In the chilly months, our La-Z-Boy recliner and our rocking chair sit side by side in the kitchen, facing the woodstove. Most nights after dinner, glancing from time to time at the fire through the woodstove’s window, we read on them by the light of a lamp. Though we paid almost nothing for them, they are the two most seductive chairs we’ve ever had.
One Saturday afternoon, while poking through the little town of Radford, Virginia, we found the La-Z-Boy in a used-furniture store. It was an off-white recliner that—while otherwise well cared for—had been charred by a cigarette. Wanda sank onto it, then stretched far back, the foot pedestal separating her feet from the floor. The chair enveloped her. On this island of velour pleasure she would gladly tackle Anna Karenina in one sitting. The chair cost $25 “as is,” declared the owner, who seemed surprised that anyone wanted it and grateful that we would haul it off in our pickup. At home we draped a hand-woven Peruvian wool blanket—a gift from Wanda’s father—over most of the chair, hiding the scar, and tussled over who got to use the La-Z-Boy more until we’d found a companion for it.
Frank didn’t want another La-Z-Boy; he wanted a rocking chair. One day in October, en route to Charlottesville, we stopped to see a man we know at an antique store north of Roanoke. In the back of our truck were four dining table chairs—low-back, Art Deco chairs from the 1930s that we had bought, along with a dining table, in Los Angeles. We’d never felt comfortable in them but only recently had replaced them with more hospitable chairs purchased at a furniture salvage store. We hoped to find a rocker and engage in the popular Appalachian pastime of horse trading.
Inside the ramshackle store was just the thing Frank was looking for: an oak, mission-style rocker from the turn of the century, with a slatted back and bent arms. We tried it out: it felt sturdy and rocked like the proverbial cradle. After a lot of talk about the weather and other neutral topics—and, at last, a close inspection of our chairs and some hypercritical remarks on their condition, Larry hemmed and hawed and allowed that an even swap might be all right this one time. From a strictly monetary standpoint, though he’d made it sound as though he were doing us a big favor, the odds were that he was getting the better end of the deal. But we enjoyed the bartering game. And without spending any extra money for it, we—especially Frank—have since logged countless hours on the rocker.
“I may not be rich,” Frank’s thirty-year-old niece, Teresa Van Hoy, once told us, “but I am resourceful.” Those words—delivered with Teresa’s patented southern drawl—have stuck to our ribs like one of Ben Franklin’s proverbs. Like Teresa, who is an elementary school teacher, we’ve tried to learn ways to stretch our dollars, here in Virginia and in our travels. We’ve also learned just how much fun it is to be bargain hunters, to buy on sale and in bulk, to haunt thrift stores and resale shops, yard sales and remnant houses. We go out of our way to find the sport—even the adventure—in being frugal.
One of our favorite destinations remains the flea market in Galax, Virginia. For years we’ve been exploring the cavernous space, once a church sanctuary, subdivided into dimly lit side rooms, with chicken-wire walls and doors that could be padlocked but never are. All sorts of dusty junk nestles in the gloom, and you have to dig through disintegrating boxes and amorphous piles to find treasure, as if from a time capsule. A plastic hood hair dryer from the 1960s might rest precariously atop a metal tea cart or typewriter table, surrounded by empty carafes, stacks of ancient women’s magazines, assorted glassware, and an old Allen Drury novel.
Along a rear wall, retirement-age men chew tobacco, puff cigarettes, and ponder the images on an old black-and-white TV. When the time of reckoning comes, Hobart, the sixtyish proprietor, rises to tally the purchases, scratching the tip of his pencil on a paper bag. There’s no license to dicker—Hobart’s assessment is as final as Judgment Day. “Well,” he declares, tugging at the brim of his felt hat and studying the occasional item that has no price tag, “I’m gonna need fifty cents for that, I reckon.” Whatever the unticketed item, Hobart’s verb and tense remain the same: he’s “gonna need” X amount of money.
At times we use the flea market like a dry goods store, coming in expressly for certain standard items. When, for instance, we switched from buying milk in plastic throwaway jugs to mix-your-own powdered milk in cardboard boxes, we came in search of glass pitchers. We found at least half a dozen, of which we purchased two—one for $1.50 and the other for $4.00. The cheaper one was from the 1960s with psychedelic yellow daisies dancing around its bright blue base. The other was burnt-orange carnival glass, which of the two makes a sleeker presentation but holds less liquid. Having two pitchers allows us to wash one while pressing the other into service.
Among the other purchases have been occasional chairs, plastic kitchen bowls, and glass milk quart jars for flower vases. For $12 we bought a hand-planed wooden washstand. And God knows how many books have made their way home along the Blue Ridge Parkway from the Galax flea market.
Certain items that we need, like computer-printer ribbons, aren’t available just anywhere—certainly not at the flea market! Rather than getting frustrated because we have to drive an hour south to Winston-Salem to replace an indispensable tool of our trade, we’ve adopted another posture—that of anticipation. We are less likely to run out of computer ribbons now than in Los Angeles because we stockpile them.
