Advance praise for Farewell, My Subaru
“Fine is Bryson Funny.” ——Santa Cruz Sentinel
“Fine is an amiable and self-deprecating storyteller in the mold
of Douglas Adams. If you''re a fan of Hitchhiker''s Guide to the
Galaxy-style humor -- and also looking to find out how to raise
your own livestock to feed your ice-cream fetish -- Farewell may
prove a vital tool.” —— The Washington Post
“Fine is an eco-hero for our time..” —— Miami Herald
“An afterward offers solid advice and sources for lea
內容簡介：
Like many Americans, Doug Fine enjoys his creature comforts,
來源：香港大書城megBookStore,http://www.megbook.com.hk but he also knows full well they keep him addicted to oil. So he
wonders: Is it possible to keep his Netflix and his car, his Wi-Fi
and his subwoofers, and still reduce his carbon footprint?
In an attempt to find out, Fine up and moves to a remote ranch in
New Mexico, where he brazenly vows to grow his own food, use
sunlight to power his world, and drive on restaurant grease. Never
mind that he’s never raised so much as a chicken or a bean. Or that
he has no mechanical or electrical skills.
Whether installing Japanese solar panels, defending the goats he
found on Craigslist against coyotes, or co-opting waste oil from
the local Chinese restaurant to try and fill the new “veggie oil”
tank in his ROAT short for Ridiculously Oversized American Truck,
Fine’s extraordinary undertaking makes one thing clear: It ain’t
easy being green. In fact, his journey uncovers a slew of
surprising facts about alternative energy, organic and locally
grown food, and climate change.
Both a hilarious romp and an inspiring call to action, Farewell,
My Subaru makes a profound statement about trading today’s instant
gratifications for a deeper, more enduring kind of
satisfaction.
關於作者：
DOUG FINE, a contributor to NPR and Public Radio
International, has reported from remote perches in Burma, Rwanda,
Laos, Guatemala, and Tajikistan. He is the author of Not Really
an Alaskan Mountain Man, and lives in southern New Mexico.
內容試閱：
One
THE PARKING BRAKE WAKE-UP CALL
As I watched my Subaru Legacy slide backward toward my new
ranch’s studio outbuilding, the thought crossed my mind that if it
kept going— and I didn’t see why it wouldn’t—at least I would be
using less gasoline. A few days after I moved into the sprawling,
crumbling, forty-one acre New Mexico spread that I had named the
Funky Butte Ranch it had a funky limestone butte on its east side
where two great horned owls with an active love life nested, I
neglected to firmly apply that last click to the parking brake on
my aged fossil fuel–powered hatchback, the LOVEsubee.
This was a good thing. Really. The imminent demise of my ride, I
rationalized, would help me with one of my four big goals for the
next year, which were:
1. Use a lot less oil
2. Power my life by renewable energy
3. Eat as locally as possible
4. Don’t starve, electrocute myself, get eaten by the local
mountain lions, get shot by my UN-fearing neighbors, or otherwise
die in a way that would cause embarrassment if the obituary writer
did his or her research
Epiphany in the desert Southwest is not subtle. Almost nothing in
this stark, gorgeous ecosystem is. I moved several thousand miles
from my place of birth in order to kick fossil fuels and live
locally. Three days later, MY CAR WAS LITERALLY RUNNING AWAY FROM
ME. This is how lessons are taught in a place where even sitting
down means a possible impaling. I figured I would forge success
from astonishing, seemingly irrevocable defeat, you know, like Al
Gore.
I didn’t need the message hammered home so literally. The time
was absolutely right for me personally to embark on this adventure
in living green—other than having no electrical, plumbing,
building, engine mechanical, horticultural, or animal husbandry
skills at all, that is. After growing up on Dominoes Pizza in the
New York suburbs, at age thirty-six I wanted to see if a regular
guy who enjoyed his comforts could maintain them with a reduced-oil
footprint. In concrete terms, this meant raising animals and crops
for my food, figuring out some way besides unleaded to get
anywhere, and making bank account–draining investments in solar
power.
I’d lived and worked in extreme conditions on five continents
since the beginning of my career as a journalist fifteen years ago,
but time and again, after shivering in Alaska and dodging bullets
in Tajikistan, I reaffirmed what I already knew: I like my Netflix,
wireless e-mail, and booming subwoofers. In fact, I didn’t want to
live without them. I just wanted to power them by the sun. If my
ear- melting music could go solar, and still make my UN-fearing
neighbors complain about bass lines interrupting their nightmares
of Hillary Clinton, I’d consider this experiment a success. If I
had reliable Internet and could download movies into my green world
to boot, the feeling would be closer to “Eureka!” Especially if I
was eating munchies I’d grown, raised, or at least bought
locally.
Because as I saw things, global climate change, pollution, world
wars, and human rights aside, the Oil Age has had a great run:
fossil fuels turned the United States, for example, from a nation
of farmers into the Jetsons. I largely welcome this. I know I sure
dig my laptop. When else in history could I have listened to Malian
drumming or Beatles outtakes or some DJ mixing the two all within
three clicks? When else could I be that DJ? This really is the best
time ever to be alive, if you’re fortunate enough to live in the
West and not be in the armed forces. In short, I wanted to prove
that green Digital Age living was possible, and I was psyched to
get cracking.
