“One of the most important secrets I learned from the Nearings was succession planting,” Papa claimed. Rather than the garden beginning in spring, producing in summer, and ending in fall, the Nearings succeeded in extending the short Maine growing season by continually planting new crops. When the peas were done for the season in June or July, for instance, they were ripped out, fresh compost was spread, and the area was planted with a new crop. The pea vines were added to the compost pile, which would in turn be put back into the garden the following season.
Another successful habit adopted from the Nearings was their attention to detail, planning, and observation. They kept careful notes of what they did each year in the garden, such as which lettuces had grown well with what soil amendments and which ingredients worked best when making compost. Many of their discoveries came from chance observations that a less astute farmer might have missed, and from being in the right place at the right time. If something wasn’t working, it was time for a new plan, and they were always thinking ahead, even putting in trees to create a windbreak they might not live to enjoy.
“Helen and Scott are the only octogenarians I know who are planning for ten years down the road,” Papa often joked, but their steadfast and purposeful effort appealed to his still-young and impetuous mind and provided him with a framework to achieve his goals. The Nearings would prove, like most mentors, to have clay feet, and their ideas fallible, but their achievements will always be an extraordinary example of the power of determination and effort.
“Just you watch,” Scott liked to say about the unlikely force of water. “With continual effort it will find a way to the sea.”
“Let’s visit the Nearings,” Papa had said to Mama two years earlier as they headed out in their VW truck with its built-in camper on a land-hunting trip around New England. They’d stopped at the Nearings’ coastal Maine farm on Cape Rosier once before, to find that the Living the Good Life authors welcomed visitors, as long as you weren’t afraid to help around the farm.
It was the summer of 1968, and Papa had just lost his job at Franconia College. That spring, Vietnam protesters at Columbia took over the administration and shut down the university, the musical Hair scandalized Broadway with full nudity, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. For Mama and Papa and others, there was a feeling of powerlessness in the face of opposing forces and a longing for ground on which to stand.
The political climate at Franconia College was also in turmoil, tension building between the liberal faculty, including a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, and the conservative board. On April 5, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, an article ran in what Time dubbed the “archconservative” Manchester Union Leader. “Bare Debauchery at Franconia: Drugs, Liquor, Sex Rampant on Campus,” it declared, effectively dwarfing the MLK story. Although the tales of sex and drugs at Franconia were said to be exaggerated, students certainly grew marijuana in the woods, and unmarried couples slept together on campus. The fallout was that Franconia’s president was forced to resign, and many of the more vocal faculty members, including Papa, were let go or resigned in solidarity.
“To hell with them,” Papa said. After the initial sting of loss, he felt a new freedom. They could do anything; now was the time to find land of their own. He had $5,000 in savings, which seemed like a lot of money at the time; the average national annual income was about $7,000. Following the Nearings’ example, they sought a place they could afford to pay for in full—a perfect piece of land to start a farm and home.
“Everyone shares a kinship with the land,” Papa wrote years later in his first book, The New Organic Grower. “No matter where we are in time and distance, the desire for the ideal country spot is very real. Whether the image comes from books, childhood experiences, or the depths of our souls, it has an indelible quality. The dream farm has fields here, an orchard there, a brook, and large trees near the perfect house, with the barns and outbuildings set off just so. The dream is effortless. The difficulty comes in trying to find such a place when you decide to buy one.”
Beyond the tiny township of Harborside, the road narrowed to the width of the VW truck. Up and down hills they went, and around sharp turns. When the view opened out to the sea again, the road took a sharp dip before leveling to overlook a beautiful cove with a rock island in the middle. Across from that cove was a large mailbox with “Nearing” painted on it and a wooden placard with the greeting, “Forest Farm, help us live the good life, visitors 3–5 or by appointment,” signed, “Helen & Scott.” A sandy driveway led up through the woods past a stone-walled garden to an old clapboarded farmhouse connected to a barn by a wooden arch that they passed under to find a stone patio and table set with wooden bowls for lunch.
“Hello, hello, hello-e-o,” came a lilting cheerio voice through the screen of the kitchen window. “Come in, come in, come in!”
Entering through the mudroom to a country kitchen with mottled pine floors and colorful cabinets, they found Helen standing over the stove, making soup. Small and energetic with short sandy hair, Helen possessed a hawklike quality in her face and movements, fierce, regal, and confident, but kindly, too. In her sixties, she wore a shapeless outfit over a trim figure, her age revealed only by a slight puffiness in the sun-weathered skin beneath her eyes and chin.
“Hello, hello,” she said again, automatically almost, not seeming a bit perturbed to have strangers standing in her kitchen. “Where are you kiddos from?”
As Papa told her of their quest for land, Mama took in the small house. The counter and sink looked through mullioned windows to the patio. Across the room was the living area, consisting of a solid table with chairs and bountiful bookshelves, above which a large plaque read, “There is no religion higher than truth.” They would later learn that this was the emblem of the Theosophical Society, and the quote was of the founder, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
“Scott-o’s out in the garden,” Helen said to Papa. “Why don’t you tell him lunch’s ready?”
