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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - THE COURAGE TO SCREW THINGS UP

  Chapter 2 - KILLING MY LAWN

  Chapter 3 - GROWING FOOD

  Chapter 4 - TICKLING MISS SILVIA

  Chapter 5 - RAISING BABY DINOSAURS

  Chapter 6 - STRUMMING AND STIRRING

  Chapter 7 - FOMENTING FERMENTATION

  Chapter 8 - KEEPING BEES

  Chapter 9 - LEARNING HOW TO LEARN

  CONCLUSION:

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  INDEX

  PORTFOLIO

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2010 by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Mark Frauenfelder, 2010

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-101-43296-9

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  Set in Baskerville

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  For Carla, Sarina, and Jane

  INTRODUCTION:

  ESCAPE TO RAROTONGA

  “All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality—the story of an escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times—how to escape.”

  —A. C. BENSON

  On New Year’s Day 2003, my wife, Carla, and I were sitting in the garden of a little coffeehouse in Studio City, California, with our notebooks open and pens in hand. We were taking part in a yearly ritual: writing down our goals for the coming year. Usually this was a happy, optimistic exercise. In past years we listed such goals as learning Japanese, improving language skills, learning how to become better cooks, and getting book deals with publishers. But not this year. Thanks to the aftereffects of the dot-com implosion of 2001, we were both in a gloomy mood. One of the magazines I was under contract with, The Industry Standard, which covered Internet-based businesses, had itself gone out of business, and other tech magazines I contributed to either had shut down or were circling the drain.

  The entire freelance-journalism market was in the dumps, and since Carla and I made our living writing for magazines, we were in the dumps, too. Just a couple of years earlier, in 2000, The Industry Standard was publishing monstrous, four-hundred-page weekly issues filled with expensive full-page advertisements. (To this day the magazine holds the record for the most ad pages sold in one year.)

  In those giddy days, tech magazine editors were desperate for stories to fill pages, and they were paying top dollar for them. I was able to write about almost any subject that struck my fancy: old stop-motion monster movies, retired science fiction comic book artists, kite-camera enthusiasts. It was wonderful. When I pitched these story ideas to my editors, the only question they’d ask me was “How soon can you give me copy?”

  But by 2001, after hundreds of Internet companies with untenable business plans—like Kozmo.com, Den.net, Pets.com, Floo.com, Webvan.com, Boo.com, and Etoys.com—blew through hundreds of millions of dollars, wiping out stunned investors and driving the NASDAQ into freefall, there was hardly anyone left to advertise. Instead of four-hundred-page issues, the Standard was reduced to a mere pamphlet, topping out at sixty-four pages. The magazine was running on fumes, and it was becoming painfully clear that easy street was about to become a dead end.

  I wasn’t too surprised when my Standard editor called me one morning that August and warned me to submit my final invoice immediately to avoid having to wait in line with other creditors, who would be lucky to get pennies on the dollar for what they were owed. The magazine, which had burned through $200 million in just a few years, was bankrupt.

  “We had a good run,” my editor told me, and she was right. The money had paid for my kid’s school and our mortgage and had given me confidence that we’d be able to deal with the additional expenses of a second child, which we hoped to have in the near future. But now the flow of cash from that fat pipeline into our bank account slowed to a trickle, and reality began to sink in.

  In the days following the news of the Standard’s demise, I made calls to editors I knew at other magazines. They all told me the same thing: They had a backlog of stories, and even if they were to have an assignment for me, they wouldn’t be able to pay the same word rate as in previous months. In my mind’s eye, I saw our comfortable lifestyle imploding: no more restaurant takeout several nights a week, no vacations in Hawaii, no new laptop every eight months, no trips to the gourmet supermarket, no weekly gardener to tend to our tropical garden, no endless cavalcade of FedExed products pouring through our front door. We were going to have to do some serious cutting back. As the months wore on, work continued to dwindle, and it became clear that the Internet bubble wasn’t going to reinflate anytime soon.

  As Carla and I sat in the coffeehouse we began to get serious about a radical idea that we’d been toying with as we’d dealt with our reduced income over the past months: Could it be that the problem was less about how much money we were spending and more about how we were spending our time? As we thought about the things we’d have to give up, we began questioning whether we really wanted to raise our kids in an environment of prepackaged diversions, theme-park rides, trips to the mall, freeway traffic, and incessant e-mails. Was there a better way of life out there, waiting for us to create it?

