This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [4]
As Papa worked on the house, Mama returned to Franconia with a trailer attached to the VW truck for the rest of their things. Noticeably pregnant, she managed to move the cast-iron cookstove onto the trailer with the help of friends. Next she herded the goats and chickens into the back of the VW and drove the seven hours to the farm. The chickens lived in a coop next to the camper, and the goats ran free. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Monkees drifted in from the outside world on the battery-powered transistor radio as Mama and Papa cooked over a portable Coleman stove and showered with a plastic bag of water hung from a nail to warm in the sun. The camper was cramped and cluttered, but they kept up the illusion that they were on an expedition and it was base camp.
The first snow fell while Papa worked beneath the protection of the new roof. “We can’t move in until it’s done, otherwise we’ll get used to it like this and never finish,” he told Mama. The interior walls took shape, with planed pine boards nailed vertically from floor to ceiling over the insulation. To the front of the side door sat the wood cookstove, surrounded by an L-shaped counter with an embedded stainless steel sink, a ship’s nautical water pump, and a water container below. A dining table made of varnished pine boards and crossed-log legs, with tree stumps for chairs, sat beneath the tall south-facing windows looking out under the overhanging roof. The far back corner walls were covered with bookshelves above built-in L-shaped benches that Mama would cover with maroon padded mats for a “sofa.” In the corner behind the kitchen, a raised sleeping loft over closet storage formed the bedroom space. The only appliances were a galvanized grain mill clamped to the kitchen counter, the radio, and kerosene lanterns.
On a walk along the coast with the goats, Mama found a piece of driftwood that she carved and painted with their names, “Eliot and Sue Coleman,” and nailed to a post where the rutted path to the house left the public dirt road. By December 1, a little over a month after they started, Papa declared the house complete. As anticipated, the four-hundred-square-foot space felt like a mansion after the cramped camper, and the accumulating snow made its comforts all the more welcome.
When Mama told Helen Nearing, her new neighbor and mentor, that she was pregnant, she expected congratulations from the woman who was becoming an alternative—if opinionated—mother figure.
“You should have waited,” Helen clucked instead. “One needs time and energy to make a foundation as a homesteader. Children will use all that time and energy.” Mama recounted the incident to Papa, but passed it off by saying Helen probably didn’t value the joys of childbearing because she was not herself a mother.
When the local doctor in Castine refused to do a home birth, Helen stepped up to suggest a midwife she knew named Eva Reich. The Reich home and laboratory, Orgonon, was located three hours west in Rangeley, Maine, but Eva lived with her husband on an organic farm in nearby Hancock. Eva’s father, Wilhelm Reich, the noted psychiatrist, scientist, and former associate of Sigmund Freud, gained notoriety through his experiments with a natural energy that he called orgone, but was put on trial by the FDA in the 1950s for his unorthodox methods and his attempt to collect this energy for healing purposes. The government, in an amazing act of censorship, had Reich’s orgone accumulators destroyed and many of his books burned, and Reich died soon after in prison. Eva later adapted her father’s theories in her work with children, using what she called butterfly touch therapy as a way to heal traumatized or colicky infants, but in the 1960s she was simply part of the small network of midwives supportive of home birth at a time when the establishment