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Back from the Land
HOW YOUNG AMERICANS WENT TO NATURE IN THE 1970S, AND WHY THEY CAME BACK
By ELEANOR AGNEW Ivan R. Dee
Copyright © 2004 Eleanor Agnew
All right reserved. ISBN: 1-56663-580-2
Chapter One
The Lure of Back to the Land
"I felt the simple life calling me. The compulsion was strong and unquestioned."-Keddy Ann Outlaw
"One night in New York City, I dreamed of such peace that I couldn't bear to wake up in the real world. My dream was of a girl dancing in a wheat field. It was a picture of the country." -Sandy Sanchez
* In August 1975 my husband, Kent, quit his radio career in Massachusetts, packed his camping gear into the van, placed his Leilah-blasting headphones over his ears, and took off up Route 95 to move permanently onto our newly purchased sixty-two acres of land in Maine. While the children and I stayed in the city waiting for our house to sell, Kent arrived in Troy, pitched a tent among the tall pines, donned his bandana, and revved up his chainsaw. It roared through the silent woods, spewing oil-smoke. One by one, cedar trees creaked and smashed onto the forest floor with a boom. As the maples, oaks, and elms turned orange and red, Kent spent his days shaving the bark off of logs. He built a foundation for a log cabin and arranged the horizontal beams. As autumn passed and the trees shed their leaves, he stacked twenty-foot cedar logs horizontally into the wall frames and cemented and spiked them in place. By the time the first snowflakes spit through the grey air, he had just finished hammering the last nails into the roof. That same month we finally got an offer for our house in the city at a break-even price. I resigned from my job. We held a yard sale and jettisoned our major appliances and other vestiges of middle-class waste. At last we packed up the kids and the dog and, giddy with anticipation, headed for the country-along with millions of other young adults across the nation.
* When Kent and I moved to Maine in 1975, the back-to-the-land movement had already attracted untold numbers of converts who had grown increasingly estranged from mainstream American society. By the millions, visionaries much like us were moving into woods, mountains, orchards, and farmlands in order to disconnect from the deleterious influences of modern life. We moved into log cabins, A-frames, geodesic domes, underground homes, tents, old schoolhouses, and rundown farmhouses, and we grew our own organic crops, hauled clean water from wells, avoided doctors and pharmaceutical giants in favor of natural cures, and renounced energy-guzzling appliances. We yearned for psychic rewards and spiritual wealth, not money, so we planned to generate mere trickles of cash flow from our cottage industries, manual labors, and crops. The payoff was to be freedom.
Free spirits that we were, we sometimes appeared unorthodox to onlookers as we sped along the highways and roads in our overstuffed vans, school buses, or trucks, but our mission couldn't have been more serious. Linda Clarke remembers her journey to the country. She drove the pickup with the camper top, and her husband went in the U-Haul, as they proceeded north out of Maryland to their new farm in upstate New York. Their convoy was a sight. The VW beetle rested on a tow bar behind Linda's truck. All her houseplants had been secured to the top of the camper's roof. Inside the back of the truck, five cats yowled in their crates, along with "what I was hoping was going to be a commercial, viable goat herd for our farm-which included a giant buck with a full set of curved horns," says Linda. "We had him chained in because he was a mean, horrible animal, and we had four other goats in there." Late that night, the procession crossed the New York state line. Unsure of their location, Linda and her husband pulled over to reassess their route and began arguing about which direction to take. Finally Linda's husband sulked back to the U-Haul, gunned the engine, and drove straight ahead onto what turned out to be the wrong road, with Linda reluctantly following. But they became separated, and in the dark Linda became confused. The next thing she knew, blue lights were flashing. A police officer had noticed that her towbar had no lights. He pulled her over.
"The cop starts looking over this load," remembers Linda. "I've got a crying kid in the front seat beside me, the other kids are screaming in the back of the car on the tow bar, and then he starts to look in the back of the truck with his flashlight. That's when this big buck goat with the big horns lunges at him. The cop jumps back. Finally he just shakes his head and tells me to go on."
All across the country, similar caravans of earnest people were driving out of the cities toward the land.
