Losing the Garden

Barra. began on an ice-climbing trip to Mount Washington’s Huntington Ravine in February 1971.

I wasn’t along. Guy had driven up from New York with our friend Brad Snyder and a young climber named Dave Troe. On the drive up and back, on the walk into the Ravine, and at the Harvard Cabin, where they spent the night, the three friends talked about what they wanted to do next. All of them felt unhappy with their present lives.

Dave, who had just graduated from high school, wanted to build fine furniture but wasn’t sure he could make a living. Besides, his parents weren’t too thrilled with this out-of-the-mainstream plan.

Brad taught German at Mount Holyoke College but knew that it was no longer right for him. He was attracted to land conservation but didn’t see his next step.

Guy’s job writing speeches for the top executives at General Electric had not turned out as he had hoped. He had taken the job with the understanding that he would be writing statements of conservative economic policy for a company known for being willing to speak out on economic issues. But in December 1960, the very week of Guy’s arrival at corporate headquarters in New York, news broke of the largest antitrust scandal in U.S. history, a massive conspiracy of price fixing by the electrical equipment manufacturers. General Electric was at the center of the scandal. Company morale plummeted as employees went from perceiving themselves as part of the top company in America to feeling like they worked for the top crooks in the business world. After the dust settled Guy was assigned to the new president, Gerald Phillippe. Though Guy admired Phillippe, the antitrust trouble had silenced the company’s political voice. Guy found the work tedious and lacking in the sense of urgency and mission he’d thrived on in Washington. He stuck with the job because he had college tuitions on his mind. His family had increased to three with the birth of Jim in 1955.

By the time I met him Guy was thirty-eight and determined not to spend the rest of his working life at General Electric.

On that trip to Huntington Ravine, Brad and Dave told Guy about a book they’d just read called Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing. The subtitle ran: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World. That seemed to sum up their predicament.

The Nearings’ book, published in 1954 about their twenty-year experiment of homesteading in Vermont, was reissued in 1970 at the height of the back-to-the-land movement. It has remained vigorously in print, and the Nearings themselves have become the patron saints of the homesteading movement.

Helen and Scott Nearing, disillusioned with city life, had a story to tell to anyone who wanted to make the “good life” a reality in the country. “At the outset,” they wrote, “we thought of the venture as a personal search for a simple satisfying life on the land, to be devoted to mutual aid and harmlessness, with an ample margin of leisure in which to do personally constructive and creative work.”

Guy saw in the Nearings’ story a way out. Scott was a trained economist. He had taught in various universities during the 1920s, but his politics, a kind of deviant Marxism, had eventually rendered him unemployable. Like Scott, Guy too was an economist who had found himself out of a job in Washington. Though Guy was a registered Republican, these two men were not as separated politically as it might appear. Both were idealists, both were committed to sustainable living and resource conservation, and both had a vision for their lives.

What had always stopped Guy from buying a farm, he told me, was that farmers have no time for anything but taking care of their animals. Guy wanted time for the mountains. Reading the Nearings’ book had shown him that he could be relatively self-sufficient by raising his own food and supplying his own fuel from his woodlot. The Nearings had supplemented their income by selling maple syrup. Guy was a writer. Writing might be the way he could continue to earn money.

When Guy had left Washington to become a New York commuter he had moved his young family to Stamford, Connecticut. During those years his drinking worsened. Discovering hiking, and especially rock climbing, had restored some meaning to his life. It had helped him give up alcohol and offered a way to spend more time with his sons by taking them hiking. By the late 1960s Guy had come to grips with his failing marriage. He had stuck with it, he said, because he didn’t want to walk out on his sons. But now the two oldest were on their own: Bill was starting college, and Johnny was climbing full-time. Guy thought that the divorce would be hardest on Jim, who was in high school. But reasoning that the home atmosphere was probably no better for Jim if Guy stayed, he finally moved out—briefly into the city, then to the Hudson River town of Marlboro, New York. This gave him a two-and-a-half-hour commute into Manhattan.

