Claire Hansen

Extract from Sufficient

Michael and I left London early one Saturday in the middle of July. It was light out when we slipped into the King’s Cross underground, but only just; people were still out from the night before, blearily eating McDonald’s in crop tops and ratty sneakers smudged with scuffs from the dancefloor.

We caught the first tube of the day, and then, from Paddington, endured four blurry, coffee-less hours on the train, where through slitted eyelids I watched the grey of cities eaten up by red brick and green fields. When we finally arrived in Carmarthen, Wales, I was awake and the sun was climbing, the day already unusually warm. As we waited outside of the car rental shop, my shoulders turned pink before I thought to smear on sunscreen.

I was there to see Dawn, a woman who lives on a smallholding tucked in the Brechfa forest. She’s a prepper, though she dislikes the term, instead describing herself as “self-sufficient.” I’d found her on Facebook, where she runs two women-only groups about prepping, and from there I’d stumbled on her YouTube. We’d spoken on the phone, and I asked to visit. She agreed. Michael and I were hoping to go hiking in Wales, anyway.

We got in the car and pulled out of the rental car lot, my knuckles white on the wheel as I slung us through unfamiliar roundabouts.

It was a tense drive. Michael and I squabbled over how close I was to the thick brush on the passenger side while the road undulated over the hills, going from two lanes to one and back again, each hairpin turn an exercise of blind faith. The road in some places wound through thick woods with dense ferns reached out toward the car in supplication from the shoulder, and for most of the 45-minute trip, I had that peculiar feeling that I often do when I first travel somewhere new, when I am trying to reconcile the idea I had of the place – an imagining I’ve built up in my mind – with the reality, but I can’t, and so the two images lay superimposed over each other, leaving me off kilter, my perception skewed.

At one point, the trees formed a tunnel, leaves a bright summer green, and it reminded me so much of the mountains I grew up in, an entire ocean away, that I almost expected to see Kudzu creeping up the tree bark. But then we suddenly shot out of the trees, the illusion shattering against the patchwork quilt of the pastoral.

I turned off the main road when Google told me to and guided the car down a long gravel driveway of sorts with a couple of buildings at the end. We got out, stretched, and walked to what I thought was the front door of Dawn’s house. I stepped back in surprise when a round-faced, younger woman answered my knock, and told me that no, actually, Dawn lives next door. The first presumption of the day crumbled; I had assumed that Dawn’s homestead was completely isolated, but there was a neighbour, so close that they shared a driveway.

When we walked around the bend again and lifted open a large livestock gate, there she was, sitting at an outdoor table with a man I knew to be her husband.

Dawn stood as we approached and a trio of labradors bounded toward us, curiously sniffing our hands and legs. She was shorter than I expected, but her face was familiar enough from the YouTube videos I’d watched: weathered by the sun and lined with the upper cusp of middle age, light blue eyes neither sharp nor soft, frizzy hair more grey than brown.

We said our hellos, made our small talk. The drive, the weather, the train. She spoke softly, regarding me with what I couldn’t decide was shyness, wariness, or both. I was a bit shy, too, nervous and rusty from not interviewing someone in months, and I was so in my own head – weighing what I was saying, how I was coming off – that my surroundings didn’t fully register until, stopped in front of an enclosure by the main house, a white goat gave my hand a big, pushing nudge. The sunlight, the noise of the landscape, Dawn’s face in front of me – all of it snapped back in place in a rush.

I looked around the property. The house sat to our right, a modest, red thing with construction on the side where they were building an addition. Stretched out beyond was grassy land, slightly sloped up and then back down again and collaged with animal enclosures. A light wind tangled my hair, the air clean and clear with an edge of manure. After observing the goats for a few minutes, small talk still stilted, we started tromping through the grass slowly, Dawn’s docile, blind lab trailing dutifully behind us.

Dawn took us around to see all of the animals. There were chickens in two pens, a rooster to each. Huge white ducks waddled in a line up the gentle hill. In an enclosure furthest from the house, pregnant water buffalo gazed at us indolently, their bellies swollen cartoonishly out to the side. “Any day now,” Dawn said with a nod.

In another enclosure, alpacas lolled in the dandelions, jaws working in a circle, and in a pen near them, four pigs, black and grunting, stamped at the dirt. Dawn had gotten the pigs for free from a breeder she’d befriended on Facebook, she said. Bacon, soon.

I asked about the animals and as we walked the silences got shorter, the conversation less stiff. Dawn told me about the smallholding, about its rhythms and the work it took to run it. It was, I realised quickly, not just a small homestead – it was a working farm.

