In the summer of 1969 my boyfriend and I, like lots of other hippies, decided to take a road trip. From a carpenter we bought a used van with wooden cubbies in the back to hold his tools and supplies. They would serve just fine for our kitchen pantry. I made Indian-print curtains to cover the windows, and we were off to California.
When the van’s starter broke, we figured out how to crank the engine by connecting a wire directly to the solenoid. Then, in Oklahoma, one of the tires exploded. We happened to have two clean-cut, young hitchhikers with us at the time. As we all sat on the side of the highway, a police car pulled up. Seeing my boyfriend’s shoulder-length hair and my pink halter top and cutoff jeans, the officer asked to search our van. We politely refused, and he went back to his car to get a warrant.
I know now that no judge would issue a warrant on a Sunday for four kids with a flat tire, but none of us knew it then. Frantically we retrieved our stash of pills from the box of Quaker Oats in the “pantry,” and the four of us took turns swallowing—I’ll take a green and a yellow; gimme a blue one; hand me those three reds.
Having failed to obtain a warrant, the officer returned and told us we were free to go. By that time we’d taken all the pills.
The sleepless night that followed is a blur. I only know we somehow fixed the flat and made it to a campground. But I’ll never forget when we stopped for gas. My boyfriend successfully navigated the van to the pumps, and an attendant filled the tank. Driving away was not going to be straightforward, given how stoned he was. My boyfriend leaned his head out the window and, in all seriousness, asked, “How do we get out of here?”
“Very carefully,” the attendant said without missing a beat. “Very carefully.”
Judith Shapiro
McLean, Virginia
My grandparents hewed their lives out of wood: cutting it, stacking it, chipping it into pieces to light the stove or heater. As a young man my grandfather had driven logs downriver to the mill in Savannah, Georgia, walking from log to log on the water, but when I knew him, he worked inside the sawmill, where he’d lost the ends of two fingers to a blade.
I used to live with him and my grandmother in the little cabin my grandfather had built. Dirty and black-footed, my sister and I slept on a pallet a short distance from the wood-burning stove, piled like puppies with our cousins who, on cold nights, came from across the paddock to sleep in the heat.
Once, I rose from the pallet and found my grandfather in the dimly lit kitchen, prodding at the fire in the cookstove. A spark flew upward and traveled past the open back door, which framed a cold, dark morning. I don’t know why, but I’ve remembered that moment all this time. I watched him cut thick slices from a slab of bacon and set them to sizzle in a pan. He ladled grits from a pot, poured black coffee, and ate in silence. Then he left for the sawmill before dawn.
We children had been warned not to go too near the cookstove. My grandparents had lost a four-year-old child, Elizabeth, to fire. The story was always told the same way: The children were sticking splinters in the stove to watch them flare when an ember landed on Elizabeth’s nightgown. The tellers touched their wrists, then forearms, then throats to show how the flames had traveled up the cotton gown. The burned girl drifted for three days in my grandmother’s arms, asking, “Mama, am I still your baby?” Yes, my grandmother told her. Yes.
V.L.D.
West Palm Beach, Florida
I was born in China but moved to California as a preschooler. At school I would use the English I’d learned watching Looney Tunes and Ren & Stimpy. I spoke Mandarin at home, but my parents worked double shifts to make ends meet, and our apartment was mostly silent.
When I was nine, my parents sent me back to China to live with my aunt. I soon realized I no longer formed thoughts in Mandarin. One day my aunt brought me to her company’s team-building event at a gymnasium. Her colleagues were playing tug-of-war and chanting “Jiayou! Jiayou! Jiayou!” That was the first time I’d heard the phrase.
I asked my aunt why her coworkers were shouting, “Add fuel/oil!” when there was no vehicle or cookware present. They were tugging a rope; surely slippery oil would be counterproductive.
My aunt chuckled. “It’s a cheer of encouragement,” she said.
Standing on a squeaky gymnasium floor in a foreign country that should’ve felt like home, I felt like the chant was for me, the little girl stuck between two cultures: Keep going. You can make it. Jiayou.
