BENEATH THE SKYLINE

I WANT TO LIVE LIKE A PURPLE MARTIN IN A SAGUARO

Deborah Good

For a year or two in high school, the most expensive thing I had ever owned was a pair of hiking boots. Then it was a down comforter and, later, a CD player. In the years since, I have grown a much longer but mostly unimpressive list of "things owned, over 100 dollars"—bike, floor rug, mattress, computer, and, as of a few years ago, a light blue Honda Civic.

None of these compares to a purchase I am pondering today. I have good reasons to consider it. Still, I stumble at the thought of attaching my name to a possession as invaluable and undomesticated as this: one acre of West Virginia woods, selling for 30 thousand dollars.

Property ownership is, of course, commonplace. The people I know are more likely to invest in a house or a condo than in a patch of maples and poplars. Nevertheless, for a non-homeowner like me, the prospect of buying land is a bit like grabbing hold of a new and unfamiliar branch in the tree I’m climbing, hoisting myself up, and freeing my head from the foliage to look around at my life.

What does it mean to own—a couch, a dog, a business, an acre?

There are the legal definitions. But day to day, the personal experience of knowing I have control and primary responsibility over everything I own infuses me with a sense of—oh, I don’t know what for sure—identity, wealth, power, security, and, grandest of all, SELF-SUFFICIENCY, the drug that carries us all forward on the rivers of capitalism.

In the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia, I traipsed around the land I may own someday soon. There are a dozen or so lots for sale, each labeled with a number nailed to a tree. I stood on Lot 1203, watching water gush over rocks and down a ravine, wondering how any of us could think it possible to own part of a stream; or the leaves-to-dirt mixture softening a hillside; or its moss, its trees.

In reality, I suppose no one owns a stream. The molecules of bonded hydrogen and oxygen are there and then gone; it would be impossible to grab hold of them with your bare hands if you tried.

You could, if you wanted, kneel on the bank with a mayonnaise jar, fill it, and cap it. You could set the jar on your window sill to catch bits of sunlight like magic floating dust. You could claim you had captured part of a stream, but you would be wrong. You would be the proud owner of a mayonnaise jar filled with water.

Chief Seattle of the Duwamish and Suquamish Indian tribes has been credited by many for a speech he supposedly gave in response to an 1854 treaty proposal. "How can you buy or sell the sky," he asks. "The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?"

With a little Internet research, I find that the historical merit of crediting Seattle with these words is dubious at best, that the "Chief Seattle" who has been attached to this speech and marketed by myriad environmental causes is, as one anthropologist puts it, "a fabrication by whites for whites." (William S. Abruzzi, "The Myth of Chief Seattle," Human Ecology Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 2000, pp. 72-75).

Even so, evidence does suggest this: The understanding of private land ownership we accept today with hardly a second thought arrived on boats from Europe, right alongside the guns and disease that nearly wiped out the peoples already living here. If you trace history back far enough, all land that is today "owned" by individuals or entities was first acquired through conquest—usually racist, bloody, and violent.

With this history in mind, and the realities of real estate markets, credit ratings, and my own ambiguous life plans, I feel in no way qualified to make a decision about purchasing land. The experience is yet another reminder of how much I live my life like a kid growing older: inquisitive, uncertain, and slightly terrified of the vast amount I don’t know. I suppose we are all perpetually under-qualified. We can only do the best we know how, ask for guidance from everyone we can, make our decisions, breathe, hope for the best.

I worry about settling, without thinking, into conventional patterns of living that could tie me like a dog on a leash to needing a high-paying job. Conventional living expects us to graduate, marry, buy houses, fill our houses with things, have kids, add additions to our houses, fill our additions with new things. We should buy everything we need. Then we should buy even more.

Pretty soon we realize we are doing little more than treading water. Now we absolutely must have a high income just to keep our heads up where the oxygen is breathable. We call this self-sufficiency.

We can be more creative than that.

Our kindergarten teachers taught us to share the toys we played with. In adulthood, we would do well to relearn this lesson. I try to take note of alternative ownership models: car-shares, land trusts, housing cooperatives, families who choose to own as little as possible.

This is creative: In a front yard in Tucson, Arizona, a purple martin pokes its head out of the home it has built in a saguaro cactus, in a hole left by woodpeckers.

Our culture’s obsession with personal ownership is coming around to "bite us in the backside," as Barbara Kingsolver recently put it in her commencement address at Duke University. "We’re a world at war," she said, "ravaged by disagreements, a bizarrely globalized people in which the extravagant excesses of one culture wash up as famine or flood on the shores of another."

Early in the summer, I stayed with some of my family at a cottage we had rented for the weekend. When the tomato soup was hot, I grabbed a dishtowel from one of the cabin-kitchen’s drawers and set it on the table, as a hot pad, beneath the pot of soup. The plastic measuring cup I found in one of the cupboards made a splendid ladle, and the silverware drawer produced just enough soup spoons for the four of us. Four was all we needed.

When we were kids, my younger brother and I used to crouch over the creek with plastic cups poised in our hands. We nudged stones, flipped them, and watched the crayfish scuttle around exposed and frantic. We loved to listen to them clicking their way around the water in our plastic bucket.

Afterward, we counted the crayfish, sized them with our eyes, prided ourselves on our largest catch, and, at the end of the day, returned them to the stream. My brother and I knew the small creatures wouldn’t do us any good at home and would not survive long in our captivity. I imagine us sighing, a little sadly, as we tipped the bucket and, one by one, watched them swim their lobster-like claws to its edge, watched them tumble into the water below.

Is it possible, I ask myself, to hold my one acre of land (and everything I own) like this? Gently, creatively, and daily, letting it go?

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is likely to buy, with her mom, an acre of woods along the western border of Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Community (www.rollingridge.net). She hopes this one acre of hillside will be better off with them as owners, rather than the investors or developers who might land with it instead. She can be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com.