Mark Sundeen - The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America

B y the time the train approached the station, night had fallen. Sarah gathered her bags and descended the stairs to the luggage rack. Her husband helped slide an unwieldy cardboard box toward the door. The steel floor rocked beneath her shoes. The conductors voice crackled over the loudspeaker: This is not a smoking stop, folks. Unless this is your final destination, please stay on board the train. The next smoking stop will be Kansas City. Sarah peered out the window but saw only her reflection. She turned to the woman beside her.

Are you from here?

The woman said she was.

Can you see the stars here?

Oh, yes, said the woman. Theyre beautiful.

Sarah and Ethan had spent two nights on the train. First they rode the Silver Meteor from Fort Lauderdale to Washingtona twenty-two-hour haul. Then nineteen hours to Chicago aboard the Capitol Limited. Had she sifted through newspapers discarded on seats by fellow passengers, Sarah might have seen an item concerning the bankruptcy of the nations second-largest subprime mortgage lender, the most recent in a string of nearly fifty such failures. In other news, a senator named Barack Obama had announced a bid for the presidency. Steve Jobs had unveiled a device called the iPhone, its failure quickly forecast: Nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. Sarah had slept some, lulled by the clicking of the rails and the muffled whump each time a bridge flexed beneath the car.

She was hungry. During these final four hours, aboard the Southwest Chief, she had eaten the last of the peanut butter from Florida. The train had smelled of disinfectant when it left Chicago, but as the passengers began to snore beneath blankets, sprawled in their seats, the air had thickened and gone stale. Through Illinois, Sarah had gazed down at backyards and country lanes, but once the sun had set, the window allowed no glimpses of her new home. She was as giddy as a bride.

The train shuddered to a stop, and the conductor slid open the steel door and placed a set of portable yellow stairs on the platform. An icy wind nipped Sarahs ears as she stepped into the white pool of light. Sarah and Ethan wrestled the cardboard box off the train, piled it with the rest of their belongings. The train whistled and chugged into the night. The smattering of departing passengers was whisked away by waiting cars. The frozen air smelled of wet wood.

Sarah cut open the box with a pocketknife. Inside were bicycle parts. Resting a frame upside down on the concrete, she attached the wheels and brake cables. Her breath hovering in clouds, she flipped the bike and threaded the seat post into its orifice and tightened the clamp. By the time both bikes were ready, the station was empty. Fingers of trees stretched toward the dark sky. The whole place could be swallowed by the night. They hung panniers and fastened backpacks to the racks. Sarah zipped her jacket, snugged a wool stocking cap beneath her helmet, inserted her hands into warm gloves.

After studying a folded photocopy of a map under the lamps of the platform, Sarah and Ethan crossed the tracks and pedaled into town. They glided between the plain white clapboard cottages, a distant streetlight shimmering in a halo of mist. Sarah felt awkward, as if she had misassembled her bike. With each pump her knees bumped against her belly. But it was not her bicycle that had changed. It was her body. She was in her fifth month.

Three months earlier, she and Ethan had compiled a list of twenty criteria for a home, a place to begin their family. Among other things, they intended to grow as much of their own food as was possible, so they listed:

Year-round drinking-water source

Long growing season with ample rainfall

Those requirements alone had eliminated huge swaths of the country: the northern plains were too wintry, the Southwest too dry.

Another goal was to live without electricity and petroleum. That did not mean they would generate power with solar panels or wind turbines. They simply would not have it: no hot-water heater, refrigerator, furnace, washing machine, computer, or cell phone. No lightbulbs. They added to the list:

Existing structures not wired for electricity

No building codes, to allow building with natural materials

Sarah and Ethan would not use cars or airplanes. They would rely on walking, bikes, and public transport. They wanted to be:

Fewer than five miles from a train station

Within biking distance of a college town

They also listed criteria of purely personal preference. Sarah was a classically trained soprano and wanted a town where she could sing opera. As for Ethan, a former marine biologist raised in a Massachusetts fishing town, he hoped to be near the sea.

Ethan and Sarah already knew of a place that met most of their criteria: the forested hills of Cottage Grove, Oregon, where they had rented a homestead for five years and Sarah had sung in the chorus of Carmen