It was properly hot by that point, my jeans sticking to the back of my legs. Our steps and voices were the only sounds except for the soft huffing and clucking of the animals when we got near.

“Do you get lonely here, away from everyone else?” I asked.

She waved away the question with a hand. “You don’t really have time for it.” Dawn insisted that she and her husband were about 90 to 95% what she described as “self-sufficient.” They grew their own vegetables and farmed all of their milk from the goats, all their eggs from the chickens, all of their meat from the pigs and water buffalos. “I wanted to get away from commercial meat production,” she told me between periodic sips on a small silver vape pen she kept tucked in one fist. I sidestepped out of the way of her exhale, the cloying vapour cutting through the sweet smell of cut grass.

Dawn didn’t leave the land much, but every week, she said, she or her husband had to drive the hour round trip into town every week to buy animal feed.

The last stop on our animal tour of sorts was a field with male water buffalos, five or six of them, the most massive creatures I’ve ever seen in person. They came right up to us, separated only by the thin, electrified wire, jostling each other out of the way to stick their pebbled noses towards us. Squeezed together, they were a huge, teeming mass of power that made some animal part of me wake up and recognize the threat, how easily they could trample me. But they were friendly, Dawn said, and when I tentatively put my hand out I was rewarded with a wet lick from one of the largest ones, a male with a funny name that I didn’t write down and have since forgotten. They name the animals they keep around for breeding or milking, and don’t name the ones they raise for meat, Dawn said.

“That’s right boys,” she crooned to the unlucky nameless beasts. “Going to be steaks.” I asked her if they slaughtered all the animals themselves. No, she said, patting a wiry head. The buffalos they had to send to a slaughterhouse. They were much too big for her and her husband to kill by themselves.

Dawn does not believe the world is going to end – not soon, anyway. She prefers the terms “self-sufficient” or “self-reliant” over the label “prepper,” which she associates with the militarised, paranoid and overwhelmingly male iterations of the practice that dominate the internet.

I had started thinking about approaches to prepping as two sliding scales: the first was what people were prepping for, from the mundane to the extreme – on one end, things like storms and power cuts, unemployment or sickness – and on the other, events like polar shifts, asteroids, complete economic collapse. The second sliding scale I imagined was the extent of the preparation, from a small stash of cans in the cupboard to a fully-stocked bunker. Dawn, I had thought, was relatively low on the first scale and somewhere in the middle of the second – though I mentally slid her way up on the latter scale after seeing the extent of her smallholding.

Dawn had started a women’s only prepping Facebook group as well as a more local Wales group for women looking to be self-sufficient after seeing how badly they were treated by men in the larger online spaces.

“It’s all talk about crossbows and knives and where you are going to bug out,” she said. “These men have 50 years of seeds and they’ve never grown anything in their lives.” We were standing in a small polytunnel. It was stiflingly hot and full of leafy vegetables – lettuces and vines, miniature corn stalks and root vegetables. A bead of sweat dripped down my breastbone as Dawn snapped off two peas from the vine and handed them to me and Michael. I bit into it the sinewy shell, slightly bitter before the sharp, intense sweetness of the pea exploded in my mouth.

In a week, Dawn was set to host some of the women from one of her groups. They would camp out, learn how to grow and store food and how to shoot weapons. For as isolated as the land is and as alone as Dawn is most of the time, it struck me how persistent Dawn was about trying to form community – her blog, her YouTube, her Facebook groups. Not having time to be lonely doesn’t mean you aren’t, or don’t want to be.

We left the vegetable polytunnel and ducked into the next. It was even hotter, the air humid and tropical. This one was for fruits – limes and peaches, pineapples and apples. An unripe orange the size of a child’s fist dangled off a foot-tall shrub, yellow and dimpled.

“The idea of being self-sufficient – I didn’t want to just eat a drab diet,” Dawn said by way of explanation.

“Where on earth do you get all these seeds?” I asked.

“E-bay.”

After we’d seen most of the smallholding, Dawn walked us behind the main house to a shed-like building. Tall green plants with umbrella-sized leaves guarded the door, and the mid-afternoon light shone through them, illuminating the veins. I reached out to rub the leaves between my fingers and was surprised to find the surface pleasantly rough. Astilboides, Dawn told me. I forgot the name and had to look it up later.

The shade of the building was a welcome relief. Inside, it was a fully stocked crafting workshop, with a wall full of thread spools and fabrics and other supplies, and four tables with gleaming white sewing machines arranged in front of a fifth, which Dawn sat behind. She wanted to start hosting crafting and sewing classes for other women to make a bit of money, she said.

