This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [9]
I’ve climbed all the real mountains I want to climb, Papa thought to himself; here’s a way to put those skills to use on a lifelong expedition, a mountain with no top. And Mama was eager to climb with him. They didn’t want to be hippies in the traditional sense, having no interest in drugs or communes; rather, what appealed to them at the deepest level was the sentiment espoused by Henry David Thoreau over a century earlier, when he moved from the town of Concord to a rustic cabin on Walden Pond.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Thoreau explained. “To front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.”
They found that the idea of going back to the land was far from a new sentiment, and Americans, taken as we are by the romance of nature, seem to find the concept especially compelling. After Thoreau, the nature essayist John Burroughs left his job as a federal bank examiner in the 1880s to take up residence in the Hudson River Valley at a remote cabin called Slabsides, where he wrote about conservation and farmed in relative simplicity for the times. Then, at the height of the Great Depression, economist Dr. Ralph Borsodi began an experiment in “voluntary simplicity,” a concept that led him to move from his native New York City to a farm in the countryside, as detailed in his 1933 book Flight from the City. Living the Good Life was now inspiring a new generation of discontented city dwellers, and soon the political climate and energy shortages of the 1970s would spark the coals of the back-to-the-land movement to flame.
From December to March, after they moved into the farmhouse and before I was born, my future parents lived “the good life,” as defined by the Nearings, striving to follow the Nearing formula of four hours a day of bread labor, four hours of intellectual pursuits, and four hours of social time. In other words, divide the day between hands, head, and heart. Hands: chopping wood, making food, woodworking, sewing. Head: reading, learning to play the dulcimer. Heart: caring for each other, talking and laughing together.
The smells of wood smoke and simmering onions from soup filled the little house; the root cellar was stocked with vegetables they’d brought from their Franconia garden, as Mama planned for the birth of their first child and Papa prepared for the birth of the first garden. Mama sewed baby clothes and Papa made a wooden-handled box to carry his seeds, and a tool chest from leftover lumber, carving it with Scott’s saying, “Work as well as you can and be kind.”
They referred to Living the Good Life as their guide:
We would attempt to carry on this self-subsistent economy by the following steps:
1. Raising as much of our own food as local soil and climatic conditions would permit.
2. Bartering our products for those which we could not or did not produce.
3. Using wood for fuel and cutting it ourselves.
4. Putting up our own buildings with stone and wood from the place, doing the work ourselves.
5. Making such implements as sleds, drays, stone-boats, gravel screens, ladders.
6. Holding down to the barest minimum the number of implements, tools,