My maternal ancestors came from England and settled on Cape Cod in Massachusetts in the early 1700′s. It wasn’t long before they were moving north and west, first to the Deerfield, Massachusetts area, then to New Hampshire and Vermont. A generation later, they were spread out all over the country from New England to the California goldfields. The reason for this was two-fold: genetic wanderlust and a desire to live private lives apart from their fellow humans.
In an old letter, one of my ancestors writes to his sister back East that he’s moving, because – not only can he see the smoke from his neighbor’s chimney – but he can also smell it and hear his neighbor calling his pigs. “There is no peace for me here,” he writes, “Not a week goes by but what someone “drops in” and many days we see at least one traveler pass by on horseback or wagon. There have been weeks when we’re afflicted with visitors on two out of seven days and I have to retire to the woodlot to avoid them.”
While I’m not quite as antisocial as my (however many)-great uncle, I can sympathize. I’ve inherited the need for solitude. Although I’ve lived in cities, towns and suburbs, I’m not comfortable living where I’m overlooking my neighbor’s living rooms and they’re overlooking mine. When I look out my window, I want to see trees, plants and sky, not people.
This is something I think of when my friends and family are rhapsodizing over eco-communities designed around a common, with houses cheek by jowl to spare the environment and enhance community participation. It all sounds wonderful until I start to think about how I’d be surrounded by people from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed. I’m just not made that way.
As a homeschooling mother, I’ve learned to adapt to more social interaction that I was used to before the kids joined us. I love my kids and really enjoy being around them, playing and working with them or just hanging out with them on the deck, in the backyard or at the dining table. However, I also make sure that I have enough downtime without them for my sake and theirs. Luckily, I have kids who also need time alone, so it’s rarely an issue.
Where other people get energized from being in social situations, I get tired. Rather than charging my “batteries”, other people seem to drain them. Even when I have a good time and really enjoy gatherings of more than a few people, I need time to recover my equilibrium and process the experience before I’m fit company again. This is why it’s a good thing that our house is surrounded by woods and fields where we can walk without bumping into anything more sociable than a raven or squirrel.
So, when we’re all living in ecologically sustainable communities, where will people like me fit in? I suspect that it will be considered terribly politically incorrect to have a little cabin off by ourselves or a yurt up in the mountains. Maybe we’ll have to pay extra to make up for the damage our “singular” lifestyles do to the environment. Or, maybe, hermits will be outlawed and we’ll have to shut ourselves in the bathroom to get away like homeschooling moms have been doing for years.
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