‌Earthship

‌Lawrence Norfolk

You can see them from the top of Saint Anthony’s Isle, their long glass walls glinting, their solar panels sopping up the early morning sun as that morning’s fleet sets out. The long-drifters spin slowly as the currents nudge them, the bulky float-tanks jiggling over the gentle swell. The simpler rafts bob up and down. Sometimes as many as a hundred will set off together. A dozen or so is more usual, the under-floats or hulls tied to one another with thick black cables.

I watch for a long time. Always, once they’re clear of the quays and piers, one or more will cut loose and float free, slowly separating from the other craft. Off on some frolic of its own. Soloes, they’re called. They let the currents take them, drifting away wherever. It’s unwise, even on a well-equipped raft. A lot never come back. But I think they’re the ones that really understand what’s happened. Those are the ones I watch.

Of course there’s not much else of New Mexico to watch any more. But back when Saint Anthony’s Isle was Mount San Antonio and the tail end of the Rockies was a mountain range, not an archipelago, the wettest thing about the Land of Enchantment was the Rio Grande. That was where I and my girlfriend Al fetched up in the summer of 1995 on the south-west leg of our Great American Road Trip.

We had met on a lit course after I had dropped out of applied math. Al was one of three women in the theory class, out of which she dropped after six belligerent seminars because of her ‘pathological regard for the likes of D.H. Lawrence’ as the professor characterized it.

I bumped into her again about a year later in a bar when a pair of white forearms ruffed in rolled-up light blue shirt sleeves wiped the table top in front of me. The hands were white too, the nails unpolished. They lacked that resigned quality that a real waitress’s hands have. They skirted my beer. This was over four decades ago. I looked up.

‘Hi, Al.’

She was a dark-haired, wide-hipped girl with a full mouth and a silver nose ring. She pretended not to recognize me (she admitted it later) then pretended to be pleased to see me again. She had quit college altogether and was writing or not-writing a novel called Running Girl. I don’t know why I asked her to meet me later, or why she agreed. People now think it’s only rafters that just float along but there was plenty of drift back then too.

She called me ‘Cad’ (for Cadwallader, my middle name) when, drunk, we took the stairs up to her apartment that night. When I moved in, this became ‘Wal’ (pronounced like ‘Wally’ but without the ‘y’).

She could not cook and I could. I could not drive and she could. Our complementarity began and ended there. Besides the nose ring, she wore heavy boots and men’s shirts which she tucked loosely into tight black jeans. I stuck to cords. I had gone to a private school while she had spent at least part of her late teens living in a teepee with a couple, about whom I knew only that the man was called Jez and that Al had had some kind of relationship with him. I could believe it. Certain kinds of men were drawn to her, engaging her in sharply focused discussions and nodding earnestly in the hope that she would sleep with them. She always attracted the committed types.

Of course that attraction would be publicly and even spectacularly evidenced in the years to come but at the time no one, least of all me and Al, had the slightest idea what those years would hold. In the meantime, other men’s desires broke against the adamantine cliff of Al’s earnestness. I observed, cooked and was driven around for five semesters. When our second summer came around, Al more or less insisted on, then organized, a road trip.

We had hired a Buick Regal. For the large majority of the population of Planet Earth who have never driven and never will drive such a vehicle, the Regal featured a 3-litre V6 engine, a rubber-hammock-style suspension and a ride best described as imperturbable. Its engine made a distinctive low hum which never varied whether the car was speeding along the Hoover Dam, descending the buttes of Arizona or climbing the Rockies. We had picked it up in Vegas but the strange weather that year had forced us south into New Mexico.

In Taos we fell in with a guy called Jason who offered to take us rafting down the Rio Grande. The next day, after speculating whether or not Jason was a psychopath who would lure us out there and murder us, we ate breakfast and set off to meet our guide.

‘The roads are pretty rough out there,’ Jason told us, indicating his battered 4 x 4. ‘Why don’t you jump in?’

‘We thought we’d take our car,’ I said stiffly.

‘Sure.’

■

Jason took the I-64 then turned right onto a dirt road. We followed. After a few miles bumping along, we noticed what looked like a row of windows out in the distant scrub. It was set into a bank of earth. A chimney-thing rose beside it. A similar structure showed a few hundred yards away from the first, then several others, more distant. Al and I stared, trying to make sense of these odd-looking dwellings out here in the middle of nowhere. But the road took us away and soon we took a left onto another, bumpier dirt track where we lost sight of the glass things. After a few more miles the track broke up and the Buick started bottoming out. Jason parked about a hundred yards further on. We were at the edge of the gorge.

