The Half-hearted Homesteader

Welcome to the Half-Hearted Homesteader. This page strives to explain the blog’s purpose, get across what I’m trying to do here, and what I am doing Here, at my place in Freeport, ME. 

 HH is really an expression of contradictory urges–one to move away from modern (urban) society, and the other not exactly towards it, but to remain attached to it. I am only half-hearted about homesteading if I define homesteading in a somewhat purist way:  I see it as a holistic life choice, involving things like going off-grid, and achieving a large measure of self sufficiency in food and other consumables, and choosing to structure one’s life according to different priorities, often swimming against the grain.  

Homesteading for me embodies much of the “antidotes” to the various pathologies of modern life: our need for consumerism, instant gratification, social competition, obsession with technology, fear of aging, fear of nature, fear of death, among others.

But to really escape much of the above we’d have to completley re-invent ourselves, to such an extent that it would seriously jeopardise our relationships–with family, friends, and all social communities to which we belong, for good or evil. What we are left with, in the absence of any such radical action, is a constant struggle to live in the world (this world) without being engulfed by it.  Some of the things that we can discover in the many aspects of “homesteading” do help to moderate the worst effects of the society we inhabit and bring us close to nature, our bodies, our food chain, and even each other.  

But there was a time when homesteading was not a “lifestyle choice.” It was simply what you had to do to survive. Back when life was nasty, brutish and short, few people got soft-focus about the prospect of butchering your own meat, hewing wood and carrying water. No, that is hard work, and most of human history has been spent trying to escape that, trying to climb the ladder of material prosperity, and overcome those physical burdens placed on us by our poverty or lack of technology. To go back to a lifestyle that does not involve devices to do everything for you seems counter-intuitive, masochistic and luddite. But many people have an urge to do so, perhaps in a “grass-is-always-greener” type of a way.

This is really the point of the Half-Hearted Homesteader: I do not claim to be homesteading, in fact–I’m not that hard-core. I do a few “homesteady” things, sure, but at the end of the day I am connected to the grid, and partake of all it supplies. I watch TV, I sometimes take vacations to warm places, I live, in other words, much like most of my neighbors and friends–within easy reach of the every day ameneties the twentieth century affords us.

january

But this ambivalence, I believe, is part of modern life. Even before recent climatological events began telling us that we had really fucked up the planet, it was easy to look around at one’s society and long for some purifying escape–a sojourn in the mountains, perhaps, or a trek through the desert.  And although its part of modernity, this feeling, its also been part of the rural/urban dichotomy for centuries– The Prophet Muhammad had exactly that desire in the seventh century, which is why he went off to a cave outside of Mecca and either went nuts, or started talking to God, depending on your point of view.

For my part, I sometimes look at the map and fantasize about a small island off the coast of Maine where I could really focus on the job of living a purpose-driven life, away from the banal distractions of contemporary society. Then I think, well, who would I have dinner with? Would my friends and family ever visit? Could we sustain ourselves as a small family without considerable input from others–social life, activities, all the stuff we have grown up with? Perhaps I would do it if I didn’t have a wife and kids. With kids you really have to start a commune, and I just don’t think I’m that committed.

Fall

That’s really the nub. Committment, to a vision, or an ideal. I don’t really have that. If I did, I might well take the line that this society is shot, and we need to do something else, somewhere away from it all. Not too far inside me is that bearded curmudgeon who wants no part of it all, Not unlike Daniel Day Lewis in The Ballard of Jack and Rose.  But just like that character, it wouldn’t work. Its too hard to be in the world and not of it, and that is where my half-heartedness come from.