  We wrote down three goals: 1. To take more control of our lives.

  2. To cut through the absurd chaos of modern life and find a path that was simple, direct, and clear.

  3. To forge a deeper connection and a more rewarding sense of
involvement with the world around us.

  These goals looked awfully good on paper, but how were we actually going to achieve them? Once the holidays were over, we felt sure that practical necessities and the forces of modern society would thwart our every effort to try a new way to live until we gave up and went back into the same old, overcaffeinated routine of school, work, driving, takeout meals, and weekends filled with kiddie birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

  I’m not sure which of us said it first, but we eventually agreed that the solution was to chuck everything and move to Rarotonga.

  Rarotonga is a remote island in the South Pacific, part of the Cook Island nation. Measuring six miles end to end, it’s about one-fifth the size of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Carla and I had spent a week in Rarotonga in 1994, and we’d fallen in love with its slow pace, its tropical lushness, and its natural beauty.

  Life in Rarotonga, we recalled, was simpler. People expected, and were satisfied by, less. The focus wasn’t on getting ahead; it was on communing with nature and sharing music, food, dance, and craft. With its wild splendor, bountiful fruit trees, and lovely weather, the island seemed a place where human beings were meant to live. Plus, there was the exotic appeal: Imagine living on an emerald speck in the middle of the South Pacific, thousands of miles from any continent, where life moves at its own pace—what the locals call “Raro time.”

  Travel writer Arthur Frommer dubbed Rarotonga the third most beautiful island in the South Pacific, behind Tahiti’s Moorea and Bora Bora, and James Michener ranked it above Tahiti in beauty, climate, and the hospitality of the native people. We also remembered with amusement that everywhere you look in Rarotonga, wooden statues of the naked, extremely well endowed god Tangaroa stare back at you; he’s even found on their flower-shaped coins. The Rarotongans’ dancing, which features fast hip gyrations and erotic gestures, was described as “positively obscene” by a nineteenth-century missionary who had grown accustomed to the more languid Hawaiian hula.

  After our first visit to Rarotonga, we occasionally, and only half seriously, had talked about moving there. Living on a tropical island is a common fantasy, of course. Lots of people daydream about cutting ties with their busy, tangled lives and moving to an idyllic island free of traffic jams, screaming car alarms, smog-belching Hummers, random incidents of road rage, billboards, talk radio, graffiti, and other noxious ingredients of urban anxiety. But most people quickly dismiss the fantasy because it’s completely impractical. Once you move there, how do you live? Jobs are scarce, and even if you do pick fruit and catch fish to survive, you still need money for a place to live, and to buy clothes and other necessities, no matter how spare your lifestyle.

  But on that New Year’s Day in 2003, Carla and I realized that we really could move to Rarotonga. As freelancers, we could write from anywhere, and living in Rarotonga would cost a lot less than doing so in our Los Angeles suburb. At the very least, a frugal life on a paradisiacal island would be a lot more fun. Instead of picking up our kids from “playdates” and zapping frozen organic soy cheese macaroni in the microwave for dinner, we could be picking mangos and breadfruit, buying taro root and coconuts from people’s front porches, and fishing for supper. We’d be experiencing life’s moments, rather than trying breathlessly to keep up with our schedules.

  The more we talked about it, the more the idea made sense. I was doing various illustrating jobs for newspapers and magazines, and there was no reason I couldn’t do them in Rarotonga, as long as the place had Internet connectivity. (It did. It was slow and expensive, but it got the job done.)

  We could write articles about living on the island, maybe even get a book deal out of it. We’d stay for a year, and if we liked it, we’d stay longer. The only question left in our minds was “When do we leave?” June seemed to be the right time, after Sarina had finished kindergarten. By then, our new baby (due around the first of April) would be two and a half months old. That gave us about five months to prepare.