We constituted "a major sector of the population," according to the historian Eric Foner. The author and researcher Timothy Miller placed the number of commune dwellers of the 70s at somewhere between 750,000 and 1,000,000, an estimate that did not even include the independent homesteaders and farmsteaders who did not live communally. Jeffrey Jacob reported in New Pioneers that "by the end of the 1970's, at the height of the urban-to-rural migration flows, there were over one million back-to-the-landers in rural North America, almost all on small acreages rather than living in communes or on large farms." A study by the Stanford Research Institute estimated that "from four to five million adults were wholeheartedly committed to leading a simple life and that double that number 'adhere[d] to and act[ed] on some but not all' of its basic tenets."
America, with its assurance of the Dream fulfilled, has always been particularly fertile ground for experimental, independent societies, notes Elizabeth Gilbert. "America has always lent herself generously-lent both her body and her capacious character-to the visions of utopians." Many back-to-the-land movements, seeking utopia, have cycled in and out over history, but the 1970s version, populated by postwar baby boomers who had come of age during one of the periods of greatest economic prosperity, represented one of the largest.
Typically we were young, white, middle class, and educated. The irony was apparently lost on us that "the world created by [our] elders," which we were rejecting, had allowed us the luxury of experimenting with alternative ways of living, as the writer David Shi points out.
John Verlenden, now a college professor, recalls an awkward moment at "this little rural bank in some town in West Virginia" where he and a small group of friends had assembled to inquire about applying for a mortgage to buy a farm. The loan officer naturally asked what their assets were, and the group fell silent. That was one detail they had not thought much about.
Laughing deeply, John recalls, "These people had traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles to be there. And it was a great moment of realization of what it really meant to buy property. You couldn't just talk about it, you couldn't just want it. It's obvious to me that all of us had eschewed all the practical realms of life. I think the reasons are well documented in the lifestyles we were obtaining after World War II. We were privileged." John and his friends returned to their home state to work for another year, save money, and pool it for the down payment.
Why Go to the Land?
A spiritual malaise had settled upon many of us. One back-to-the-land memoir offers a ubiquitous profile: "[Brad] gradually realized that something was vaguely, yet definitely, wrong with his life.... More and more, [his friends] seemed to be following a meaningless existence, content with frivolity and mediocrity, consumed by a nervous tension which he no longer found bearable."
We often attributed this inner discontent to the state of the world at the time. By the mid-seventies, inflation had reached 14.1 percent and the average cost of a new home $42, 600, while the median salary was only about $11,800. The price of gasoline and oil had risen sharply. Creating self-sufficient, closed-off societies made good sense in light of the precarious economy. For most back-to-the-land people, dogma played an even stronger role, as our disaffection from American culture and Western ways peaked in response to the confluence of environmental, economic, and social woes of the seventies.
Michael Doyle, a back-to-the-lander who is now a college professor, recalls, "We had the oil embargo in '73 and the whole crisis that went along with that. A lot of us came to the conclusion that our capitalist economy was on the verge of collapse and that going to the land was tied to survival-though not survivalism in the way the term connotes these anti-government types today that are off the grid and armed and paranoid. We back-to-the-land people really conceived of ourselves as about to win. Our analysis of American society, we thought, was about to be proved accurate. America had vast idealistic promise but was rotten to the core, largely because everyone was given over to the rat race and materialistic pursuits. What we wanted to do was eventually carve out niches, which were convivial for people, of an alternative lifestyle that we were convinced would serve as laboratories of the next civilization that would supplant the existing discredited American civilization."
As David Frum notes, "The crucial decade for ... the institutionalization of scare-mongering, the willingness of the mass media and government to lend plausibility to wild surmises about the future ... was the 1970s.... The media displayed a limitless appetite for this malarkey." A 1973 study traced the number of times the media reported certain events between 1960 and 1970 and concluded that public opinion was influenced more by how often a subject was covered by the media than by the reality of an event. For example, between 1964 and 1970, "environment and pollution ... showed no obvious trend one way or the other ... there is no statistical evidence that the actual conditions underlying this issue got either better or worse over the course of the decade." Admittedly, though the problems of the time were to a certain degree legitimate, most of us did not investigate the issues as carefully as we might have by researching a variety of credible sources, as I would tell my students to do today. We crafted our doomsday-leaning canon without much critical scrutiny.