Mama stayed with Helen, finding her the sort of alternative woman she wished she had for a mother. Born to what was described as an “eclectic and intellectual upper-middle-class family,” Helen had grown up in the New York suburb of Ridgewood, New Jersey. The Knothes were Unitarians and members of the Theosophical Society, a nonsectarian group promoting the study of religion, philosophy, and science, and they were strict vegetarians, maintaining an organic garden on the property surrounding their rambling book-filled bungalow. Attractive, and wise for her youth, Helen practiced the violin, vegetarianism, and various alternative ideas promoted by the Theosophical Society, including reincarnation, palm reading, and dowsing with a rod to find water.
At age seventeen Helen first met Scott Nearing, twenty years her senior, but she was off to spend six years traveling and living abroad in Europe, India, Australia, and Amsterdam, where she met the Indian guru Krishnamurti, a spiritual leader recognized by the Theosophical Society. Krishnamurti felt an immediate connection to Helen and insisted she join the inner circle of people who traveled with him as he gave spiritual teachings. They maintained a mutually admiring, chaste relationship for a couple of years until a rumor that they were engaged to be married soured the relationship for the guru, who had taken vows of celibacy. Returning to the States without a clear path before her, Helen, now a self-possessed twenty-four-year-old, invited Scott to speak at a Unitarian church meeting. Separated from his first wife, Scott asked Helen a number of questions about her travels, then invited her to go for a drive in the country. He proved to be fun-loving, impulsive, and a believer in fairies.
“I thought, What kind of a guy is this?” Helen said. “I was going with four or five fellows at the time, but I was taken with his integrity, his purpose in life. Even those who disagreed with him responded to his warmth.”
Soon enough she fell in love.
Scott was in the stone-walled garden, hoeing the cabbage patch in rubber boots, sleeveless work shirt, and knee-length shorts that hung from old red suspenders. With his high forehead topped by thinning white hair, he looked closer to his eighty-four years than Helen did to her sixty-four, but only because the lines of his skin were so deeply creased into his tan face.
“If he had any more wrinkles, you’d have to roll him out to see what he looked like,” the joke went. Others used the comparison to an apple that had been in the root cellar all winter, the skin leathery and mapped with lines.
“I’ve been sent to tell you it’s lunchtime,” Papa told him, feeling an easy comfort in the warmth and peace of the walled garden. When Scott looked up in greeting, the lines of his face softened from forehead to cheeks as he smiled, revealing a strong and handsome bone structure beneath.
“Hello, son,” he said. “Grab a hoe and help me finish.”
Born nearly a century earlier in the rural Pennsylvania town of Morris Run, Scott saw the first telephone, flush toilet, and electric lights come to town during his childhood. After attending the University of Pennsylvania, he received a graduate degree in business and became secretary of the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee, fighting against big businesses for child labor laws. Despite some successes, he decided instead to become an economics and sociology professor at Penn, where he wrote pamphlets and books on child labor, women’s issues, wage and income, racial and social change, and eventually war.
In 1915 Penn’s trustees decided not to renew Scott’s contract, as many were uncomfortable with his antiwar views, and a year later he was let go from the University of Toledo for the same reasons. Options narrowing, Scott joined the Socialist Party in 1917 and took a post at the Rand School of Social Science in New York City, where he became a radical in earnest. It was there he wrote a pamphlet called The Great Madness, which argued that capitalism and big business, hand in hand with the government, encouraged and profited from war, using it to protect and further investments “in the name of liberty.” Scott was arrested and put on trial along with the Socialist Party, charged with attempting to obstruct the draft under the Espionage Act, a piece of legislation similar to today’s Patriot Act. In a very public and controversial trial Scott defended himself and was acquitted of the charges, but his career was in ruins.
“Thus began my education at the College of Hard Knocks,” he liked to say. He traveled abroad and in 1927, after visiting China and Russia, put in an application for membership in the Communist Party. This was before the age of McCarthyism, when the U.S. Communist Party was gaining numbers—opposed as it was to the threat of fascism. It was the volatile time later portrayed in Warren Beatty’s 1981 movie Reds, in which an aged Scott would appear as one of the real-life “witnesses.” Scott eventually resigned from the party when a pamphlet of his was rejected because it didn’t align with Leninist thinking. The party was angered enough not to accept his resignation, instead expelling Scott for his individualism.
It would be individualism, and his union with Helen in 1928, that defined the rest of his life. In Helen, he found a woman who was both a helper and an equal. Though their relationship was at first tempered by the age difference, they formed a remarkable liaison. The conservative world of the Great Depression settled in on them, leaving Scott few outlets for his views, as the media was controlled by the very forces of financial power he sought to expose. Helen and Scott chose instead to shrug the weight of public life from their shoulders and move to an abandoned farm in Vermont in 1932 to start their rural experiment. Thirteen years later, on Scott’s sixty-second birthday, August 6, 1945, President Truman gave the order to drop the first atom bomb on Hiroshima.
“Your government is no longer mine,” Scott wrote to the president in objection. Then in 1952, when Vermont became popular with skiers and city vacationers, the Nearings picked up and moved even farther away from New York, to Maine.