In addition to Galax and Winston-Salem, we shop in Mount Airy and Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, as well as in Hillsville, Cana, and Pulaski, Virginia. Although the distances are farther, the drive time is probably no greater to disparate destinations than in Los Angeles. And the custom of this region—in many ways a throwback to the past—makes even routine shopping a pleasure compared with the experience in the faceless malls of California. Here you can establish relationships with merchants, some of whom still extend no-interest charge accounts for which no plastic card is issued. They remember your face, not your number, and many keep accounts by paper.
Of clothes, William Penn wrote: “The more plain and simple they are, the better: neither unshapely, nor fantastical; and for use and decency, and not for pride.”
While sharing to some extent the sentiments of the founder of Pennsylvania, we have to admit that we also like clothes that have a little pizzazz; plainness alone seems no cardinal virtue. But we do like to buy good clothes inexpensively. At the Salvation Army store in Mount Airy, Frank regularly buys used jeans, shirts, and sweaters. On our last trip to New York, he packed two of the three brightly colored wool sweaters, purchased for two dollars apiece at the store, and wore them to business meetings. Almost new, to all appearances, when he bought them, these sweaters should last for years. In Pulaski, along with a minor league baseball team, the Pulaski Braves, we’ve discovered a quality used-clothing store for women that carries contemporary items along with some vintage stuff. Wanda has purchased silk scarves, cotton turtleneck pullovers, and silk-and-wool-blend sweaters for a fraction of the price of the items when new.
Magazine and newspaper subscriptions can be surprisingly costly. And what’s the point of subscribing to all those publications if you just aren’t getting them read? In the past eighteen months we’ve cut the number of subscriptions from seven to four—still a high tide of verbiage flooding the house, but one in which at least we can (barely) swim. Friends who made a similar reduction report that they now schedule visits to the periodical room at the Winston-Salem Public Library. Though we only occasionally follow suit, we like the idea.
Now if only we can apply the same read-it-or-don’t-buy-it standards to the books we buy! Frank’s the guiltier party. “I’ll read it one of these days,” he protests lamely when Wanda points toward an unread book gathering dust on the shelf.
To atone for his spendthrift ways as a book buyer, Frank gets his hair cut for four dollars at the same barber shop in Mount Airy where Sam and Garnet Dawson go. He’s long since given up on asking for a “medium” cut. The barber, an eighty-four-year-old gentleman who still works long days (and tells salty stories), knows two ways to cut hair: very short and United States Marine. Frank settles for the “very short” cut, reasoning that the Orioles baseball cap he wears away from the house will cover any embarrassment until his hair grows out again to an acceptably shaggy length.
In our travels we’ve talked with people who trade or reciprocate services to save money. At a place called Eco-Home in Los Angeles, we learned of a network of people on the West Coast who swap services ranging from computer training to plumbing. In Maine, Dale and Terry told us that they do carpentry work in exchange for medical services. Here at the orchard, Sam trades his work grading and selling apples with fellow orchardists every fall. In exchange for complicated mechanical work at which he is no master, Frank has several times worked in a neighbor’s packhouse. In addition to saving money, these kinds of swaps help build friendships.
A dear friend once told Wanda that giving a gift away brought bad luck, but Wanda doesn’t buy it. Surely it’s the spirit of the gift that counts, the sort of spirit embodied by the Amish, who traditionally have not attached the name of the gift giver to wedding gifts. But sometimes that feeling is hard to conjure when faced with gift-giving occasions. Marrying into Frank’s large family, Wanda soon got the impression that we—and since this usually fell on her, she—had to come up with a gift every two weeks: holidays, graduations, birthdays, weddings, and now, heaven help her, anniversaries. In order to escape viewing gift giving as an endless (and depressing) exercise in materialism, Wanda adopted the idea of a gift “war” chest, filled with things bought in quantity or on sale and kept tucked away in drawers for future use, things bought in after-Christmas sales for use the following year.
In Wanda’s family wrapping paper has always made more than one run, often lasting years. The stuff is surprisingly durable, if you’re willing to overlook a few wrinkles (or disguise them with ribbon or recycled Christmas cards). Now Wanda keeps old bows and ribbon in grocery bags and cuts off the tattered ends to make them fresh again. When gifts are opened Christmas morning, we bring out two grocery bags: one for paper to be saved for next year and the other for paper (at last!) to be sent to its final resting place.
When we first moved to Virginia, the idea of recycling gifts seemed an actionable affront that Wanda’s mother-in-law engaged in shamelessly. Miriam told a joke about some pine soap that circulated in the family for years with such gusto that Wanda couldn’t help but hear it as an endorsement. Her grandchildren—Frank’s nieces and nephews—kidded about how many times they’d received copies of The Good Times Song Book—and speculated that their grandmother had picked them up overstock at a church book sale. When Wanda gave her in-laws a gift, she watched to see if it would disappear, perhaps destined for someone else’s Christmas tree.
With the many occasions back east in which gifts were expected, we began to see the benefit of putting gifts, as Frank liked to joke—borrowing a screenwriter’s expression—“into turnaround.” After all, as the recipient of more than a few such items ourselves, we figured two could play this game. So when Frank received a wall photograph that we didn’t care to hang, Wanda rewrapped it and passed it along to a couple who’d invited us to their wedding. We didn’t feel so bad about it: Wanda had never met the bride or groom, and if he had, Frank couldn’t recall when!