Wei Shi
Los Angeles, California
Before I ran the Boston Marathon, I was told that caffeine could help you go the distance. That morning I enjoyed two cups of coffee, then filled my travel mug for the road.
My wife dropped me near the Boston Common to await the rest of my team. While waiting, I finished what was in my mug and got two refills from a coffee shop. Then we boarded the bus to Hopkinton, where the race began. The lurching stops and starts along the way brought signals from my bladder, alerting me that perhaps I had overdone it on the coffee.
As we neared the Athletes’ Village, the driver opened the door for me so I could sprint to the porta-potties. Unfortunately there were a thousand or so runners lined up at each. I considered going behind a shrub, but a guard stood in front of it, arms crossed. The Participant Guide I’d received had been brimming with cautions for marathoners. One of the starkest: whatever you do, do not publicly urinate in Hopkinton.
Luckily I still had my travel mug. I wrapped my windbreaker around my waist, plunged the mug down my shorts, and pretended to stretch. I managed to halt the stream as the urine reached the mug’s rim. After I discreetly emptied it behind a bush, I stuffed the mug down my shorts and filled it a second time.
This process continued until my bladder was mercifully empty, and I was ready to run.
I had just one last task: get rid of the mug. I discarded it in a trash can, making sure to bury it beneath the refuse. I couldn’t bear the thought of a passerby thinking, What a lovely mug.
Matt Chapuran
Boston, Massachusetts
My seven-year-old son, Tyler, and I lived in a century-old house in the town where I grew up. Hoping to lower our heating bills, I invested in a cast-iron woodstove. For weeks it sat in the corner of our kitchen with a cord of wood and an owner’s manual, waiting for me to learn how to use it.
At 3 AM on Christmas Day the intense cold pulled me out of a deep sleep. Please—not the furnace! I woke Tyler, wrapped him in as many blankets as I could find, and went to the basement to check the gauge on the oil tank. Zero. I’d been so lost in grief over the recent death of my mother that I’d forgotten to order oil.
My only option was a crash course on how to get a fire going in the stove. Tyler sat close by, hopeful I would do what moms do: solve problems. I placed logs on the grate, stuffed wads of newspaper between them, tossed in a lit match, and closed the door. Easy enough.
Within seconds heavy black smoke billowed from the crack around the door and began to fill the cold rooms. Now we were not only freezing but choking. Tyler watched anxiously as I threw open the downstairs windows and called 911.
Not wanting a scene for the neighbors, I pleaded with the dispatcher to send only one person knowledgeable in operating a woodstove. She told me it didn’t work that way. A minute or two later several sirens screamed, and fire trucks pulled up in front of our house. The firemen entered, assessed the situation, cleared out the smoke with fans, educated me on woodstove operation, and wished us a Merry Christmas.
As soon as they’d left, I called the emergency number for my local fuel company. Denise—who owned the company with her husband, Bob—answered. Between sobs I said we had no heat, my mother was dead, and it was Christmas Day. Denise assured me Bob would deliver oil and get the furnace restarted. And after a couple of failed attempts, he did.
Tyler and I had been visiting my best friend to get out of the cold. When we returned, on our front porch was a bottle of champagne with a note expressing condolences for my mother’s death and wishing us a Merry Christmas. Bob had sacrificed part of his Christmas with his family so that Tyler and I could have a warm home. I cried again, this time out of gratitude.
Linda T. Bradley
Manchester, Connecticut
We kept our distance, Conrad and I, as we searched for hot spots across several acres of a controlled burn. The two of us had been left behind to scrape dirt over any embers while the rest of the firefighting crew worked on another project over the ridge.
It was late fall in the foothills of Northern California. I was twenty-one and, after two years of college, had joined the California Conservation Corps to experience the “real world” for a year. Conrad, also twenty-one, was a lanky guy with a mass of curly brown hair and a ’65 Chevy Nova. He was assistant crew chief and had joined the CCC to earn his GED and maybe get on with Cal Fire. To me we seemed about as different as two young guys could be—and I felt sure I was the superior version. So I’d been shocked when my girlfriend had dumped me for him.
