Thrift is Its Own Reward

Virtue signaling of a farmer

Thrift – n. from Old Norse, prosperity, from thrīfask to thrive.

“Virtue is its own reward”. – Socrates

If it appears that I’m bragging throughout this letter, rest assured, it’s because I am.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Over the course of the last few years, I’ve made and saved tens of thousands of dollars from stuff other people threw away.

The other day I made a deal with a guy at the dump to buy his trash, under the counter, cash. Because, you know, it’s illegal to buy trash. He was built like an ox and wore spiked-up hair and a black shirt with “cocaine” written in big white letters. I wandered around the mounds of discarded refrigerators, piles of plasma TV’s, and rusting metal awhile until I gathered the courage to sidle up to the cobbled-together shack that served as a front desk. I told the guy in the cocaine t-shirt that I might be in the market for an old car battery that can zap chickens. He lowered his voice, even though no one was around, and asked if I was a cop or something. I took a quick glance over my shoulder and slid a carton of eggs across the counter. He gave me half-off what people pay to throw away old car batteries. It’s zapped a harem of chickens and a few foxes who tried to eat those chickens. Its zapped me a few times too.

I picked through a mound of car batteries as tall as a cow connecting a thick copper cable first to the plus, braced myself ,and then touched the copper to the minus. The larger the spark, the better. When I joined the plus and minus of an old Mercedes battery the shock of lead-acid blew off part of the terminal – a real teethe rattler. Exactly what I needed. As if by divine intervention I intercepted a metal cabinet to house the battery from a bozo throwing it out of his trunk. I drilled some holes in it and installed a three-number lock. I bet you can’t guess what they are. And then I stuck a little solar panel on top of the metal cabinet that moron was throwing away. Can you believe that guy? A perfectly good cabinet.

I rarely come back from the dump empty handed. On one occasion I saw a gorgeous wooden countertop, ash, leaning up against the rubbish container like a drunkard. I ran up to it, sliding my fingers down the grain. I smooth talked Lucie into smooth talking the old man with a handful of teeth in the orange jumpsuit into letting us take it. He looked over his shoulder, to see who was around. Scanned the lot, and real slyly said, “Alright, but hurry up”. Before his jaw returned to a slack position I had it tied down in the bed of the truck. Furiously tying the slab down atop the truck, I laid eyes on some pallets sticking out of the the pile of garbage. These weren’t just any pallets, the kind you get from behind a grocery store or fitness center. These were the nice sturdy ones, the ones you can build a shed out of. While hurling those pallets from the pile to the truck, I was struck by a chair - solid wood, stained but worn - in the back of the head. I wrestled it to the steel bottom of the container and hoisted it over my head. A chair stronger than the glue that holds it together. Pure gold.

By this point the guy in the orange jumpsuit had enough. He was desperately pleading with Lucie to get me in the truck and get the hell out of there. There are cameras at the dump, you know. We got the hell out of there because we didn’t want to be caught stealing trash.

That solid slab of dead ash tree is our kitchen counter.

Trash counter

Wooden counters should be oiled, not stained. I stained it so I had to sand it off because it scratches, and I don’t like a scratched counter, not my style. I put some oil on it but didn’t press it in hard enough. Marek, our neighbor, who’s an architect who built his house and helps us build ours, told me that when he has his cabinet makers, his guys in southern Bohemia, birth some cabinets, they’ve got to strip down to their underwear when they work the oil into the wood. That’s to keep from overheating, I’m assuming.

So I figured it would be prudent to strip down to my underwear and proceeded to massage lots of linseed oil and even more sweat into the surface of that wood. And then I realized it was upside down.

And those trash pallets? I turned them into the counters of our outdoor kitchen. I angled them in such a way we can wash dishes or brush our teeth between two big spruce trees. All the water that comes out the sink, along with all those bits of food, runs down a garden hose I found in the back of an abandoned mill. That dirty water goes into a bed of flowers that we made from rocks that were lying around. The flowers drink the water and then make more flowers.

Aside from the steel barrel, and the second hand stove, everything in this photo is trash.