In the winter of 1971 I joined him for nearly every trip to the Adirondacks, speeding through Friday night up the New York State Thruway to the Northway and on up the smaller roads to the High Peaks. There we set up our tent on ice-covered Chapel Pond and spent the weekend snowshoeing mountains and ice climbing. We zoomed back to Guy’s apartment on Sunday night, beat but happy, except that we had to be up at 4:45 a.m. and on that commuter train the next morning. Our life wouldn’t have appeared either simple or sane to the Nearings. To Guy, who was unhappy in his job, it felt downright schizophrenic.

He bought the Nearings’ book. When he showed it to me I said, “I looked at this in the bookstore.” I’d put it back on the shelf.

I knew my life in New York was headed for a change, but I wasn’t as desperate for a way out as Guy was. Adopting the Nearings’ kind of life was a very radical step, different from anything I’d thought of. But since I’d discovered climbing and met Guy, I was having a hard time staying interested in my editorial job with Athenaeum. I wanted something else, though I didn’t know what. Whatever it was, I knew I didn’t want it to be in an office from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. I wanted to be outside. I mulled over getting a degree in outdoor education, but that would mean going back to school, which I didn’t think I could concentrate on either. I remember becoming aware of mail carriers and dog walkers. I liked the idea of walking around all day. Despite knowing my life was headed for some kind of upheaval, I never would have come to homesteading on my own.

As I had listened to Guy describe the commitment he’d felt to his work in Washington, I knew I had never experienced anything like that —and I wanted to. Though I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything besides working with books—it’s what I’d come to New York for—it had never given me that saving-the-world feeling Guy talked about.

Guy was looking for a life’s work. What he was thinking about—homesteading—needed two people if it was to be successful. Sure, I could pour myself into this. But back in the planning stage, I knew nothing about homesteading and it took a far, far second place to spending every day with Guy. When we talked about how we could make it work, I pictured the two of us living in a tent while we constructed our house.

“And if the house isn’t finished by winter,” I said, “we’ll just keep on living in the tent.”

“I don’t think so, Laura,” Guy said. “Tent living is fine for winter climbing weekends, but the house has to be built before the snow flies.”

That part didn’t concern me at all. I could think of nothing nicer than to spend the winter with Guy in a tent.At any rate, our discussions about homesteading didn’t progress beyond the talking stage. That couldn’t happen until Guy decided he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me.

In May 1971 we went on a climbing trip to the Alaska Range. Our small party failed miserably on the then-unclimbed North Face of Mount Hunter, yet Guy and I had gotten along in an effortless, carefree way before which difficulties dissolved. When we returned home I felt like I was on the other side of something. We’d been together for a year. I was ready to marry Guy. We had a teary conversation standing in the kitchen of the Marlboro apartment.

“Laura, I just got out of being in a bad marriage for nineteen years.”

“I know. You said you weren’t going to marry the first woman you went out with. Who happens to be me.”

“I still feel that way. I’m happy the way we are.”

“But I can’t go on and on and on the way we are now.” Something within me was making it impossible to stay with Guy if he didn’t care enough about me to make it a permanent arrangement.

“If you don’t want to marry me,” I said,“I have to move back to New York.”

On Sunday, June 6, Guy drove me back into Manhattan. It was a hot day, and we had the windows rolled down. Truck exhaust made it hard to breathe in the car. Guy drove across the George Washington Bridge in a tangle of traffic. I gazed down at the Hudson. There was a tugboat moving a long way below, looking so peaceful in its soundless island of calm.

“If I married anyone,” Guy said,“I would marry you.”

This didn’t help. The tugboat grew smaller. I had forced the issue, and Guy was taking me back to New York. I knew he wasn’t going to change his mind. I wasn’t either, though it was awful to move back into my old life that didn’t fit me anymore.

I stumbled into Camp and Trail Outfitters, where I was working at the time, on Monday morning. At the end of the day Harry Hunt, who ran the store, said, “What’s the matter, Laura? Did someone die?”

I went home to Lawrenceville that first weekend. Ordinarily I would have been climbing, but I wasn’t ready to face the Gunks scene. Guy would be there. But we wouldn’t be together. I didn’t talk much with my mother about what happened. I could hardly talk at all. Sometime on Sunday, before I went back to New York, my mother said, “You really love him, don’t you?”

