“I finally feel a bit good at things,” she said. In Papa, Mama had found a kindred spirit to ease her old loneliness.
“It’s on Susie’s birthday that you can feel the light returning,” Papa liked to say, which of course made Mama smile. Mama’s birthday arrived on February 7, and with it the lengthening days, if not warmth. They celebrated with the Nearings, and again on Helen’s birthday two weeks later on February 23. “Had an excellent birthday party for Helen—food was superb and we all enjoyed ourselves through and through,” Mama wrote. “Scott looks very well.”
Soon after, Helen and Scott left for Europe on a lecture tour to promote their books. When the Nearings traveled in the winters, they paid Mama to reply to their mail, fill book orders, and look after their house. The money was welcome, and the work kept her occupied. The mail was often spread out on the table, letters lots, bills not many, as Mama sorted it into piles and I played in the low winter sun streaming through the south-facing windows. Most of the letters were from people who had read Living the Good Life and wanted to visit or had already visited during summer.
“We were so encouraged by our tour of your farm,” one said. “Now we’re looking for land to start our own homestead.”
Mama read this again and again; people were fleeing to the woods. Another thing she noticed was that some of the envelopes were unsealed, the glue appearing to have been steamed open and then unsuccessfully resealed or taped. Helen had said not to worry about it—Dot Crockett was tampering with the mail. The Harborside postmistress, the Nearings believed, read their correspondence to keep tabs on what were thought to be their Communist activities. It was no secret that Scott had been a member of both the Socialist and the Communist parties. Some even knew he’d written that letter to President Truman stating, “Your country is no longer mine.”
“Commies,” the more conservative locals muttered about the Nearings. “Pinko lefties.”
“Choose your enemies carefully,” Scott liked to say, “for you will become more like them than anyone else.”
We now know it was President Truman who set in motion the National Security Agency, or NSA, to keep tabs on citizens in ways very similar to what we deemed the Soviet Union’s evil KGB. One of the jobs of the NSA was to systematically intercept and monitor the phone, mail, and telegram communications of millions of regular Americans. During the 1970s, these efforts were focused on citizens identified as “unreliable,” such as civil rights leaders, antiwar protesters, teachers, and union leaders, as well as some politicians and church officials. It would later be acknowledged in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee investigations that the Nearings and many of their friends were on this short list of “unreliable” citizens. Scott believed this was because anyone who championed human rights in favor of the free acquisition of wealth was a threat to capitalism—and hence the government—which he saw as banking in the back pocket of big business.
“When we left the city, we sought to provide, by example, an alternative,” Scott said. In his view, this disengagement was also threatening to the government because people living outside of society could no longer be controlled. Dot Crockett, it seemed, was a means of keeping tabs.
Trips to the post office were darkened by a childhood intuition that Dot Crockett might cook me for dinner. The post office was located in an annex attached to an old mustard yellow farmhouse on the main road in the quiet hamlet of Harborside. We’d enter a small room with dusty wooden floors, a wall of individual brass-plated PO boxes, and a teller’s window that dominated the back wall, with a ledge that was just a little too high, so Mama had to reach up in order to hand through the outgoing packages. The imposing figure of Dot Crockett blocked the light of the window, her cropped hair musty and uncombed, her equally dark eyes rimmed by glasses. If she spoke to Mama at all, it was to criticize something about the mail, or the way in which it was packaged, in a voice leathery and raspy from smoking.
“This package’s not taped right, you’ll have to redo it.”
“Only books can go book class.”
“Wrong zip code.”
One time the postmistress actually slammed the window shut when she saw Mama coming with a larger than usual stack of packages.
“Some people are easily threatened,” Papa said, when Mama told him about the incident. “Work as well as you can and be kind,” he added, quoting Scott’s favorite saying.
