“We left the city with three objectives in mind,” the Nearings wrote in their conversational but self-serious tone. The first was to live independent of the economy; the second, to improve health; and the third, to find liberation from the unethical trends in society. Ultimately, the Nearings sought to make a living “with our own hands.” What Helen and Scott were talking about in Living the Good Life was not exactly revolutionary, except that in the 1950s and early ’60s, it was. To give up your hard-earned place in the socioeconomic hierarchy and forgo modern conveniences was blasphemy; self-sufficiency was a threat to the status quo. But to Papa, the Nearings’ book was far from a threat—homesteading sounded like the next great adventure.
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, gadgets and machines which we might buy from the assembly lines of big business.
7. If we had to have such machines for a few hours or days in a year (plough, tractor, rototiller, bull-dozer, chainsaw), we would rent or trade them from local people instead of buying and owning them.
“That list was our initial guideline,” Papa told a visitor. On the Nearings’ advice, they also developed a five-year plan to define their goals. “A plan is essential,” Papa explained. “There are so many things to do that unless you follow a plan you may end up doing nothing except think about how much there is to be done. That first summer and autumn we planned to make a garden, build a little greenhouse in front of our living room windows, and dig another root cellar to complement the one we already had.”
One of the many obstacles to self-sufficiency that winter was lack of firewood. The green wood Papa cut that fall needed at least six months to cure. “I’ll be damned if I’m buying wood, of all things,” Papa said. “We’re surrounded by it.” Each challenge, he began to realize, had a solution. While clearing more trees, he noticed that the thick dry branches at the bottoms of old fir and spruce trunks had up to fifty rings of growth. “It’s such compact wood it makes for slow burning,” he told Mama, pleased to find a temporary source for heat and cooking fuel that could be cut and used immediately.
The pulse of material needs began to slacken. The less they satisfied the urge to buy things, the more the craving—as with sugar, carbohydrates, and alcohol—began to wane. The drugs of the modern world were only a mirage of need easily forgotten in the absence of fulfillment. “I used to buy a new article of clothing when I was tired of wearing what I had even though it was nowhere near worn out,” Mama wrote in the journal she kept during those early years. “Now we try to have clothes we like and wear them until worn out (being patched over and over).”
“Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without,” was the homesteading adage, and it served them well.
When the Russian revolutionary classic Dr. Zhivago played at an Ellsworth theater, it alone merited emerging from hermitage. Papa grew a Yuri mustache, and though Mama preferred him clean-shaven, she indulged his fantasies by sewing him collarless Russian peasant shirts. They added the Russian “ski” to their names, which implied honor—Eliot-ski and Sue-ski, the dog Norm-ski, and one of the goats would be dubbed Goat-ski—imagining they were living the subsistence life that Dr. Zhivago and Tonya led at Varykino when the revolution forced them into hiding at a remote family estate.
Papa had a picture book of European farms with rich ancient soil and gentle rolling hills that he’d look at in the evenings by the light of the kerosene lanterns.
“This one.” He’d point out to Mama. “This is my favorite.”
They dreamed of a patchwork of fertile beds spreading out from the house in all directions, with careful paths and neat rows of plants. However, when they looked out the front windows that spring of my birth, the reality was tree stumps in all directions. Papa had cut as many trees as possible over the fall and winter, climbing up to saw off the branches for firewood, then felling the trunk and sawing it into logs to cure for next winter’s wood. Once the snow melted, the carnage emerged, resembling the aftermath of a forest fire.
Living primarily on food grown or hunted yourself was a daunting concept in the supermarket 1960s and ’70s, and for many back-to-the-landers, the biggest challenge. Added to our situation were the short growing season, thickly forested land, and poor soil.
“Whatcha growin’?” the Maine joke went, one farmer to another.
“Rocks,” was the dry answer.
Despite the obstacles, the natural affinity Papa had found in his first garden at Franconia inspired and encouraged him to keep at it. As Mama nursed me in the rocking chair by the front windows, Papa declared war on the army of tree stumps with a pick, matt
ock, and handsaw. He’d heard from Scott that if you sawed the side roots and taproot from the center of a fir trunk, you could pull the whole thing out with your hands. He tried a small one, chopping the roots from the trunk with the mattock, then pushing it back with the pick to detach the taproot with the handsaw, and voilà! The stump came right out. Not all the trees were so easy. Some took hours to release. A friend of the Nearings told Papa he looked like Paul Bunyan, swinging his ax and wresting the trees from the earth with his bare hands.