The question becomes thornier when giving to close friends and family. But from our experience, almost everyone willingly deescalates the level of giving—as long as you send the first signal. If you give an inexpensive, token gift to someone, it enables him or her to give you something of equal value. Gift giving, after all, is a reciprocal exchange. Wanda gives writer friends subscriptions to the Utne Reader. She gave her pregnant sister a subscription to Parenting magazine as a birthday present. Her friend Liz Brody likes giving experiential presents, such as tickets to movies, plays, and concerts.
Downscaling gift giving has worked for us. We aren’t givers of extravagant gifts, nor are we recipients of extravagant ones. The simple gifts we give and receive seem appropriate for us. Several of our wedding gifts come to mind: a clear plastic napkin holder, a set of beige cloth napkins, a French cookbook. One old Wesleyan friend of Frank’s, now a Cleveland artist, presented us with one of her paintings—she’d sent us several slides from which to select our favorite—and she delivered it five years after the big date on a southern vacation trip with her fiancé. On a recent, memorable wedding invitation, a friend and his bride-to-be declined gifts in advance, suggesting that anyone so moved might deliver and share a bottle of wine with the newlyweds when next in town.
Michael Van Hoy, Frank’s oldest nephew, told us about a gift exchange in which he’d participated one Christmas in Philadelphia. People brought in gifts they didn’t want, couldn’t use, or didn’t fit, and they had a kind of swap meet and party. Everyone came away happy, Michael said. Things were recycled and ended up with people who wanted them rather than in the great trash heap.
Of all the ways in which it’s possible to be frugal, food may be the category most likely to escape notice. Perhaps because most of us buy food in some form almost every day, we tend to think of those transactions as an unalterable fact of life, as absolute necessity. In fact, if we’re willing to sacrifice convenience, many food purchases are not necessary at all.
One of the most obvious ways to shrink a hefty food bill is to pack food for the workplace, school, or trip rather than relying on restaurants and cafeterias. Since we no longer go to school and don’t work away from home, the one thing we can do is brown-bag it on our frequent day trips, discovering along the way that cheese sandwiches with homegrown tomatoes and lettuce taste just as good as, if not better than, a burger at McDonald’s.
Not that dining out is a felony. Once in a while on the road, we’ll stop at a fast-food place to eat—the point is, doing it all the time can add up to some real money. The same is true of restaurants around home. In Los Angeles our monthly restaurant tab could make us wince. Nowadays we still like to go out occasionally, but we try to make it a special occasion—an anniversary, a celebration of finishing the cherry harvest. The fact that our restaurant visits are infrequent makes the experience of dining out more special, too.
More than we ever thought possible in California, we’ve come to relish home cooking. In Los Angeles, when we weren’t eating out, more likely than not we’d be eating a Lean Cuisine or Budget Gourmet frozen dinner. We were aware of, but tried to ignore, the long list of preservatives and additives on the box flap, and we knew that given the small size of the pouch or tray servings, we weren’t getting much grub for our buck. Still, cooking always took last priority.
These days we take time to cook healthful meals while continuing to observe an urban-style eight o’clock dinner hour. In the summer and early fall there are plenty of fresh vegetables to be had from the garden just below our asparagus patch: tomatoes, beets, collard greens, string beans, summer squash, radishes, lettuce, sweet corn. Year-round, Frank is the salad man. Because he likes salads so much, almost every night he finds himself chopping vegetables and washing lettuce. Every month or so he makes a wreck of the kitchen by concocting a huge pot of onion, tomato, and mushroom, heavily garlicked pasta sauce, which we freeze in pint boxes. With somewhat more finesse, Wanda does the same with big batches of vegetarian lasagna.
When we feel like having something exotic, Wanda whips up a pot of bigot, a Polish hunter’s stew. She also makes chicken and fish dishes along with turkey burgers and, very occasionally, steaks. For reasons ranging from our consciences to our pocketbooks, we’ve cut back sharply on meat consumption, often going vegetarian for weeks. Raised a meat-and-potatoes girl, Wanda has surprised herself by developing an appetite for rice heaped with spicy fifteen-bean soup. Lately she’s been soaking beans overnight and making large pots that are good for a week’s worth of lunches.
Being fruit growers as well as frugivorous (fruit-eating) creatures, we were intrigued to learn that the words frugal and fruit derive from the same Latin root. This ancient link between fruit and frugality still holds for our customers, who save money by buying fruit at the source, often in bushel-or-more quantities. (At ten dollars a bushel, for example, customers are buying apples for twenty-five cents a pound, an unheard-of price even in the cheapest supermarkets.) This link also holds us—the only fruits we buy at a store are bananas and, occasionally, oranges. In June, unless the crops have been killed by spring freezes, we have all manner of sweet and sour cherries, as well as red raspberries and blueberries; in July, apricots and summer apples; in August, peaches, nectarines, and Damson and Stanley plums; in the fall, seven main varieties of apples, including the Crispin Mutsu, a grapefruit-size, green-gold apple developed in Japan. During these months, these fresh fruits and berries heavily supplement our diet, and when there’s time, we freeze them and make preserves for gifts and home use. Up at the Red House, in addition to doing more freezing and preserve making than we ever seem to get done, Miriam makes her famous fruit compote—a chilled, slightly sweetened mixture of all the fruits and berries that has been known to transport house guests to Valhalla.
