But even he got snakebit once, and Hannah had to go for help.”

Their names were Hubbell, Orrin and Hannah Hubbell. Orrin was a landscape painter. He had built the house they were living in, on the Ohio River, and all the furniture. Hannah cooked and put up food on a wood-burning cookstove, Orrin fished and gardened and milked. Jane was nineteen when she met them, five years older than Kaylee, and she had fallen utterly in love with their homestead on the river. “I thought their place was magical, and the life they were living there was magical. I could see it was a lot of work, but the work seemed to keep them, well, you said it yourself: in touch with fundamental things, things they got enormous satisfaction out of. They were old by then, and got tired and cranky sometimes, but underneath there was always this—this deep serenity. It was like—well, as if what they did all day every day was a religious calling, as if they were monks or something, living every moment in the consciousness of a higher purpose.”

And that was why Jane had chosen to live as she did. “Oh, I compromise in ways they never would have. I’ve got electricity, though I make as much of it as I can myself, and conserve what I make. I’ve got gadgets: a washer, a TV, a computer, a landline phone. Had gadgets,” she corrected herself, and paused again. But then she went on without Kaylee having to prompt her. “The purity of their life came at the cost of ignoring society—though society didn’t ignore them, people heard about them and were always dropping by. I didn’t aspire to go as far as they did—they paid no attention to current events, never voted, they basically chose not to be citizens of the world. But if there had been another person or two who wanted the life I wanted, we would have been able to come much closer to the Hubbell’s self-sufficiency than I have. Sustainability, that’s the word for that.”

“But nobody did.”

“Nobody did. Not really. Not after they’d tried it for a while, experimentally.”

“So you finally just went ahead and did it by yourself.”

“Mm-hm. Compromises and all.”

“Are you glad?”

Jane thinks a bit. “On the whole,” she says finally, “Yes, very glad.”