This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [40]
“All I want to express to the world via the newspaper is this,” Mama told him. “We are a family of human beings trying to live a happy, healthy and fruitful existence in a world where it is difficult to do so. Our goal is not to prove anything, but is mainly to survive as decently as possible.”
While Mama wanted to protect her privacy, feeling the dirt under her fingernails and patches on her clothes illuminated in the glare of self-consciousness, Papa took advantage of the opportunity to share our way of life.
“I’m working sixteen hours a day for survival,” Papa told Gumpert. “This isn’t any game I’m playing. If I don’t grow enough, it’s that much less to eat this winter. But we find, every passing day, we’re just so happy here.”
Mama was less encouraged. “The reporter from Boston has left and I realize how difficult it is to express our way of life to those who live so differently,” she wrote in her journal. “I realize now that the experience with the reporter was an unfortunate one. He was like an intrusion, making me feel uneasy and paranoid the three days he was here.”
The article and a picture of my two-year-old face hit the front page on Tuesday, July 13, 1971, and despite Mama’s fears, it turned out to be a favorable profile.
“When Sue and Eliot Coleman sit down to eat in their tiny one-room house, they use tree stumps instead of chairs,” the story began. “When they need drinking water, Sue walks a quarter of a mile through the woods to a freshwater brook and hauls back two big containers hanging from a yoke over her shoulders. And when the Colemans want to read at night, they light kerosene lanterns. The young couple—Sue is 26, Eliot 31—aren’t the forgotten victims of rural poverty or some natural disaster. They live as they do out of choice. . . . With their two-year-old daughter, Melissa, Sue and Eliot are trying to escape America’s consumer economy and live in the wilderness much as the country’s pioneers did.”
Our serve-yourself farm stand was soon crowded with summer folk on a treasure hunt to find us on the winding roads of the Blue Hill Peninsula. No one could believe we were surviving on less than $2,000 a year, as reported.
“Eliot and Sue still retain some ties to the money economy,” Gumpert wrote, tailoring the story to his financial audience. “During the spring and summer Eliot does gardening and other odd jobs for local residents three or four mornings a week, for which he is paid $2 to $2.50 an hour. Sue also has done some part-time secretarial work. Together, they were able to earn about $1,400 last year. They earned another $350 from the sale of surplus vegetables from their garden—mostly peas and lettuce—to neighbors and tourists, for a total income of $1,750. The remaining $250 they spent came from the last of the savings they had when they moved to Maine. . . . The Colemans are among a tiny but apparently growing number of young couples, often from middle-class families, who are taking up the pioneering life, or ‘homesteading’ as it’s often called.”
A friend of Papa’s from prep school was working in New York in publishing at the time. “Well, I’ll be damned, Eliot’s gone and put his finger on the zeitgeist,” Ian said when he picked up the paper that day. The article, it turned out, was a messenger of change, as more and more people became interested in a simpler way of life—people who would seek us out in droves during the coming energy crisis. Soon, the isolation of the woods would be anything but.
Chapter Five
Companions
Scott and Eliot in the Nearings’ garden (Photograph by Tom Jones. Originally published in the Maine Times, May 10, 1974.)
The one thing I yearned for those