This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [82]
Much to my delight, a girl my age had arrived with her father, another bearded and long-haired apprentice named Michael. “I came to the cape with fifty dollars in my pocket and left with fifty dollars in my pocket,” Michael would say at the end of his visit. He’d heard about the Nearings when working for the photographer Lotte Jacobi, who put together The Good Life Album, a photo book on Helen and Scott. Recently discharged from the army, Michael was looking for a place to stay with his daughter for the summer, so Greg offered him the cabin on the hill behind his house.
Heather joined me at the beaches where everyone swam after work, and naked and free, we spied for hours in the tide-pools and seaweeded rocks for starfish, sea urchins, and snails. We loved to collect the bleached discs of sand dollars and watch the gulls drop shells on the rocks to break open for dinner. The ancient-looking cormorants perched nearby with wings outstretched to dry in the sun, as S-necked egrets stalked fish in the shallows.
At night, we hung out at the campground, ignoring calls for bedtime and listening to Frank and Michael improvise tunes around the campfire, the starlight exploding across the navy sky. Frank loved to play bluesy riffs and popular tunes of the time, folksongs and ballads. He and the others also improvised, with much amusement, lines to a song about the high—but often unreachable—values the Nearings were supposed to stand for, though didn’t always meet themselves. There was Helen’s weakness for ice cream, despite her belief that too much dairy and sugar were unhealthy, and the trips to warm places to escape the cold Maine winters, despite tough public personas.
Each stanza detailing the various Nearing commandments was followed with the refrain: “Likely it’s not, with Helen and Scott.”
It was rebellious humor of the best kind.
“Milk and honey, milk and honey,” I’d always beg for my favorite song, referencing as it did Heidi’s and my beloved bedtime snack.
“Michael row the boat ashore . . . ,” Frank hummed in reply, a tune he liked to play for Michael. “Halleluuujahhh”:
Sister help to trim the sails,
Hallelujah.
River Jordan’s deep and wide,
Hallelujah.
There’s milk and honey on the other side,
Hallelujah.
He explained it was a slave song sung by freed black men as they rowed from an island off the southern coast, and that the Jordan was a river in the desert, and Michael—wink, wink—the angel who took you across when you died.
“You get milk and honey when you die?” I wanted to know. By then Heidi was asleep on my lap, and Michael told Heather it was time to row home to our beds.
That June, everyone was talking about the Rockefeller Commission’s report exposing the CIA for “unlawful and improper” activities, including the opening and reading of mail belonging to private citizens. Dot Crockett’s possible involvement at the Harborside post office was certainly not disclosed, but Helen and Scott were indeed on the list of watched citizens.
Two days later, we appeared in another big article on homesteading, this time by the New York Times. “Self-sufficiency, the distant call of a small band of young enthusiasts in the early nineteen-seventies,” the reporter Roy Reed began, “has become the battle cry of a full-scale back to the land movement. . . . Established politics and economics are beginning to feel the movement’s pressure in several places, especially in New England.”
“Mr. Coleman,” Reed went on to report, “is a leader of an organized effort in Maine to promote a return to biological agriculture, as he calls it.”
“There are just not