For some, less is more

Remember from your youth the potheads, the guys who slept in their rust-bucket cars, the women who baked their own bread from scratch and bartered it for used shoes?

They're back.

You can reunite in this quirky, unsettling and fascinating look at 21st-century men and women who have cut the cord to power and water and choose to live, for a variety of reasons, "Off the Grid."

The author, Nick Rosen, is British, a journalist and documentary filmmaker who edits Off-grid.net and lives part-time off the grid on the island of Majorca.

He purports there are half a million Americans living off the grid, at least part-time -- from environmentalists to survivalists, plus the rich, the poor and the angry.

He purports millions more would do so if it weren't so hard to find cheap land, to get building permits and mortgages from leery officialdom, or to plant an old motor home on a lovely bit of land without issues.

Why aren't more of us moving back to the land? "The main requirement is a change of mind-set," Rosen writes. He details how power companies have for a century promoted power-guzzling home appliances to addict us to ease. "Americans are happy and proud to buy and use recycled toilet paper," he writes, "but a composting toilet is another matter, a level most people won't even think about."

This book is your opportunity to not only think about that, but to introduce yourself to the Clivus Multrum, which Rosen calls, "the Hummer of composting toilets, a vast and intricate object."

It's also a way to step into a variety of off-the-grid shoes.

Consider Sequoia, who lived with a couple hundred others on a 5,000-acre off-the-grid ranch in Mendocino, Calif., a woman who "would stride around the back roads wearing nothing but cowboy boots ... a joint hanging from her pouting lips, boyfriend du jour at her side." Now she's dead, "lying in state on the clubhouse table," while other residents drink her rare tequilas as she had asked them to do.

We meet plenty of other pot-smokers and growers. But we also meet a very rich guy who built his own hydroelectric plant on his Colorado mountain ranch. We meet a Vietnam vet who lives in a steam-cleaned, 10,000-gallon kerosene tank.

We spend some time with novelist Carolyn Chute ("The Beans of Egypt, Maine"), who lives without indoor plumbing.

Everyone speaks, and Rosen quotes them well.

Says a man who sleeps in his four-door Saturn in Boulder, Colo.: "I don't live in a car. I live out of a car." He rents a storage unit for his stuff. And a Mennonite who started a cheese-making business told Rosen: "I'm trying to live a more common lifestyle."

Almost all of these off-the-gridders had decency in common. I do wish, however, that Rosen had spent less time on the intricacies of pot-growing in California, and less space quoting wacko Sept. 11, 2001, conspiracy theorists.

But his book will linger with me, making me ask uncomfortable questions of myself: How much do I need? Why do I need it? And can I live better without it?

Susan Ager, a former columnist for the Detroit Free Press, is at susan@susanager.com.