  We began writing a list of things we needed to do before moving: 1. Sell house

  2. Sell car

  3. Talk to pediatrician about taking newborn baby to island

  4. Get passport for baby

  5. Box and store the stuff we don’t want to bring with us

  6. Find homes for pet lovebird and rabbit

  7. Find out how to continue Sarina’s education

  8. Cancel car insurance, Internet service, electricity, water, gas, newspaper

  Next, we started a packing list: Baby blankets

  Baby bottles

  Breast pump

  Car seat

  Computers

  Computer batteries

  Computer games

  DVD player/DVDs

  Fever thermometers

  Hair dryer

  Hats

  Mosquito nets

  Mosquito repellent

  Pacifiers

  Playpen

  Portable printer

  Portable radio

  Stroller

  Sun cover for car seat or playpen

  Sunscreen (regular and infant)

  Toys

  Ukulele

  Video camera

  Voltage converter plugs

  Walkie-talkies

  As the months went by, the list grew longer. Much longer. This wasn’t a plan for a simpler life. This was a condensed catalogue of the modern conveniences we were trying to escape.

  Looking back, I can see that, in addition to mosquito nets and sunscreen, this list contained the seeds of our destruction.

  I began reading up on the Cook Islands. I was especially interested in learning about city folk who had tried doing what we were about to do. I read several books by Robert Dean Frisbie of Cleveland, who in 1920, at the age of twenty-four, headed for the South Pacific. For several years Frisbie wandered from island to island, eventually settling on Pukapuka, one of the Cooks’ remote northern islands, in order to live in “a place beyond the reach of the faintest echo from the noisy clamour of the civilised world.” There Frisbie ran a trading post and wrote the first of a dozen novels and memoirs of living an unencumbered, rustic life in the South Pacific.

  In his later years, Frisbie was befriended by Tom Neale, a sailor from New Zealand who had taken a job at the general store in Rarotonga’s capital, Avarua. Like Frisbie, Neale longed to escape the noise and congestion of civilization and live on his own terms. He thought that the only way he could do that was by living alone on an island where no one could tell him what to do. In the early 1950s, egged on by Frisbie (now nearly bedridden from a chronic respiratory ailment), Neale moved to a tiny uninhabited Cook island called Suwarrow and set up house in a little shack that had been built as a World War II monitoring post. He caught fish, raised chickens, and hunted down the feral pigs that tore up his garden at night. His days were filled with hard physical labor, but he was profoundly happy on the island, where he lived, on and off, for sixteen years. He wrote about his time on Suwarrow in his memoir, An Island to Oneself.

  Neale’s and Frisbie’s books thrilled me and made me even more excited to move to Rarotonga. But I failed to understand that what they had done and what we were about to do were entirely different things. Neale and Frisbie chose to be responsible for making and maintaining every object and system needed to ensure their survival, while Carla and I were still going to be dependent on others to provide for all our necessities and luxuries. We weren’t really changing our behavior; we were just changing our environment.

  All I can say is, we didn’t understand it at the time. We thought that by living on an island, inhabited by people who lived at a slower place, we’d somehow become that way ourselves.

  Over the next five months, we went through our to-do list: selling the house, storing our furniture, selling our car, buying supplies. It was exciting, and we talked about little else. At night, lying in bed, we discussed our plans, hopes, and fears. We talked about how our friends thought we were crazy; we sometimes
wondered if they were right. We talked about what needed to be done before we got on the plane and left the United States. The one thing we didn’t talk a lot about was what we were going to do once we got there.

  We had vague notions that we’d simply spend a lot of time hiking and beachcombing and sitting under palm trees while Sarina explored tidepools and our baby slept in a miniature hammock. Beyond that, we didn’t have a plan. Part of the reason for that may have been that we really wanted to escape the crazy schedule of kids’ playdates and school functions and other social obligations that raised our stress levels. So the idea of not having a plan appealed to us.

  When the day came to leave, our friends Liz and Craig dropped in to help with last-minute details. The amount of gear we had lined up in the hallway surprised them: eight giant roller suitcases, a carry-on for each of us, plus a stroller, a portable crib, and a car seat for the baby. We needed two taxis to take us to the airport—one for the four of us and a van for all the luggage. (That luggage became an anchor that dragged on us for our entire stay in the South Pacific. Carla had packed thirteen pairs of shoes, and she never wore any of them, always either sporting a pair of two-dollar flip-flops she bought in Rarotonga or going barefoot.)

  After a twelve-hour flight we landed at Rarotonga’s tiny airport, across the road from the ocean, which consisted of a simple airstrip and a one-story building with a blue-and-white wooden sign that read WELCOME TO THE COOK ISLANDS. We were greeted by a group of men wearing floral batik shirts who strummed ukuleles near the immigration inspection line. The blue sky went on forever, patched with just a few white fluffy clouds.

  As we found out later, we had just missed a four-day rainstorm.