There was the time when Lucie and I went to the city-run dump to give them all the broken glass, asbestos roofing, plastics, soiled clothes, and cigarette butts that someone left lying around the land we bought. They wouldn’t let us throw the asbestos away because it’s so dangerous it needs to go to a special toxic dump. The squirrely guy working there told me we’d have to pay the special dump, and if we didn’t want to pay, we should just go in the woods somewhere off the side of the road and bury it. I went to the toxic dump and paid around $200 to throw away the waste I cleaned up because I’m a good person. It was raining that day, so I paid a lot more because it was soaked and paid by the pound. I was a couple dollars short and it’s cash only, for obvious reasons. I opened my jacket a little to show the old geezer manning the counter I was packing eggs. He blew smoke in my face. I yelled, “Where’s the justice!?” into the window and then drove to a shopping mall, parked on the sidewalk in front with the flashers on, and found a machine that gives out money if you press the right buttons. Then I went back to the dump and threw the pieces of paper on the rusty counter and seethed in the pouring rain as the geezer counted it up really slowly, which gave me an excellent chance to imagine bludgeoning him about the head. He then allowed me to carefully put that hazardous waste into a container without cracking it and getting sick.

We rented a long truck for a day. Cost us about $50 bucks. We drove that truck to a friend’s house and did them the service of dismantling the burnt remains of an old barn and house, probably a couple a hundred years old. We carried out solid spruce beams, concrete blocks, boards, fencing, and an old scythe. We turned those beams into a storage shed we call “The Barn”. Original, I know. The windows, you’re not going to believe this, I pulled out of a container labeled odpad, that means garbage in Czech. What these perfectly nice glass windows were doing in the garbage, I won’t live to know, but I put those windows on the barn to let light in. Some fire years ago did me the favor of charring the beams of The Barn. People in lab coats study charcoal to figure out how old a campfire was, maybe from some Neanderthals or aliens. This means my barn will be here millennia from now, probably until the sun burns out.

Trash barn

We cut grass with the scythe.

I paid a guy we found through the internet for metal roofing. He’d used it for a shed he no longer needed for some reason. I gave him paper for the sheets of roofing. That’s when he asked me, under his breath like, if I wanted to walk around back. Of course I did. Temperance has never been a virtue of mine. He took me out back and showed me his gutter collection. Pealed green paint, a little rust on the edges. Just my style. I took the lot of them.

I dug out the side of the hill where the new barn was going to be and used that soil to build a hügel mound. That’s a word that comes from what’s now called Germany.  Back when the people lived in tribes and painted themselves blue and ate mushrooms from the forest.  These people would dig trenches, throw branches and logs into it, cover it with soil, and poke in seeds. The first couple years it probably sucked. But after some time, those logs started to get eaten by the white web of mycelium and then by worms and all sorts of tiny bugs. And little by little all the energy of that tree was released in the soil, rotting, like a log smoldering in the fire. And those seeds used the energy to grow into a turnip. Magic.

After I’d dug out the hill, I reckoned I’d just eyeball the dimensions for the posts. Piece of cake. I did have to make a lot of custom cuts, and nothing is square. The original barn was put together mortise and tenon. That means no nails. These geniuses cut the wood into different shapes and put it together like Lincoln logs, but ones you could drive a truck over. Here and there I found a hand welded nail, probably three times bigger than those made in Nazareth back in the day.

Viktor is a gardener. A small guy with red hair and a small right hand with only four fingers. He lost his thumb in a sawmill as a kid, so they attached his pinky where his thumb used to be. You should see him wield a chainsaw. Cigarette hanging out of his lip, furrowed brow, sawdust flying, a century old tree dismembered in minutes. When the flakes of wood from the saw get too small, he unsheathes a file from his sleeve like a pirate’s saber, then sits on top of the chainsaw with the teethe of the blade between his legs and runs the file with swift, fluid motions. I made the mistake of telling him I was going to buy a new chain for my saw. He took one look at it and wagged his pinky-thumb in my face, “Only fools buy things they don’t need. He told me to sit on the saw and sharpen the chain. I slid the file down a few teeth and looked up for encouragement. Viktor took a puff of his cigarette and told me in Czech, “My friend, you have the touch of a rapist”.

Hay is cut grass. Straw is the stem of a grain, like wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley. The brewery next to our farm makes beer from boiling barley. I just go up there with a wheelbarrow and call out Ahoj to Tomas and Peter. Those are the owners, the head of the restaurant and the brew master. They know me. I just call out Ahoj and walk right across the little bridge over the stream, shoo away the two goats that live at the brewery, and dump loads of boiled barley and kitchen scraps into a wheelbarrow. I then retrace my steps and give some to the chickens and then to Frank, our pig. His full name is Sir Francis Bacon, but we call him Frank for short. Or rather, called him.