After an hour or so I sat down and drank from my canteen, imagining what my friends were doing back at college and kicking myself for ever leaving.
“Hey, asshole!” Conrad yelled. “Who said it was break time?”
I ignored him. He said I was a lazy shit. I flipped him off and called him a moronic hillbilly. We traded a few more insults before he said, “You know, dude, she only went out with you cause she wanted to see what a college boy is like.”
I went at him. With surprise on my side I had the upper hand—for about three seconds. Then Conrad flipped me on my back, punched me expertly in the gut, and left me curled like a pill bug in the dirt. I worried he might start kicking me with his steel-toed boots, but instead he offered his hand to pull me up. I dusted myself off, recovered my canteen, and picked up my shovel just as the crew returned to pick us up.
We were almost over the ridge when somebody looked back and saw the smoke. While Conrad and I had been going at it, the wind had lifted an ember into the brush.
It took our tired, pissed-off crew two hours to put that fire out to our leader’s satisfaction. Conrad accepted the blame, and, to my shame, I let him.
Devin Odell
Fort Collins, Colorado
In the kitchen before dinner a friend accuses me of using gossip to bond with the other guests. He’s right; I am. It’s a party, after all. And we gay men are used to knowing each other’s personal business. So little between us is considered truly scandalous. Sharing others’ secrets fuels the conversation. It elevates emotion. A good secret has the power to bring laughter and even tears.
Later, at the table, the man to my right teases the shyest among us about his orange shorts. The teaser is trying to distract someone else, who’s already drunk, from telling more secrets. Both men are closer to me than brothers. Listening to them banter, I wonder what normal people talk about at dinner. A boss used to say, “If you don’t know the chump in the room, it’s you”—meaning, always stay in front of the conversation. The dinner parties I’ve known are gardens one minute, open battlefields the next.
But the thing about secrets is, once spoken, they can’t be unsaid. A week ago, in a quiet exam room, a doctor told me without looking up, “The masses on your kidneys, they’re on your pancreas too.” I watched his lips carefully, the tension in his jaw. In that moment I felt more intimately bonded with that doctor than I had with anyone else in recent memory.
I turn to the man on my left and start talking about a mutual friend who is having sex with someone twenty years younger. He edges forward in his chair, a glow in his eyes, wanting more.
D.D.
Seattle, Washington
My big sister Sue and I shared a drafty old house while we were in college. Sue had recently met an older guy, Ron, who drove a Camaro, grew pot, and stayed over most nights. When we ran out of firewood during a spell of arctic weather, Ron and one of his buddies stole a couple of armloads from a neighbor’s stack. I didn’t know what my sister saw in him, but I welcomed his contribution to keeping the house warm.
Little by little Ron’s true nature revealed itself. He was manipulative and controlling and became ugly after a few drinks. Yet my sister stayed with him, even after she graduated and became a CPA. Each time he treated his friends cruelly, grew irate over some minor issue, or belittled her, she let it pass.
They married and had a son. Then Sue got breast cancer. Following her mastectomy Ron started taking Sue’s painkillers himself. By the time she understood how bad his drug use had become, it was too late. Sue died knowing her marriage had been a mistake and that she was leaving her young son to be raised by an addict.
The twenty years since have been predictably tragic for my nephew, who has struggled with addiction, incarceration, and homelessness. I wish I had done more to encourage Sue to break free. There were so many red flags, the firewood episode being the first. I used to see Ron’s petty thievery that night as one of the few things he ever did for someone else. Now I realize it was more about his own desire to keep warm.
M.B.
Washington
I grew up in rural Maryland, where the landscape was dotted with beef and dairy farms, and I learned to drive a stick shift on our half-mile-long driveway. My mom would blurt out instructions as I jerked our family’s Toyota Echo up and down the lane, our placid beef cows my only audience. Cattle guards kept them from meandering onto Route 560, where high-speed tractor trailers blew through our small, steep valley.
