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7. If we had to have such machines for a few hours or days in a year (plough, tractor, rototiller, bull-dozer, chainsaw), we would rent or trade them from local people instead of buying and owning them.

“That list was our initial guideline,” Papa told a visitor. On the Nearings’ advice, they also developed a five-year plan to define their goals. “A plan is essential,” Papa explained. “There are so many things to do that unless you follow a plan you may end up doing nothing except think about how much there is to be done. That first summer and autumn we planned to make a garden, build a little greenhouse in front of our living room windows, and dig another root cellar to complement the one we already had.”

One of the many obstacles to self-sufficiency that winter was lack of firewood. The green wood Papa cut that fall needed at least six months to cure. “I’ll be damned if I’m buying wood, of all things,” Papa said. “We’re surrounded by it.” Each challenge, he began to realize, had a solution. While clearing more trees, he noticed that the thick dry branches at the bottoms of old fir and spruce trunks had up to fifty rings of growth. “It’s such compact wood it makes for slow burning,” he told Mama, pleased to find a temporary source for heat and cooking fuel that could be cut and used immediately.

The pulse of material needs began to slacken. The less they satisfied the urge to buy things, the more the craving—as with sugar, carbohydrates, and alcohol—began to wane. The drugs of the modern world were only a mirage of need easily forgotten in the absence of fulfillment. “I used to buy a new article of clothing when I was tired of wearing what I had even though it was nowhere near worn out,” Mama wrote in the journal she kept during those early years. “Now we try to have clothes we like and wear them until worn out (being patched over and over).”

“Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without,” was the homesteading adage, and it served them well.

When the Russian revolutionary classic Dr. Zhivago played at an Ellsworth theater, it alone merited emerging from hermitage. Papa grew a Yuri mustache, and though Mama preferred him clean-shaven, she indulged his fantasies by sewing him collarless Russian peasant shirts. They added the Russian “ski” to their names, which implied honor—Eliot-ski and Sue-ski, the dog Norm-ski, and one of the goats would be dubbed Goat-ski—imagining they were living the subsistence life that Dr. Zhivago and Tonya led at Varykino when the revolution forced them into hiding at a remote family estate.

Papa had a picture book of European farms with rich ancient soil and gentle rolling hills that he’d look at in the evenings by the light of the kerosene lanterns.

“This one.” He’d point out to Mama. “This is my favorite.”

They dreamed of a patchwork of fertile beds spreading out from the house in all directions, with careful paths and neat rows of plants. However, when they looked out the front windows that spring of my birth, the reality was tree stumps in all directions. Papa had cut as many trees as possible over the fall and winter, climbing up to saw off the branches for firewood, then felling the trunk and sawing it into logs to cure for next winter’s wood. Once the snow melted, the carnage emerged, resembling the aftermath of a forest fire.

Living primarily on food grown or hunted yourself was a daunting concept in the supermarket 1960s and ’70s, and for many back-to-the-landers, the biggest challenge. Added to our situation were the short growing season, thickly forested land, and poor soil.

“Whatcha growin’?” the Maine joke went, one farmer to another.

“Rocks,” was the dry answer.

Despite the obstacles, the natural affinity Papa had found in his first garden at Franconia inspired and encouraged him to keep at it. As Mama nursed me in the rocking chair by the front windows, Papa declared war on the army of tree stumps with a pick, mattock, and handsaw. He’d heard from Scott that if you sawed the side roots