Coincidentally, society seemed to be ready, too, or at least to
have transformed from considering such an experiment radically
subversive to simply radically unfeasible. By 2005, when I moved to
New Mexico, even a marginally coherent man deemed president of the
United States was struggling to pronounce “biofuels” at the State
of the Union Address. Citigroup, the world’s largest company,
announced in 2007 that it was investing $50 billion in green
projects. Companies were marketing everything from “sustainable”
mascara to green SUVs. What was next? Environmentally friendly
gunpowder? Organic Raid roach spray? Nothing would surprise me at
this point.
From Zambian government officials who refused genetically
modified organism seeds during a recent famine to Russian spies
who continued to kill one another over their boss’s natural gas
policy, it just felt like a critical mass had recognized that the
fossil fuel– powered civilization that got us to this point was in
big trouble. Maybe it has fifty years, maybe one hundred left in
its life cycle. In addition to my personal reasons, to my
“environmentally sensitive while comfortable” motivations, I saw
adaptation as a matter of survival.
I didn’t know if the current green rage was just another trend—a
fad until oil prices came down a little. But what if $2.29 gas
prices weren’t coming back? What if $3.29 oil prices weren’t coming
back? What started out as a cute whim for me quickly became a much
more personal journey.
Whether I needed the lesson or not, the LOVEsubee was gathering a
head of steam. I recall the instant I discovered that I had a
parking brake issue on my hands. Perhaps three quarters of a second
earlier, halfway between my car and house, I caught the hint of
something moving in my peripheral vision. I had just returned from
what would become my weekly, monumental supply run to the town of
Silver City, twenty-three miles away. In my possession were five
store-bought, organic, box-ripened tomatoes, “grown” eight hundred
miles away in California and shipped to the crunchy Silver City
co-op via roughly a hundred twenty gallons of fossil fuels.
Life had been idyllic for a brief moment that July afternoon. Two
green Rufous hummingbirds ignored FAA altitude requirements around
my head, and I had an unfamiliar proprietary sense about them and
everything on the ranch. I was going to be here for a while, and
there was evidence everywhere. For instance, I had already bought
an actual non–thrift store bed. An expensive, four-figure one,
following an extensive test in the furniture showroom that nearly
got me evicted from the store. For a thousand bucks, I thought the
mattress should hold up to every kind of rigor.
The Funky Butte Ranch being the first property I had ever owned,
I was kind of sauntering through the postclosing honeymoon phase in
a haze of bliss, excessive capital outflow, and plans. In fact, I
don’t know why they call that nightmare at the title company a
“closing.” It should be called an “opening.”
An opening to new projects, loves, entire worldviews. I found I
was already becoming much more of a fiscal conservative, now that I
owed property taxes for the first time. Small government suddenly
seemed the way to go.
Alone on my new property, my mind was also wandering. Wandering
in the way a healthy guy’s mind wanders when he’s got time to
think—and not just because of all the mattress testing. I was
freshly single again, after a long and spiritually unsatisfying
relationship. My body was still adjusting. In my first few days at
the Funky Butte Ranch, in fact, I kept censoring conversations
between my pituitary and my cerebrum that went along these
lines:
Pituitary: Why don’t we take a little break from repairing the
goat pen to find out if the ol’ Sweetheart wants to take a little
break from whatever she’s doing?
Cerebrum: The ol’ ex-Sweetheart isn’t in our life anymore. She
lives in a McMansion two hundred fifty miles away.
Pituitary: Fine. I’m sure you can provide a substitute.
Cerebrum: Look, we can’t bring home the goats and get started on
this local living project if we don’t secure the goat pen from
predators. Did you not see the mountain lion teeth marks on that
deer carcass in the creek bed? There are other things in life
besides sex.
Pituitary: You think so? Try and think about anything else while
you’re working on that cow pen.
Cerebrum: Goat pen.
Pituitary: Whatever.
But there was no time for daydreaming. I turned my head and there
it was, my car of twelve years and crash pad from time to time,
gliding furiously in reverse, and, it should be pointed out, not on
fossil fuels, across my irises and down the hill toward the
beautiful stone building I planned to use as a writing and dance
studio. It all happened so fast. Before I even had time to say
“Come back, LOVEsubee!” a one-hundred-year-old live oak, like a
last defender on a long kickoff run-back, knocked the vehicle off
its trajectory. It miraculously came to rest against a ten-foot
yucca, a variety featuring spears that would suffice for medieval
combat.
“Firmly apply the parking brake” is the message I was getting as
I moronically waved my vine of nonlocal tomatoes at the LOVEsubee.
“To your unsustainable life. To petroleum in your very food and
coal in your hot water. To relationships based on lust. The whole
thing.”
As a person raised on the East Coast of the United States, I
bring a healthy skepticism to anything that sounds too Whoo Whoo
and New Mexico is perhaps the World Capital of Whoo Whoo gurus,
diets, left- and right-wing conspiracies, and alien sightings. But
I couldn’t even park my car at my new ranch without the world
screaming “Less Oil. More Heart.”
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