Because of the traffic, leaving our driveway could be dangerous. For years I had observed my mother stop at the bottom, roll down the window, and listen for vehicles before quickly pulling out. Now, after weeks of practice, it was my turn. As she’d taught me, I rolled down the window and listened, then peeled out—except I stalled in the most vulnerable position: centered in the path of traffic coming over a blind hill.
I scrambled to restart the engine only to stall it again. My mom groped at the stick shift. I was frantically trying to focus when a silver tanker truck crested the hill. I had just enough time to squeeze my eyes shut. Our car shuddered as the massive, gleaming eighteen-wheeler careened past in the other lane, which was mercifully clear of oncoming traffic.
Returning to his own lane, the driver overcorrected, and the truck tipped precipitously, then surrendered to the fall. As it screeched to a stop on its side, the earth seemed to shake. The overturned truck blocked both lanes, and the driver scrambled out of the skyward-facing door. Then it occurred to me that the untold gallons in the tanker’s hold might leak out and explode.
I restarted the engine, shifted into reverse, and backed into the driveway. Two cars turned in beside me to avoid colliding with the downed tanker, so close neither my apoplectic mom nor I could open our doors. Panic set in. Fearing an imminent explosion, I looked again to the wreckage only to see it wasn’t leaking fuel, but milk!
Thankfully no one was injured. My mom did gain some gray hairs that day, and it was many more months before I would attempt to exit our driveway again.
Kelly Goodrich
Christchurch, Virginia
From my late adolescence to my early thirties I despised my body. Extreme weight loss—skeletal, straight, narrow, no curves or soft edges—was my mission. I bloodied my pointer finger, repeatedly scraping the knuckle on my front teeth as I shoved it down my throat to purge the food I’d eaten. Binge, then purge. My monthly bleeding stopped as I became starved for nourishment.
My mom had given me the birds-and-bees talk when I was eleven. I didn’t want the boobs or the blood or the cramps. S-E-X wasn’t too interesting to me, either. The babies, though—I wanted them. Back then, yesterday, today—I have always aspired to have children, but my body dysmorphic disorder has impacted my fertility.
While hiking the 485-mile Collegiate East route of the Colorado Trail in the summer of 2020, I learned to think of food as fuel. The more calories I consumed, the more confident my footholds were, the steadier my thighs held me on the slopes, and the more miles I could cover.
Hiking for the last forty days of my fortieth year, I ate with respect and care, and I reveled in how my body responded. For the first time, I adored it.
L.J.
Englewood, Colorado
During the energy crisis in the 1970s, the gas rationing made it hard for my older sister, Deb, and her high-school friends to get wherever they wanted. Our father made it worse, forbidding her to drive unless he deemed it necessary.
As a teenager Deb chose the wild crowd and mostly ignored me, her timid younger sister. But one evening, when Dad was working late and Deb’s friend Caren called to ask if she wanted to hang out, Deb invited me to tag along. Mom, her nose in a book, said to take a sweater.
Caren picked us up in her parents’ Plymouth station wagon along with Janice, another friend. I slid behind Caren because Mom had told me the seat behind the driver was the safest spot in a car. Barely a block from home the girls lit Marlboros, rolled down the windows, and shoved Led Zeppelin into the eight-track. As we toured the valley, they laughed often at jokes I didn’t get. Everything was funny to them.
On Ventura Boulevard at sunset Caren announced we were almost out of gas and had to make a pit stop. My sister asked if I’d like to fill the tank. I said sure. Ever the rule follower, I immediately wondered whether Caren’s license plate ended in an odd or even number: that’s how you knew which days you could buy gasoline.
I was confused when Caren drove past the first station, turning into the hills. We cruised through neighborhoods with big lawns and few streetlamps until Deb said, “Park here.”
From the rear of the station wagon my sister retrieved a five-gallon can and a length of garden hose, which she handed to me. “I’ll show you how,” she whispered, putting her finger to her lips.
Caren remained at the wheel. While Janice played lookout, Deb and I tiptoed over to a Cadillac and squatted beside a boxwood hedge. My hand shook as I flipped open the fuel door and unscrewed the gas cap. Deb shoved the sawed-off hose in and gave me instructions. After a deep breath I sucked on the other end until I tasted gasoline, then shoved the hose into the gas can. Nervous, I stood up to look around.
