Chapter Twelve

A Tale Better Told in the Retelling

I HAVE KNOWN several people who tried to put Wes Jackson’s and Louis Bromfield’s ideas into practice, becoming pioneer farmers and homesteaders. One friend moved with her husband, brother-in-law, and his wife to California where they built their own house and grew their own food on a mountainside north of Eureka. The front of their house was pointed like a ship’s prow forging its way not through waves but through branches of tan oak and sequoia. In 1998 at the annual Horse Progress Days event in Holmes County, I met a young man who had been raised in the late seventies on a commune by hippie parents and who started his own farm in the Maryland hills. For years during the 1970s, when I went hiking in the Wayne National Forest, I passed a small, old-fashioned trailer that stood on a hillside. A proud sign read “Oleo Acres—a Cheap Spread.”

One of the most interesting stories of self-sufficiency, however, came from an academic colleague. When President Johnson unveiled his Great Society program in 1964, some people claimed that subsistence farmers in Appalachia and the rural South were poor because they were uneducated; others declared that laziness accounted for their poverty. On the contrary, “I thought it looked like a great way to live,” Elliot Gaines said. Raised in suburban New Jersey, the son of a businessman, Gaines attended a highly ranked high school from which graduates became surgeons and ophthalmologists, research scientists and artists. After graduating from Rutgers with a degree in psychology, Gaines lived for a time in Manhattan with students attending Julliard, some of whom later became famous. Although he never saw the former Beatle, Gaines lived a few blocks from John Lennon’s apartment. City life was not for him, however. “I used to go down to the river and watch the birds feeding and wonder how they could survive in the middle of all the pollution and industrialization,” he said. “Watching them, I knew there was more to the life cycle than working and dying.”

By the 1970s the West was not only urbanized but expensive, and the interior of the country promised more solitude and freedom. Gaines found out that a group from one of the State University of New York campuses had bought cheap land in West Virginia. In the midst of economic downturn, oil shortages, and a devastating war in Southeast Asia, he and his friends turned their backs on the consumerist, fossil fuel–based, competitive society and became homesteaders. Influenced by their example, in 1973 Gaines bought, with money saved from a job as a music therapist, thirty-four acres in Randolph County bordering the Monongahela National Forest in the Tygart River Valley and went there to live, taking only a few clothes and his mother’s canning book from the 1940s.

The property began at the end of a four-mile-long gravel road. The right-of-way across the land—a narrow, steep, winding dirt road built by loggers—was difficult or impossible to drive over in bad weather, even with a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The closest village, Huttonsville, boasted two filling stations and a general store that sold seeds, fruits, vegetables, trousers, and shirts. The nearest town of any size—twenty-five miles away—was Elkins, the county seat, with ten thousand people. There were people living on a commune within ten miles, and there he met his future wife who had moved from Michigan with her two children. They married, Gaines adopted her children, and they set to work creating a homestead. Another son followed after five years and after three more another daughter, both born at home. At first, the family lived in an old house that had no electricity, running water, or furnace other than a wood-burning stove. Outside, half-concealed in the high grass, sat their predecessor’s legacy, a wheelless ’59 Chevy filled with empty wine bottles.

After a year they installed electricity in their old house, which allowed them to have a freezer, a radio, and lights, although there was still no plumbing. The first year they carried water from a stream. The well, which had been hand dug and lined with stone and tile, was contaminated from disuse. It took a year or so to learn how to clean it and be sure the water was safe to drink without boiling it. They washed clothes in an old wringer washer and hung them to dry in spring and summer. In autumn and winter they went to the laundromat in Elkins. Family members made gifts of sweaters and coats.

A few farmers made a meager living on the mountain, but homesteaders did not farm; instead, they gardened, growing every kind of vegetable and fruit the climate allowed: tomatoes, peppers, beans, corn, eggplant, melons, several types of winter and summer squash, okra, asparagus, potatoes, carrots, broccoli, apples, pears, cherries, strawberries, and raspberries. They made their own pickles and dried their own herbs. The orchard provided applesauce, apple butter, and cider, which they made with a press. “We spent all of September canning,” Gaines said. “We canned over a thousand quarts of food every year, with over two hundred quarts of spaghetti sauce.” They kept bees and collected honey which was their only source of sweetening. They also grew loofah gourds which, when dried, became sponges. Everything was recycled. Glass from the windows of a shack became glass for the windows of the house. Since they grew all their own food, there were no cartons or containers to discard, and so they generated no more than one bag of trash a year.

The property boasted two big barns and several small sheds where they kept chickens, ducks, goats, a cow, and a pony. One cow can produce more milk than a family needs, however, even with four children. They made butter, cheese, cottage cheese, and yogurt, and still had milk left over. On most farms, unused milk would be fed to the hogs (this practice led to the expression “slopping the hogs”), but the Gaineses were vegetarians, so they traded their excess milk for hay, grain, and straw.

Abundance created problems as well. Two ducks rapidly became forty ducks. The hens, however, were less practiced at hatching their eggs. So Gaines and his wife put the hen eggs into the duck nests; the eggs hatched, but the chicks followed the duck mothers to the pond where they stood on the edge and chirped. “Those chicks were never right in the head,” he told me, “and we still had more ducks than we knew what to do with. Finally we broke our vegetarianism and ate them.”

The woods provided wild plums, teaberries, chinquapins (related to chestnuts), walnuts, and blackberries. Neighbors taught them how and where to find mushrooms and the wild leeks called “ramps” that were tasty but smelly. One local dentist put a sign up in his office declaring that he would not work with anybody who’d eaten ramps within twenty-four hours.