There was one small store on Cape Rosier, Perry’s Store, located in a white New Englander on the road near the turn to Dog Island. Perry had a gas pump out front, and a selection of packaged and marked-up processed foods lined the dusty shelves of the dim interior. We usually drove the half hour to Blue Hill, or forty-five minutes to Ellsworth, where we could find a wider range of products for less, but every so often Papa stopped at Perry’s Store in a pinch to pick up batteries or buy gas.
“A-yuh,” Perry responded to Papa’s hello.
Most of the locals on Cape Rosier had lived in the area for generations. The previous generation might have survived without electricity and flushing toilets, but this one had fought (and paid money) to get electrical and phone wires brought to their remote roads. Why in the hell someone would want to live without these luxuries now was beyond them.
“Queer folk,” they said, referring to us. “Hippies.”
“You mean the rabbit food eat-ahs?” Perry would joke when visitors asked at the store for directions to the Nearings. Native Mainers spoke in what you might call a dialect of the Kennedy Boston accent. A’s had become r’s, and r’s had become a’s. Melissa was “Melisser.” The combination of e or o with r sounded more like a and h. Mainer was “Maine-ah,” neighbor was “neighbah,” and lobster was “lobstah.” “You can’t get they-ah from hey-ah,” went the famous saying. Other common Maineisms were “A-yuh” for yes, and “Mothah,” as an affectionate name for one’s wife. Children, or friends of any age for that matter, were called “dee-ah,” meaning dear. The word farming sounded more like “famine,” as Brooklin neighbor and Charlotte’s Web author E. B. White pointed out in his essay “Maine Speech,” and bastard, pronounced “bayster,” was often coupled with ole, for just about anything. “He’s an ole bayster, they say, when they pull an eel out of a trap.”
Perry viewed Papa, as he did the Nearings, with a mixture of curiosity, humor, and suspicion. There was no getting around it, the fact that we were “from away” immediately labeled us as “not likely to last the wintah.” Now that the Nearings had lasted nearly twenty winters, they were at least acknowledged as being in existence as residents, even if they did sometimes disappear during the cold months, which was regarded as highly suspect and bordering on the category of “summah folk.” Summer folk had long been populating second homes along the Maine coast as a hot-weather escape from the cities, and their numbers increased dramatically with the easy access provided by the automobile in the 1920s, though they were generally ignored, unless, of course, they were buying something.
Papa had respect for the locals and treated them accordingly. As he was paying for gas that day, he mentioned to Perry that he now had a daughter who’d been born in Maine—perhaps that counted for something?
“Elyut,” Perry said. “You know how the saying goes. If a cat has kittens in the oven, you don’t call ’em biscuits.”
Other locals weren’t so affable. A fellow named Percy, who sometimes worked as Carolyn Robinson’s gardener, thought himself a more able farmer than the “city folk” living on the cape. He took it as an affront that the Nearings, and soon Papa, were recognized and written about for their gardening expertise. In retribution, Percy was known to leave piles of tacks on the final section of road leading to our land, with the intention of causing a flat tire, usually in the most inopportune of situations.
Papa was towing a trailer of manure back from his favorite horse farm when he found himself stranded at dusk by such a flat. Not hav
ing a spare, he unhitched the jeep from the trailer and left it by the side of the road, returning the next day with a patch kit. He removed the offending tack and mended the leak, only to find that the trailer’s other tire had been slashed in the night by a vindictive knife.
“Sacre bleu!” Papa swore, borrowing the French Canadian curse used by the locals. At that time of winter, nearly spring, we were down to the bottom of the money stash under the couch, and a new tire was more than Papa could afford. He swore again, this time in English, and then did the only thing he could do—he went and got a job pruning a neighbor’s trees for a few days until he had enough cash to buy a tire and bring the much-needed manure back to the farm.
“How many bastards are this lucky?” he reminded himself with a laugh as he finally patched the second tire. “How many ole baysters,” he repeated in Maine-speak, “are this goddamn lucky?”