As frugal with food as we imagine we are, we’re no match for Sam. Few Americans are, at least not voluntarily. Two meals a day—breakfast and lunch—Sam eats nothing but cereal, milk, and applesauce. Only at dinner does he yield to Miriam’s more sumptuous fare. In the spirit of Thoreau, who proudly itemized his food costs at Walden Pond, Sam can give you a pretty good idea of how much these first two meals of the day set him and Miriam back.
Twice a year or so, Sam drives his rattling Ford Escort to the Statesville (North Carolina) Milling Company to pick up a hundred-pound sack of raw wheat, bagged directly from the wheat field. At six cents a pound, that’s six dollars for the bag, plus maybe another six in gas money for the round trip. Back home, he pours the wheat as needed into a grinder in the woodshed behind the Red House and turns the crank, then cooks the wheat in a double boiler. Three-quarters of a pound of wheat is enough for two meals, he says. Not counting the electricity needed for cooking, at six cents a pound that’s less than a nickel spent on wheat for two meals. Add the cost of powdered milk—he uses about a pint a day, which comes to ten cents—and he’s up to the lordly sum of fourteen cents. Add the cost of raising the apples for the applesauce, plus a little sugar, and the percentage of the total refrigeration costs for the milk and the applesauce, plus the gas money divided by days of the year, and surely you’re looking at no more than thirty cents for two meals. That’s fifteen cents for breakfast, ditto for lunch.
What Sam’s meals lack in haute cuisine, they make up for in nutrition. And the flavor’s not half-bad. When Frank was in his twenties, Sam methodically blended the wheat with ground soybeans, and the results, while richer in amino acids than wheat alone, were a gastronomical dismal swamp. Sam’s boglike cereal was notorious around the family for its lip-curling taste, and even its creator and lone champion (Sam never bypassed an opportunity to tout the virtues of the stuff), after years of proving his mental and physical toughness, had to flee to “higher” culinary ground.
Just recently, swayed not by basketball star Michael Jordan and other Wheaties pitchmen, but by Sam’s incontrovertible evidence that Wheaties cost $2.52 a pound (compare that with $.06 a pound for raw wheat of at least equal nutritional value, probably better because it’s full of bran and fiber), we’ve been accepting his weekly gifts of “Sam’s cereal,” hand-delivered to our kitchen counter in microwave-safe containers. What else can we do? These gifts are full of Sam’s love for us, harder to express in words than in wheat, full of his hope that we will live as long as he and maybe do the world some good, as he has. Eating his cereal, we love him back. What’s more, once microwaved and topped with applesauce, milk, and a sprinkling of brown sugar, Sam’s cereal is a tasty breakfast.
But we do draw the line at eating the stuff again for lunch. Surely there’s something to be said for a little variety in the menu, a fine point lost on Sam, whose mind often dwells on loftier matters. At lunchtime, our own minds dwell on the transition to Wanda’s beans.
One evening Frank sat on the rocking chair reading a magazine when a statistic seemed to jump off the page. The average in-town cost of travel in New York City for businesspeople in 1989 was $312 a day, he announced, whistling through his teeth. That broke down to $163 for a hotel room, $75 for food, and $74 for car rental.
“What do our trips cost us?” he wanted to know. Since moving east, we’ve managed, on average, two New York trips a year. They are business trips, arranged around meeting editors, with the occasional play slipped in. Frank knew in advance that we had beaten the national average, but the question was by how much. Fifty, a hundred dollars, or more daily? Wanda dashed upstairs to check our tax files.
There she found records of our two trips, one in January and the other in November. She discounted the first trip with its artificially deflated cost: that time we apartment-sat for a friend. The second—four full days in New York, including garaging our car; taxi, bus, and subway fares; lodging; meals; and miscellaneous expenses—came to a total of $576 for the two of us. The price worked out to $72 a person a day, or over four times cheaper than the businesspeople surveyed. And this cost was typical, if not somewhat high, for our trips.
For starters, we’re living cheaper in New York by buying bagels for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch and bringing them back to our room, avoiding high-priced restaurants—and by walking or taking the subway as often as possible instead of a taxi. But the biggest saving is in lodging that is far less expensive than that of the average businessperson. And of course two can sleep cheaper than one. We stay at the Leo House, a homey, unassuming Catholic hospice run by the Sisters of St. Agnes on West 23rd Street, which welcomes guests of all faiths, barring only unmarried members of the opposite sex sharing the same room. Because we have different last names, we were required to present a copy of our marriage certificate when we first checked in. Even the computer seemed skeptical about our legitimacy as a two-name couple and has mistakenly identified us ever since as Mr. and Mrs. Frank Urbanski.
