12/12/97 .. Kaczinski's Cabin.

Last Thursday was visiting day at the art factory. Two of my cohorts drove up the drive in quick succession and filled the kitchen with grand speculation.

I don't get many drop-ins. Some local shops become wateringholes. Sites for the morning smokebreak. Chatrooms via pickup. Heaven knows I'm sociable enough to down tools and smooze with any casual arrival, but something keeps this site from getting too many hits. Just as well. Maintaining the necessary solitude to create is an awkward juggle in any case. A friendly face is the best excuse to avoid the work. The kettle immediately goes on the hob.

It was amusing to have synchronous arrivals. Tim and Buzz both live out in the woods in small cabins in Brunswick. And have never encountered each other. Tim must be around thirty, and is still trying on different lifestyles. Buzz has been a recluse for thirty years. Watching them sound each other out was a hoot.

Tim went through the University of Maine where he studied under Richard Hill, the resident energy guru and stove designer, and we are talking about collaborating on a yurt installation out back. Tim has a scheme for mass heat storage in a sandbed floor which appeals to my diabetic toes. He's the kind of guy who'll futz around with a crazy notion until it becomes obvious. But he has difficulties with institutional life (smiles Bryce) and jumped off the fast track after school. He worked his way through college by summer clamming, and if tides work doesn't make you incorrigible, nothing will. Tim went back to the flats fulltime while he was figuring on post-grad trajectories. Took up urchin diving, and got onto that rocket ride. Independence, good money, the outdoor life, fascinations of the deep.. a tough combination to beat for a young guy.

It's hard to balance an ecological consciousness against a gogo fishery, though. The torquing out there is a wrench, as I can attest. On the one hand you are intimately engaged in observing the environment, your life and livelihood depend on it. On the other, you know the stocks are being pounded. Unless you convince yourself that the biome is healthy, and will bloom in other directions as you over-harvest a species, rip and switch begins to stick in your throat. Guys born and bred to fish are keeping up a cultural tradition, and tend to stay cooler on the subject of ecology. But hotdogs like Tim begin to sizzle as they watch fisheries die.

And Tim has other fish to fry. Without the whole cultural apparatus.. the village life, the hometown girl, the sense of continuity.. fishing begins to feel like a trap. Tim took his earnings, made a downpayment on a chunk of real estate along a prime shore in Brunswick, and began charting a new course. Took a brief course with a German fiddlemaker, and got the sawdust up his nose. In order to train his eye he started coming to Carlo's for life drawing, which is where we met him.

Tim was badly discouraged by his figure drawings.. it's tough to start cold when you are surrounded by a dozen talented artists.. and I think Tim stopped coming out of embarrassment. But he drops in here periodically to chew it all over. Alternative design, the craftsman's life, the ecological conundra, a new chin rest, economic practicalities. I'm not much help in the last department.

Tim got hired for two different jobs last month, one a techy manufacturing gig in the medical devices shop here in town, the other a social action job in Portland. His scheme was to earn enough to pay off his land, build the dream house and shop, then go back to self-employment. Make fiddles. The trouble with the self-employable is they are congenitally unemployable, out there. If you luck out early, and find you can survive on a self-gotten pittance, it's all over but the scrambling. Tim quit both jobs, and is still smiling.

The key, of course, is living on a pittance. Just ask Buzz.

Back in the late 60s Buzz was embarked on a career in hotel management, running one of the local inns, when he got swept up in the times. Dropped out. Built a 10X12 camp way out in the woods behind his family home.. where his childhood fort had been.. and experimented in the alternative lifestyle, as it was known. His father is an electrician and master of all crafts, so Buzz was techy enough to find plenty of work. As his name might suggest, he tended to experimental psychobotany.

Buzz was the maintenance man at the alternative school where Bob and the whole crew were deconstructing education, and describes how the kids would hang out in his shop, enraptured by the wonders of wrenches and compressors. When the grand plan unraveled, Buzz went into lobstering and marine construction with his buddy Bert. That must have been a sight to see. Mutt and Jeff conning a bargeful of ingredients out to the islands. The tales are comic.

But the fishery wore thin for Buzz and Bert, too. And Buzz became increasingly reclusive. Not coming out of the woods for months at a time. His life filled with the comings and goings of birds and beasts, the slow turning of the seasons. Buzz went from headstrong logging with chainsaw fever, to careful selective cutting, to the point where he couldn't bear to cut a live tree at all. When I met him he was carving monumental mythic figure out of deadfalls, and making deerhide drums. Gone full strange.. and wearing an aura. We became fellow travelers at art fairs, and I learned more about the quiet from Buzz. And how to drum out the voices.

Buzz has simplified his life to bare essentials, and is my benchmark for the other way. Not that he's gone absolutely primitive. He runs his gas generator for an hour every other day to power his CB radio, charge his bagphone (a recent gift from his sister), run his mini-TV and stereo. But he hauls water, uses an outhouse, and heats with wood... deadfalls he twitches out with a fourwheeler. Buzz's big expense is keeping a beater on the road.. maintenance, registration, and insurance. He and Doc, his black lab, can live for months on what we spend for a night out. His time is his own.

There's the choice. Absolute independence is impossible, probably undesirable, but you can get close to it.. from nowhere.. at the cost of material simplicity. It also helps to own your place free and clear. Buzz lives on family land. But Tim still has a mortgage.. as do we. If you aspire to the arts, fiddlemaking or wood carving, you better learn voluntary simplicity. At which point eco-philosophy and necessity converge. Buzz and Tim are eloquent on the foibles of a materialist culture. We're going to hell in a shopping basket, we agree. But how much of our noble minimalism is self-justification? Tough call.

Which brings us to Kaczinski. Assuming he's the Unabomber, Kaczinski carried an anti-materialist philosophy to an extreme conclusion. Now his "shack" is being held up as proof of his guilt.. or craziness. Anyone who'd live in such a place for years must be nuts, antisocial, dangerous. They've actually carted the cabin to Sacramento as evidence.

I think living like that is evidence of a radical craving for self-sufficiency. The independent dream. Don't you want to escape to a cabin in the woods? That's what summer cottages are all about. But there is something fundamentally estranged about the simple life.. not to mention that it ain't simple. String that guy up.

Tim and Buzz probably are dangerous, to our complacency. They are still trying on that frontier possibility, and it makes me feel bloated. I go around turning off lights after Buzz visits. And they are both nuts, of course. Buzz self-medicated himself for years, treating, as it turns out, a bi-polar condition. He had to end up in the mental a couple of times before he found the right balance.. and it's always tenuous at best. Tim's a young wildman. It was a treat to see him encounter an old master woodwizard.

These guys aren't sending letter-bombs, but their lives may be dangerously radical. They remind us how big a mess we're making, and how we've lost the gift of stillness.