A woman about Mom’s age, rolling her garbage toward the street, shouted, “Hey! What the hell are you doing?”
“Shit!” Deb laughed and yanked out the hose. Gasoline splashed on my jeans. I grabbed the half-filled can and waddled toward the station wagon like a pregnant woman. Inside the car I licked the sleeve of my peacoat to clean the taste from my tongue, and we made our getaway.
That fall I entered high school, where my sister and her friends were now seniors. Not knowing the ropes, I entered the G Hall bathroom—the one the smokers used. Nobody but cool upperclassmen ever entered it. When I pushed open the door, I heard the “guard” yell out, “It’s cool. It’s just Deb’s little sister.”
E.K.
Beaufort, South Carolina
On our last day of canoeing through the lake wilderness in Ontario, Canada, we paddled more than twenty miles—much of it in the rain—before stashing our canoe at the island landing on Crane Lake. We were tired, wet, hungry, and ready to go home. The group campsite included an outhouse, whose dry, gleaming interior we regarded with an awe usually reserved for medieval church architecture. My spouse, Heather, typically a paragon of campsite industriousness, sat in a stupor at a picnic table and popped granola into her mouth.
The campsite was accessible by motorboat, which meant it was also used by very different sorts of travelers than us. Soon a family walked past our tent pad, cursing that there seemed to be no campsites available. When they asked to share ours, we grudgingly agreed.
While the family went to collect their gear, I gathered scraps of bark and microscopic twigs—not an easy task in an overused campsite on a waterlogged day. Heather set our cook pot on the fire grate and filled it with dehydrated black-bean soup. She also hung a tarp over our work area, adjusting slipknots to angle away runoff and limit the wind.
The family soon returned, dropping bundles of badly organized gear. The husband and wife took out an unopened cardboard box labeled “Pop Up Canopy Shelter,” cut through the packing tape, and dumped a pile of tent poles and tarps on the wet ground. They proceeded to curse at each other about why neither had learned how to assemble it before they’d left.
Their ten-year-old girl, trying to stay out of the fray, sat near me. In my best schoolteacher persona I showed her how to build a fire with wet wood, explaining which types of wood to use and so on.
The dad came over to survey the scene, walked away, and came back with a gallon can of gasoline. He poured gas on my twig pile, threw on some newspaper, and clicked his lighter. The flames leapt. “There,” the dad said, “that should help.”
Heather jumped up to save our tarp from the inferno. We stood in a moment of awkward silence as the fire blossomed. “This is ridiculous,” the man announced. “We’re going home.” With that, they gathered up their unassembled pop-up canopy and other belongings and disappeared. We were once again surrounded by silence.
Only now we had a roaring fire, which meant hot food. I hadn’t realized how desperately we needed help. Nor could I have imagined the unlikely agent our guardian angels would send to provide it.
Annika Fjelstad
Minneapolis, Minnesota
“John’s Fuel Service and Trucking, may I help you?” My sister and I grew up saying this every time we answered the home phone. Our dad sold alderwood at sixteen dollars a cord and delivered it to homes across our city. The business had one truck and no office. On weekends we’d ride along on his deliveries and earn fifty cents for our labor. When customers asked if he had any boys to do the stacking, he said, “No, but I have two strong girls.”
I was proud to be a strong girl, especially when I went with him to pick up the alder in the countryside, where he had an arrangement with some woodcutters. My sister, four years my senior, was on her way to becoming a teenager and didn’t come. Having Dad all to myself—riding shotgun, sipping a Coke—was fine with me. He’d throw two logs into the back of the truck for every one I loaded. Once, when he took off his shirt in the summer sun, I took off mine.
“Put your shirt back on, Catherine!” he told me. “Someone might see.”
See what? At eight I had no breasts and considered myself a good substitute for the boy Dad never had. (I sensed he’d always wanted one.)