After the manner of an old-style girls’ dormitory, guests can entertain outside visitors in the first- and second-story lounges but are not permitted to bring them to their rooms. Our clean, simple room, with twin beds, toilet, sink, and a sliver of closet, costs $55 a night; the bathtub and shower are down the hall. Wall-mounted telephones in each room take incoming calls but will not place outgoing calls. It’s a service that might not suit everyone, but it works for us.
In part because the city is so frenetic and we find it easy to be sucked into that mode, we try to pad time around each appointment or event to create a cushion of unhurry when we travel there. We leave time to make calls and pick up callback messages at the switchboard. We take a few minutes so that if one of the two pay phones in the lobby is in use when we need it, we can wait without growing anxious, or if someone else in line for a phone appears in greater need than we, we can surrender the telephone. When we lived in Los Angeles we often ran late for dates, but when in New York we make it a point to arrive everywhere early, thus reducing the stress and heightening the pleasure of a new place.
The Leo House is not the Plaza or the Waldorf, but we feel comfortable there. And though its address impresses no one, it makes trips to New York within our reach, financially and emotionally.
We do know whereof we speak. We have tasted the Plaza. Actually it wasn’t the Plaza, but we supposed it wasn’t too far off. After staying with friends in Louisiana, we decided to spring for a fancy hotel in New Orleans’s French Quarter. It was Wanda’s first visit to the famous city, and in her fantasy she saw streets crawling with horse-drawn carriages, heard Cajun fiddlers, and savored the sharp, wafting smells of Creole cuisine—things that could be found only in the heart of the French Quarter.
We spent much of the afternoon checking out the hotels for our splurge, scouting out the perfect room. Once we signed in, there was the bellboy and at dinner the waiter to tip and the perpetual obligation to look presentable, even when strolling through the lobby. After dinner and a brief walk through the French Quarter, we returned to our room, determined to get our money’s worth. But by now we were exhausted. Instead of feeling refreshed by luxury, we’d pressured ourselves from the start to have the “perfect” experience. The results made us feel stale, anxious to leave.
The next day we drove through Texas and on into the wee hours west of San Antonio, feeling liberated in our return to the open road. Frank steered the Malibu into a roadside rest area and we stretched out on the car bench seats for a deep sleep.
When we described this juxtaposition between the luxury of our hotel and vehicular camping tour to our friend Ellen Hoffs—herself a traveler who favors the simple experience—she observed with a laugh that we’d crossed over the line. “When I’ve spent eighty dollars on a hotel, 111 try to find a cheaper place the next day, too. But never would I stay in a rest area. That I know I won’t do.”
“It’s uplifting in its way,” Wanda responded. “And when Frank starts to drive at seven in the morning, I continue to lie in bed!”
Why it’s uplifting is a tantalizing question. Have we become so enamored of frugality that we enjoy sleeping in the car more than a luxurious hotel? Apparently so, for we haven’t slept in a fancy hotel since, but we have, three times, in the Malibu. That night in west Texas our senses were fully alive before we fell asleep: stars glittered through the windows, and the wind smelled of desert plants. For the first time in her life, Wanda heard the eerie keening of coyotes talking to each other. And though it wasn’t a long night’s sleep, even Motel 6 couldn’t beat the rates.
Truth is, as the night in west Texas would suggest, over the past few years we’ve come to expect that frugal travel, at least for us, will be more spontaneous, more adventurous. It’s an active, not passive, experience, a vivid alternative to the guided tour. Travel can be a way of getting outside yourself, of preventing cultural myopia from setting in. Contrary to the myth that spending tons of money enhances travel, in fact, such lavishness can insulate you from other people and from the natural world. The way we like to travel, we’ve discovered, is a pretty good metaphor for the way we like to live.
In the fall of 1987, after a year and a half at the orchard without a vacation, we joked to each other that the only foreign vacation we could afford would be in Eastern Europe. The joke soon became reality.
When we journeyed to Poland that December for the Christmas and New Year’s season to visit with Wanda’s first and second cousins (whom she hadn’t seen in ten years and whom Frank had never met), we shunned hotel accommodations in favor of sleeping on couches in tight apartments and touring the country through natives’ eyes. The price for getting close enough to a foreign culture to see the reality of day-to-day life was waiting in line behind five persons to brush our teeth and use the toilet or driving around western Poland in a crowded Polski Fiat.
We flew into Berlin the weekend before Christmas and, after touring West Berlin by day, took an afternoon train to Poznan, home of Grzegorz Urbanski, Wanda’s first cousin, a physician, husband, and father of two young children. The West Berlin train station was packed with Polish laborers, who worked and lived temporarily in both East and West Germany and were returning home for the holidays loaded down with all manner of consumer goods: enormous color televisions, VCRs, and bags full of gifts. It was pure chaos trying to press our bodies and luggage into the train. After the short ride into East Berlin, we changed trains in a bewildering maze of tracks and platforms. Luckily we met an educated, English-speaking Polish woman named Biata, traveling the same route, who steered us to the right train.
