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I read a little anecdote recently, in a book by Mike Madison called Blithe Tomato, which is a series of essays about organic farming in California. It was about an old character who sells stuff at the local farmer's market. Turns out he isn't a lifelong farmer. He was a bridge engineer who one day had the realization that the beautiful bridges he designed were just making it possible for untouched wilderness areas to be destroyed by developers. So, that day, he quit being a bridge engineer. He moved out to forty acres he had bought a while before as an investment, and grows all his own food on two of the acres. The rest of the land he is restoring to native grasses. He's been there for twenty or thirty years now. He doesn't have electricity and he doesn't miss it. He misses his wife though, who divorced him. She didn't want to be a subsistence farmer and restore grassland, apparently.

Used to be, when I sat around shooting the breeze with friends, relatives, or people I sat next to at traffic school, we would talk about our kids, our pets, the lousy weather, refinancing the mortgage, and fun things like that. But now, all anybody ever talks about is moving. We live in one of the most coveted places on earth, coastal California, and we all want to get out.

I've lived within thirty miles of here my whole life, and have lived in this little valley of fifteen families for twenty-five years. In that time, the whole climate of life has changed. What used to be a funky, easy-going little university/beach town, surrounded by trailer parks and farms, has become frenetic, chic, insanely overcrowded, regulated to the nth degree, and so expensive that it has made the top five least-affordable places to live in the United States list for the past ten years.

Many of my old friends and neighbors have already left. They've moved to the Sierras, Oregon, Washington,—one person I know had just had it with the whole United States and moved to Canada. They buy land in these places. Forty, fifty, eighty acres, for what a two bedroom house with asbestos siding, and a neighbor peering from his kitchen into yours, costs here.

But, my husband's job is here, and particle physics isn't something there's a lot of call for in most rural towns. My daughter loves her high school. And we all love our little house, which my husband and I designed and built with our own hands. So, we are staying. We try to ride bicycles when we have to go to town, because the traffic is so bad now you can't otherwise get about very well. Our land is steep and forested, and pretty hard to make into anything very agrarian. I dream about grass. Grass and wind.

Last weekend we cut down twenty trees. Most of them were pretty scrawny, but there were some substantial oaks and redwoods among them. I have hated to watch trees being felled, it feels like murder, but this time I didn't care. I am sick of living in the shade. We roofed the hay shed, and set more posts for the cross fencing. I still don't own any herbivorous mammals, only ducks and chickens. I covet every pasture I go by.

There are two separate, intertwined subjects here. The smaller one is: how do I live? The larger one is: how does anyone live? The larger question, I believe, has arisen with greater urgency than ever before, because we have so successfully broken the connection between us and natural time. Maybe it started with electric lights, but it has really gotten unbearable now that no one seems to get up when it's light and go to bed when it's dark, rest in the middle of the afternoon when it's hot, sit down and eat together after a day of labor, or do much of anything else which has kept life sewn together for thousands of years. It is this perception of the fabric of life unraveling faster and faster that makes people say, “I've got to get out of here.”

I wonder if the people who succeed in leaving here just create another crazy-making place somewhere else, or do they really get away, like that old guy at the farmer's market? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy a few chickens and follow their example? Chickens know when to go to bed, how to enjoy the sunshine, and how to pay attention to what's right under your beak. They have a few moral flaws (male insensitivity, cannibalism), but I think we can deal with those.

Last weekend, at an extended-family get-together, even my staid, middle-class, suburban brother-in-law was talking about buying remote land in the mountains of northern California, and living off-grid. I said wistfully, “I'll come too.”