Working next to him in the garden, Papa admired the palpable strength of Scott’s character and was encouraged by the fact that a man who’d been fired from his teaching posts by a conservative society had gone on to lead a full life of his own choosing. Now, with an unpopular war being waged in Vietnam, the Nearings’ example was inspiring increasing numbers of back-to-the-landers. In Papa’s eyes, Scott had won.
Joining Helen and Mama on the stone patio, they talked over carved wooden bowls of vegetable soup topped with freshly chopped parsley. In Mama’s memory it was the most delicious soup she’d ever tasted—to this day, the smell of parsley brings back that charmed afternoon.
Back at Franconia in August, Mama, while waitressing at a restaurant called Lovett’s, found herself running to the bathroom with nausea after delivering food to diners. She thought her period was late because she hadn’t been eating much, but soon it was confirmed that she was pregnant, due in April. Her heart danced a jig. For the past year, something in her body had been telling her it was time for a child. Papa was also thrilled, but at twenty-nine years of age, with a twenty-three-year-old wife, he felt ever more strongly the need to provide a home and income for his growing family. During the July visit to the Nearings’, the older couple had mentioned owning a hundred-some acres on Cape Rosier, though Papa hadn’t dared to think they would sell. As the cool weather of fall began to close in, he decided to write and ask. A week later, they received that postcard from Helen offering them the sixty acres.
“I’m afraid to believe it’s for real,” Mama said, as they drove up in the VW to look at the land. Back in the Nearings’ kitchen, Helen and Scott asked what they could afford to put down. Papa estimated about $2,000, leaving enough reserves from their $5,000 in savings to build a house and live until they could start making money. Divide $2,000 by sixty acres, and the Nearings offered them a price of a little over $33 per acre, the amount the Nearings had paid when they bought the land almost twenty years earlier.
“Most important to pay as you go,” Scott said, referring to his lifelong economic philosophy of never going into debt. He also said he didn’t like to make income without doing work to earn it, which meant it was morally offensive to him to raise the cost of the land simply because it’d appreciated over the years. Helen piped in to say she’d seen in the lines of their palms that they’d be good neighbors. So with a handshake, it was settled—Papa would bring the $2,000 in cash when he returned.
It was not the dream farm Papa had in his mind’s eye during the search, lacking as it did cultivated fields and a pond. But none of that mattered; it was their ground on which to stand, unbeholden to a mortgage or bank, and it was up to them to make it into the dream.
As I tottered and babbled after the chickens, Mama finished carving and painting her masterpiece, a large sign for the end of our driveway with the words “The Vegetable Garden” in big letters over a painted outline of a wheelbarrow full of a cornucopia of vegetables. She planted a bed of marigolds and snapdragons beneath it. Our farm stand was ready for business. At first it was only a few baskets of this or that next to a chalkboard with names and prices. With Mama’s help, the random customers could select for themselves the lettuce or tomatoes of their choice.
Soon word got out, and the trickle of customers wandering down the grassy lane began to increase. They’d heard about the flavorful tomatoes that Papa pronounced “to-mah-toes,” “because you say ahhhh when you taste them.” The carrots were so sweet, they would eventually be dubbed “candy carrots” by an appreciative child. There were butterhead lettuces that held the beautiful formation of enormous roses, and cabbages the size of basketballs. “I’ve never cared for spinach until yours,” a customer said of Papa’s large and especially tasty leaves. Even Helen and Scott were impressed.
“It wasn’t until the second summer of 1970 that I really began to understand gardening,” Papa told Stanley Mills, the friend of the Nearings who wrote the quarterly newsletter about us. “That winter was when I read Sir Albert
Howard’s classic, An Agricultural Testament, in which Howard claims that if plants are healthy there is no role for insects. The role of insects with plants is like the role of wolves with deer and caribou: to eliminate the unhealthy and unfit. The sicker, the weaker the plants, the more appealing they are to insects. After two years of following Rodale, I began to see how things really are. After this we began experimenting with the soil. With Rodale I was working in a system akin to Ptolemaic astronomy, with Sir Albert Howard I hit on Copernicus. The results speak for themselves.”
For most modern farmers of the time, when the pests arrived, it was time not to think about building up the soil but to get out the pesticides and kill the enemy. And no wonder—the farmers were being marketed to by formerly war-based companies.
“Gardening books published prior to nineteen-forty were mostly organic; those after nineteen-forty were mostly chemical,” Papa explained to Stanley. “Nineteen-forty seems to be the transition between organic and chemical practices, a kind of continental divide.”
In 1971, a certain loud-talking, strong-opinioned Dr. Earl Butz was making himself known as President Nixon’s new secretary of agriculture. He planned to encourage commercial farmers to plant commodity crops “from fencerow to fencerow” using pesticides and chemical fertilizers, in order to revitalize agriculture and cut costs, as well as to help out his friends in the chemical industry. His motivation was to feed the world on cheap corn, but small farmers were unable to compete, and this situation led to a counterculture movement to save the small farm and restore less invasive farming methods. Therein organic agriculture began to find its voice.
This Life Is in Your Hands Page 6