Once there, she squeezed us into a compartment crammed with jolly Polish workers who were passing around a bottle of vodka. Delighted to have two Americans aboard, they toasted our health and offered us sips. Knowing no English, they were patient with Wanda’s Polish, unlike the educated Poles who, out of some combination of politeness and desire for self-improvement, would invariably switch to English. More frequently, Biata, an assistant director at a theater in Hamburg, served as translator. In this cheek-by-jowl fashion, enjoying no more comfort than an ordinary Pole, we rode for six hours until arriving in Poznan.
By not cushioning ourselves in the luxuries of our culture, by electing nonstatus, low-cost travel (a two-hundred-mile train ticket cost us the equivalent of two dollars), we avoided some sanitized version of the Polish experience. At the same time we were able to take advantage of opportunities created in the United States. We spent two days with Kasia Gintowt-Bajon in Warsaw—the woman who drove with Frank across the United States in May of 1987—and her husband, Filip, a prominent film director in Poland, whose newly released film, Magnet, we saw in a theater in Warsaw. We attended a New Year’s Eve parry in a festively appointed Krakow piwnica (wine cellar); met a schoolboy friend of Wanda’s father, an actual prince who lived in a virtual museum to his noble family; and, for the Los Angeles Times, Wanda interviewed Tadeusz Konwicki, one of Poland’s foremost writers, in his Warsaw apartment.
During our stay in Krakow, our host’s cousin, a cabdriver, took us on two day-long round trips: one to Zakopane, where the unseasonably warm weather had melted the famous ski slopes, and the other to Auschwitz. His charge for the trips were $20 and $15, respectively.
Pawel, our Krakow host, reluctantly accompanied us on the excursion to the death camp. For Pawel, who was a young boy when Poland was invaded in 1939, Auschwitz was the source of recurring nightmares that were grounded in the reality of close family tragedy. His Polish Catholic aunt was among its earliest victims. “If they had had their way, they would have killed all us Poles,” he told us, bracing himself before entering the gates. “That’s what they intended.”
Indeed, at Auschwitz we learned—something little known in the United States—that the camp was used exclusively for ethnic Poles until late 1942; that more than a million of the approximately four million killed there were non-Jews. No matter what the ethnicity or religion of its victims, however, the most poignant reminder of the Auschwitz tragedy for us were the remnants of snuffed-out life: the aging mountains of boots, hair, and antique eyeglasses.
The trip was emotionally and physically exhausting, at times harrowing, but nonetheless spectacular. Frank saw for the first time communist Eastern Europe in its last days before collapse. He met peers in age and education whose own daily struggles for food, drink, gasoline, and clothing put his own disappointments into perspective. For us both, it was the kind of travel we like best—reality, not fantasy travel.
Beyond the glaring material deprivations of the Polish people was the range of human experience—so often lacking in our consumer culture: the intensity of focus on history, politics, the arts, family, and spiritual life. While it would be presumptuous to argue that Polish want is superior to American over-abundance, it struck us nonetheless how often these people manage to create joyous lives given their circumstances, and that we had much to learn from them.
Malcolm L. “Mac” Hunter, Jr., proves Rudyard Kipling’s maxim “He travels the fastest who travels alone.” Kipling might have added, “And without excess baggage.” A thirty-nine-year-old professor of wildlife at the University of Maine, Mac has trotted the globe for much of his adult life, pursuing such far-flung goals as working to preserve biological diversity and to promote wildlife conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources. He has conducted conservation research in eighteen foreign countries, among them India, Iran, Zaire, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, and Greece. When we visited his primitive log cabin home on the Penobscot River in tiny Milford, Maine, Mac had just returned from a recent three-week trip to Nepal and was unpacking the backpack—closer in size to a large knapsack—that contained the sum total of his belongings. He usually checks the backpack through on the plane and takes his camera equipment and research papers with him in a small carry-on case.
“I always wear khaki-colored clothing because it doesn’t show dirt,” he said, sheepishly trotting out a grungy pair of pants to illustrate the point. He pulled out a Peruvian wool tie. “I’d received a cable telling me, ‘Please be sure to bring a tie,’” he said, laughing. “They know how I usually dress.” A water canteen, sandals, shirts, underwear, jacket, and socks rounded out his belongings. Mac showed off an emergency/ utility kit containing a flashlight, matches, first-aid kit, sewing kit, candles, compass, paper clips, elastic bands, pencils, a one-dollar bill, a quarter, a dime, a small lock, a pair of sunglasses, duct tape, masking tape, and regular tape. “I carry this everywhere. When I’m driving to campus, it goes on the front seat of my car.”
When Wanda first met Mac in 1974, he had just won a Rhodes scholarship from the University of Maine to study zoology at Oxford—the first Rhodes scholar selected from the university in forty years. Despite the honor, Mac possessed a somewhat limited knowledge of travel, as he is the first to admit. He remembers transporting ten wooden crates to England that fall, most of which contained his library. “Fifty percent of those books, I never opened,” he admitted. “Now I’m tempted to travel with practically no clothing, but you need more. You get invited out to the ambassador’s house or something, and I’ve been in the position of having to go and buy clothes.”
A trick to carrying a minimal wardrobe is knowing how to launder under any circumstances. “Put soap on the clothes and while you’re taking a shower, jump up and down. Wash them, wring ’em out, and hang them up to dry.”
