Novella Carpenter - Possum Living: How to Live Well without a Job and with (Almost) No Money

Possum Living

Possum Living

HOW TO LIVE WELL WITHOUT A JOB AND WITH (ALMOST) NO MONEY

Dolly Freed

Way back in 1978, an eighteen-year-old with the pseudonym Dolly Freed wrote a impassioned book about how to live a more simple life. Her timing was impeccable. The late 70s was a weird time: There were fuel shortages and gas lines. There was the mass suicide at Jonestown. The nighttime soap opera Dallas aired, setting the stage for a turn toward materialism and excess. Something just wasnt right.

But Dolly and her dad had found happiness. They lived outside of Philadelphia where they kept rabbits and a garden, and even made their own hooch. Each chapter of Dollys book outlined a way to live DIYfood, housing, heating or transportation. The book became a cult classic. We live this way for a very simple reason: Its easier to learn to do without some of the things that money can buy than to earn the money to buy them, Dolly wrote. She called her way of life, and her book, Possum Living.

When I was approached to write this introduction for the new Tin House edition, I have to admit I smirked at the title. In my urban farming memoir, Farm City: the Education of an Urban Farmer, I had described, in excruciating detail, my execution of an opossum that had killed some of my livestock. Possums arent my friends.But Dolly, it turns out, is. Shes like a long-lost half-sister that I had never met before. As I built my urban farm in Oakland, CA, which contained honey bees, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, pigs, goats, fruit trees, and vegetables, I had consulted a great deal of farming howto books including Helga Olkowskis City Peoples Book of Raising Food, The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing, and Carla Emerys The Encyclopedia of Country Living. But I had never heard of Possum Living. Now that I have read it, Im honored to write this introduction and explain why people today might want to read this 70s cult classic.

Possum Livings main concern seems to be philosophical. Dollys god is Diogenes, the ancient philosopher who lived in a wine barrel and eschewed possessions. Dolly calls him a good old-boy, one of the first back-to-basics freaks in recorded history. Living free, without having a real job, like Diogenes is her main pursuit. It is with wide-eyed glee that she dispenses what she has learned from living possum since she was thirteen years old. Possum Living includes gems like buying bags of wheat at the animal feedstore instead of at a health food store; securing land by buying foreclosed properties; and getting protein in your diet by fishing for river turtles. The fact that Dolly knew all these tricks and skillsand wrote a book about it as a teenageris mind-boggling. A seventh grade dropout, Dolly went on take the GED, got into college and eventually became a NASA engineer. She appeared on the Merv Griffin Show, and starred in a documentary about her lifestyle. Dolly eventually did give up the possum life, but as she writes in her afterword, Just knowing how to possum live takes away a great deal of the fear brought on by the fluctuating economy, Y2K-type scares, and unstable job markets.

Im tempted to call Dolly the grandmother of urban farming. Like urban farmers, she was focused on what we call food security or food sovereigntythat is, having reliable access to healthy food. She and her father had a cellar astir with meat rabbits, a metal barrel that served as a fireplace, and a kitchen that kicked out a bastards blend of Euell Gibbons and Joy of Cooking. If you were invited to supper, you might have been served rabbit sausage, snapper soup, and a side of rocket pickle.

Dolly is refreshingly skeptical about trendy gardening ideas; she only writes about what works for her, never getting dewy-eyed about ideology in the garden. Her motto is simple: dont plant it if you cant eat it. Matters close to my heart, dumpster diving and foraging, are also discussed, with a similar focus on the practicalgathering apples from an abandoned orchard, for example, might yield more food than say, trying to make cattail flour gathered from a nearby pond like some hippies suggest. I do have to gently insert that anyone looking to re-create some of the recipes might be alarmed at the inclusion of margarine in pretty much every dish. It was the 70s after all. May I suggest replacing all calls for the oleo with good old-fashioned butter instead?

Im not sure brewing alcohol is part of food sovereignty, but for Dolly and her dad, having alcohol on tap was crucial. As such, Possum Living outlines exactly how to make a still, with a useful diagram and detailed recipes. Next time I plan on having a party, I doubt that Im going to make a big ol batch of sugar beet liquor, but its nice to know that, in a pinch, I could.

Possum Living was prescient about the current housing crisis. You must own your home in order to live cheaply. If you are renting or paying off a mortgage, Dolly explained, you are locked into the money economy, period. She recommends buying foreclosed houses or getting creative with non-traditional structures. I think of Dolly when I see punks squatting in abandoned buildings or the simple living folk building tiny houses. And I thought of her when I got word that I would be evicted from my long-time rental apartment in Oaklandits true, that housing must come first. Farmers need land security.

Of course you have to spend money on a few things: electricity, heating your house, buying clothes, getting around, but she urges (as the simplicity movement urges today) that less is more. Shop at a thrift store, ride a bike, unplug your refrigerator, wear a sweater. These things are all better for the planet. Dolly muses, While Im not contributing to economic growth, a dubious good, Im also not contributing to pollution, a definite evil.

Possum Living can be read in so many different ways. An urban farming manual. A manifesto for living a more simple life. A time capsule that shows a way of life in 1978, margarine and all. A tonic for our internet-fueled consumer culture. But a careful reader might read this as a book within a book, a story of a father and a daughter, and their struggles.

Im sensitive to father/daughter stories because of my own personal history. Around the time Dolly was writing about her time spent fishing for turtles and making homemade gin with her dad, my parents were setting up a ranch on 180 acres in Idaho. Just like Dollys dad, my own father wanted to give up the rat race. Like Dolly, I had always thought that my dads need to get away from society had noble, philosophical roots. Dolly obviously idolizes her fatheraka the Old Fool. He has taught her about Diogenes, after all. But as you read Possum Living, and experience life as Dolly explains it, it becomes clear that somethings not quite right. The truth is revealed between the linesDaddy has a drinking problem. His practice of making threatening late-night calls or visits to adversaries lets the reader in on the fact that he might harbor some violent tendencies. Maybe theres a reason he had to escape the real world that was more than just philosophical. Maybe he just couldnt function in normal society, and so he created a world where he could drink during the day, and fed that story to his impressionable daughter. It was the same for me: it was when I was in my late thirties that I realized that my dad, the mythical mountain man philosopher, was actually just a misanthropic prick.