The young will know the Rio Grande only from the pre-Rise maps that their parents bring out to show where Ma and Pa used to live, but old-landers will remember this part of it from the hot springs bathing scene in Easy Rider. It looked vaguely familiar to me that morning.

The odd structures we’d seen, Jason explained, were earthships.

‘They make them out of old tyres and cans. They’re self-sufficient. There’s water out here but it’s under five hundred feet of rock. These guys gather rain and recycle. They put in compost toilets, planters, cisterns …’

He talked on as we descended. The path to the Rio Grande wound down. The heat was baking but Al was paying close attention. Jason was getting the earnest look.

When we got to the bottom we discovered that the Rio Grande was too low for rafting. Al paddled in the hot springs, stripping off her jeans and unfurling the shirt she’d borrowed from me into a kind of rollercoaster-hemmed skirt. I watched the water drops slide down her calves and wondered again why the whole place seemed familiar. Jason sat on a rock. When it was time to ascend he decided to run it. We decided to trudge. At the top, Jason (when he’d finished being sick) told us about the Easy Rider connection, then gave us directions to a cantina owned by a couple of friends of his which served the best mixed fajitas in New Mexico. We could reconvene for lunch. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to get roped into lunch. Maybe, I said. We watched Jason’s 4 x 4 bump away then got back in the Buick. That’s when we found the car wouldn’t move.

■

In Death Valley back then temperatures regularly topped 120 degrees and you were told that, in the event of breakdown, you should under no circumstances leave your car. But Death Valley, apart from being one of the deadliest places on earth, was also a US National Park complete with Park Rangers, one of whom would at some point come along and rescue you. Second, we weren’t in Death Valley but outside Taos where the temperature was not 120 degrees but only (according to the Buick) a mere 104. Third, we hadn’t broken down. The engine still worked. The wheels went around (although they made a funny noise). We just weren’t going anywhere. Of course there was a simple explanation for that but at the time our predicament seemed pretty inscrutable. We had water. We had hats.

‘We’ll just have to hike back to the road,’ I said.

‘The road’s fifteen miles,’ said Al.

‘Well, Jason’ll know something’s up.’

‘Yeah,’ said Al. ‘That we didn’t want lunch.’

‘Hiking it is, then,’ I said.

But Al shook her head across the bonnet of the immobile Buick and pointed out into the scrub. ‘What we’re going to do is this. We’re going to check out those earthship things.’

■

Earthships are long, low dwellings made from recycled materials such as tires filled with compacted dirt, tin cans and mud. A grey-water reclamation system uses exterior and interior botanical cells. The roof collects rain. Solar panels and battery arrays are self-explanatory. You grow your own food in the botanical bits and drink water filtered through the cells. Another system pressurizes the water and a big electrical box turns the DC current into AC and distributes it to power sockets, the fridge and so on. An earthship is not, in any conventional sense, a ship. Or so both Al and I understood when the first hunkered structure heaved its glass face out of the scrub two and a half hours later. This one was raised on its own little berm. Around it were set perhaps two dozen other lower dwellings. The nearest was painted in pastel blues and pinks. Motionless wind chimes hung outside. As we stood with our eyes screwed up against the glare, a glass door opened and two young, nearly identical-looking women emerged. They wore their hair short and were dressed in dungarees. They introduced themselves as Jean and Joan.

‘You’re late,’ Jean said.

‘But it’s fine,’ added Joan. ‘Where’ve you put your car?’

‘Car?’

‘You haven’t parked up by Fro’s place, right?’ She pointed behind her towards the next nearest dwellings. ‘He gets pretty grouchy about that.’

‘Or Mimi,’ added Jean. ‘She had a dog run over once.’

‘Or Gibson,’ said Joan. ‘Not that you could with all his junk.’

As they said this, both women looked back into the scrub, searching among the different structures for wherever we’d put our vehicle. I was about to tell them our situation when a new thought struck Jean.

‘You didn’t leave it at Zeke’s?’

I shook my head.

‘Who’s Zeke?’ asked Al.

At that the women both laughed in a relieved kind of way.

‘We haven’t got a car,’ I said. ‘It broke down. We walked.’

‘We can’t be late either,’ added Al. ‘We didn’t know we were coming.’

Jean and Joan looked at one another again.

‘So you’re not the guys from the Times?’