Two weeks after we visited Mac in Maine, we took our trip to Mississippi, Louisiana, and points west—a journey that lasted more than a month. In contrast with many previous trips, this time, directly influenced by Mac, we decided to travel as lightly as possible. So we limited ourselves to one medium-size suitcase apiece for clothes, plus a briefcase for reading and writing materials. The results set the standard for subsequent trips of any length: one suitcase apiece, period. It makes travel far less cumbersome; rather than having piles of things to choose from that become obstacles to easy movement, we take just a few things to use over and over. Less luggage gives us a streamlined feeling that carries over into the spirit of the place and of being frugal. Travel light, we tell ourselves, or don’t travel at all.
In the years we’ve been together, our thinking about money has not evolved painlessly. When Wanda moved in with Frank in 1980, he was living in a run-down duplex in Venice Beach, for which the rent was $225 a month. It was the kind of place you could call a hole, and it quite literally had one—in the bathroom floor, large enough for a terrier to climb through into the earthen crawl space beneath. (We nailed a piece of unpainted plywood over it.) Frank had lived on borrowed money for part of 1979 and, although he was driving a cab by the time Wanda moved in with him, was still borrowing from friends and family in the conviction that his screenplays were bound to hit the jackpot. Time was on his side, he reasoned. He was not so much extravagant with himself as he was extravagant with his dream.
When Wanda entered the scene, she quickly fell into the role of money prude, parting with cash reluctantly, stressing the need to generate income. She allowed that although Frank’s screenplays might hit it big one day, he should cover his expenses till that moment arrived. Recognizing her own need for steady employment, she embarked on a job search that led her to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
Still unwed, we recorded our every expense in a ledger book: each bag of groceries, every gas bill, even quarts of milk, which we would eventually divide right down the middle. But when we decided to pool resources in a common pot, those accounts were abandoned. As months passed, our battles over the buck grew less frequent and less heated. Frank grew scrappier, more aggressive about pursuing screenwriting and other work. He solicited newspaper assignments and took steady freelance work for a corporate newsletter. In time, having the additional pressure of repaying $6,400 in loans, he came to regret having ever borrowed money in the first place and wondered how he could have done it, having always loathed the feeling, growing up, of being chronically in debt at the orchard.
As much as lavish spending, borrowed money can be the bane of frugality. At least in his profession, the trouble with borrowing, Frank realized, was that it created the illusion of prosperity, that money wasn’t all that important because there was plenty of it to be had. It was reality deferred. And so, Frank spent money he didn’t have—until the accounts came due.
“I can see you’re not new-car people,” the man said, taking in the Malibu—now splashed with roadside mud and wintry slush—on his rural Mount Vernon, Maine, driveway. He spoke approvingly, motioning with an over-the-shoulder glance toward his 1982 Datsun. Dressed in a red plaid shirt, jeans, suede moccasins, and thick wool socks, red-bearded Russell Libby looked the very picture of the rugged outdoors Maine man. The looks weren’t deceiving. Russell and Mary Anne Libby had intentionally stretched their salad days into years, and the payoff was a piece of earth and a self-designed house where they could raise a family and eventually, they hope, enough food to supply all their home use.
The Maine Protestant and the Ohio Catholic paired up in 1980, married in 1982, and embarked on an ambitious life plan that has already borne fruit. During the first four years of their marriage, the couple lived off Mary Anne’s paycheck as a medical librarian and were able to deposit Russell’s salary from the Maine Department of Agriculture (where he is now director of special projects) directly into the bank. By living below their means, they had saved enough by 1986 to purchase outright the thirty-one-acre, $42,000 former farm on which they subsequently built their dream house.
“We borrowed nothing for the property,” Russell said, sitting in the great room of their wide-open house. Its most distinctive feature, a stone-built Russian hearth, partially divides and separates the dining room from the living areas. “We felt very strongly about not getting into debt.” There was a ramshackle house on the property, which they initially considered renovating, but abandoned the idea after estimating the cost of making it habitable to be $50,000.
Financing the construction of their new, 2,300-square-foot house proved somewhat trickier. They cashed in Mary Anne’s pension, which came to almost $40,000, added their savings, and bit the bullet and took out a $12,000 loan. A five-year-loan, Russell explained a tad defensively. “It’s something you could pay off with a minimum-wage job if you had to.”
In June of 1986 forty volunteers showed up from all over New England to break ground on the house and participate in an old-fashioned house raising. The crew included neighbors, family members, and old college pals of Russell’s, along with “some people we didn’t even know—brothers of friends, a couple of doctors. We put up the whole frame in one day, except for the north end.” The framing was of hemlock timbers from a local mill, which were secured with pegs. Russell and Mary Anne envisioned the place as being chemical-free and self-sufficient, although in the end they made some compromises, including the use of plywood (which they’d opposed at first because of its “toxic” glue component) and hooking up the house with the power line (initially they’d wanted to install their own generator).
