Out of the Subaru and into the green rough

AT AGE 36, Doug Fine decided “to see if a regular guy who enjoyed his comforts could maintain them with a reduced oil footprint.” And so he bought a parcel of land in southwestern New Mexico, dubbed it the Funky Butte Ranch and dug right into his greener lifestyle.

“In concrete terms, this meant raising animals and crops for my food, figuring out some way besides unleaded to get anywhere, and making bank account-draining investments in solar power,” Fine writes in his memoir, “Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living.” Within the first few days the universe appears to give him two thumbs up when his parked Subaru rolls backward into a tree, “MY CAR WAS LITERALLY RUNNING AWAY FROM ME. . . . I figured I would forge success from astonishing seemingly irrevocable defeat, you know, like Al Gore.”

Fine starts with four simple goals: to use a lot less oil, to power his life with renewable energy, to eat as locally as possible and to not get killed in the process. He soon discovers it isn’t easy being green. He confronts his first major challenge as he pulls into his local Wal-Mart for supplies. “The lifestyle contrast was too stark to ignore. I had a bag of organic goat grain in the LOVEsubee, for crying out loud. I was at a crossroads: was I going to go green and independent, or was I going to keep the Walton family buying Picassos?”

He buys two goats (off Craigslist) and names them the Pan Sisters. They quickly become his primary companions as well as endless sources of humor and frustration. “When I was inside the ranch house violating their social boundaries by eating a meal without them, they tried to get in with increasingly powerful horns applied to my sliding glass window. They actually knocked.” Despite their endless assault on his prized roses, Fine’s deep affection for the goats and their importance to his project creates a beautiful and hilarious tension.

Next, he bids farewell to his Subaru and purchases what he calls the ROAT (for Ridiculously Oversized American Truck”), which he converts from diesel to run on used deep-fryer vegetable oil collected from local restaurants. The only downside, he discovers, is kung-pao-scented exhaust. “I found myself mysteriously drawn to Chinese takeout places at every exit. Now and forever more, my truck was basically a munchies machine.” Thoughtfully, he includes a recipe for kung pao chicken with cold sesame noodles.

Fine is an appealing misfit in his new community, which is itself a colorful mix of rednecks and mystics, alternative lifestylers and people paranoid of the United Nations. As owner of an XXXL truck, he notes that “the type of masculinity I project had now and forever changed. Women with names like Darla were eyeing my ride like it was a human body part. They winked. Introduced themselves with tattooed waves. Once or twice tongues emerged.”

Fine is carrying on a lovely literary tradition: the sissified macho man negotiating a rural outpost. Though he lacks the depth and sublimity of Jim Harrison or the rip-snorting, self-effacing humor of Michael Perry, the lure of a thinking man in or out of harmony with nature is delicious. What woman wouldn’t want to wave down a guy with a monster truck and a good frittata recipe?

The lie at the center of this book, however, is that Fine is just “a regular guy.” He plays up his suburban upbringing, love of Netflix and jones for premium ice cream as though those things qualify him as a big softy just like the rest of us. In fact, he’s been living off the mainstream grid for quite some time. An “adventure journalist,” he has logged time as a reporter in such places as Rwanda and Tajikistan. His first book, “Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man,” documents a year roughing it in the wilds of Alaska.

The guy thrives on challenges, and there are many on the Funky Butte Ranch: floods, mammoth rattlesnakes, coyotes picking off his chickens, near electrocution via solar panel. “Farewell, My Subaru” works at cross-purposes with itself, making green living seem a little too epic. This Subaru driver wouldn’t last a single season on the Funky Butte Ranch.

Fine does due diligence to his environmental agenda by dropping in little green factoids, which sometimes inform and other times distract. He wraps up with the requisite list of things we can do to reduce our carbon footprint. But within the framework of Fine’s heroic story, the prescription makes the average, gridlocked reader feel sicker than ever. Like a whiff of kung pao chicken off a tailpipe, “Farewell, My Subaru” leaves a city slicker hungry for something she can’t realistically have.

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Erika Schickel is the author of “You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom.”