The Moneyless Man (10 page)

Another hundred push-ups and it’s time for a candlelit read. My December reading alternated between Bill McKibben’s
Deep
Economy
, Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden
, and Kahlil Gibran’s
The Prophet
, a book I have read many times but still learn from. If I don’t fall asleep with the candle burned down to the stub and the book on my face, I get up at eleven for a final pee on the compost heap, go back indoors, gaze out at the stars untouched by the city lights and fall into a very nice, deep sleep, recharging my body and mind for the next day’s wonderful eighteen hours.

Winter can be a difficult time of year for many of us, especially those who live in countries at higher latitudes, like Britain. It’s dark when we get up, dark before we leave work and the great outdoors don’t seem so great any more. Many people suffer, to varying degrees, from the aptly named SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, also known as ‘the winter blues’. And we inevitably spend more of our hard-earned cash, whether on increased energy bills or through the form of escapism known as shopping.

When I announced I was going to start my experiment at the end of November, just coming into the start of the coldest, wettest and darkest part of the year, it persuaded my friends that I had, in fact, finally lost my mind. It wasn’t only the weather; there is also very little wild food available between December and March. However, I chose to do a complete year so I could see how it felt to go through four seasons without money. I had to get through winter some time and I thought it best to get it out
of the way at the beginning. This was a risky strategy; the first few months were always going to be the most testing and winter certainly wasn’t going to make them any easier.

An unwelcome surprise was that it turned out to be – officially – the coldest winter there’d been in my lifetime. I have always loved this season, but this was probably because I knew I had the option of a nice warm house with a stove and central heating when I’d had enough of the elements. There’s a reason December is the cheapest time of year to buy a trailer, yurt or converted truck – no one wants to live outside at that time of year. Not only would I be living in a glorified pig ark, I would be cooking, working, washing, cleaning, and emptying my bowels outside in the harshness of a proper British winter.

I believe people in countries such as Ireland and the UK drink more alcohol than folk in warmer climates, especially during the winter, largely because many don’t think there is much else to do at that time of year. That was how I’d justified spending endless days and nights in the bar. My binge-drinking days came to an abrupt end when I left Ireland in 2002 and became teetotal for a few years, but I still really enjoyed meeting friends for the odd beer on cold wet evenings during the winter. We’d go to the places that had a big fire and have a couple of drinks while philosophizing, singing or battling it out over a chessboard. Or I might go to the movies, stick a DVD in the laptop (I’ve had a self-imposed ban on watching television since 2003, because I had a penchant for frittering away hours watching absolute garbage), listen to some music, or go see a friend.

One of my first realizations was that none of these were now going to be possible, except seeing friends. And even that was going to be extremely difficult, living as I did eighteen miles away
from them, with only a bicycle for transportation and darkness falling at 4.30pm. I love my friends but I wasn’t going to make a thirty-six-mile round trip in the wind and rain, up and down hills, in the dark, to see them every evening.

I tried to get into the city as often as I could. When I did, I regularly stayed with my friends Cathy, Eric or Francene; all three were really supportive of what I was doing. I’d met Cathy and Eric after they’d contacted me through the Freeconomy website, and Francene was Fergus’s ex-girlfriend. Much as I intellectualize that cities are inherently unsustainable models of living and that the pollution and stress that seems to go hand-in-hand with them are really unhealthy, I admit I love Bristol, largely because it’s home to some fantastically inspiring people. Many are involved in projects such as Transition Towns, a movement whose
raison d’être
is to build resilient communities by ‘transitioning’ from our dependency on oil to a more sustainable way of life.

In the first few weeks I had no idea what I was going to do for fun. I’d long since become used to the city way of life, where everything you could possibly imagine was sitting in a store window waiting for you, price tag attached. I felt isolated living in the country and the public transportation was terrible. Not that I could use the bus anyway, but it was also difficult to get my friends to come out to my trailer during the winter, as none of them are as fond of cycling as I am. My second realization figured out this problem – there wasn’t going to be much spare time anyway!

Wanting to meet my friends as often as I could meant I was clocking up the miles on my bike. And because I hadn’t established good, efficient waste-collecting routines, I was soon averaging well over sixty miles a week. While much of this was in
the country, it seemed that as soon as I got into the city I got a puncture. There’s never a good time to get these but at nine o’clock on a cold, wet, winter night, after a physically tough day, it’s even less pleasant. Within three weeks, I had used up the few patches I’d had before the start of my year and buying a new puncture repair kit wasn’t an option. I tried reinforcing the tires with old linoleum, so that sharp objects couldn’t pierce them, but the little bits that broke off the linoleum served only to compound the problem.

Searching for an alternative, I came across a company, Green Tyres, which made unpuncturable tires. They used solar energy to power their production and selected their original staff from the long-term unemployed. I really admired the ethos of the company and the fact that their product would prevent a lot of unnecessary resources being used for new inner tubes and repair kits. I wrote a blog about them, so that those who used money could benefit, even if I couldn’t. The director of Green Tyres, Sue Marshall, was so thankful she emailed to say she was sending me a few tires in the mail. This wasn’t a solution I had considered as a possibility, but it was a great reminder that if you trust in life and give without any thought of receiving, whatever you need will come your way when you need it. Which was lucky, as I was only one patch away from walking for a year!