“Ever thought of getting a chain saw?” the fellow asked innocently.
“We’d rather do without and work more slowly in peace,” Papa replied in his affably militant manner. “A power saw is an unnerving noise. It pollutes in every way, the vibrations and the stench it makes.”
“We prefer to use nature’s lawn mowers,” he added, pointing to the goats that ran free like a troupe of horned groundsmen, nibbling at the foliage, brambles, and trees to leave a nearly manicured, if a bit hoof-trodden and bark-chewn, landscape.
The sight of Papa tearing up stumps, struggling to grow food for our little family, assuaged Mama’s old fears. He was so full of vitality, an athlete in his prime, it seemed nothing could stop him. She wanted to climb inside his arms and stay there always, but the twelve- to sixteen-hour workdays and his part-time job left little time for that. The next year we would sell vegetables at the farm stand for income, but that first year Papa worked odd jobs for Helen and Scott and other townsfolk for $2.50 an hour, to bring in cash on top of his work at our farm. Mama’s day had multiple demands as well—hauling water for the pump sink in the kitchen, grinding grain with the hand grinder for baking bread, preparing meals, sewing and mending clothing, caring for me, and helping Papa while I napped.
“It was unremitting labor, the hardest time we had to go through,” Papa would later admit in an interview with Stanley Mills, a visiting friend of the Nearings who published a quarterly hand-typed newsletter detailing our back-to-the-land exploits. “If you’re going to homestead without private means you have to take it seriously,” he explained. “It would have helped to have more money so that I could have given all my time to homesteading instead of taking outside work. Heaven knows, there was enough to do on our place. When winter comes, there’s no going off to California. You have to stick it out and work much longer hours than the Nearing work formula suggests. We never had any doubts it was worth it, but at first we didn’t realize self-sufficiency means nineteenth-century primitivism.”
After the stumps on the half acre in front of the house were removed, Papa divided the area into twenty- by forty-foot plots, using a commonsense approach to small-scale agriculture. “We chose the size of the plots for their convenience,” he told Stanley. “It’s one fiftieth of an acre. Much information is available about needs and yields of land in terms of acres. In spreading lime, it’s common knowledge that acid soil requires at least two tons of lime an acre. To find out how much a twenty by forty plot requires, simply divide two tons by fifty. This amounts to eighty pounds, and lime comes in eighty-pound bags. So one bag each plot.” The lime served to decompose the vegetation and neutralize the acidity of the forest floor, thereby releasing the nitrogen that had been locked in by the acid and allowing for the growth of healthy soil bacteria. Next Papa tilled in compost and manure and staked out string in careful rows to transplant seedlings and seed the hardier crops.
Mama carried me on her chest or back with a cloth sling while she worked. After the gift boxes of Pampers from Mama’s parents ran out, she put me in plastic panties over safety-pinned cloth diapers that she washed by hand in the ocean and hung to dry in the sun. Since we might be outdoors for hours at a time, she would augment the cloth diapers with the same dried peat moss we used for toilet paper. It’s no wonder I would potty-train before the age of two. By midsummer I was able to hold my head up and roll around in the little playpen made from Mama’s old purple poncho blanket draped over a wood frame. I can feel in my bones the chirp-cluck-brooding sounds of the chickens busying in the dust nearby, the smells of scythe-cut grass, freshly tilled earth, wet Normie-dog, and wood smoke from the cookstove as I lay on my back and babbled to the sky, grabbing my bare feet with my hands.
The garden was also finding its feet. The acre between the well and the house had, amazingly enough, become a rough version of Papa’s imagined patchwork of garden plots with a network of trodden paths. The apple orchard grew as I did on the hill next to the garden, with saplings of varietals suited for the cooler climate: Northern Spy, russet, and Spy Gold. Come August, as Woodstock was giving voice to thousands of muddy festival-goers in New York State, we were celebrating a bounty of exceptionally large vegetables, including cabbages that literally weighed forty pounds. It wasn’t until a couple years later that Papa learned that this abnormal growth was due to the release of all of the naturally occurring nitrogen that had been stored in the forest floor over the years. “The founders of the spiritual-ecological community of Findhorn in Scotland saw the forty-pound cabbages in their first garden as a spiritual sign, but it was most likely the same nitrogen release we saw,” Papa explained, amused.