Dawn and her husband have only had the smallholding for eight years. They saved for decades so they could move from the suburbs of a larger city in England.

She’d always wanted this kind of life, ever since she was in her 20s. I knew her story wasn’t a happy one, and I tried to probe gently, tugging on comments she made with quiet, open-ended questions. I hadn’t needed to tread so lightly; she recounted it to us matter-of-factly, tone conversational with the cadence of someone who has gotten used to sharing a hard story.

Dawn fell pregnant at fifteen and then again at sixteen, by a man that was twice her age. They married, and he was abusive to her and to their daughters. Her second husband was a drug addict, but eventually she escaped that marriage, too, before meeting her current husband, whom she’s been with for more than 30 years.

“When I got away,” Dawn told us about her first marriage, “I swore I was never, ever, ever going to depend on a man again.”

I had been trying all afternoon to make sense of her, and a few pieces clicked neatly into place then – the women’s groups, the wariness, the hard edge to some of her comments and beliefs.

Dawn and her husband can’t both be away from the property at the same time, she said. They’ve missed a family wedding. A funeral was tricky. They can’t visit friends or family or go on holiday. It’s been a wedge between her and her family; she doesn’t speak with her sister anymore.

Her old friends find her new life embarrassing. They judge her. It’s no loss, she said. City folks. Buying new clothes, wanting nicer cars or houses or holidays. How could they live like that? Disgusting. At one point she stuck her leg out for us to admire her clogs, which she made from cutting down an old pair of Wellingtons. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, glad I had worn old jeans and my dirty sneakers.

Living like she does in Wales, “is what England was like 50 years ago,” she said affectionately. I shifted in my chair again.

What about people who live in cities? Who don’t have the money or desire to move to a rural community? I asked. She didn’t really have an answer. But prepping, she said, is still essential.

“What if you lose your job? What if you die? Do you have life insurance?” She said. “It’s not as simple as creating hordes of food. It’s the crap that life throws at you.” The homestead is on the main electric and gas grid. Sometimes the power cuts off in the area. One time for more than 40 hours. But some of her neighbours don’t even have a candle.

***

Walking around the smallholding that day reminded me of Iowa, where my parents both grew up and where I used to spend summers visiting my grandparents. Maybe it was the fields and the animals and the gardens that made me think of the American Midwest, but mostly, I think, it was the sky – wide and tall and clear. The sky of my childhood, of where cornfields met the horizon in a clean slash.

I don’t know why I think of fields when I think of my grandparents, because they actually lived in a medium-sized town, in a modest, 70s-style ranch house on a cracked-asphalt street. I haven’t been in the house for about a decade – it was sold after they both died – but my body remembers it: the roughness of the grout in between the tiles near the front window, where my grandma kept her plants; the sound of the wind chimes dangling from the tree out front; the cracks in the leather of my grandfather’s reclining chair. The house has since taken on a mythic quality in my mind, unchanging, like the rooms of a historic-home-turned-museum with its objects glued down. I imagine walking through it and my chest aches with longing.

The house looked normal enough. It was always a bit cluttered – enough that you knew it was lived in – but clean and functional. But open a cabinet or look under the bed or pull open the shower curtain in my grandparents’ bathroom, and you would be met with a wall of stuff, things crammed together so tightly it was hard to figure out what anything was. In the refrigerator and freezer, we would find things months and even years past their expirations dates.

The basement was the worst. Down the carpeted steps, in a big, windowless room, boxes and stacks of objects formed a maze, the rows separated only by enough room for the narrowest of walkways.

Very little of the stuff was what you’d think of as garbage, but the clutter was so dense in places that it has in my mind taken on the indistinctness of a cube of compacted trash. But still, I loved the basement. I have always loved things, have always been the person to enter a room and rudely start going through the objects on the top of the dresser, and so as a kid I would sit on the carpet in the basement and sort through the boxes, this archive of my family. I remember few specifics: masses of plastic bags and towering stacks of magazines; letters from my aunt’s ex-boyfriend and my uncle’s baseball card collection; clothes in protective plastic hangings that had not fit anyone for years; a 1960s-era government pamphlet on how to prepare for a nuclear attack. The latter I tucked into my backpack and took home with me.

The hoarding got worse when the Alzheimer’s took root. My grandmother would forget what she had bought at the store the day before. At one point, she had some 15 pairs of identical front-pleated khakis hanging in the closet, most still with the tags on. When my mother finally moved my grandparents out of the house and to an assisted living facility, she and her siblings spent a week sorting through the contents of the home. They donated carloads of items to charity shops and filled three enormous, industrial-sized dumpsters destined for the landfill.