That next weekend I went to the Gunks. Guy would be there, but I wasn’t about to give up climbing just because I had a broken heart. Sooner or later I’d have to confront seeing Guy, so it might as well be sooner. Herb Cahn, a climbing friend who lived in the city, drove me up.

“Guy and I get along great,” I babbled as the car streaked up the New York Thruway. “There’s no reason other than his just plain not wanting to get married.”

“Do you want him back, Laura?” Herb asked.

“You bet.”

“When you see him, act as though you do.”

What was Herb talking about? How could I act otherwise?

Herb had said what he did, Guy told me later, because by Tuesday Guy was having second thoughts. He called Herb and two or three other friends of ours and asked if he could talk. He was beginning to think he’d just made a horrible mistake! He was suddenly in a panic that some other guy was going to snap me up. I didn’t feel it necessary to tell him, right then, that that was absolutely impossible. Herb had offered to bring me up to the cliffs that weekend. Guy told Herb that if I showed any hint of being friendly, even just the glint of a smile, he’d ask me to come back—and he’d ask me to marry him.

That evening the climbers gathered at the Bavarian Restaurant, a German place a few miles from the cliffs. When I walked in Guy was already there, sitting at a table and talking with his usual animation. I couldn’t tell if he noticed me or not. Just before dessert he came over to where I was sitting at a different table and said, “Laura, would you come outside with me?”

It was a cloudy night and very dark. We stood between the cars in the parking lot, just outside the thick wooden door of the Bavarian. When we walked back in together everyone looked up with concerned faces. Then broke into wide grins.

Sunday, June 6, the day Guy drove me back to New York, was forever known by us as Black Sunday.

That summer of 1971 we began making plans to become homesteaders. I knew I had already acquired certain strengths through climbing that would be useful to me, like self-reliance, discipline, and the ability to master something difficult. Climbing had also taught me perseverance and given me inner strength. And it had certainly contributed to my good health and kept me in good shape. But climbing is regarded, even by climbers, as a useless activity of no social value. Perhaps the same could be argued of homesteading. Why spend all that time chopping wood when you could heat your house by turning a dial on the wall? Why invest so much time growing your own food—fighting drought and deluge, punishing wind, heartbreaking late frosts, and menacing insects—when you can buy your food already packaged? Think of all the time you could save and thereby put to the good of society! The answer for me was, at first, the same answer as to why I climbed. It was fun. It was self-competitive in a way that I learned from. It was deeply satisfying, that is, to my soul.

I think Guy saw homesteading as his last chance to reinvent himself. In it he found what he had lost when he left Washington, something large that he could believe in and throw himself into, something that would ceaselessly challenge him mentally, creatively, and physically.All his life no one was as determined as Guy to be his own man.

I wanted to be with Guy. It didn’t make a great deal of difference how as long as it felt useful and fun and took place mostly outdoors. Homesteading seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t really have a clue as to what this new life would give me.

There was something else about homesteading—and about climbing too—that went deeper, deeper even than my longing to be with Guy.All my life I had resisted the idea of becoming what I called in my head a “real adult.” The stereotype I had was a briefcase-toting, three-piece-suit type from the suburbs who boarded the 7:08 a.m. train five days a week for a lifetime. Since I had grown up in the fifties, this was the form my fear of entrapment took: for me a “real adult” was someone in a trap. A real adult was stifled, suffocated in a life that felt like a prison sentence.Yet on the outside it was the accepted thing. It was the kind of life you were expected to have, but ever since I was a kid something deep inside had resisted it. I had no idea what I wanted for my life, but I knew there was a certain type of adult I didn’t want to grow up to be. The truth was that I didn’t want to grow up to be an adult. I wanted to stay a kid. For me life was all about what happened on Saturdays. Climbing captured that. Guy and I often joked that climbers are children at heart. You don’t find real adults, we said, in the climbing world. We felt superior talking this way, as though just by knowing how to have fun we were in on a secret real adults didn’t know.