At the end of the long summer days, my parents fell to sleep exhausted, knowing they would be woken any number of times in the night by my crying before getting up at first light to start work again. Creating a living from the land with a newborn baby was indeed every bit as challenging as Helen had predicted. Each day was a swarm of obstacles. All they could do was stay focused on one task at a time and see it through to its resolution.
My grandmother Skates arrived in September, joined by Papa’s sister Lyn, her husband, Lucky Callen, and the four kids, Paige, Chip, Lindsay, and Hunter. They’d driven the nine hours north to find out for themselves “what the heck we were doing up in the woods of Maine.” Papa’s family was as modern as we were not, and upstanding citizens of one of New Jersey’s oldest and wealthiest towns. The Callens lived in the updated house on Blackpoint Horseshoe in Rumson, where Papa grew up, while Skates had built her own modern home across the field by the river, with a dock where she liked to fish for snappers.
The year of my birth was the year of the first moon landing, Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick incident, the Stonewall riots, Charles Manson’s murders, and the advent of no-fault divorce, signed into law—ironically enough—by a Republican governor named Ronald Reagan. In this Age of Aquarius the songs of Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, and Crosby, Stills & Nash were giving voice to change. The turmoil brought on by hippies, radicals, and folksingers made Papa’s family nervous. They were supportive of America, capitalism, and the status quo. More than that, they were staunch Republicans. Nixon, who had taken office that January, was their hero.
“Nixon,” Skates said, “will return the world to equilibrium.”
Skates’s tall figure stood out in bright blues and whites against the browns and greens of the farm as she walked up the garden path to the house. She wore a striped shirt over wrinkle-free shorts with a perfect crease down the front, glasses hanging on a beaded cord that matched her blue eyes like Papa’s and white hair styled in perfect short waves around her high forehead. Lyn and Lucky and the kids followed, a model WASP family of the 1960s, blond, fair-eyed, fresh-faced, and appropriately androgynous in pressed khakis and polos of light blues, yellows, and nautical stripes, their whites bright and unstained unlike our permanently dirty grays.
Skates often said Papa must have inherited his adventurous spirit from Thomas Coleman, the man at the root of the Coleman family tree, who left Wiltshire, England, on the James for the New World in 1635. Thomas was awarded a land claim on Nantucket, where his son went on to marry Benjamin Franklin’s aunt, and their son hunted whales from the harbor. As American settlers, they lived by necessity in the ways we would live by choice two centuries later—growing and hunting food, cooking and heating with wood or whale blubber, using an outhouse. Thanks to in-law Benjamin Franklin, as wel
l as Thomas Edison and others, by the 1900s, Americans would have electricity, running water, telephones, and the automobile. Food would be bought at the store, vegetables grown commercially, cooking done on reliable gas or electric stoves. Life was good for Americans—the Roaring Twenties had arrived.
It was in this privileged time that my grandfather Eliot, nicknamed Skipper, undoubtedly for his love of boats, met Dorothea Morrell, a spirited girl from a fun-loving family in Morristown, New Jersey. She was a tomboy debutante with sporty tastes—skiing, fishing, hockey, and tennis. The nickname Skates came from the time she was playing hockey disguised as a boy for the Morristown pickup team and got knocked down, her hat falling off to expose curly, long blond hair. “A girl,” someone on the other team yelled, “and she skates.”
“Skipper was handsome, and a good athlete,” Skates told us, athleticism garnering her highest esteem. His parents had moved from Long Island to the well-to-do suburb of Rumson, New Jersey, known for the oldest lawn tennis club in the country, a beautiful beach club, and easy access to Manhattan by train. When Skates and Skipper married, they set up house in the renovated boathouse of the Coleman estate on a tributary of the Navesink River. Aunt Lyn was born in 1936 and two years later, Eliot Warner Coleman Jr. came into the world at Morristown Memorial Hospital.
“He came out smiling,” Skates claimed. She smiled, too, it was such a joy for her to have a son. We still joke that he was like her own little baby Jesus. There were so many pairs of knitted booties among the baby gifts, the nickname-prone family dubbed him “Boots,” which later became “Bootsie,” much to his chagrin. Boots was sent to private school at Rumson Country Day and then to prep school at St. Paul’s in New Hampshire, where his cousins also went. He was a star cross-country runner and lacrosse player, though a mediocre student. Papa made close ties with friends and teachers, but was by spirit independent, even then preferring V8 to Coke. Though he was teased for it, he stood up for himself, to the point of once getting his nose broken in a fistfight in the dining hall.
This Life Is in Your Hands Page 3