I was looking at my dog-eared copies of Living the Good Life (Helen and Scott Nearing) and The Complete Homesteading Book. And thinking “what ifs.” I was doing this as a musing only, because we get one life to live and not multiples and we can’t go back anyhow. But nonetheless, “what if” Fran and I had met earlier, say in the early 70’s when we were each dissatisfied with current relationships? It’s an interesting mind game for us – who needs Sim City?
At some point we likely would have ended up homesteading like Helen and Scott Nearing, and probably in Vermont or Maine as they did. We might have even discussed our plans with them, as they welcomed visitors. Fran and I would have had much in common with how the Nearings had started out in homesteading decades before, and we would have learned much. They were of the pacifist PYM Quaker sort, war tax resisters (when they owed taxes), and he was forced out of his academic position at U. Penn in WWI because of his pacifist and socialist activities. During the depression they left their urban surroundings for a new lifestyle of subsistence farming. They were highly intelligent, well educated, and maintained some connections with their old friends via their reading and writing. They had no children (I’m assuming Fran and I would have had five children – our current ones) and worked very hard at the Vermont farm. Through dint of hard work and innovative farming techniques, they subsisted comparable to their more established neighbors. In their later years their books coincided with the spirit of the times, and they were feted by many and hated by many. White House invitations depended on who was in the White House. They willingly advised hippies attempting to homestead, but it is interesting that most of these attempts failed (cf. What the Trees Said- Life on a New Age Farm). The only folks I knew in this category bought a small farm near Exton at about the same period (early 70’s), and the couple had chickens (for eggs) and goats (particularly for milk for children sensitive to cows’ milk). After a while they hated the life, hated one another, and divorced and sold the farm to a developer for a large profit that enabled a new life for each of them (strange, how life turns out).
It is noteworthy that the Nearings maintained their intellectual and activist activities with the “outside” world, something that would be important to Fran and me. This distinguished them from (and sometimes antagonized) their traditional New England Republican neighbors of that period. However, they did not have independent money when they arrived (money is something that makes outsiders different and unacceptable – it is a “game” for the outsiders and survival for the natives). A constant worry for subsistence farmers is how they will survive in their old age. There is a great deal of serious poverty in rural Maine, particularly among the elderly. By the time they reached old age, Helen and Scott’s books had achieved such popularity that the royalties could support a conventional middle-class retirement. The right-wing criticized them for having electricity, flush toilets and oil heat in their retirement house, but do we really want folks in their 80’s and 90’s to be living without these things? The Nearings lived to be 91 and 100; it is no virtue that other Mainers sometimes meet their end in their 80’s by essentially freezing to death in their rustic farmhouses. The poverty there is rampant, the Nearings worked to change that, and I am grateful they did not need to die a pauper’s death.
So if the Nearings might have been a model for us, one question would be would we have homesteaded our entire lifetime? For Fran and me, I doubt it. We would have tried something else, not from a sense of failure or giving up on principles, but for the experience of life. Note that the Nearings started their Thoreau experience when Scott was in middle age and Helen a few years younger, and they already had a wealth of experience behind them. Fran and I would have started at a considerably younger age and anticipated a wealth of change and experience ahead of us. What would that “post-homesteading” life have been like for Fran and me? That is another “musing” story.