Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas.
Just off Singing Hills Road, in one of hundreds of two-story homes dotting a former cattle ranch beyond the southern fringes of Denver, Phil Boyle and his family openly wonder if they will have to move close to town to get some relief.
They still revel in the space and quiet that has drawn a steady exodus from American cities toward places like this for more than half a century. Their living room ceiling soars two stories high. A swing-set sways in the breeze in their backyard. Their wrap-around porch looks out over the flat scrub of the high plains to the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
But life on the fringes of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable. Mr. Boyle and his wife must drive nearly an hour to their jobs in the high-tech corridor of southern Denver. With gasoline at more than $4 a gallon, Mr. Boyle recently paid $121 to fill his pickup truck with diesel fuel. The price of propane to heat their spacious house has more than doubled in recent years.
It all depends on what you define as “country.” Our nearest neighbors are nearly a mile away. Our modest 1100 sq ft home stays toasty warm in winter, courtesy of hedge wood (osage orange). There’s a half-acre garden out back, and almost as much in berries and fruit trees.
Except for church, there are times we don’t go past the mailbox for days on end. So far out of town we have to keep our own tomcat.
The problem with suburban living is that it combines the worst aspects of both rural and urban life, with few of the benefits of either.
That’s why we have a fireplace in our home……..and we use it. It’s amazing how much it reduces our gas bill……..we turn the thermostat down to a comfortable 70 degrees in the winter, we wear sweatshirts and sweaters, and we use the fireplace at night until bedtime at midnight when it’s really cold. Down-filled comforters really help. And we’re comfortable!
There’s something else to think about: How many of us think to install blackout drapes on our windows? We installed two curtain rods…..one for the blackout drapes and the other for decorative drapes……NICE! Keeps the heat out in the hot months, and the cold out in the winter! It works!
[blockquote] The problem with suburban living is that it combines the worst aspects of both rural and urban life, with few of the benefits of either. [/blockquote]
Thank you! If I had a nickel for every time I have said exactly that!
THIS is country life. Oh, ha ha ha ha, country life! Welcome to rural America. Folks around here – where there is REAL country life – put their five to seven cord of firewood in the wood shed, and light the wood stove first when the black frosts begin. It goes out in April sometime, when sugaring is over and done. Wood is right around $200/cord. We may go without medical coverage of any kind, but we put our fuzzy bunny slippers on, draw the rocking chair up close to the wood stove, and drink a couple of glasses of real hot water, flavored with gin, three cloves, a slice of orange, a slice of lemon, and a stick of cinnamon to alter the flat taste of hot water. Then we close our eyes and listen to the logs settle in the fire. Then we go to bed. And this is not a joke either.
Cut your own wood out back this summer, split it and let it sit in piles till late September. When you start pressing cider, bring it into the woodshed. The wood shed should face southwest. Leave enough space so you can put an old overstuffed chair in the northeast corner just by the wall. That way, when the low winter sun shines in but the wind is brutal northwest, you can sit outside, sheltered, while the wind hammers the cold wall. Take coffee. Singing Hills Road! What a name! Larry
Larry, I know exactly what you mean! I was born and raised in the North Country of upstate New York……’WAY upstate……and we country families did just fine being out in the boonies! Nothing like milking the cows at 5 AM on a frosty winter morning! It just takes a while to get your blood circulating!
Oh amen Brother (or Sister, as the case may be)! When the white wolf walks abroad in January and snarls at the back door, demanding you come out, then it is time for the rocking chair and the wood stove, the poetry workbook, and the warm slow dreams of the perfect trout stream, where the wood thrushes sing and the trout wait in the cold pools, and all just for you.
he fact is, that if my wood shed’s full, I do love winter. This is the time for fresh doughnuts and hot cider when you come in from work! God is never more present than on a iron moonlit night, when the shadows are black and all is pewtered silence and the strong outlines of the earth are so clear. Tend my sheep, Christ said, and that is what I have done, the cold sheep sheds, the quiet breathing of the ewes, their hot breath making clouds in the bitter air, the heat lamp and the new lamb. (Age has driven me from being a shepherd, but I remember it only too well. How Christ hit so correctly on the right image!)
