Introduction

A Small Farm in Maine

by Terry Silber

Copyright 1988

 We can neither see nor hear any of our neighbors. The last stretch of road to the farmhouse is dirt, and it ends about a hundred feet from the kitchen door. If we want to shop for food, we need to travel about twenty miles, and if we want to purchase supplies for our farm, we need to go at least that far, if not fifty miles farther. During the summer months, I see more hawks flying over our fields than I do planes. Our mailing address is a rural free delivery number, and the postman negotiates his route in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. We pump our own water from a well that was dug down some twenty-five feet and carefully lined with field stones, probably by the Ellises in the early part of the last century. When we lose our electricity, which we do whenever there are heavy winds, rains, or snow, we heat and cook on the kitchen wood stove and light our house with kerosene lamps.
 The floors of the farmhouse are old, wide spruce boards that we have sanded free of their gray paint. Unfortunately, the roof is still original, and it sags a bit more each year, so one summer very soon we will have to tear it off and completely replace it. We have yet to insulate and plaster the ceiling of our attic bedroom, so I look up each night at the hand-hewn beams and the roof boards, which bear the marks of cross-cut saws. I will be somewhat sorry when we do finish off that room, because it is there that I can most clearly re-create a sense of the effort that went into building this house.
 When the moon is full and the ground is covered with snow, there is enough natural light outside to see the color of the mittens and jacket that I've put on to walk to the barn. On a cloudy night when the trees are fully leafed out, the farmhouse and grounds are totally and wonderfully dark, it is the kind of darkness that seems to expand the distance between us and the rest of the world. It is a darkness that can make me feel, for a brief moment, altogether separate.
 The other evening, shortly after dinner, a cow moose and her calf ambled across our back lawn, stopping for a moment to graze and exchange glances with our two horses in the pasture before sauntering off through the pines. We could hear branches snapping beneath their hooves until they were well off into the woods. Loons come every spring to nest on North Pond, about a mile from our land; we hear them clearly morning and evening. The whippoorwill hasn't arrived yet this summer. I notice its call only at night, when its distinctive melody is woven among the flutelike notes of the hermit thrush.
 It is time to mow the winter rye that we planted as a cover crop on parts of the upper fields. That means we will have to wrestle the mowing attachment onto our old tractor, a job that none of us enjoys. But if we don't get it done soon, we will not be able to turn the horses out to graze, and it is getting much too late in the season to be buying feed hay. We also have to finish liming and seeding the uppermost field, so we can reclaim that area for haying and grazing as well. Whatever the season, I am fully aware of the tasks that must be done, and I am working to fit those in with the tasks that ought to be done and those that we would like to include if we could find the time. Before us, the Ellises, Coles, Sullivans, Watethouses, Turners, Dunns, and Trasks must have been kept just as busy by this place.
 I never expected to end up on a farm in Maine, least of all one that is located no more than twenty miles from the small mill town in which I was born. Since I left to go to college, I have lived in five states, two countries, and more than two dozen apartments or houses. Since graduation, I've worked in eight institutions, each of them rather interesting, some challenging, and some that are considered prestigious. At thirty, I was setting my course toward professional accomplishment of a rather traditional sort. Now my work exists far outside the boundaries of well-known institutions. I make a living off the land in a way that is not explainable with any label that can be easily understood, much -less counted on to garner status. I live on a real family income that places me close to the national poverty level. What's more, I grow more and more certain that I will live out the rest of my life here, although I am not certain whether I should be scornful of my contentment or grateful for my discovery.
 I am one of thousands of men and women who moved back to the land. We homesteaders, the urban dropouts of the sixties and seventies, made it fashionable to come to the country. In fact, we developed homesteading into yet another national industry. Magazines, tools, machinery, cooperatives, political movements, clothing, and architectural styles were first produced by and for the homesteaders, and then refined for the weekend dropouts. The movement produced millions of active and sympathetic followers as well as a number of prominent spokesmen. The men and women who became regionally and nationally visible did so principally. because of their political and social organizing, but also because of their increased awareness of and appreciation for homesteading skills and crafts. The movement also gave rise to a number of proselytizers and backwoods philosophers - earnest ones, simplistic ones, committed ones, and opportunistic ones.
 We will probably not be able to evaluate the impact that this small movement had and will have on attitudes in this country in the immediate future, since we are still too close to it to sort out the faddish responses from the long-term social impact. We do know, however, that the rush to settle in a cabin in the country has peaked and all but disappeared. We also know that a goodly number of us who participated in the movement became disappointed and disillusioned by its realities. Cities and suburbs are now filled with people who have dropped back in and returned to graduate schools, professional careers, and traditional upwardly mobile aspirations.