With this in mind, consider the state of the world in the 1970s:
One of the great national malfunctions was the unchecked pollution, a by-product of progress, that was inflicting irreversible damage upon natural resources. Factories from coast to coast were dumping toxic waste into the rivers and emitting poisonous fumes into the air. Industries were paving over the world's woodlands, parks, and jungles, destroying animal and bird habitats, ruining the aesthetic quality of our countryside, and throwing off the earth's delicate ecological balance. The razing of the forests was reducing the earth's remaining oxygen supply. As though air and water pollution were not enough, the farming industry, now a big business, routinely sprayed massive doses of pesticides onto growing crops and fed synthetic hormones to steers. Processing factories later injected these foods and meats with preservatives to extend the shelf life of the products (as well as the profit margin). "Before World War II," reflects Frum, "bread would begin to spoil within hours of purchase, even in the tightest breadbox. Alas, the preservatives that triumphed over mold and other contaminants had their dangers too-and because these dangers issued from the hand of man, they carried a sharp sting of betrayal."
While business and industry were busy poisoning natural resources, the average consumer was busy wasting them by driving gas-guzzling cars that emitted toxic fumes, buying fast food housed in Styrofoam containers, and using frivolous spray products.
Each flush of a toilet squandered dozens of gallons of water, and millions more swirled down the drains of dishwashers, washing machines, and bathtubs. People turned their thermostats too high, burned every light in the house, trashed perfectly good items the second they grew tired of them, and frittered away money on replacements. America had turned into a sedentary, unhealthy nation of people who were unwilling to walk a block to the grocery store. They led spurious lives for spurious returns, selling their souls to their workplaces and living out their careers trapped in unfulfilling jobs so that they could purchase ostentatious houses with colossal cars in the driveway. Though cruising for early heart attacks, they were too afraid to quit and do something worthwhile. In contrast, writes Amy Saltzman, the baby-boom generation, unscathed by memories of the depression, wanted meaningful jobs and "believed they were entitled to far more than what they perceived as the complacent, emotionally stultifying existences of their parents. They looked at the 'organization men' of the 1950's and vowed to be different."
"Back in my college days," recalls David Manning, who graduated from college in 1968, "there were a lot of bitterly satiric lyrics about that sort of thing; people ticking away their lives in blind service to meaningless functions. We were going to be different, devote ourselves to life itself, work with purpose."
Modern American life had become dangerous as well as decadent. The population was multiplying too fast, crime was increasing, houses were crammed together, traffic was jammed. Former homesteader Sandy Sanchez and her husband were living in New York City in 1972. After her husband came out of a meeting and discovered his car had been stolen, "he was susceptible to my suggestion that we chuck it all and go find ourselves some wildnerness retreat away from nasty civilization," recalls Sandy. Soon they moved to West Virginia.
The land, notes Robert Houriet in Getting Back Together, was "the primal source of consciousness, the true basis of culture" where young Americans would "[keep] to the main road and to the central spirit and consciousness which modern man had lost along the way."
The universal mystique of the country, shared by city and suburban idealists, only added magic to the escalating back-to-the-land movement. Our culture's glorification of the pastoral, through song, poetry, literature, and myth, fed our growing desire for the land. The term "country" conjured up appealing images of ripe corn swaying in an autumn breeze, fireflies glowing at dusk, the smell of maple logs burning in the wood stove, the raging snowstorm pounding the side of a cozy house. We believers, of course, had never in our lives cleaned out a barn or spent long hours weeding under the broiling sun.
Veneration of pioneers, explorers, and early frontiersmen, another enduring thread of our cultural heritage, added a delightful spirit of heroism to our mission. Simon Shaw, series producer of the popular documentary Frontier House, confesses that in his childhood he was "spellbound by the lure of a life where men and women pitched themselves against a world full of rugged challenges. For years, every movie, television show, comic, and book detailing heroic endeavors in cow towns and across prairies was a favorite escape from my real life...."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Back from the Land by ELEANOR AGNEW Copyright © 2004 by Eleanor Agnew.
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