Before he bought his own truck, Dad had delivered coal for Garvin Ice and Fuel. He’d come home late with his face hidden by black dust, which I found frightening. He was “let go” from Garvin’s while World War II was going on, I think because of his heavy German accent. Unable to find another job, he borrowed twenty-five dollars from a friend, put a down payment on a used truck, and changed his name from Hans to John.
By the time I reached high school, he’d accumulated ten trucks and employed as many drivers. He had an office at the Canadian White Pine mill, drove an expensive Ford, and didn’t do the physical labor. Instead he spent hours at his desk, drinking a bottle of rye a day or more; one of my boyfriends worked for him and saw the empties in the garbage. Dad wasn’t an angry drunk. I didn’t suffer any abuse. But he distanced himself from us, and his powerful body deteriorated. I preferred the scary, dust-covered father of my childhood.
My father died at sixty-one of cirrhosis of the liver. By then I had graduated from a university and gotten a job teaching there. Dad used to boast to his workers that I was the youngest professor they had. I wasn’t, and I was a lecturer rather than a professor. I was embarrassed to hear that he was boasting about me. His material success was what had allowed me to attend university. But it had also ruined him.
Catherine Sosnowsky
North Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada
It started with a weakness in my left hand. The neurologist diagnosed me with ALS while I sat in a paper gown, astonished. I was only thirty-three years old, and the motor neurons in my brain were slowly blinking out like stars at dawn.
My astonishment immediately gave way to planning: How much can I fit into the life I have remaining? I began organizing a backpacking trip to Patagonia, calling beloved friends, splurging on dinners, but I kept coming back to this image of stars: the brightest shining brighter and brighter as they decline toward death, burning fuel with abandon.
I have a team of physical, occupational, respiratory, and speech therapists. When I feel overwhelmed, I think of them as astrophysicists rather than medical professionals: my body is their universe to explore and gather data for future generations. They ask, “How do you feel today?” They listen closely to my replies. Which star will be the next to blink out? Will it be my left leg? My ability to swallow?
What’s happening inside my brain is still kind of a mystery, but the doctors do know how it ends. And so, while I still can, I squeeze my friends tight, eat chocolate, and burn whatever fuel I have left.
Kiah Coble
Vermont
I once served as the chronicler and photographer of a scientific expedition to South America. In 1987 I spent six weeks traveling on the Rio Orinoco in a large wooden motorboat, through the heart of Venezuela’s Amazonas Territory. Villages there are sparse with very few places for refueling. Because our research required hundreds of miles of travel, we carried gasoline in fifty-gallon drums.
Tensions in the area were high, not just because of the drug smuggling that went on there, but because fuel in Venezuela cost about a fifth what it did in Colombia, and was more abundant. Colombian guerillas made regular incursions across the border in search of petrol.
We motored upstream along a section of the river that forms the Venezuela-Columbia border, pausing to study fish and other organisms in the channels that feed the Orinoco. As we navigated a particularly narrow turn, a low-slung bungo appeared and raced toward us. One man brandishing an automatic weapon on its deck would have been enough to stop us. This boat had six.
Wearing the military uniforms of Venezuela’s border patrol, the men clambered aboard our boat. Had they pegged us as couriers for some drug cartel? We held our hands in the air to show we were unarmed, which did nothing to calm the young soldiers. Half of them held us at gunpoint, and the others ripped through our cargo. The other gringos and I refrained from comment while our Venezuelan colleagues tried to defuse the situation.
We handed over our passports and all the travel documents we could find. The commanding officer scowled at our photographs and barked questions I couldn’t understand. He repeatedly pointed to the gasoline drums, grilling us about why we were carrying so much—around eight hundred gallons. What purpose could all this petrol serve unless we planned to sell it illegally in Colombia?
We’d been questioned like this before, but never at gunpoint. Our equipment boxes were breached, their contents strewn about. Our duffels were ransacked. We tried to remain calm and respectful as our helmsman produced an official letter granting us permission for the fuel purchase, as well as the receipts we hoped would confirm its legitimacy. The officer read them skeptically. After a long delay he returned our passports and abruptly announced he would spare us arrest. At his command the soldiers lowered their guns, reboarded their bungo, and motored off downstream.
