It’s a Fine Life

One day roving journalist Doug Fine decided to change his life. He would move to the Mimbres Valley in southern New Mexico, trade in his trusty 12-year-old Subaru for a biodiesel-fueled monster truck, buy a couple of Nubian goat kids and some chicks, start a garden and set out to live an oil-free life. Farewell, My Subaru is his memoir of that venture.

Known for his first book, Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man, which tells the story of his previous life-changing move, that time to Alaska, Fine is an amiable and self-deprecating storyteller in the mold of, say, Douglas Adams. (The name of his homey, hippie-style ranch, the Funky Butte, is typical of his sensibility.) If you’re a fan of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-style humor — and also looking to find out how to raise your own livestock to feed your ice-cream fetish — Farewell may prove a vital tool.


Raised on suburban Long Island, Fine set out to live sustainably in the West in an arid river valley near New Mexico’s vast Gila Wilderness, a place where reintroduced Mexican gray wolves struggle to survive assaults from ranchers and unreconstructed hippie communes can be found adjacent to the spreads of U.N.-hating rednecks. (Full disclosure: I, too, live in the Gila, in the town of Silver City, albeit only when the 110-degree summer heat of Tucson drives us into New Mexico’s mountains.) He concedes up front that he’s not willing to do without his wi-fi or iPod, and we thank him for that: His project is not to secede from modernity but to live a life that’s comfortable and connected without being dependent on petroleum for power.

Unfortunately, he also finds himself relying on a nearby Wal-Mart for many of the supplies needed to start up his non-fossil-fueled utopia: “I hit the Wallyworld exit every time I went to town. It was open all the time, and its crappy, slave-made junk was often cheaper than the crappy, slave-made junk at the town’s local stores. . . . Progressives in my part of New Mexico were all too aware of the dilemma. ‘Busted!’ we said to each other, jabbing the other guilty party in the ribs when we found friends in the gardening or paper towel aisle.”

Washington Post