■

I believe it was the French social theorist Alain Sokal who first demonstrated how information degrades along with the rules governing its production in a closed semiotic system. Maybe that wasn’t quite how he put it but, over the next few hours, something similar happened to me and Al. We had arrived as people whose car had broken down (or not, as it eventually proved) by the banks of the Rio Grande, but now we found ourselves recast as a journalist and photographer from the LA Times. It wasn’t so much that Jean/Joan introduced us as the anticipated journos (who had already, we discovered, cancelled twice). But as they escorted us down a dirt track to the dwellings of Fro, then Mac and Jay, then Mimi, Gibson (whose dog barked non-stop during the encounter) and the other inhabitants of the Great World Earthship Community, the non-appearance of the journalists, of whose visit some had been in favour and others not, took on a significance that eclipsed our own actual appearance. Re-evaluating that instance of conceptual slippage now, I think it might have been the start of what became, for Al and me at first, then everyone else, a much greater shift that although contributed to by everyone was not actually willed by any of them, like finding yourself at the head of a slide with a great crowd of people pressing behind you, or that story about the boy on the diving board, about to take the plunge.

‘I want people to come out here,’ explained Mimi, a leathery-skinned middle-aged woman with full lips and bright white teeth. ‘Even journalists. We’re off-road, off-grid. We’ve got enough non-contact. We need people to see what can be done.’

‘What can be done?’ asked Al.

‘You can get away,’ said Mimi. ‘You don’t have to be alone.’

She was in retreat from an LA divorce. Felipe next door suffered from chronic aerosol-triggered asthma. Fro waved us away in a strangely friendly way. Jay was from Montana, about which he loved everything except the minus 40 degree winters, and Gibson needed space for his stripped-down engines and the sculptures he was making out of the parts. And somewhere for his dog to bark. He pointed to the berm.

‘You should talk to Mike,’ Gibson said among the yelps. ‘He started all this. Designed these places.’

‘He’s away,’ said Joan. ‘Least his pick-up’s gone.’

We continued the odd tour. Some didn’t open their doors. Most did, inviting us into surprisingly cool interiors that smelt pleasantly of greenhouses. We were offered water in all of them and food in most (Billie’s home-baked cornbread was the stand-out). At the end of our tour we had reached the far side of the Great World Community plot. The scrub stretched away towards distant Mount San Antonio in one direction and the snaking crack of the Rio Grande gorge in the other.

‘So,’ said Jean. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s great,’ I said, and Al nodded enthusiastically. It was, too: all these slightly strange people making homes out of junk in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. I’d expected at least one of them to kick off about UN-sponsored parachutists or Area 51 or aliens. But none of them had.

But neither had any of them offered us a lift back to town. Jean/Joan, Al and myself stood at the edge of the desert and smiled at each other.

‘So,’ said Joan.

The moment stretched. Then off towards the gorge I saw a glint of light. Another earthship lay about half a mile away, set off from the others.

‘Who’s over there?’ I asked.

Jean and Joan exchanged looks. ‘That’s Zeke,’ they said at the same time and laughed. Al and I laughed too.

‘He’s slightly crazy,’ said Jean.

‘Not bad-crazy,’ Joan hastened to add. ‘He was out here first. With Mike. You should talk to him. I mean, if you were journalists.’

‘We’re not journalists,’ said Al. ‘We have no idea …’

I expected her to add, ‘what we’re doing out here’ or ‘how to get back’ but she just left it hanging.

■

I suppose it’s fairly obvious by this point that the real point of Al’s and my Great American Road Trip was to figure out whether we should drift along together some more or let ourselves drift apart. I was never jealous and even now I’ve never felt more than a certain retrospective regret. A slight propensity to glance over the shoulder and wonder what might have been. I never let myself think that Al actually loved me.

Nevertheless, despite my non-jealous nature, having left Jean and Joan and trekked through the scrub to Zeke’s earthship and having got my first glimpse of Zeke, my first thought was that he looked exactly how I imagined the teepee guy Jez.

Given the later history of Zeke and Al, it would be good to report some kind of spark passing between them at this point, a recognition of something or other. But there wasn’t anything like that. A tall, lean, grey-ponytailed guy with a moustache looked us over.

‘You got stuck?’

‘Pretty much,’ I said.

‘I go into town Fridays, if you can wait that long.’

It was Tuesday.

‘Friday’s fine,’ said Al.

Zeke nodded and turned back into the long cool room. ‘Make yourselves at home.’

■

Zeke’s earthship was different from the others. It was bigger, older (as he told us), and set apart from them in the head of a ravine that dropped down to the river. Unlike the others, it had been constructed inside a kind of concrete envelope which had either been built in the ravine where its weight had forced the loose dirt to subside or poured into some kind of mould. Either way, Zeke’s earthship rested inside a kind of concrete ‘hull’. We settled on facing couches and looked out the wall of glass. To the north, I noticed a cloud in the hitherto cloudless sky.

