This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [83]
The article was not the glowing first-blush portrait that the first Wall Street Journal pieces had been, but a harder look at a movement that was becoming an often contentious segment of the public consciousness. The reporter pointed to Census Bureau numbers showing population in nonurban areas growing faster than the cities since 1970, but said that while many were serious about the move to the country, “some portion of back-to-the-landers are leftovers from the escape culture of the sixties who were chiefly interested in smoking marijuana and sitting on the porch talking philosophy.”
“Self sufficiency,” the article also noted, “proves too difficult for many. Marital stresses, for example, are exaggerated in isolated areas around the country.”
Certainly, our isolated tribe was not immune. The increased foot traffic and drama over Mama’s departure and Papa’s hyperactive behavior led Keith to cut a new path so people would no longer walk through his property on the way from the campground to the Nearings’. Chip, who had been working for both us and Keith, decided to work only for Keith and take a break from the tensions at our farm, but her choice also marked the beginning of the end of Keith and Jean’s marriage.
More and more, the farm was overrun with reporters interviewing Papa about advances in organic farming. When a reporter showed up, everyone did the “pants dance” and Papa talked a mile a minute, his excitement over his experiments with natural fertilizers doubled by the hyperactivity of his thyroid.
“This farm is like a large canvas, and I enjoy making paint splashes all over it,” he told the Ellsworth American reporter, sharing his discovery that planting cabbages in soil with tilled-under oak leaves made the cabbages immune to maggots, and onions and asparagus seemed to grow twice as well in beds spread with calcium-rich clamshells.
“Healthy plants aren’t troubled by insects,” he explained to the Country Journal writer, laying the foundations of his plant-positive theory. “Insects are symptoms of ill health and disease. Substituting [natural repellents like] garlic spray for [the chemical pesticides of] DDT removes the symptoms. It doesn’t create healthy plants. It’s like removing the spots of chicken pox; you still end up with the disease.”
“If you use aspirin for a headache,” he elaborated for the Maine Times, “you mask the symptoms rather than find the reason, such as your hat is too tight or your glasses aren’t right. If the bugs ate plants indiscriminately, the world would have been defoliated long ago. So when a bug is on a plant, it shows me that the plant is unfit.”
After numerous tests with different soil amendments, Papa was ever more certain that the secret to healthy, happy plants lay in creating good soil.
“At first people thought we just sat around and blew pot,” Papa told the Country Journal reporter. “But when they came out here they saw we work hard. New Englanders appreciate hard work.”
“It’s very exciting here,” an apprentice named Marcie was quoted. “Last summer I worked in a bank. Next year I’m going to get a job in a greenhouse.”
“We don’t get too old with young people around,” Papa added.
As much as Papa’s public face had a genuine enthusiasm and true excitement over the magic of clamshells, he possessed an uneasy skepticism about the outside world that sometimes alienated him from a mainstream audience.
“New York City is an aberration,” he was quoted in none other than the New York Times. “If we can do anything so places like that don’t exist, we’re doing the world a favor.”
“Lunch!” Mama called out the door every day at noon.
“Lunch!” Papa echoed. Summer was, as always, a match