Larry
I live in the suburbs. I have a pellet stove (it will burn coal and wood at need, but will not “feed” it). The stove heats the entire house and means I don’t need to run my electricity. I have a whole house fan which I run for a couple of hours in the evening, and this, together with fans means I dont run my air conditioner. I have venetian blinds on the South facing windows which are kept closed during the day. (I will probably put see through solar reflection adhesive on it. I have this in the bathroom, and it blocks heat and glare, and lets the light through).
I have a vegitable garden. My ground cover is in strawberries. I have pecan trees, apple trees, plum trees, raspberry, blueberry, grape, apple berry and kiwi vines. I can. If I had the guts to kill chickens after their productive years, I would have hens (No rooster, but you don’t need a rooster for eggs). If I was more certain about the safety of bees, I would keep bees. (I may do all these things later).
And I still have city plumbing and city electric (and if the city services are suddenly hit by power outages, well, I have a privacy fence and I can use a composting toilet as well as anybody else. (There is one in emergency supplies).
In the suburbs, I could still ride my bike to work (which I could not do in the country). I wouldn’t enjoy it, especially in winter, but I’m sure I could get used to riding 10 miles a day.
What’s not to like about the suburbs? You get the best of city life (access to services, power, electricity, plumbing) and the best of country (access to land for food, beauty, neighborliness).
And of course there is city water. But us suburbanites can attach rain water barrels to our gutters, and if the city water fails, we will live off our barrels, instead of watering our lawns. (I have bleach in the emergency supplies. I also have several food grade containers of water in emergency supplies).
If you are a city dweller who is willing to put in the work of a country dweller, then suburbs are the best of both worlds
Well said, Clueless. You don’t sound clueless to me. But here’s the problem. You have neighbors right next to you. Bad. Moreover, I don’t think the zoning laws will let you raise livestock of any sort and they prolly won’t let you have bees. I keep bees, and I must say that it’s lucky I don’t have neighbors right next door, esp. ones with a swimming pool.
Still, solitude – the real thing, not the privacy fence – would be hard to give up. Anyway, you are doing the right thing in your own world. (It sounds much warmer there than where I am. I would be hard pressed to do without real winter. I suspect Cynnydd is familiar with 20-30 below if he/she comes from northern NY. That’s proper winter.) L
I forgot to mention that we had a very deep well and an ice-cold spring on our property, along with a cistern in our basement……and the nearest city water system was fifteen miles away. The comforts of home…..and no utility bills except for the power company, the phone, and #2 fuel oil once every other month…..if we needed it. We also had our own generators…..one for the house, and the other for the barn and outbuildings.
I’m a “he,” and yes, I’m VERY FAMILIAR with sub-zero weather. I was stationed with the USAF in Montana and Thule Air Base, Greenland! 40 below zero when the wind blows and you can’t see 6 inches in front of your face during a white-out!
Well, we are wimps here in the “show me state”. Plenty of snow and ice, but it rarely gets below about 10 below or 100 above.
Still, I am impressed by my lack of any need to use either airconditioning or electric heating with the stove and fan.
Depends on the surburb in question when ti comes to livestock. I know several folks who keeps chickens (but no roosters) as much as pets as for eggs. And a cousin kept a pair of goats to help maintain the grass on her VERY steep back yard, till she felt guilty since they kept being eaten (she said by foxes, I suspect coyotes, they’re in Atlanta now). So you can do livestock in a small way, depending on your neighbors.
Want to sweat, soak, and suffer in the summer? Try downtown Manhattan at noon!
I saw -40 once, and that was plenty. I can work outside at -10 or -15, but aft er that, show me the wood stove! -40 is MEAN, BRUTAL. Bu I’ll venture this, that I would survive temperatures like that sooner than downtown Manhattan on a hot, humid August day.