Everything, it seemed, took longer. Take washing my clothes. In the past, I’d gather any clothes needing washing, throw them in the machine, take them out when they were done and stick them on the radiator: easy. Not any more. Before I could begin my laundry, I had to make my own soap. First, I hauled waste wood from the city, on the back of the bike, to make a fire. Next, I fired up the rocket stove to boil some water, into which I stuck some
soapnuts (
Sapindus mukkorossi
, a plant native to Nepal), ‘foraged’ from a local eco-store that had gone out of business. I boiled the nuts up for about half an hour – constantly feeding the rocket stove with old broken-up vegetable boxes – and lo! I had myself
some detergent. This was no ordinary detergent; not only did it clean just as well as supermarket brands, it was much more environmentally friendly and certainly not tested on animals. With no way of heating lots of water, I’d put the clothes and detergent in a my small, makeshift sink with some icy-cold water, scrub for forty minutes, rinse for twenty minutes and hand-wring as much water out as I could before hanging them up to dry. In winter, clothes can take days, if not the entire week, to dry outside.

Not only washing clothes took extra time; everything did. Making a cup of tea took about twenty minutes. I decided it was sometimes more pleasurable to just not drink tea. Going to the toilet was equally time-consuming. First, I had to make sure the coast was clear; I didn’t want to upset local people who might arrive on the public path near my compost toilet just as the belt of my pants hit my ankles. Then, my hole in the ground inevitably seemed to be full at exactly the wrong time, and I’d have to spend ten minutes, with tightly-clenched buttocks, digging a hole half the size of my leg while praying I wouldn’t have an accident and have to re-start the whole clothes washing process.

When it got cold, I couldn’t turn the central heating on. There’d be wood-chopping, kindling-gathering, paper-finding and fire-starting before the fire even got going. Then it took a further thirty minutes to warm the trailer. There isn’t, unfortunately, a timer on a wood burning stove. It all sounds like a nightmare, but it’s wrong of me to portray it like that. There are a lot of environmental benefits in this way of life, which I believe outweigh the inconveniences:

Time to wash clothes with money: 10 minutes. Time to wash clothes without money: 2 hours 15 minutes.

Water used to wash clothes in a machine: 25 gallons. Water used to wash clothes by hand: 3 gallons.

Water used in a flush toilet each day per person (according to American Water Works Association Research): 18 gallons. Water used in a composting toilet each day per person: 0 gallons.

If the people of the US successfully made the transition to compost toilets, not only would every household save 34,000 gallons per year (American Water works Association Research Foundation) we’d also have a lot of great compost, to put back into the soil to replace everything that we’ve taken out.

Average household energy bill: $1,400 per year (more than my entire sustainable home cost!). My average monthly energy bill: $0. (This difference is like a person on the minimum wage having two weeks off work during winter.)

I discovered that I had no such thing as a work life–social life–private life balance. I just had life. Instead of doing an evening class paid for by the money I earned in a normal job, my learning came from being out in nature. I became acquainted with the sounds of local birds and learned more about squirrels through observing them than I ever could on the internet. I realized that Jew’s ears mushrooms have a fondness for elder trees and that there’s a big difference between burning elder wood and alder wood.

My favorite times were when it rained heavily. I’d listen to the rain crashing on the roof with a real appreciation for the shelter that was keeping me dry and protected, and for the tree that supplied me with the wood that was now keeping me warm against the wind. Not to mention my thankfulness to the guy who made the wood burning stove. Such gratitude increases as you get closer to nature and the things that you use; the more degrees of separation you have, the less you appreciate them.

Because of what I was doing and the exposure it got, I did a lot of writing. I’d dreamed of living with nature for years; years when I had complained that I could never find the right space to think, read and write. Sitting in front of the wood burning stove, watching the embers glow and looking at the moonlight filtering through the trees, was perfect. My thoughts were clearer and I wrote articles in half the time it would have taken in the city.

It wasn’t all nature and coping with my, perhaps inevitable, feelings of isolation. There were free movie nights in the city and most weeks I’d go to Freeskilling. These evenings were so much fun and very informative, and gave me a real sense of doing something communally. They were also a great way for local people, who couldn’t afford to pay £10 ($15) or more for a workshop, to learn the traditional skills they would need for a sustainable future. Through Freeskilling, I got to meet loads of new friends every week and learned new skills at the same time. After each session, we would often go back to somebody’s house, rambling into the early hours about what we had learned and how we wanted to put it into practice. I organized the evenings with two local Freeconomists, Lucy and Amanda, with whom I became good friends very quickly. While neither had any inclination to live without money completely, both were passionate about skill-sharing and the need to rebuild our crumbling communities through sharing resources. Their enthusiasm and energy was a great source of inspiration.

Living the slow life is definitely more time-consuming, but I’d rather have it consumed this way than in watching a reality TV show in the room we call ‘living’. If we want to be truly sustainable in the long term, I really believe that this is what we need to do. The modern conveniences we have grown to love, the washing machines, dishwashers, and cars, come from an industrialized society, with the pollution and environmental
destruction that go hand in hand with it. If I didn’t really believe this, I wouldn’t put myself to so much trouble.