In April the white-throated sparrows called out their arrival, the ground thawed, and spring was off and growing again. By that third year, we’d fully succumbed to the seasons. We felt the changes in our blood and waited anxiously as the mud began to grow things. The first blooms were white, as if to match the melting snow. Pale pussy willows proliferated in barren thickets, and snow blue clumps of bluets dusted damp grassy areas. Soon an abundance of pink blossoms exploded across the orchard, their round petals falling like a late snowstorm and accumulating on the ground in drifts.
“Most beautiful day we have had in weeks,” Mama noted in her journal. “Still eating apples stored since last fall in the root cellar. They remain crisp and juicy: Northern Spies and Golden Russets.”
As the white flowers faded, everything turned green. Grass thickened to a vibrant carpet as clumps of chives returned to the herb garden, where they’d been planted the previous year. Segmented stems of horsetails sprang from low, damp areas, and green tongues of wild lily of the valley caught the light around the edges. Spruce and fir branches put forth electric green bristles, and baby fiddleheads brightened to an edible chartreuse that Mama snapped off and brought home to sauté with butter for lunch.
While Papa seeded flats with me in his lap and readied the farm for planting, Mama carried water from the drinking spring, milked the goats, cooked meals, and sewed or mended clothes on her foot-powered treadle Singer sewing machine. She brought out cotton shirts from storage, put away sweaters, washed the windows, swept, dusted, and mopped the floors. Spring cleaning helped get the winter doldrums out of her mind, too.
“I used to be a troubled person—not able to find myself nor find a way of life that suited me,” Mama wrote on April 9, thinking back to her difficult adolescence. “I believe I grew up in a fear of life setting and this I somehow think drains creative energies (anti-life being negative leading to destructive energy). Then I came here, found homesteading and made myself well.”
Papa was in the garden tilling, spreading compost, and transplanting as I trundled after him in my favorite red-checkered Marna coat, as I called it, handmade by Mama’s sister, Aunt Marth, of a blanket “borrowed” from the ski lift at Mad River Glen. The once-poor soil was now rich and dark brown from compost when Papa dug into it with a trowel to transplant seedlings. We put our noses close to inhale the fresh scent of spring.
“That’s the smell of possibility,” Papa said.
Mama watched us through the front windows as she sat with her journal, hoping to capture her feelings of contentment and well-being. “Realized for the first time in my life that I am truly happy,” she added to her previous post. “Happy to be with Eliot and to have had Melissa and to be living here with the Nearings as neighbors. My life has become meaningful after years of confusion and chaos.”
We received the message from the Wall Street Journal on a rainy day in May of 1971. The newspaper my grandfather Skipper read as he rode the train to his job as a stockbroker in New York City wanted to do a story on us. Mama’s initial thrill turned to apprehension.
“This is exactly the type of thing we wanted to escape,” she said. Papa nodded, but his thoughts were elsewhere. The article could be used, he thought, to spread the word about a better way of living. Furthermore, his Wall Street Journal–reading family and friends in New Jersey thought he was a financially destitute hippie. A story in their paper of choice might prove otherwise. It could show that material wealth was not the only wealth.
The reporter, David Gumpert, might as well have been covering a story in a third-world country. A staff writer at the Boston office, he’d been captivated by an article about us in the Maine Times and proposed a story on this new interest in going “back to the land.” Sales of the 1970 edition of Living the Good Life had reached nearly 50,000 copies, compared to only 10,000 for the previous edition, and The Whole Earth Catalog and Rodale’s Prevention magazine were giving voice to this growing subculture of environmentalists, natural foodies, and organic farming advocates. The problem was, there was no easy way to get ahold of us. Gumpert finally succeeded in contacting Papa through Bucks Harbor Market’s phone, and left the city to enter our world for three days, sleeping in the guest camper/soon-to-be goat house and following us through our workday. He had lived only in Chicago, New York, and Boston, so our lifestyle was an especially exotic contrast to his own. Quiet and easy to talk to, the young reporter adapted without complaint to the difficulties of using the outhouse and eating our vegetarian food, though he secretly thought the goat’s milk tasted of the barnyard, and it sent him to the outhouse with the runs.