But on the thread, it may be that current conditions will see the spread of home garden and community g ardens, and this will be a real gain in American life because the real garden and the CG are a face-to-face social occasion; working together – real work, sweat work – is good strong soil on which to plant a friendship. Of maybe it will increase the number of people who actually walk to a farmers market and buy tomatoes that are real, and corn that is just of the stalk. Do you want to get to know your father better? Go out on some late September evening at the edge of dark and set about digging potatoes. Good stuff, every minute of it.
There is something about the agrarian world that makes religion more real, more palatable, more palpable. If I were to revitalize Christianity, I would make the unchurched work in the fields and meadows. Larry
Good thought, Larry! A good many of our church members here in Los Banos are hard-working farmers and cattle ranchers…..good folks! They’re one of the reasons why living here is so great. The Farmers’ Market down the road from us is open every Saturday, and boy, the fresh local produce is fantastic! But more important is the fact that this town of 38,000 people has 25 churches, and you won’t see a single business open downtown on Sundays……except for one drugstore (state law).
A pleasant, cheerful, positive thread here…o that we might weave this into a broader fabric. The agrarian tradition needs somehow to be revived for its concepts are deep in our bones. If many go back to working the soil, each in his own way – and see Clueless’s solution, then there will be a new sense of calm, a new vitality to what should properly be called conservatism, the abiding desire to articulate the best of the past with the potential of the future.
I cannot speak for women, but there is a farmer in a surprising number of men of all sorts and conditions. Take a confirmed urbanite with pointy shoes and a rash of extreme sophistication, put him him in a hayfield freshly mowed, let him become adjusted to the notion that he will have to walk out, not take a taxi, and ancient memories, long dormant, will scent his dreams. It is a common sophistication that the image of “the cattle winding slowly o’er the lea” is all nonsense. Well, that’s dead wrong. Mother Nature, as I have said before, is good to sleep with but a bitch to married to – all true enough. But once you accept this reality, then she speaks nothing but the truth, nothing, and she tells us what we passionately want to know, that life is born anew, that death is temporary. When we smell new mown hay, when we see the maple leaves in the fall,we are reminded that some things have to die for their fragrance and color to be released; the soul knows this instinctively, and nature, who can only speaks facts, tells us that this is not merely metaphor. Larry
Amen.
By the way, it occured to me why you asked me how severe our winters were. We only get down to -10, but I believe that my whole house fan and pellet stove would withstand far greater extremes. The secret is that I have insulated the inside of my attic in Mylar (there is a special attic insulation material that has pores in it that breathes that is based on Mylar. (I also have two solar roof fans to keep it from overheating).
Since heat rises, the heat from my stove (which is large enough to heat the home) does not escape in the winter and the house stays warm. On hot days the heat from the sun does not penetrate the attic (very well) and on sunny days, which are the hottest, the solar attic fans automatically turn on and cool the attic.
I have also put thermal film on my south south west windows.
We have a couple of car batteries to keep the pellet stove operating should there be a power failure (it will still work manually, but the mechanism that automatically feeds pellets throught the day runs on electricity).
I’m waiting until Cheney’s 300,000 million dollar long lived car battery comes in. Then I will put solar panels on the house to run lights and electric and to run an electric car, with the goal of being off the grid.
(BTW none of this, with the probable exception of the last paragraph is expensive. I have cut my power bills to a quarter, despite increases in the cost of energy).
I plan to be off the grid
“she speaks nothing but the truth, nothing, and she tells us what we passionately want to know, that life is born anew, that death is temporary. When we smell new mown hay, when we see the maple leaves in the fall,we are reminded that some things have to die for their fragrance and color to be released; the soul knows this instinctively, and nature, who can only speaks facts, tells us that this is not merely metaphor”
Definately. The folks who are most at peace with their mortality, and with the ravages of age, are the farm folk in my practice. They face their personal “winters” with cheerful practicality, and none of the anxiety and despair that characterize the more “successful” folks.
Three acres and a cow used to be the rule for every English yoman. There is still something to be said for it.