The clutter and hoarding never bothered me as a child – if anything, it added to the mythos of my grandma’s house. But it upset my mother and embarrassed my grandmother, even as she continued to stack yoghurt containers and boxes and extra canned food in the corner of the basement.

I understood the impulse with a child’s simplicity. I had grown up hearing about my grandmother’s childhood. The volatility of farm life and the one-room schoolhouse. The unpredictable tragedies that took several of her siblings’ lives. The Depression. The war. Her one pair of shoes. When I was older, my mother would tell me that there were weeks when she was growing up when, looking back, she wasn’t sure how my grandparents managed to put food on the table for their four kids.

“I could use this someday,” my grandmother would say to us when tucking something away in a cupboard. “We might need it. You never know. You never know.”

***

Sitting in Dawn’s craft room that July afternoon, the sun and our early morning was catching up to me, and the conversation started to wane.

We cycled through a few more topics. As we talked, wind chimes tinkled in the distance, the huge, umbrella-like leaves visible through the doorway. They rustled in the wind, the sound like dry paper rubbing together.

Dawn doesn’t really believe in climate change, she said. The climate has always been changing. Still, she can feel it. The winters are wetter, the storms worse.

The conversation turned again to current events: The war. Covid. The cost of living crisis. It’s getting more expensive to go into town, she said with a sigh. Animal feed costs more. “It’s made a lot of people realise that they can’t depend on the government,” she said. “Do you think the government should do more?”

“No.” The answer was quick. “Not their responsibility.”

At one point I asked her if she thinks she’ll ever leave this place. If she’ll ever go back. “No,” she said.

Suddenly, she turned the question back on me. “You don’t think you could live like this?” She asked, almost in challenge.

I paused for a moment, weighing. Thought about all the places I wanted to go, all the people who were important to me, all the things I wanted to do. What would I trade for security? “I’d love to have chickens and a garden,” I hedged. “But the whole thing? No, I don’t think so.” The words sat in the air, heavy and final.

It was time to go. We left the shed and walked through the yard, where a stack of plywood sat next to a pile of Amazon boxes.

We lingered by the front gate. Dawn mentioned that she was having brain surgery soon. Her cranial fluid was leaking. I’d known this – she talked about it on her blog – but I had forgotten over the course of our visit, and it was a bit of a jolt. She’d been prepping meals to make life easier during her recovery. The recovery will be long – almost a year – and the doctors said that she might never get back to the quality of life and degree of functionality that she has now. They’ll just have to wait and see.

We gave the dogs a final pet, said a final thank you, and walked back toward the rental car, steps crunching on the gravel.

As I pulled out of Dawn’s property and started the drive back down the winding road toward town, I turned the afternoon over in my head, trying to untangle the contradictions. Michael and I looked at each other. “Well?” I asked.

“Huh,” he said. I nodded.

As I often do after spending time with someone, I realised all the questions I wish I had thought to ask. I didn’t ask Dawn what would happen if her recovery went poorly and she couldn’t manage the smallholding, or what would happen in 15 or 20 years, when she crosses the line from ageing to elderly and the upkeep of the smallholding becomes too much. I’m not sure if she would have had an answer for me.

Dawn has about a year or two of food stored up, as well as her garden and the animals themselves. She would outlive most of us if tomorrow there were to be a sustained food shortage or another pandemic or some other major event that would dramatically change the world as we know it – but still, she’s not self-sufficient, not like she insists. She needs petrol to buy the animal feed, the labour of the part-time farm hand they hire, help with slaughtering the water buffalo, the electric grid, the man with the pigs, vape cartridges, eBay, the mail system, her online community, the surgeons who are going to fix her leaking brain. It shouldn’t be a liability to need people. It shouldn’t have to feel like one.

Easing the car around a corner, I thought about all the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives – about the safety in those narratives. About how fragile the illusion can be. But maybe this is how it goes. Maybe we find ourselves safe for so long that we trick ourselves into believing that we are, until something comes along – a pandemic, a war, a job loss, a brain fluid leak – and reveals that safety to be an illusion. And then we have to relearn that truth, only to hopefully be lucky enough to forget it again. Over and over. The road curved, winding over a stone bridge at the bottom of a village. I sighed, suddenly exhausted and yearning for the bed at our Airbnb, still an hour’s drive away. The tree tunnel yawned open just ahead. Michael reached over the console and took my hand.