‘I got down here in the mid-seventies,’ Zeke told us after a supper of vegetarian chilli. ‘Lots of old road-warriors headed this way. There’s a bunch around Telluride. It was a terrible time to be out of the mainstream. A lot of guys just gave up but Mike and I came down here to Taos. He was trying to get these places built. I told him I’d get one up.’ He gave the floor a wry smile. ‘Hippies were practical. A lot of people forget that. You want someone who can get a VW Microbus over the Andes, ask a hippy. You want to build a house out of garbage, same. Me and him threw this place up in about three months. Then we fell out.’

We were sitting with the dirty plates on a low table between us. Al had leaned closer and closer during this account and now was sitting on the edge of her seat, elbows propped on her knees, hands clasped under her chin. I wondered if Zeke could see her breasts but he was sat back looking out of the window where the sunset was striating the sky into an unfeasible number of dark pink and red bands.

‘Mike wanted to put up more of these things,’ Zeke went on. ‘Grow ’em like mushrooms and get the township to zone it. Pay tax. I don’t know. Anyway, we haven’t spoken since.’

‘They told us you were crazy,’ Al said.

‘Slightly crazy,’ I chipped in, alarmed at Al’s candour. But Zeke just nodded.

‘I guess,’ he said. ‘If crazy puts you the other side of the fence from everyone else.’

There was a slightly uncomfortable silence. ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

‘There is no crazy,’ Zeke said as if I hadn’t spoken. It was a trick I’d see him play later on the various politicos and CEOs who splashed a course to his door hoping for some kind of endorsement to shore up their dissolving bastions … Or maybe it was uncalculated on Zeke’s part. Maybe he just spoke as the thoughts washed through. ‘Can’t be,’ he went on. ‘Not if there’s no fence.’

Here it comes, I thought. Alien abduction. Area 51. I adopted my ‘It’s a point of view’ expression, well rehearsed from theory seminars when (for example) other participants implied that characters in novels were representations of actual people rather than rhetorical figures. Al, however, nodded enthusiastically.

‘It’s not enough to be off-grid,’ Zeke said. ‘That’s what these places were meant to prove. What if there was no grid?’

‘There has to be a grid,’ I said, more curious than challenging. I genuinely wondered what Zeke meant.

‘Does there?’ asked Al. That startled me.

‘This is a liquid planet,’ said Zeke. ‘Seven-eighths of the surface is water. The core is molten. It’s meant to be dynamic.’

‘Dynamic systems are unstable,’ I said. Then, to Al’s surprised look, I added, ‘I used to study fluid dynamics. In math.’

‘That sounds like a smart thing to study,’ said Zeke.

I was gearing up to say something else about fluidity but Al spoke first.

‘Then you have to change the conditions.’

‘Right,’ said Zeke. ‘But how?’

It wasn’t rhetorical. He was actually asking.

‘I don’t know,’ Al said at last.

She was gazing at him – there is no other word – raptly. But Zeke looked away out the window where I now noticed that the dark pink sky-bands were more clouds.

■

A milky film covered the sky the next day. The sun would burn it off, I thought, but as the morning wore on it seemed to thicken. It was what the weathermen called an occluded warm front, Zeke told us. Pretty rare out here. This was a big one too. Most of the south-west was under it. Apparently it was raining in parts of Nevada.

He showed us how the place worked, tracing pipe runs and cabling, tapping the bright red fruit dangling from his chilli plants, opening hatches and staring down into cisterns. It was like a regular house, just self-contained. The electrics were the most complex, with transformers and different kinds of circuits. Al asked questions and pretended she understood the answers.

We took a walk that afternoon. We didn’t want to venture back into the Great World Community so we headed into the ravine, scrambling under the concrete hull and then following the slope down to the Rio Grande. The descent was gentle enough but the sides of the ravine soon rose steeply on either side. In the shade it was, if not quite cold, at least not hot. Nothing like yesterday. When we reached the bottom the river had changed character too.

Without the sunlight glinting off the surface, the body of the river seemed more solid, more opaque, with deep eddies opening and closing and the water ramping up in ridges. Al had mentioned maybe having a swim but there was no question of that. It was darker and colder. Even so she stripped off to wash. I admired her white skin as she splashed about in the shallows. Then she beckoned and I stripped off too.

