At night I remain toasty inside a
good sleeping bag and during days the heat of my computer and my own body keep
the trailer's small space warm enough. I wear several layers of clothing and
often work at the keyboard in fingerless gloves. My main problem is that
sometimes the oxygen runs low and I must let in fresh air. Then heat escapes
like a frightened wren.
This entire last summer I never
once turned on a fan (most days I wore clothing only for jogging and working in
the garden), and I'm hoping to make it through this winter without once using
the small electric space-heater kept for emergencies. Some years I've managed,
others I've needed the heater, though never for more than a few minutes each
day. This week last year we had a 14°F (-10°C) morning and I was glad to have
the heater then.
I used to keep quiet about my
living style, especially about my insistence on not wasting energy. I know that
most people who see how I live regard me as being either despicably miserly or
else mentally unstable. When our hunters meet me on a road some of them address
me as if I were a child, or the village idiot. Though they can hear that I
speak normally, they haven't the resources to interpret my appearance any other
way.
When I am in a regular US home and
either the air conditioner or heat pump drones on and on, it weighs upon me. I
cannot but keep thinking of the vast environmental destruction being caused in
the name of my physical comfort. Land lost to coal mining, the production of
greenhouse gases, radioactive wastes... all to produce energy to have me feel
cooler or warmer without needing to add or remove clothing.
When at night I turn off my
energy-efficient computer and my little 40-watt, high-intensity reading lamp,
not an electron flows in my trailer. While I sleep, no ecological violence is
committed on behalf of my comfort, and maybe that's one reason I sleep so
soundly and awaken so glad.
*****
COLORS AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT
Sometimes I just pause and take in
all the colors, textures and patterns around me. For instance, so I can sit in
the sunshine and write this, I open the door to my room.
Beneath the 15-ft-high ceiling the
room's walls are painted gold. The doorframe, the pipes bracketed to the walls
carrying electrical wiring, and the metal bars across my high windows are all
blue. The ceiling is white concrete between 26 closely spaced, rusty-red
rafters. The ceiling fan is white. The tiled floor, cool to my feet, is a
mosaic of patterns -- green, pink, cream, brown, gray tiles, and a few
multicolored tiles with snowflake designs and arabesques.