Guy, of course, was taking that commuter train, and I was taking it with him. We had a two-and-a-half-hour commute each way to New York City. But we had only a half-hour drive to our favorite climbing cliff, and this seemed to make all the difference. This shift in balance changed the nature of the game. When Guy suggested that we turn ourselves into homesteaders—rely on our garden for most of our food and on our woodlot for cooking and heating—I thought of it as a high-stakes game that sounded like fun. Not only that, but it seemed to have everything to do with how I, deep down, wanted to live my life because it sounded like play. Hard work, yes, but play too, because it was the sort of thing kids did on Saturdays. I could hold on to Peter Pan. Yet, unlike Peter, who remains stuck in Never Land, I wanted to do something useful with my life. This seemed to me the only good reason to grow up and become a “real adult” that I could think of.

So from the beginning homesteading appealed to me, but I could have never guessed the soul-deep contentment of getting to know my own trees to the point that every day we worked in our woods was a visit with old friends. It appealed to me to grow my own food, even to get to know my own soil, but I could not have foreseen the gut-calming sense of place, this feeling of belonging to something much larger than myself, and much more enduring, that it would give me. When we moved to the land I was not particularly concerned about lightening my impact on the earth; I hadn’t really thought about it. But this idea grew—and took on compelling meaning—as we began to live lightly. What Guy suggested felt right on some intuitive level, and I embraced in full measure the onerous idea of “responsibility”—which I had spent my young life trying to avoid—now that I had found something, a way of living, I could give my whole heart to.

We began to talk about where we wanted to homestead. We considered seriously mountainous West Virginia and Alaska but discarded West Virginia because the winter climbing season wouldn’t last long enough. From our climbing trip in May we found out that Alaska wasn’t for us. Those mountains demanded an expedition. We wanted mountains we could make short, frequent trips to. We knew our homesteading life wouldn’t allow us to be away for much more than a week at a time.Also, the Alaskan forests of unrelieved spruce, fir, and stunted birch weren’t woods that spoke to us.

We needed the northern hardwoods: maple, ash, oak, beech, and tall, graceful birches—trees that leafed out in summer, then raised bare arms against the sky in winter. We needed a rural countryside of alternating pastures and woods revealing a farmstead cupped in the folds of the land. We needed small villages where the houses clustered around a green or along a riverbank. We were looking for a landscape where humans could fit in.

In short, we learned we were already there.

In the summer of 1971 we began to look for land in northern New England and around the High Peaks in the Adirondacks, areas that were familiar to us from climbing. We ruled out acreage around the Shawangunks as being too built-up and too expensive.

We talked about the qualities we wanted our land to have, and Guy made a list. We knew we couldn’t find everything we wanted in one spot, but making the list helped us think out what we were looking for.

• Forty acres (more or less), mostly wooded, but three to five acres of open land with a good house site

• Woods: mixed hardwoods for firewood, but sufficient softwood of spruce, fir, hemlock, and pine for building purposes

• Stone walls

• Old apple trees

• Sugar bush with perhaps an old sap house

• Rosehips

• Wild blackberries and raspberries

• A stream or old well

• A cellar hole or old building we could use for lumber

• Views, preferably of mountains

That summer we tramped over more than fifty properties. Most were easy to eliminate: the woods were too scrubby, there was too much open land and not enough forest, it was on a busy main road, water was inadequate. But by looking at what wasn’t right, we were finding out what was.

Sometime in July we called Bryce Thomas, a real estate agent in Newbury, Vermont. He drove us around and showed us a couple of parcels that didn’t work. It was getting on in the afternoon, and we’d seen enough land for the day. Besides, we weren’t too drawn to Mr. Thomas. He was a little too intent on selling.

“I have one more piece I want to show you,” Mr. Thomas said.

We reluctantly agreed.

He drove us into a small village, made a left-hand turn across a bridge on a dirt road, and kept going.

“This land out here, two hundred acres, belongs to a man named Anderson,” Mr. Thomas said.“He’s divided it into parcels over ten acres. Most of them have been sold.”

We continued on along a rutted road that looked like it would need a lot of work and through a nice piece of open land that he said was recently sold to a family named Wells from Long Island. Then we bounced up a track that had never seen traffic—tree sprouts and high grass were dinging the car’s undercarriage. We emerged in a clearing of about three acres with three branchy white pines growing in it. Mr. Thomas skirted his large,American-made four-door under some red oaks of enormous girth and pulled up at the top of a thin-soiled knoll with a good view out over the Waits River Valley.