Poor Frank. Fed trash his whole life.

Kuba stopped by to pick up his vegetables and eggs for the week. We grew all those vegetables and a lot of the feed for the chickens out of a bunch of stuff people wanted to put in the trash: horse shit, sawdust, leaves, charcoal, branches, dumplings, rotting pumpkins, stale bread, weeds, ashes, grass, leaves, logs, hay, straw. Some kind of incomprehensible alchemy turns all those materials into compost, and that’s what grows the vegetables. Bugs eat the waste, and the chickens eat the bugs and then lay eggs. You know a chicken’s only got one hole in its rear-end? I pay people with eggs that come out of a chicken’s ass. People pay me for them too.

Never bought an egg cartoon.

Like I was saying, Kuba stopped by for his veggies and eggs the other week. We greeted each other and then he got real serious and lowered his voice and asked if I wanted a billboard. I didn’t want to let on like I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. That’s how you end up in a ditch somewhere. So I gave him a shrug, and a grunt - legal deniability. The next week he came back for his veggies and asked if I had a minute to help him with his car. His car was fine. We walked around back, and he popped the trunk. I let out a long whistle. “That’s thick stuff”. He said, “Yea,” and then we hoisted an enormous, folded billboard out of the trunk and stuck it in The Barn made from the old barn. I opened it to see if it was clean, no trails of blood. Then I let things cool down for a while, until a few days later I took it out of The Barn and cut it into the right size pieces for the outdoor kitchen and the farm sales stand, which I call HQ. It takes all the rain away from falling on our heads and runs into the pealed green gutter from the “roof deal” into a big plastic barrel we bought the night before Easter from a young guy out of a garage. The chickens drink the water and so do the vegetables.

The mattress my bride and I slept on our wedding night - I got from the trash. I’m nothing if not romantic. It was actually the recycling, and it was two twin beds. Graham and I had just picked up two old white doors from Lucie’s friend to use as the tables for our wedding party, when we drove past a few recycling containers, and there they were. Two perfectly nice beds - palm tree pattern to them, no stains. The beds didn’t fit, so Graham sat on them so they didn’t fly out of the back of the car. My bride was so thrilled about it that she bought a plastic sheet that zipped up the mattresses.

The bed frame I made from wood I got from Pavel, who works at the lumberyard up the hill. He gives me planks of wood and tells me they’re bent. Then he winks. Pavel gave us two beehives he got from a beekeeper who tipped over a few years ago. He teaches us how to steal their honey. If the hive is strong, the queen will make a little wax nest and then lay a special egg which grows into a new queen. The old queen then gathers half her army, and they swarm away, spinning like galaxies, coalescing on a branch or under a roof as a dripping stalactite of bees. That’s the chance to catch them. Pavel handed me a big tub and told me to hold it below the roof and he wound up and rained a blow and the bees went flying into the tub. Pavel slapped the lid on. We had the queen. He took his netted hood down, bees still swarming about, his eyes circled white, laughing like a madman. The honey I steal from the bees, who steal it from the flowers, who steal it from the sun, I give to friends as gifts on Christmas.

You don’t have to stay put to be thrifty. Me and Lucie biked thousands of miles across Europe and hitchhiked across the United States. We traveled all over the place for months at a time carrying a tent and sleeping bags and a stove. We’d camp wherever we wanted, along a river, in a forest, next to a highway, on a mountain. The people we met or who gave us rides sometimes tried to give us money, or a meal, or a place to stay for the pleasure of letting us ride in the car with them. We’d buy food and cook it for about a fourth of the price of a bean soup at a gas station. Some of the best meals I ever cooked or ate.

Camping in the Tetons

I could write a book about thrift, and maybe I will. But I’ll end here for now.

In an age where virtue is measured in degrees of suffering, I’m thriving. I have all I need and eat like a king. Every trade I make, every dollar I don’t have to spend, I’m a wealthier and more virtuous man.

Who knows, maybe they’ll turn me into a saint someday.

I heard that Ben Franklin used to say, “Virtue is its own reward,” and he’d follow it up with, “To be proud of virtue, is to poison yourself with the antidote.” He just stole that from Socrates and the good book of Mathew. How virtuous is that?

Mathew said, "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven"

I don’t need handouts from above. Thrift is its own reward.  

It doesn’t cost a thing to like, share, and subscribe. It makes all the difference in helping Mad Farmer grow. Now that’s thrifty.