 So in the absence of that committment to escape and rebirth, I do what I can to balance some of the more heinous aspects of contemporary life. I read more than I watch TV (but I still watch it); I grow some of my own food. I go further than some, perhaps, in that I raise a few sheep and chickens (for meat and eggs), and cut and split my own wood. But I still have a day job, and only so much is possible between working 40 hours a week, hanging with the family, and doing a few other things that could be considered leisure. There’s lots of stuff I want to do away from home, and this limits what I’m realisitcally able to achieve on my piece of land–lots of tasks remain on the to do list, including the clearing of dead trees in the woods, the building of a work shop in the barn, a chicken tractor, etc, etc. The list remains long partly because I refuse to let it become my master, refuse to become a slave to the homestead, which I can imagine happening without enough vigilance.

And this need for balance did not come out of the blue. Like thousands of others around the country, we moved from a suburban area to a, well, less suburban area.

Conrad and Rabbits

Why?

It started with a feeling, a distaste, perhaps, for much of what we saw around us in Boston’s Metro West. Like most people we had both spent lots of time in big cities, but we found that urban charms were growing thin. The things people often mention as reasons for living in them were beginning to lose their appeal: movie theaters, restaurants, theatres and museums, and social life. We were sick of cappucinno and latte.

Not that we were recluses, though. We enjoyed the company of friends, we like movies—and books and art. But something in the tenor of urban and suburban life was really beginning to turn us off. Partly the increasingly crowded state of built up areas; partly the overwhelming sense of consumerism that turns so many interactions into commercial transactions; partly the stifling sense of status and competition driven by the need to keep up with the Joneses.

Ultimately, I suppose, we felt a lack of meaning both in the place, and the way we lived, and a hankering after something else. There was something vapid in our existence: Endless trips to and from the supermarket in our mini van (to buy produce grown thousands of miles away and vulnerable to contamination), struggling through traffic. Weekends trying simply to “entertain” the kids—as if life were simply a quest for Bouncy Zones, playgrounds, bowling alleys and endless, branded fun. And perhaps the biggest issue causing this sense of dissonance was that we didn’t do anything for ourselves—we outsourced everything, including the formation of opinions (to the editorial pages), the education of our children (to day care and state schools), our need for artistic expression (to TV and other screen activities); the growing of our sustenance (to giant corporations who were making product, not food).

Pasture

Surely these parts of life were really essential—how we raised our children, and how we expressed ourselves, how, and what, we ate—but they were lacking in some way.

But the project of “going back to the land” is not easy. Nor is it new. Few people really want to cut themselves off from what modern life and society have to offer. Not many of us really want to experience naked interaction with mother nature—its what we have spent most of our time on earth protecting ourselves from.

As animals we naturally seek out ease and plenty. Start feeding a raccoon regularly and it’ll turn up every morning ready for more. It won’t say, “no thanks, I really enjoy foraging for scraps, and slimming down a little in winter, it gives me meaning.” Human history has been a steady march away from the pleasures afforded by back woods homesteading, towards the processes and machines which make life easier: Electricity; oil heating; the Remote.

Similarly, there is no surprise that in the nineteenth century millions of people flocked to the United States looking for material prosperity, and an end to the devastating rural poverty they experienced in places like Ireland and Italy, Hungary and Romania. The wonderful irony is that in these places where people were eking out a meager existence from the land, they were already homesteading. And it sucked!

So now, our parents and grandparents, having afforded us the opportunity to get good city jobs and spend our days at clean, warm desks, gossiping, flirting and drinking flavored coffee products, we say “Blah!” Let me get my hands dirty.

Maybe the grass is always greener after all. And this is not new. The homesteading movement of the sixties and seventies went through all of this already, although often in a more counter-culture way, culminating with well-known people such as the Nearings up in Harborside, Maine, who were looking to reconstruct the very foundations of their life, weaving meaning into the fabric of their day, living the purpose-driven life.

So our Half-Hearted homesteading really refers to the fact that life is a balance, and whereas the urban/modern paradigm of living does afford a certain plenty and luxury, it is lacking in all sorts of other ways; somehow its ease and plenty are insidious, turning us into pallid cardboard representations of what we used to be, making us soft and flaccid, emotionally, intellectually, physically. But at the same time there is a limit to how much hardship we are prepared to suffer, and how much of modern convenience we want to surrender.