“I’ll sit here,” the real estate man said.“The land runs down this hillside, across a little stream, and up into the woods there.” He pointed toward a hardwood forest in which stood a few clumps of darker evergreens.

We scrambled down what we later came to call Pavilion Hill. I was wearing shorts, and the thorny brambles scratched my legs.

“Blackberries,” Guy said to me, and smiled.

We walked into the woods, under the regal hemlocks that formed the edge, separating clearing from forest. The sunlight slanted down, falling on the trunks of three or four toppled elms that had lain there long enough to become hosts to several varieties of mosses. We examined the ancient trunks, touching the soft moss with our hands. We looked up into the canopy of sugar maple, red oak, and ash, mature trees stretching upward for seventy feet. Guy and I were suckers for large trees.

The stream, which lay a few steps farther into the woods, was meager, but we thought it might do.

We came out of the woods and into the clearing. Guy knelt down and scratched in the dirt. “What do you think?” he asked, letting the topsoil sift through his hands.

I knelt down too. I had no idea what made up good garden soil. But this was loose and fine. I was sure it could provide a start for a garden.

“It looks good,” I said.

“The house could go here,” Guy pointed up the slope, directly above the flattish spot where we were standing. A rock ledge rose steeply up behind and merged into a forested hillside of a few hundred feet. That would give protection from the north. The house would tuck in below the brow of the hill and face due south.

We stood a moment in the clearing and looked around at this land that was all sloped and wooded. It formed a high valley.“I like this,” Guy said. “It feels like its own contained world.”

We walked up to where the house could perch, about fifty paces above the garden, and then along the old wood track under the rock ledge to where Bryce Thomas sat in his car.

“This would be the place to put your house,” the real estate man said, indicating the hilltop where he was parked.

Guy and I exchanged a glance. We climbed back into Mr. Thomas’s car, and he started the engine.

This land was worth a second look. We would come back.

We bought this land on August 23, 1971. Guy suggested naming it Barra, after an island in Scotland’s Hebrides, the ancestral home of his mother’s family. Guy was a great namer, and his naming of our land was the beginning of what he named at Barra, which grew to include the rock ledges to the north behind the house (Arads), the bare hill we looked out on to the west (Pavilion), and the wooded slope to the south (Colby Hill) that led up to the Highlands, where stood our largest-girthed maples, named for the 8,000-meter peaks in the Himalayas. By naming Barra, Guy began to create a world—his. But it was mine too, since I embraced this plan.

That Christmas, which we celebrated at my parents’ house in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Guy’s gift to me was a navy-blue three-hole notebook. The title on the spine read “The Book of Barra.”

On the first page Guy had typed:

The Basic Plan:

—To go to live on a 38.8 acre section of land in Vermont, and to create a relatively self-sufficient homestead there.

Under the heading “General Objectives” Guy outlined:

To live simply

cheaply
unhurriedly
basically (i.e. concerned with basics like food and
shelter and fuel)
And to maintain our interest in climbing and hiking,
in reading and music, and possibly in writing or other
interests which we may decide to develop.

This was followed by a page called “What This Life Will Entail ”:

1. Raising our own vegetables, fruit, berries, and sugar; storing food for non-seasonal consumption; buying other food needs (generally in bulk).

2. Building our own shelters, expanding them slowly over a 20-year period, using purchased lumber and other materials as necessary (especially at first), but placing heavy reliance on our own logs and stone.

3. For fuel (cooking and heating), using wood from our land.

4. Minimizing other financial expenditures, by building our lives around interests and activities which do not require sizable financial outlays.

5. For cash needs, relying mainly on substantial money savings (1973–1991) and then on Social Security (1992 on). The modest additional amounts needed will be scrounged from one or more of several possible sources, including: (a) developing some regular cash-producing crop or activity; (b) undertaking small income-producing jobs; (c) writing; or (d) holding major scheduled expenses below estimates.

6. Keeping up our interests in reading, music, possibly writing, relaxing hobbies.

7. Maintaining a strong interest in hiking and climbing, and keeping up our contacts with climbing friends and organizations.

