Twelve by Twelve by Micahel Powers Page A

wonder.
    I recalled my years living and traveling in villages and cities throughout Africa, India, and South America, enmeshed in communities of people who lived outside modernity, who walked and biked — and swam — everywhere. In large cities like La Paz, Bolivia, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, less than 2 percent of people own cars, mostly because they can’t afford them. When I lived in those places, I watched the locals and tried to emulate them. Squeezing five to a tiny taxi in La Paz you could cross the city for a quarter. Rapport usually developed among fellow passengers in such tight quarters, leading to some fascinating conversations.
    In the Bolivian Amazon, the indigenous Chiquitano people have no cars, and barely any roads — the river is their highway. They engage in what I came to call Amazon swimming, where they combine pleasure and function into a seamless activity. Instead of swimming directly up the Amazon tributaries to do the chore at hand — weeding a field, visiting a relative — they backstroke in a lazy, curvy pattern, sometimes chatting with a friend as both swim. They might stop midway to eat wild pineapple springing up on the river bank somewhere. I began to do this in Pine Bridge, taking the circuitous route down dirt roads for diversity or going out of my way to visit new neighbors and friends.
    All the while, in front of the 12 × 12, that one-ton monstrosity of metal, plastic, and rubber sat as a nagging reminder of Western excess. I got in it once and turned the key, the motor roaring to life, bluesmoke shooting out of the tailpipe. I turned it off and walked down to No Name Creek. Before I even reached the banks I knew what I was going to do. I knew that having that car in that place at that time was too much. I’d crossed the elusive threshold of living well. In this situation, the car didn’t add anything. In fact, it rather complicated my life. Each day, one more unnecessary decision: drive or bike? With fewer options, I’d feel and be freer. And, anyway, why did I have to get anywhere faster than two wheels or two feet could take me?
    I called my mom and told her. Silence.
    Finally, she said, definitively: “You’re keeping the car.”
    I tried to explain, but she told me there was no public transport in the area. I said I could take the bike ten miles to Siler City, lock it up, and get a bus from there, but she insisted.
    “You’re keeping the car,” she said, “and that’s my final word.” I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get her to take the car back. I figured the only way to convince her was to bring her out to the 12 × 12 so she could see for herself.

    THE STRENUOUS CONTOURS OF ENOUGH

7. MOM AND LEAH VISIT
    I DROVE BACK TO CHAPEL HILL and picked up my mother, and we drove back to Jackie’s. Instead of relaxing in the deep countryside, however, she grew increasingly anxious as the quiet isolation swallowed us, and particularly as we turned onto Jackie’s dirt road and parked in front of the 12 × 12.
    “Now you’re really keeping the car,” she said, a horrified look on her face as she regarded the miniature house on No Name Creek. I remembered my own first reaction: embarrassed for Jackie that she lived in such cramped quarters.
    In awkward silence we walked through Zone 1 and entered the house. My mother sank into the old rocking chair and soon remarked at how surprisingly roomy the place felt. We brewed tea from rainwater, picked mushrooms and asparagus for the evening meal, and watched the bees — as Jackie had predicted, they were now “swarming like a freight train” around the hive. After her initial wilderness shock, my mom blended rather easily into 12 × 12 life. Perhaps it was because she had a reference point: she’d served as a Catholic nun for fourteen years. Amid Jackie’s material simplicity, my mom talkedabout entering the convent at age eighteen. She’d wake up joyfully in her cloister at five AM each day to pray in silence. When she left