I’m thankful that the men who overtook us worked for Venezuela’s military and weren’t guerillas ready to kill for fuel.
Robert McCracken Peck
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
After growing up surrounded by affluence, confused by society, and ostracized by my peers, I became invested in radical ecological and humanitarian causes and renounced capitalism. In my twenties I lived off the grid, maintaining a small solar setup, trimming wicks on oil lamps, shunning regular showers, and stacking a lot of firewood. I knew the phases of the moon, the hawks that hunted in the grass by my cabin, and when the blackberries would ripen in the ravine. I could navigate by the sun and stars.
I lived on a big property with other like-minded people, all couples. We tended gardens and livestock and learned to make what we could for ourselves. Traveling often created a moral dilemma. I walked and rode horses a lot, but the closest small town was more than forty miles away, the nearest real city more than a hundred miles—too far to walk or ride. I had a bike, but the weather and terrain created challenges. I also had an old Mercedes that ran on biofuel, but it required a lot of repairs. Usually I just stayed home. Besides, there was much work to do to provide for myself, and I didn’t have a lot of money.
Eventually I grew lonely and realized I needed more than I could provide for myself. I began to emerge little by little from this life. About once a month I’d get to town to use a laundromat, read a newspaper, and see people. It was like going to an amusement park: fun, overwhelming, and brief. Caught on the freeway in rush hour with thousands of daily commuters, I was amazed by the mindless waste. Clearly, living in modern society would require some compromise.
I moved into a rented farmhouse with three other young women. It felt like the lap of luxury—switches on the walls! We shared costs and worked together to cook and clean. My roommates all had jobs they drove to, and boyfriends. I slowly acquired a cell phone, a laptop, a social life.
I now use petroleum vehicles. I have flown infrequently to visit family. The house I share with my husband is heated with propane. He’s catching me up on the movies and music I missed in my twenties. I’ve learned it takes many kinds of energy to stay healthy and happy.
Robyn McCallister
Little River, California
Dad topped off the fuel tanks in the wings of our single-prop plane before telling me the flight plan: west with the river to get out of the valley, then east following the interstate, scraping by over the peaks of the Continental Divide. After two hours the challenging altitude would give way to the easy-flying Great Plains—and ultimately to the start of my junior year of high school back home in North Carolina. Years later I would learn that the air that day was too thin for a small plane like ours.
As we lifted fast from the valley floor, I scanned the horizon for the mythic fourteeners of Colorado’s Elk Range. The climb to higher altitude became labored, and Dad adjusted the fuel-mixture levers. The engine sputtered, then stalled. A menacing siren wailed in the cockpit. We watched in horror as the nose tipped toward a tree-covered mountainside. The oxygen masks hissed. There was a clean, mindless silence in which I awaited my chaotic death. Then metal and glass collided with a dozen quaking aspens above an unforgiving earth.
Somehow we survived. We escaped the flaming fuselage with our hair charred and flaps of skin hanging. Before running down the mountain in search of rescue, we looked back in disbelief at those wings—still filled with fuel. They had been clipped on impact with the trees and dropped behind in the aspen grove, yet to explode.
Blake Tedder
Hillsborough, North Carolina
The first time I visited my girlfriend’s cabin in Vermont, it was fifteen degrees—on the inside. But Kathy had a cookstove and plenty of firewood, which soon heated the cabin to a tolerable temperature. That stove warmed us, cooked our meals, and kept us busy keeping it lit. I grew to love it, the little cabin, and Kathy.
We married and several years later found a more-permanent country home. Heating and cooking with wood was part of our self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle, and I grew to enjoy the ritual: learning how best to light the fire; choosing the right pieces of fast-burning poplar or slow-baking oak; finding uses for the ash. I could actually see the sobering amount of fuel needed for our two-person household.
