Spring break, cont'd

On Monday, having the luxury of time, I spent the day studying for my Anatomy and Physiology exam at 5:00. This was the first time I've been able to devote an entire un-interrupted day to reviewing the material. I think I did very well on the test. We had to know the names of all 12 pairs of cranial nerves, which have names like hypoglossus or glossopharyngeal. We had to know the names of the lobes, gyri and sulci of the brain, the areas of different language processing, and the minute details of the act of swallowing.

Today, I planted lettuce and squash in a small corner of the yard where I had dumped four bags of topsoil. It would be cool if any plants grew. Over the weekend, I read a book which reminded me why I didn't hack it as a back-to-the-land person: This Life is In Your Hands, by Melissa Coleman. Her father was one of the super-star gurus of the back-to-the-land movement in the '70's, the successful one the rest of us lesser homesteaders looked up to. Second only to the famous Nearings, he was the unofficial spokesman for the Good Life, speaking at MOFGA fairs and Organic Farming workshops and granting interviews to counterculture and mainstream publications on behalf of the movement. The picture above shows him on the cover of the homesteader's Bible, Mother Earth News. He and his earth-mother wife, Sue, homesteaded in Maine, and every other homesteader in the state and beyond, including Kent and me, made a pilgrimage there at least once to gain inspiration from the beautiful, perfect organic garden and what appeared to be a well-controlled, disciplined way of life without cash. They were vegetarians; their perfect diets kept them in good health. Sue, the wife, cooked all their meals from scratch, gave birth at home, ate the placenta, yada yada. It was so idyllic, we all thought at the time. Why can't WE be more like them? A month or two after our visit to the Coleman homestead, on a Sunday morning in 1976 I remember, we heard through the hippie grapevine that Coleman's three-year-old daughter, who had followed us through the fields that day, had drowned in one of the homestead ponds. It was painful to hear at the time and just as sad to re-live in the memoir. The author, who was seven at the time, describes how this tragedy, along with the endless back-breaking labor, eternal winters, marital friction, and isolation, caused her parents' perfect back-to-the-land lifestyle to unravel. I loved the book. As I read, I was back there again during that magical time, with its darker undercurrent. The Coleman's were divorced, the homestead abandoned, and Eliot moved out of state to a real paying job for several years. But eventually he returned to Maine (probably with a bank account this time) because his passion for organic gardening was genuine. Over the years, his farm took off into a huge cash-generating industry, so he's probably up to his neck in the money that he eschewed back in the day. He has also published numerous books for armchair gardeners. That's the irony of the back-to-the-land movement. However cashless back-to-the-landers were when they first dropped out, few could resist taking the simple life to the next level, whether adding electricity, an addition, a bigger car, or an actual cash income. Over time, they morphed into the very mainstream people whose practices they were trying to reject.