Drying off took longer than we anticipated. A cool breeze was drifting down the canyon and we actually shivered once or twice before Al and I pulled on our shirts and jeans. Hauling each other back up the ravine to Zeke’s place, Al began talking about getting back to Taos. She wanted to take the Sandia Peak Tramway. A friend of hers had told her about a supposedly lucky payphone at the top. Anyone who dialled their voicemail got good news. She would finish her novel and head for Las Vegas or get a job as a cocktail waitress in the bar in Flagstaff where they filmed the Rick’s Bar scenes in Casablanca … I made encouraging noises. None of this was really going to happen. Not in this world anyway. It was only as we neared the top and the concrete prow of Zeke’s home loomed above us, its dark V-shaped jut cutting the still-luminous sky like the zipper opening on Al’s jeans, that I realized something obvious.

None of these plans included me. Pulling ourselves up the last yards and wriggling over the lip of the concrete, the sky darkened further and just as we reached the door, the rain began.

Anyone reading of these events now, almost thirty years after they happened, will know much of what follows. The first Rise, the raft movement, the so-called First and Second Water Wars, the Floating Federation and its wackier fringes, the Pilot Cults, Nova Terrans and so on. All of it started when the first raindrop hit the ground that afternoon. Obviously much of Zeke and Al’s conversation from the previous evening might seem, with hindsight, impossibly portentous and prescient, as if they saw the whole thing coming. I must have forgotten most of it – I mean, we talked for most of the evening – and maybe only those parts stuck. I don’t think they foresaw anything really. They were just ready.

It wasn’t the Rise itself of course – that was still years away – it was just the biggest flood in New Mexico’s history which gathered up rainfall from both sides of the Rockies and reunited it at their foot, sending a great broad swell fanning out over the plain below. The famous poster of Zeke and Al’s launch, with the earthship plunging down the ravine into the Rio Grande far below, both of them with one arm raised as if they were riding a bucking horse, that was all nonsense. Al wasn’t wearing a halter-top either. She still had my shirt. The water simply rose and rose until it filled the Rio Grande canyon then lifted the concrete hull of Zeke’s earthship and floated it clear. Zeke and Al were aboard. I was not. I could report that Zeke made a grab to pull me back as I flipped over the side or that Al implored me to stay, rain running down her face and so on. The truth was more prosaic. I wasn’t prepared to set myself adrift. Al was. So I watched her float away.

I waded back to the GWC. The other earthships had been evacuated. All were flooded except Mike’s. I climbed the berm and made myself at home. A week later a state trooper, after deciding not to shoot me, gave me a lift back to the Buick. The whole of New Mexico steamed. There was no news of Al and with everything else going on no one was looking either. After a week more or less underwater, the Buick started first time. The earlier mechanical problem turned out to be Al’s not having disengaged the foot brake. To this day I wonder if she did it on purpose.

I never got to ask her. I never saw Al again. Not in the flesh. Obviously, she was on the TV plenty as her and Zeke moored themselves to the most inconvenient objects they could think of and dared the authorities to sink them. Then, after the Rise, they basically became the icons they are now. We couldn’t continue the way we were going. Zeke got hold of that early and then, with the help of a few trillion tons of water, so did everyone else. I don’t mean driving and the ozone layer and so on. I mean the way we thought. The way I thought.

All the accusations that Al manipulated Zeke in his declining years remain just that; I have no more insight than anyone else. Zeke’s dead now, of course. The earthship’s a floating museum. But Al is still pretty much head of the off-shore Fed, that is if a couple of million earthships on rafts could be said to have anything so structured as a top and bottom.

As for me, I decided to finish our road trip. Of course there aren’t actually any roads there. Nearly all of New Mexico is now under two hundred feet of water. I’m doing the Andes Loop instead. I know. It’s a cliché. Every old-lander does it. You can hardly move off Durango Point for hi-spec rafts and the silver-heads carving out their own patch of the wide blue yonder. All the same I’ve traded my share in a condo on the Spines for a long-drift raft with all mod cons (as they used to say): on-board krill-processing, full solar array, veg tanks, cisterns, the lot (I had gone back to math like Zeke advised, and fluid dynamics proved a good business to be in, post-Rise). The rafts are the descendants of Zeke’s earthship, of course, even though some of the big ones weigh a couple of thousand tons.

Mine’s a domestic, about fifty feet across. I’ve joined a hitch of drifters. Just a couple of dozen. We’re setting off in a few weeks to jiggle around feeling wavesick and crunch shrimp together. I’ll see how that goes. Then I’ll cut loose. In the end you need a purpose even if everything else is floating about. Which is to say I’m looking forward to this voyage, more than anything I’ve done in a very long time. I’m ready. The only thing left to do is to give my raft a name. I thought ‘Regal’ at first. Now I’m drifting towards ‘Al’.