Maintaining a supply of wood from your own land is a never-ending chore. As soon as this winter’s woodsheds are full, I start on next year’s supply. It’s great exercise for the body, but it’s also an exercise in mindfulness. Every saw cut requires attention and a firm grip, and splitting logs involves carefully aiming for where the end grain is already cracking. A friend who lived in a Buddhist nunnery recalled that splitting wood was one of their most popular chores. I get that. It requires just enough brainwork that you can’t daydream.
We have thirty acres, and over the years we’ve watched them evolve into a mature forest that can easily provide our firewood from deadfall alone. I’m always scanning for candidates, and have several times been present to witness an old tree crash to the ground. I’ve seen a beautiful beech slowly succumb to bark disease and end up in our woodstove. I’ve watched a dead, leaning red oak stubbornly stay semivertical for at least a quarter century. I’ve learned which ailing giants are best left to the woodpeckers and other wildlife. These trees have become old friends, in both life and death.
Steve Squires
Newfane, Vermont
I grew up in an apartment behind a restaurant at the end of a streetcar line in Chicago. It was the 1940s, and our heat came from a coal-burning furnace in the basement. The coal was purchased a half ton at a time, delivered by truck, and sent down a chute through the basement window and onto the floor.
At twelve my job was to get up first in the morning (my father worked the night shift and slept till 9 AM), corral Nancy, my fox terrier, and head to the furnace room. I’d shake the furnace handle to make the ashes fall to the bottom, open the iron grating, and shovel coal into the fire. If it had burned low, I had to place the new lumps carefully so as not to smother the flames. Sometimes it was necessary to add wadded-up newspaper, kindling, and a match.
The furnace room was warm and cozy, but the rest of the basement was dark and smelled of oil. (The upstairs neighbors used oil for heat.) Having a fox terrier was important; the space was infested with rats because the restaurant folks weren’t careful about disposing of their garbage. As soon as I opened the basement door, Nancy would tear down the stairs, and the rats would scatter. Once the fire was burning, I’d shovel the ashes out of the bottom grate and put them in a container to be carried out by my brother. My job done, I could make breakfast and get ready for school.
Most of the girls at my school came from families who owned homes, and some drove their own cars to school, even Cadillac convertibles. I felt an urgent need to study hard and get a couple of degrees, so I could move beyond that apartment with the coal furnace in the basement. Being responsible for fueling the furnace taught me discipline and hard work—values that eventually landed me in my own home, with a furnace that doesn’t require shoveling coal, a freezer full of food, and no rats.
Name Withheld
I was cruising down LA’s Laurel Canyon Boulevard in my father’s 1969 Pontiac LeMans when the engine coughed and spluttered. I checked the fuel gauge. Empty.
I had borrowed the car without my dad’s permission. No one but him was allowed to drive it, not even my mom. But he was out of town, and the keys on the kitchen counter had called to me like the sirens of Greek myth. How could I resist?
I coasted to the side of the road and banged my head on the steering wheel. My dad would be home soon, and I would be grounded for the rest of my life. I needed a plan. The nearest gas station was about a mile away. I could walk there—on the hottest day in recorded history, in four-inch platform shoes and a miniskirt that barely covered my ass—then drag myself back up the hill carrying a rusty, leaking can of gas. Or I could catch a ride.
I stuck out my thumb.
The man who stopped for me drove a gray Chevy Corvair, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and looked as boring as his car. When I hopped in, I was assaulted by the smell of Brut cologne. He immediately started asking me questions: Where do you go to school? What’s your favorite subject? Do you have a boyfriend?
Noticing him staring at my legs, I pulled at my skirt and scooted closer to the door. A Chevron station came into view. Almost there, almost there, I silently chanted.
Then the driver put his hand on my thigh. I pushed him away and said, “What are you doing? Get your hand off me, asshole.” Up ahead a traffic light turned red. Luckily he drove a stick and had to downshift. I jumped out and ran.
A guy in my chemistry class worked at the Chevron. He filled a five-gallon can and gave me a lift back to my car.
A few days later my dad appeared in my bedroom doorway. “Did you put a gas can in my trunk?” he asked.
“Better safe than sorry,” I said. “You never know what might happen.”
Gail Mackenzie-Smith
Los Angeles, California
