By Paul Fersen
Consider yourself lucky. You live in Vermont, a bastion of hardscrabble self-sufficiency. Now that the bubble has burst and the portfolio that brought you here isn’t worth spit, it’s time for you to reevaluate your circumstances. Fortunately you were lucky in choosing Vermont as a haven back when things were good and you figured your bonuses would continue to flow ad infinitum. What once was a symbol of status may well become a symbol of refuge.
I came up here decades ago with nothing, at which point I was as happy as I’ve ever been. From that point I worked and created a life here, had three children, bought a farm, built a house and evolved from a closet survivalist to a hard-working family man, building a future with all the pertinent equities and 401K’s etcetera. Now, given the current state of the economy, we find ourselves compatriots in a struggle to support the infrastructure we created. While the conveyor of plenty ran steadily, we greedily plucked from it what we wanted. There was a price, but one we assumed would be paid by the ever-increasing value of that we plucked. We substituted equity for money and now to put it in rural Vermont terms, the chickens of our collective greed have come home to roost. In the rural spirit of neighborliness, here are a few tips on the joys of living with less in the Green Mountains from one who came up here with nothing.
Get rid of the Escalade. Driving an Escalade these days exhibits a bit of the Marie Antoinette in you (think: 18th century Paris Hilton). Get a grip. Get in touch. Get a truck. Probably not a significant improvement on fuel economy, but you can haul wood (see below), go to the dump, drive down a dirt road without fear of depreciation, let your dog ride in the front seat (important status symbol in Vermont) and if it gets dirty it actually improves your standing in the community. The truth is, you can buy a truck these days that looks like an Escalade inside, but with a pickup body. Add a little dirt, and you can effectively disguise the inner Marie while outwardly seeming to be in touch with reality. The interesting dichotomy of trucks is that while environmentally detrimental as an Escalade, they work for a living and are therefore acceptable.
Grow your own food. Face it, you’re already paying someone significant sums of money to landscape and maintain your gardens and grounds. Just instruct them to plant vegetables instead of perennials. Peas and potatoes taste better than roses and peonies. Given the size of your gardens, you can probably grow enough for yourself and still be able to sell the extra at the local farmer’s market. You can throw it in the back of your new truck, go down to the market and call yourself a farmer. While it might take some getting used to, you will find that the organic, liberal agrarians that populate the booths are a reasonable and decent group of individuals and that none of them have designs on freeing the masses and stripping you of your wealth. We managed to do that ourselves.
Heat with Wood. A fireplace is not heating with wood. Buying wood is not economical. Get yourself a big old woodstove, install it in the middle of that 2,000 square foot great room and close off the other 8,000 square feet of the house (you can use it again come summer). All those trees out there are just heat waiting to be harvested. The truth is your woods could probably use a little thinning and an average tree, besides being renewable, can provide an easy cord or more of wood. Get a chainsaw and a splitting maul and go to work. Make sure you pick trees far away from the house as they probably won’t fall where you want them the first few times and adding unplanned entrances to your house is not economically sound. You’ll figure it out. Once you’ve cut and split all that wood you can haul it to the house in your new truck.
Get rid of the Shihtzu. First of all, even if you put the Shihtzu in the front seat of the truck, nobody can see it. Somewhat defeats the purpose. Get a big dog people can see and it might as well be a hunting dog. That way you can put meat on the table to go with all those vegetables from your flower garden. There are ducks, geese, grouse, woodcock, turkeys, deer, rabbits and all kinds of game out there just waiting to take their place next to your homegrown mashed potatoes. If you’re hesitant about eating something that runs wild in the woods, just think of it as the ultimate in a “free range” food source for which I’m sure you’ve previously paid handsomely at Wild Oats or Whole Foods in the lowlands.
Less is more. The other day I was going on a fishing trip and I stood in my garage surrounded by an obscene abundance of gear, trying to figure out what to take. I agonized for hours over what gear for what contingency I would need, packed and repacked, the weight of the decisions sucking the pleasure out of the whole experience. It occurred to me at that point, that the happiest I’ve ever been was as a boy fishing with Grandma Moon which meant grabbing a cane pole and can of worms and catching fish. While practically speaking, I’m not going to regress that far, there is a lesson here. On a certain plane I am as guilty as anyone who feels the unending need to accumulate “wealth” be it fishing gear or fancy cars. What I’m discovering is the effort to support this abundance often far outweighs the pleasure provided, but even with half of what we have, we simply have to look up and remember where we live. While recessions may be painful, there are far worse places in the world for us to endure them. ◊
Bucko, aka Paul Fersen, lives and writes regularly for Stratton Magazine from his home in Dorset.