Next came a quote from the Nearings’ book, as well as these words from Thoreau’s Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

We had talked over and over about what Guy had written down in “The Book of Barra.” But by committing the vision to paper, Guy was articulating the kind of world he wanted to live in. He was giving our experiment shape and immediacy, even legitimacy.

We would be successful, I knew, if Guy’s skills as a planner had anything to do with it. I was aware that by stepping out of the nine-to-five structure we needed to impose an order of our own on our lives. I already knew how organized Guy was. We never ran out of household items, because Guy had a backup for every item. That is, when the paper towel roll was empty, Guy made a note on his shopping list that he kept on a three-by-five card to purchase more paper towels, in this way restocking the backup. The list he kept of routes he wanted to climb at the Gunks was not unusual—many climbers do this. But Guy climbed about twice as many routes as most climbers because he got up in the dark, drove to the cliffs in the dark, ran up the talus rocks, and was at the base of the climb when it was barely light enough to see the holds. We were dubbed “the Dawn Patrol” by our friend Bill Thomas, who frequently joined us. When I began climbing with Guy I joined this game too. I didn’t like getting up in the dark, but after I was on the rock, held in the sun’s rays just striking an east-facing climb and turning the air spring soft, when I could hear the birds in full morning cry and knew all the other climbers were snoring in their sleeping bags for another two hours, I could imagine no better place in the world.

Guy was a driver, a pusher. He was extremely demanding of himself. If I wanted to climb with Guy, I had to fall in with the program. There was something in me—the Saturday kid? Peter Pan?—that responded to the challenge, to the adventure, to just plain being with Guy. But what if I had said no? Guy was looking for someone to climb with—to share a life with—and he was setting the pace. I fell into his vision without even thinking about it because it fit me also. If it hadn’t, nothing would have happened between him and me. I saw none of this at the time.

Though Guy was casual in nothing and the words “laid back” least described him, I didn’t feel run over by his drive or his planning. I had lived a well-organized life before I met him. The difference between us was that Guy needed to make lists, to keep track, to write everything down. What kept his planning from feeling overbearing was that in our climbing, and especially in Barra’s early days, Guy turned this organization that was so essential to the smooth running of his own life into a kind of play.

“The Book of Barra” was a starting point.After Guy had put the vision for our future on paper, we put the navy-blue notebook away. We had no need to look at it again. We began to live it.

For the rest of 1971 and all of 1972, we prepared ourselves for this great new direction.

We set a date, June 9, 1973, for the actual move to our land. This was twenty-two months away, but knowing we had a definite day to aim toward made the commute easier. When the train was overheated and delayed and we looked around at the sweaty tired faces of our fellow commuters and saw only resignation, we told ourselves that we were going to be stepping out of this world. It wasn’t going to last much longer.

In the spring of 1972 we planted a garden in Marlboro. The only gardening experience I had had was as a reluctant child-weeder for my mother in her flower beds. I could recall an asparagus bed and some tomato plants my father had in Lawrenceville, and I could dredge up a picture of my parents canning quince jelly from our quince trees, my father laying open the hard fruit with a hatchet.

Guy had been raised on the home garden at The Farm. As an adult, he’d put in a few gardens in the various places he’d lived.

“We’ll plant radishes,” Guy said. “They pop right up—gives you a real feeling of accomplishment.”

We began to subscribe to Organic Gardening and Farming magazine (as it was then called), and Mother Earth News, a magazine that grew out of the back-to-the-land movement of the sixties. Though Guy was still wearing his three-piece suit, and I hose and heels, we’d stepped into the counterculture. Our life at Barra began in the context of the late 1960s and early 1970s, though unlike the hippies of that time, we were looking for permanence. We were staking out what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives.

On Memorial Day weekend of 1972, we began preparing the ground for a garden at Barra. We drove up from Marlboro with Guy’s oldest son, Bill, and of course Ralph.

