Living Simply Is the Best Revenge : Southern California Minimalists Who Have Made the Decision That It Is Better to Do Without

‘Tis the gift to be simple / ‘Tis the gift to be free.

--Shaker hymn from the early 1800s

If Mother Ann Lee and her band of celibate, simplicity-loving Shakers were to materialize in Los Angeles in the 1980s, would they find kindred spirits here in the land of car phones and $100 sweat suits?

Impossible, it seems. On first glance, at least, Mother Ann would be mortified from her efficient shoes to the tip of her plain muslin cap.

Rare Individuals

Yet, if the Shakers were to poke around a bit, they would find that there are indeed some rare individuals living a Shaker-like existence in the very epicenter of excess.

Esta Krainis-James, for instance, is a 61-year-old artist and art therapist who has resided for five years in a North Hollywood backyard, rejecting a conventional life style in order to further her goal of “letting go of most technology.”

Or there’s Cliff Cobb, a substitute teacher from Claremont, who has pared down his material possessions out of respect for the environment. Cobb has not driven a car since 1975, and has never, in his 36 years, owned a vehicle.

What these folks and others have found--to paraphrase simplicity scholar David Shi--is that while small may no longer be chic, it is still beautiful.

In a telephone interview from his North Carolina home, Shi said that it is easier to streamline one’s life in a rural setting than in a city where you are “surrounded by complexity, artificiality, noise and throbbing activity.

“Those who continue to practice simple living in an urban setting are more fundamentally committed to it,” he said.

“But it is indeed possible to get off the treadmill of consumerism,” added Shi, author of “In Search of the Simple Life,” a recent history of simple living in America. “It is possible to live on less--and perhaps even to be happier that way.”

Bottomless Expense Account

There was a time when Franklin Zahn was fond of comfort and expensive objects. After graduating from Caltech in mechanical engineering, Zahn took a highly paid engineering job in Detroit in the ‘30s. He drove a Packard and enjoyed a bottomless expense account. He became accustomed to first-class train compartments, fancy hotels and doting bellmen.

But then, as a conscientious objector during World War II, Zahn said he came to a realization that “those people who believe in peace also believe in simplicity.”

Zahn, now 80, quit his job and resolved not to return to engineering. “In addition, I decided I would live very simply in a kind of Gandhi style, and I would not have a family,” he said. “I would live (a life like) the equivalent of a monk in a monastery, but not be under the authority of any organization.”

Although his resolution might sound like that of a stern ascetic, Zahn is actually a cheerful, energetic figure who appears engaged by the world around him. (Another advocate of simple living said that while the world may look at them as joyless souls, minimalists actually subscribe to “a higher hedonism.”)

Zahn doesn’t presume to be a saint. His weaknesses, he said, include chocolate candy and, “I waste a lot of time watching television.”

He lives in a tiny, unadorned house he built himself 40 years ago. The floors are bare concrete. He cooks on a cast-iron stove he bought at a junk shop for $4.

For transportation, Zahn rides an old 10-speed bike, equipped with baskets for groceries. For longer trips, he has a moped. He did own a car for a while when he was working as a carpenter, but in 1965 he gave the automobile away and has done without one since.

“A lot of our war today is because we want a rather high standard of living,” said Zahn, a Quaker. “In effect, we are living off the Third World. We are wiping out the forest in Brazil so we can eat more hamburgers.

‘Robbing Someone Else’

“If I had a rather nice home and a lot of stuff, as I used to have, I would feel I was robbing someone else,” he added. “I would feel like a mother who goes off to Las Vegas to have a good time and leaves her kids home hungry.”

While Zahn’s inspiration for simplifying his life was political, the motivations cited by urban minimalists range from environmental to philosophical, aesthetic, spiritual or practical. Flute maker Tom Thompson, for instance, took to the simple life because as a “ruthless traveler,” he said he admired people who had “a few very nice things they liked, but you could get them all into a backpack.”

There also is no universal agreement about what constitutes simplicity. Thompson, 41, who lives in his shop in Costa Mesa and has no phone and no car, takes his cue from the Japanese: “Their ideal of heaven is an empty room.”

At the other end of the spectrum are people who practice a more compromised form of simplicity. That would include Paul Wiebenga-Sanford and his wife, Frances Wiebenga, who are attempting to raise their two children in what they feel is an environmentally responsible fashion.

So, while they don’t own a dryer, they do have a VCR in their Los Angeles home to record educational programming for the kids. While they don’t have a single piece of furniture that isn’t hand-me-down, they do own a microwave oven.

Making Choices

“The simple life gets so damned complicated,” Wiebenga-Sanford said, explaining the choices the family has made. He and his wife are both Methodist ministers.