 Making a living and a satisfactory life for yourself is not easy in the country, and I think that the back-to-the-land movement was destined to end, primarily because many of its proponents confused the choices they were making. It might be possible to disengage from the demands of urban and professional institutions, but nowhere can one disengage from the basic needs for food, shelter, and at least a modest coordination of one's life with a community of people. The rural communities that we homesteaders moved into were less populated, less affluent, less cosmopolitan than the cities we left behind. They were no more provincial, only provincial in different ways. The rural people we all came to know were as noble, intelligent, ignominious, and ignorant as the people we knew and didn't get to know in the cities. We brought ourselves to the country and tried to imagine that we had come to a place that was saner, less troubled and demanding. But we still had to attend to our own growth and needs in places that were without the benefits of urban stimulation.
 As each of us picked our way through a series of experiences, we fared more or less well according to our individual needs for the rewards that are intrinsic in rural life. There were so many young men and women who were convinced that they were the first generation truly to experience the wonder of childbirth, the pleasure of baking their own bread, the virtue of not eating meat. And after we had all found our beautiful retreats, had our babies, fed ourselves well, and learned to make baskets and build shelters, we were forced to get on with the other necessities of life, not the least of which was to make a living from year to year, raise our children, and continue to educate and nourish ourselves.
 I believe that rural life has to be viewed as an aesthetic choice, not an ethical one. Lives can be as well-intentioned in corporate America as on the farm. There was a lot about the spirit of the back-to-land movement that was indulgent, naive, and self-righteous. Participants often spoke of their choices as though they were moral rather than personal. But sooner or later most of us realized that we had given up enormous rewards from participation in urban work and cultural life that are not easy to replace with real satisfaction in a rural environment.
 Rural life can sustain people if the things that most interest those people are rural by their very nature. In many cases, we back-to-the-land participants did not have it in mind to make our living off the land, and yet the mythology of rural life that attracted us was based not only on the beauty of a physical environment but on an old model of agrarian communities that were in fact unified by the commonality of work and by shared interests and goals.
 Small-scale agrarian communities have been on the decline in New England for more than half a century. Like many of the inhabitants of such communities before us, a goodly percentage of homesteaders were forced to seek employment away from the farm. When we did, we began to commute away from our retreats and rejoin the work forces of towns and cities at some distance from our land. The need to make a living led to changes in our attitudes and conflicts between our original and emerging goals. When the romance of settling on the land wore off and we reentered the more common workplaces around us, we often began to search again for the familiar rewards and amenities of the suburban and urban lives we had recently abandoned.
 There have been numerous times during the past decade when I've thought about how different my life would be now if I had continued with my urban career. I've reflected most seriously when I've felt discouraged with our efforts to make a living off our farm. I've reflected most honestly when trying to find the words to make my son understand why we are here.
 It would be easy to say that this spot is so extraordinarily beautiful that no one needs an explanation for being here. But I can remember looking at this homestead for the very first time. It was and is a modest place. The farmhouse is classically simple. The land around it is a common mixture of fields and rolling hills. There are no great views, and the river that marks one of our boundaries is shallow and rocky. This farm has, however, sheltered and provided for eight different families. The land has been worked ~' for one hundred and fifty years. This homestead is one of thousands that has played a particular role in the history of rural New England. The longer that I live in this farmhouse, the more I work to restore the land, the stronger becomes my bond to the place and to its history. My familiarity with this place continually feeds my sense of its beauty.
 I think that in the end, we do - if we are willing to take the, risks - make choices that will let us live out our lives in an environment that will most nurture our needs. The communities that we choose to live in must ultimately help us support our individual senses of ourselves. The work that we choose to sustain ourselves and our families has to have some meaning and the appropriate rewards if we are simply to get out of bed each day and put in all the effort.
 I've been acquainted with my land now for more than twenty years, and I have had the great good fortune to discover reasons for staying. No other place in my life has exacted so much from me, in terms of either physical or intellectual effort. No place has held out such rewards. And what is more, I know that life will not get easier as I grow older, because I already sense that there is so much to learn, so much to do. But I've found my agenda, and it is an endless list of tasks that need to be carried out on this very ordinary old homestead.