It was unseasonably hot. Guy and Bill worked bare-chested, their shirts tossed over a large rock we’d selected as a corner marker of the garden; Guy named it the Barra Stone. We cut out strips of sod with our spades, piling them off to one side. Then we loosened the ground with our long-tined garden forks. Bill removed his sod strips twice as fast as I did, the sweat pasting his blond hair to his forehead. Ralph lay in the shade under the white pines at the edge of the woods, lifting his head now and then, and watched us work.

We cooked over a fireplace we constructed. Guy and Bill had run up the steep hillside behind where we planned to build our house to roll down larger and larger rocks, whooping with laughter.

I liked to be around Guy and his sons. Since Bill had been in college out west, this was my first experience of the two of them together. It was a world not known in my family. “Dad never plays catch with me,” my brother had said. Watching Guy and Bill made me wish my father could have gone out in the backyard and tossed a ball with my brother. It wasn’t about how well you threw the ball.

In 1968 Bill had met with an accident in a freight yard in Winnipeg. He was sitting with his leg over a rail, half-dozing, in what he felt was an out-of-the-way spot, waiting to hop a freight later that night. A string of boxcars was “bumped” way up the line, and a wheel ran over Bill’s leg. The doctors had managed to save it, but the leg continued to be so painful that Bill had recently had it amputated. Now he had a prosthesis. From the way Bill was throwing himself into work and play on this Memorial Day weekend, it seemed like he had made the right decision to take this radical step.

On the drive back we had all the windows open. It was very hot, and Bill had taken off his leg and given it to me up front. This gave him a little more room in the backseat with panting, hairy Ralph, who had a tendency to lie at full length, taking up much more than his half of the seat. We stopped at a service station some place in Connecticut, and the attendant came over to pump gas. Bill wanted to get out of the car, so he asked me to hand him his leg. The guy pumping gas happened to look up as a leg wheeled through the air into the backseat. The three of us watched the attendant’s eyes bug out, but we didn’t dare exchange looks, holding our explosion of laughter until after we got back on the highway.

This is my best memory of Bill. It was the only time he saw Barra.

Building an actual dwelling sounded like a tall order to two people who hadn’t even built a doghouse, so Guy suggested we start on something small as practice. In August 1972 we came up to Barra for our vacation. Since we were to be married at the end of the month, we dubbed these two weeks our “moonhoney.” We wanted to make sure we were capable of erecting a roof that would withstand a Vermont winter. So we built a three-sided shelter, or lean-to, where we could store our belongings the next summer as we worked on our house. We would sleep in our tent. I was really looking forward to that. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anything more idyllic. We would be living outside—camping out—for the entire summer while we built our house!

During those two weeks in August we dug up another section of garden, pulling up blackberries and hacking out small saplings. Our clearing had been grazed until not long before we bought the land, so we needed to take down only a few of the taller white pine that would have shaded the garden. We continued working into the fall, on weekend trips, until we had a thirty-by-forty-foot plot. Then we sowed our first cover crop of winter rye.

Our initial plan was to build a stone house, as the Nearings had done. But we knew this couldn’t be done in a summer. First we had to gather the stone. So we decided to erect a tiny cabin from purchased lumber with no foundation, one room we could live in for at most three years while we worked on our stone house. Later we’d turn this one-room structure into a toolshed or guest cottage.

We ran into our first major problem right there.

On that two-week trip in August, when we checked the zoning requirements for our town, we found out that dwellings needed to have full foundations and a square footage of 500 feet.

So we changed our plans and decided to build the house out of planed boards, purchasing the lumber. We could get away with a minimal foundation that went down four feet, and we’d add a stone wing later. The square footage was 512.

As it turned out, we had no stone walls on the entire 38.8 acres. After we began to amass stone, Guy roamed our land, crowbar in hand, unearthing rocks wherever he came across them. To collect them he instituted his “two stones a day” program: he carried two stones a day during the snow-free months of April through November up to the west side of our cabin, where we planned to locate this stone wing. I carried stones too, but not every day. Guests seemed intrigued by this slow but steady way of accumulating stone and often helped carry a stone or two. To do something useful with these rocks until we got around to building with them, we constructed a wall at the entrance to our orchard. Guy broke down all our laborious jobs this way.

We never did build the stone wing, but we used those stones in terracing our garden, making borders around our flower beds, and laying the foundation of the guest cottage we built years later and called Twin Firs Camp.