Russell took off Fridays that summer to work alongside their full-time carpenters, and the Libbys moved into the house in September. By investing sweat equity and recruiting the volunteer labor, Russell said, the house ended up costing just over $30 a square foot, instead of the $80 they would have spent by contracting it out. “By the time we’re done, we’ll have $70,000 to $75,000 in it,” he said. “It adds up to a lot of money, but consider the mortgage on the entire place is $12,000.”
For the Libbys, thriftiness is not just a means to pay off their mortgage, but a lifelong commitment. This year, for instance, “I might make $30,000 for the first time,” Russell said. “We live at a $20,000 income threshold and save. Even though we have a loan out, we’re still putting a little money in the bank every month.”
One important reason for keeping their spending low is to enable Mary Anne to stay home and raise their two daughters, Annie, five, and Maisie, almost three. As we ate the lunch she’d made of acorn-squash casserole and salad, Mary Anne said, “I’d rather be dirt poor and able to be at home with the kids [than be comfortable and have to ship them off to day care].” Though far from “dirt poor,” Mary Anne practices thrift by buying used toys for the children and used clothing and books for the entire family.
But what has stayed with us most is how the Libbys put such a low ceiling on the amount of money they were willing to borrow to finance their dream house. Our visit with them fortified our own resolve to pay as we go. Long before leaving California, Frank “got religion” on the point of not borrowing—not for ourselves, not for the orchard. Like his grandparents, Ralph and Clara Levering, who neither borrowed nor lent money, Frank had come to believe that if he didn’t have the money, he could get by without the thing he wanted. It was an antique sentiment, and, inevitably, there would be exceptions to the rule. But it was good to learn that others shared his viewpoint.
After remodeling our kitchen with money we had on hand, rather than borrowing to finance additional home improvements, we agreed to hold off further renovation work. For the time being we’ve adopted the attitude seen on bumper stickers of old cars: “Don’t laugh, it’s paid for.”
In Los Angeles Frank once half-seriously suggested to Wanda that we accept every credit card offer that arrived in the mail, after the fashion of a movie producer friend who supported himself for several years in this way, while getting his film off the ground. In Los Angeles we had three credit cards. Frank’s attitude had changed 180 degrees by the time we met up with Gary Zapatka, a software specialist with Apple Computer in Cupertino, California, who works with Wanda’s sister, Jane. Gary gets a kick out of mutilating the occasional credit cards that come to him through the mail. “I cut them up and use them as guitar picks.”
Not long after meeting Gary, we returned home and, as quickly as we could, paid off all our accounts and reduced our cache of credit cards to one. We keep this one for identification, for rental cars, and for airplane tickets and make sure to pay the bill in full before the exorbitant interest rates kick in. Though Wanda reluctantly parted with the company that first issued her a credit card in 1981 (a sentimental, if dubious, symbol of independence), she agreed that our one card should be with a company out of Indianapolis that donates a percentage of its profits to charitable causes, such as Habitat for Humanity.
From our arrival in April 1986 until April of 1988, frugality gained the upper hand at Levering Orchard. In contrast with earlier years in the eighties, we bought no new equipment, instead making do with what we had. By doing much of the mowing, picking, hauling, grading, and selling ourselves, we slashed labor costs to the bone. We cut costs by selling more “tree-run” peaches, nectarines, and apples—merchandising the fruit directly to consumers rather than grading and packing to sell wholesale.
Then came a fruit “set” on the cherry trees—the number of pollinated blossoms that become infant fruit—that was wondrous to behold. After the small cherry crop in 1987, when most of the fruit buds had been killed by cold weather, the trees rebounded in 1988 with a prodigious number of buds. In April the weather turned sunny and warm, ideal for pollination. By early May green cherries the size of peas hung massed on the tall trees in quantities no one here—not Sam or Miriam, not Garnet—had ever seen the likes of before. In 1986, the previous record crop, we’d had enough customers to let no cherries go unpicked. This time how would we ever get enough customers to pick even half the cherries? Having been frugal for two years, we were rewarded with a now legendary extravagance on the part of Mother Nature. But how to harvest the bounty?
It was a season, as Garnet observed, that “we might not ever see again.” Many customers told us that they sent their friends to the orchard because only seeing was believing: no words could describe the tiers of leafy boughs, bent over with blood red cherries bunched together like grapes. From the first week in June until the last week in July, every day but Sunday, the crowds came, the weather stayed miraculously dry—and the cherries left the trees. On the Fourth of July—when Frank foolishly let two weary ladder-setting helpers have the day off—743 people signed in at the entrance gate to pick cherries.
We never got the crop picked; short of hiring a large, costly picking crew, there was simply no way we could. But because of phenomenal word of mouth, our first year of advertising and newspaper stories about the conjunction of the record crop with Levering Orchard’s eightieth anniversary, we picked an estimated 85 to 90 percent. At the end of July, bone-tired and mentally numb as we have never been before or since, what cherries were left had shriveled to raisins on the trees. We left them for the birds.
In August, after a short breather, we harvested the other stone fruits; in September and October, the fall apples. By year’s end the orchard debt we had faced in April 1986 had been slashed in half. In very real terms frugality was paying off—in the way we felt not only about ourselves, but in the business that, at times from California, we had all but given up for dead. Perhaps the real money was elsewhere. But the life we wanted was here.