Lifestyles

Starbucks offers consumers up to 87,000 drink combinations. Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, offers up to 1,000 channels. Sirius offers 140 different satellite radio stations for your listening pleasure. Americans have come to expect a wide array of choices, and most companies, be they car companies, clothiers or coffee shops, have been more than willing to pony up. But more choices do not always equate to happier consumers.

Jen Lynch and her family live in the heart of the city but roll out of bed to the sound of clucking chickens. Their day starts with cleaning coops, scooping out feed and hunting for eggs for morning omelets. Eight families in a three-block radius and an estimated 150 families citywide do the same. "It's our slice of rural life, minus the barns," said Jen Lynch, 35, as Flicka the chicken pecked at her backyard lawn.

In the realm of conspicuous consumption, few things are larger than the RV, the multi-ton vehicular brontosaurus that has taken generations of families on the great American highway adventure. But in the worst economic crisis since the Depression, the RV is facing perhaps its gravest challenge as sales have plummeted, manufacturers have filed for bankruptcy or gone out of business, and lofty expectations of a grander profile for recreational vehicles have been drastically cut.

The motley caravan of boats, their engines popping in staccato rhythm, headed out to sea sounding like a platoon of sputtering lawn mowers. Painted bright red, turquoise and orange, they carried a dozen men wearing baseball caps and T-shirts fashioned as turbans to block the equatorial sun. Johnny Aralaji perched on the pointed bow of one of the craft, his sun-creased face frowning in concentration. He was born on a boat like this. His family wandered, allowing the currents to lead them.

The rancher's wife takes the stage in a white cowboy hat, a brown fringed shawl and an oversized silver belt buckle. A spotlight illuminates her hazel eyes and sly grin. Yvonne Hollenbeck, who has spent 63 years on the plains of Nebraska and South Dakota, clutches a microphone at the Elko Convention Center and shares her poem's title with hundreds of ranchers and their kids: "The Bail-Out Plan." The audience titters.

The stocking repairman is long dead, the hat seller is gone too, but down Via Merulana the sparks still fly around Sergio Zoppo, his hands, the color of ore, skimming knife blades across grindstones. The steel heats and hums, a kind of music in the late morning air, coiling through the roar of buses, the whine of motorini. He looks up, glasses dangling on a string around his neck, his blue smock smeared with minerals and grime.

The vacation sort of just flew by. After dropping their packs at a hostel, Ryan Ainsworth and his buddy Richie Bendelow found a shop selling 500 herbal potions that promised to make them high and happy in 500 ways. But the young British tourists went right for the hallucinogenic mushrooms, packaged in clear plastic containers just like the ordinary ones at the greengrocer back home. The pair took the tips sheet that advised first boiling the mushrooms into a tea "to speed up the effect."

In a peeling house on South 32nd Street, five friends came together to stretch their faith. They left comfortable apartments for a communal home within walking distance of a prison, a pawnshop, a derelict trailer park. Exhaust from a sugar beet factory drifted down the streets. Moving in last January, they pledged to spend one year together, learning to become true followers of Christ. They would give generously, love unconditionally.

As a chill wind blows in, the Bakhtiari nomads pack up at the end of summer and start a long journey -- women and kids on horseback, men on foot, belongings in tow -- for the warmer regions here in southwestern Iran. In April, when the desert heat begins to fire up, they will make the reverse trip to the cool, mountainous regions more than 100 miles to the north, crossing flood-swollen rivers and mountain passes to better grazing lands for their goats and sheep.