“All I want to express to the world via the newspaper is this,” Mama told him. “We are a family of human beings trying to live a happy, healthy and fruitful existence in a world where it is difficult to do so. Our goal is not to prove anything, but is mainly to survive as decently as possible.”
While Mama wanted to protect her privacy, feeling the dirt under her fingernails and patches on her clothes illuminated in the glare of self-consciousness, Papa took advantage of the opportunity to share our way of life.
“I’m working sixteen hours a day for survival,” Papa told Gumpert. “This isn’t any game I’m playing. If I don’t grow enough, it’s that much less to eat this winter. But we find, every passing day, we’re just so happy here.”
Mama was less encouraged. “The reporter from Boston has left and I realize how difficult it is to express our way of life to those who live so differently,” she wrote in her journal. “I realize now that the experience with the reporter was an unfortunate one. He was like an intrusion, making me feel uneasy and paranoid the three days he was here.”
The article and a picture of my two-year-old face hit the front page on Tuesday, July 13, 1971, and despite Mama’s fears, it turned out to be a favorable profile.
“When Sue and Eliot Coleman sit down to eat in their tiny one-room house, they use tree stumps instead of chairs,” the story began. “When they need drinking water, Sue walks a quarter of a mile through the woods to a freshwater brook and hauls back two big containers hanging from a yoke over her shoulders. And when the Colemans want to read at night, they light kerosene lanterns. The young couple—Sue is 26, Eliot 31—aren’t the forgotten victims of rural poverty or some natural disaster. They live as they do out of choice. . . . With their two-year-old daughter, Melissa, Sue and Eliot are trying to escape America’s consumer economy and live in the wilderness much as the country’s pioneers did.”
Our serve-yourself farm stand was soon crowded with summer folk on a treasure hunt to find us on the winding roads of the Blue Hill Peninsula. No one could believe we were surviving on less than $2,000 a year, as reported.
“Eliot and Sue still retain some ties to the money economy,” Gumpert wrote, tailoring the story to his financial audience. “During the spring and summer Eliot does gardening and other odd jobs for local residents three or four mornings a week, for which he is paid $2 to $2.50 an hour. Sue also has done some part-time secretarial work. Together, they were able to e
arn about $1,400 last year. They earned another $350 from the sale of surplus vegetables from their garden—mostly peas and lettuce—to neighbors and tourists, for a total income of $1,750. The remaining $250 they spent came from the last of the savings they had when they moved to Maine. . . . The Colemans are among a tiny but apparently growing number of young couples, often from middle-class families, who are taking up the pioneering life, or ‘homesteading’ as it’s often called.”
A friend of Papa’s from prep school was working in New York in publishing at the time. “Well, I’ll be damned, Eliot’s gone and put his finger on the zeitgeist,” Ian said when he picked up the paper that day. The article, it turned out, was a messenger of change, as more and more people became interested in a simpler way of life—people who would seek us out in droves during the coming energy crisis. Soon, the isolation of the woods would be anything but.
Chapter Five
Companions
Scott and Eliot in the Nearings’ garden (Photograph by Tom Jones. Originally published in the Maine Times, May 10, 1974.)
The one thing I yearned for those first years was a baby sister or brother, and by the fall of 1971, it looked like my wish might come true.
“All is well on Greenwood Farm,” Mama wrote in her journal on October 27, 1971. “Apple storage almost completed; canning completed (over 300 quarts); cabbage in; apples being dried; cheese making started (with rennet and sour cream to activate); and still eating fresh strawberries from the garden!
“It seems I’m pregnant, due May 28, 1972.”
Then on November 2: “I made seven wheels of goat cheese weighing two–four pounds each. Some had cumin and caraway seed, and some were plain. All were rubbed with sesame oil and salt to form a rind and then scraped and bathed with vinegar and salt to keep mold down.”
This Life Is in Your Hands Page 9