“We used most of our time getting and preserving food,” Gaines said, “and yet we spent more time as a family than most people ever do. Work and fun were the same. We were never afraid of going hungry or of being sick.”

They cooked on a wood-burning stove, using logs gathered from the forest, first seasoning them and then splitting them to the size needed to fit. Hardwoods, especially oak and locust, provided most heat. Sycamore couldn’t be split well. Poplar, on the other hand, burned too fast. Hickory burned well but did not give off as much heat. Nut and apple woods gave off the best aroma.

Calendars and watches proved superfluous: the thickness of morning fog in mid-April foretold a wet or dry summer; the family knew leeks were ripe when the spring days grew consistently warm; it was time to put the garden in when the apple trees blossomed. A damp, earthy smell in autumn signaled that mushrooms called “hen of the woods” were ready, growing at the base of an old-growth oak tree that was so big it took all the family members joining hands to encircle it. They needed no thermometers or barometers but learned to forecast rain from humidity and wind direction. A low-lying, heavy mountain fog in September signaled that they had two weeks to get their crops in.

“Our kids had no theater but they had a rich cultural experience,” Gaines said. “The old radio was always tuned to NPR. Our bookshelves were filled with well-used copies of the classics that libraries had thrown out when they acquired new editions. We also got modern stuff like A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Our kids always read a lot and we read to them. I played guitar and flute and taught my kids to play. We spent evenings making our own music, playing and singing. Sometimes one of us read a book aloud to the whole family.”

The mountains in some ways afforded more social life than New York had. A neighbor invited Gaines in to have biscuits and beans whenever he passed. She taught him much about gardening and shared a lifetime of experience on the mountain. Other neighbors were not so friendly. One man lived with a woman who had a daughter from a previous relationship. Years later, when he decided the girl was old enough, he kicked the mother out and forced the daughter to marry him. Belonging was not easy. The Gaineses went to a funeral of a woman who had lived near Huttonsville for sixty years, since her marriage at the age of eighteen. “Of course,” a man remarked,” she wasn’t really from here. She was born south of here, in Webster County.”

Guests were frequent, because the families from New York and Michigan visited often. “They thought we had lost our senses until they got here,” Gaines said, “and then they thought we knew better than anyone else how to live. We never heard traffic because our house wasn’t near a road. We never saw airplanes. I forgot they existed. We lived there thirteen years, from 1973 until 1986. I missed the end of the Vietnam War, the Carter years, much of the Reagan era. I was barely aware of him and didn’t even know what he looked like. I hated the idea of ‘I wish this day or week or month was over.’ Every day was a new, unplanned experience, a chance to learn how to do something we hadn’t done before. There was no such thing as inconvenience. Each new task was just part of life. It was a whole different way of thinking. We kind of knew what we were going to do each day, but no two days were ever the same.” Life was like an old tale better told in the retelling.

Gaines and his wife built their own house, though it took nearly a decade to finish. “I had no reservations about building my own house,” he said, “although I’d never built anything, even in wood shop in school. But I knew that people had always built things, and I knew I could learn if I tried. You just pick up a hammer and you start.” Materials came partly from whatever they could recycle and partly from a lumber mill, carried on foot to the property. The whole south wall was a series of windows constructed on the principle of solar heating. “On sunny days in winter you didn’t need more than a very low fire, the house was so warm,” Gaines said. “In summer we opened the windows, and the mountain breeze and tree canopy cooled the rooms.” After the interior walls of the house were up, Gaines made all the furniture, including beds, tables, chairs, and cabinets. When those were finished he added scroll work to all cabinet doors, table legs, and bedposts. He was still perfecting the woodwork when they left the house twelve years later.

For money, Gaines built and sold traditional lap dulcimers and hammer dulcimers and finally got a job playing and singing with a bluegrass band that performed at the Snowshoe and Silver Creek Ski Resorts about twenty miles across the mountain. His wife worked as a teaching assistant in Mill Creek where their children went to school. But things were changing. The community broke up. One of the homesteaders who had bought very hilly land and who had terraced all his fields became a landscape gardener. The winters, which earlier had been leisurely, became busier than summers. The bluegrass band began touring, first in West Virginia, then the eastern United States, and made and sold their records.

Gaines had built a life with low technology, but technology finally invaded the homestead. The family had no telephone for several years and no television until the last year they lived in Randolph County. Then the eldest son bought a TV set with money earned from a part-time job and carried it all the way from the road to the old house where he had taken up residence—“his” house, as he wanted to be independent. When the family began spending more and more evenings in the old house watching television, Gaines realized that his children needed and wanted a wider world than their homestead provided. “I had envisioned living there forever, with grandchildren bouncing on my knee,” he said, but after his wife finished her degree in biology at Davis and Elkins College, they moved to Lewisburg where she attended the West Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine. She eventually became a professor at Ohio University’s medical college in Athens. Gaines, who had learned to read the natural world, finished his PhD in semiotics—the science of signs and one of the most arcane fields of communication. After twenty-four years of marriage, they divorced and sold the homestead as a vacation hunting lodge. Gaines went on to teach at Wright State University in Dayton and live in Yellow Springs, home of Antioch College—one of the most experimental colleges in the country—and has traveled widely in Southeast Asia and South America.

Perhaps they knew the meaning of Thoreau’s conclusion upon leaving Walden Pond that he had “several more lives to live.” The family had been part of the mountains, sunrises, bird-songs, seasons, spring floods, and autumn dry spells. They had raised four children. They were like rivers that change course and yet are the same rivers, flowing in different directions from the same sources.