The Adventures of Little Steve, Vol. 4

Okay, I’ll admit it. Having lent ear to your horror stories in untold number, I am willing to accept defeat. You have won. I am officially frightened.

For the longest time, I refused to acknowledge the profundity of such commentary. They are only trying to scare me, I told myself. I simply won’t believe it. Oh just wait, was often the reply. Everything will change. You’ll see.

The tales covered the entire spectrum. Toy after toy after plastic toy, my brother Jeb muttered, eyes glazed over like a veteran of some lost war. Catch up on your rest now, advised a plethora of sources, because, basically, you won’t sleep for a year. The smell, others said, faces covered with shell shock, or worse. Fun stuff? Ha! Yeah, that’s over.

A mother made the comment on the website Outside Parent that having kids is akin to entering an entirely new epoch. She called it Before Children; B.C. for short. I’ve heard this elsewhere, in different forms, from other people. I never really put much stock in it, but such insidious omnipresence leads me to believe I am missing something. Parenthood must be like combat. Until you experience it for yourself, you really can’t know anything about it.

Well, with less than a month to go before Little Steve’s arrival, I seem to be suffering from what one would call pre-battle jitters.

I’m suddenly worried about all sorts of things. What if there is something wrong with him, a chronic condition or disability? What if I panic and drop the little guy? What if he comes out looking like me, covered head to toe in fur?

No less worrisome than those genuine concerns are other, more evanescent ones. I realize my real life will change in tangible, concrete ways. But what about my invented one? What about my philosophies, my beliefs, my pipe dream? Is my fantasy of a less intrusive existence destined to be buried beneath an onslaught of plastic paraphernalia and Happy Meals? Toys, I hear Jeb say again. So many toys.

I’d really like to thank everyone who has been so supportive of Brandi and me throughout this grand adventure. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of you all. Thanks, Cindy, for spending the entire month of December making diapers. Alece, for the batch of Craigslist clothes. Sharie and Cadence, for the box filled with slightly used items (“boys love dinosaurs”). Lisa, Sandy, and Merry for their encouragement and advice. Dan and Vic, for the wonderful shower. Thanks to each and every one of you who has helped get Little Steve this far.

Did I not know you were all there, waiting to catch him should he fall, were he without your loving support and guidance, I would certainly be much more terrified than I already am.

Sticker Shock on a Mountaintop

Sitting here on my computer, surfing the internet for a jogging stroller while fighting off the global warming induced arctic chill with a gas burning furnace and a hot mug of Costa Rica’s finest bean, it’s pretty difficult to know where I really stand on the subject of energy. Certainly, the current direction leads no place I want to go, but when it comes down to putting my money where my mouth is, what other options am I given? Do I live without the stroller, the internet, the coffee? The only thing I really need is the heat. When it comes down to it, the rest I guess are luxuries.

Most of us would agree that we don’t support mountaintop coal mining practices but few of us could point out the place where the power we consume comes from, let alone source the myriad raw materials that go into each of the products we consume. Proponents claim consumers drive the free market, but this is only partially true; it is those with capital who control capitalism. Subsidies like Appalachia coal shovels alter the shape of the commodity market, obliterating the landscape and destroying natural processes. No part of the system has been left to function unmolested, unregulated. Individuals do not build the houses in which they live; industry does. They are constructed with singular function in mind; that of an efficiency for profit, not shelter. Farmers do not grow food for people; they produce crops for corporations. Consumers have little say in what products appear at market. They simply make their choice from among what is offered, often with price as the only determinate factor, and always without a clear understanding of what truly was their cost.

I have seen of late a number of exposes bent on revealing the actual cost, measured not in dollars but in death, of our having anything we want anytime we want it. Red Gold, The Cove, Food Inc, iLoveMountains.org; they all relate a similar story. Our way of living is killing every other on Earth. After a month of immersion, I am overwhelmed. Faced with this much reality, I want nothing more than to stick my head in the sand, order that stroller for Lil Steve from Wal-Mart, and sip my coffee.

Few if any of us are in a position to step out of line completely. There are very few places left in the world where one can go and practice a purely subsistence based existence, and even fewer of us who are capable. To live in these times is to be a part of this epoch of human history. Whether I want to be or not, I am part of the global community that is the dolphin slaughter in Taiji, that is genetically engineered crops in Iowa, and that is mountaintop coal mining in West Virginia.

What I gathered from all this, after calming my nerves with a cup of airlifted Costa Rican pura vida, is that we are, deliberately as well as inadvertently, asleep at the wheel. How can the practice of selling dolphin meat or producing electricity from coal dust be stopped when I don’t know where the products I consume come from or what it costs to get them here? How can I properly vote with my wallet under such circumstances? Simply put, I can’t, even if I wanted to.

For a year now, Washington has been abuzz with the term transparency. What a godsend that concept would be, if only it were applied universally. Who would buy a new jogging stroller for their Lil Steve if it had “Five mountains, seventeen thousand penguins, and countless generations of brook trout were destroyed in the making of this product” written on the side of the box? A few of us, yes. But not as many as before.

Personally, I don’t want to support mining operations that remove mountaintops in West Virginia or ruins the Bristol Bay salmon run. But I do want that jogging stroller for Little Steve, and I don’t think that those two desires are necessarily at odds. If subsidies were removed from commodities and actual environmental costs of production were assumed by consumers, I believe the free market system would force that capital be moved into cleaner, more efficient processes. The price on that jogging stroller might, and most certainly would, go up, probably a lot. But if that is the actual cost of keeping around a salmon run or mountaintop, things that are of infinitely greater consequence than Lil Steve having a new stroller, I would be happy to pay it. At the very least, I would know that what I got was what I paid for.