The couple say they are aware that their ways are regarded by some people as prehistoric. When they were in college, said Wiebenga-Sanford, who is 40, “people got married in the woods or the park. Now it’s not a good wedding unless you rent two stretch limos.”

Voluntary simplicity “is not the popular position right now,” Frances Wiebenga added.

“In some ways, simple living is a survival gift to my children,” Wiebenga-Sanford said. “I want them to know that you don’t have to have all those things to live. That you can pick up a hammer and do it yourself.

“The ability to live abundantly with diminished resources will be essential to their generation.”

The chill seems to seep down the mountains into Claremont as daylight retreats, and by 4 p.m. on a winter day heaters are clicking to life in homes and offices.

Not in Cliff Cobb’s apartment.

Cobb never turns on the heat at home, nor does he drive a car.

But that doesn’t make him a masochist. “I don’t do this to feel uncomfortable,” he said. “But when I do something that makes me comfortable that uses up oil, I think about where that oil comes from.”

Cobb said that he has experienced little peer support for his austere life style.

More specifically, according to another urban minimalist, John Quiring, it can be hard to meet women who are sympathetic to the Spartan life.

Quiring, a 40-year-old graduate student in the philosophy of religion at Claremont Graduate School, inherited a love of simplicity from his Mennonite parents whose creed was frugality, conservation and “a reluctance to keep up with the Joneses.”

Yet, for a time as a youth, Quiring rebelled against the stricter aspects of Mennonite tradition, which forbids dancing, movies, alcohol, tobacco and premarital sex.

“Clearly, the dilemma of anyone who wants to live simply is moderation--a life that is neither luxurious nor world and body-denying,” Quiring said. “It can go a little too far.”

Quiring lives in a 13x17-foot studio apartment in Upland. He drives a Dodge Colt--”the cheapest car I could find”--and owns one cup and saucer “instead of a cupboard full of dishes.”

Rather than plug in a fancy coffee-maker, he brews his morning cup with a secondhand aluminum drip coffee-maker on a hot plate situated in his bathroom. He does laundry by hand and doesn’t use credit cards.

“It’s not Buddhist simplicity--an orange robe and a begging bowl,” he said, “but I live as simply as I know how to live.”

Are you free as you are? Are you in any degree bound by your appetites, passions, your self-will? Are you at all in bondage to the opinions of your neighbors?

--Shaker tract

If you try to exist simply in the city, expect the neighbors to talk.

Tom Thompson said that when he lived in a garage in a suburban Orange County neighborhood before moving into his flute-making studio, the adults on the block were not receptive to his life style. (“Kids were my best friends. They were curious about who this guy was.”)

And Cliff Cobb said the students he meets as a substitute teacher seem not to be able to conceive that an adult would willingly do without some of the “necessities” of urban life. “The kids remind me that I’m weird almost every day: ‘Mr. Cobb . . . you still ride a bike to work?’ ”

Another urban minimalist who has encountered prejudice is Esta Krainis-James, who said she restricts visitors to her backyard habitat for fear of being called eccentric, or worse. Her own grown daughters, she said--while they admire what she’s doing--”are also worried.”

They’re worried for one thing because it’s been cold this winter in Krainis-James’ abode with only Ginko trees, bamboo and pinon pines for walls. Krainis-James’ open-air bed is heaped in Indian blankets for warmth and, on a recent morning, she was wrapped in artfully assembled layers of clothing in earth tones.

Krainis-James, who grew up in a Bronx tenement, said she first attempted to create an outdoor habitat while living in an apartment on the Westside. When she began sleeping outside, however, her landlord evicted her, Krainis-James said.

Undeterred, Krainis-James began again in the yard of a sympathetic friend. Krainis-James first planted shade trees to protect her from the sun, then she brought in plants that looked and smelled good, like ornamental asparagus. After the vegetation came a compact kitchen, with bamboo latticed overhead to hold pots and pans.

A few strategically placed umbrellas are Krainis-James’ only protection from the rain.

She sees clients here, in an office whose boundaries are defined by shifting shades of green. The therapist sits in a serape-covered chair with an unbroken carpet of brown leaves beneath her well-bundled feet.

Her living situation, Krainis-James said, “is really a refusal of the current values.”

Bonded to the Earth

As an art therapist, Krainis-James operates on a theory that people who aren’t bonded to the Earth--preferably at an early age--can suffer emotional and psychological imbalances. As an artist, she feels that living outside has increased her powers.

As for simplicity, she says, “I’m very content in my own sense of what’s enough.”

As she talked, the background sounds in Krainis-James habitat were of a cat’s paws softly snapping downed leaves and a dog’s collar tinkling nearby.

Here in her simple life, Krainis-James said, “I am suffused with a feeling of luxury.”