That winter in Marlboro we continued living as a family of four, counting Ralph. When Guy’s high school–aged son Jim moved in, Guy gave him the only bedroom. Guy slept in the alcove sitting room on a camping pad that he rolled out every night. Since most of this area was taken up by his Steinway grand, the only room for him—and me when I joined the household—was wedged half under it. Ralph curled up at our feet and, if truth be told, made himself comfortable on Jim’s bed by day, when left all alone in the apartment.

Guy had decorated the walls with climbing pictures,taken from calendars and magazines, showing fabled ranges around the world, from the Canadian Rockies to South America, from the Alps to all the 8,000-meter peaks. He had a poster from the first U.S. ascent of Everest in 1963 with a quote from Goethe under a climber headed up the West Ridge: “Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” I had bought that same poster in the fall of 1969 when I had begun climbing. Now we had two.

Guy and I got home around 7:30, and Guy, Jim, and I fixed supper together. I was impressed with how grown-up Jim seemed. He had a maturity I had been very far from feeling when I was his age. The divorce couldn’t have been easy.And here I was, moved in and an integral part of his father’s life, taking away time Guy might have been spending with Jim, though I didn’t see that then. We didn’t talk about the past. We talked about climbing: climbs we’d done that past weekend and the climbs we planned to do on the weekend coming up. We talked about our friends —all of whom were climbers—and about our climbing gear, which hung on a pegboard rack Guy had made just for this purpose. Jim, one of the best young climbers at the cliffs, climbed with a group of teenagers who called themselves the Degenerates. Oh, they had long hair and smoked pot, but they were also strong environmentalists and fiercely protective of the Shawangunks. The sound of someone pounding in a piton high on the cliffs could rally a swarm of Degenerates who would first yell up that pounding pitons widened cracks; if the pounding persisted, they’d climb up to straighten the poor guy out.

In the evenings in Marlboro we encouraged each other to crank out one more fingertip pull-up on the three-quarter-inch board over the door frame. I never managed more than five, while Jim and Guy could go on endlessly. We worked on our forearms by squeezing a tennis ball, tossing it back and forth among the three of us, being careful not to knock off the elephants (glass, china, wood, ivory) that lived on the shelves and every other flat space. Guy had collected 367 of them during his Republican political days.

Mostly I remember a perpetual feeling of carefree relief during the three years we spent in our tiny apartment in Marlboro, though I couldn’t have articulated it. This was, for sure, a different world from life in my own family, who were so hard for me to be with but for whom I often felt an aching love. I was proud of my father and his contributions to the world of scholarship. I relished our conversations when he was sober Dr. Jekyll. But when he turned into that monster Mr. Hyde, I found myself counting the minutes till I could escape from the house. Being with Guy in this happy family life with Jim and Ralph felt like perpetual vacation. I had gotten lucky! I had skipped out! And I wasn’t about to give any of it up, though I felt twinges of guilt over my inability to help my own family, who on the outside looked perfectly normal but on the inside were torn apart by the awful, tension-packed thing we couldn’t talk about. I felt helpless when I thought about my parents, alone with each other in that sad house filled with the suffocating fog of alcohol and cigarette smoke.

Between weekend climbing trips to the Adirondacks that winter, we constructed a few useful items for our new life. These were mostly made by Guy, since he could grab the occasional weekday off to do GE work at home.

One was a bin for dry food, something in which we could keep grains, cereals, and flour safe from the nibbling appetites of our rodent friends.As soon as we moved up we’d be living outdoors and would need an animal-proof place for food. We already knew about the porcupine family that lived in the ledges behind our house. Ralph had paid them a social call, much to his (and our!) regret.

Guy drew the plans for this food bin to the specific dimensions of the entryway of our cabin, its final destination, five and a half feet long by two feet ten inches high by eleven and a half inches deep. There were three openings in the front large enough for fifty-pound sacks of flour. The top opened in three sections for storing smaller bags. We covered the framework with two layers of different-sized wire mesh that allowed for plenty of air circulation. We painted it white with green trim and attached brass hooks for keeping the doors shut. Guy called it “the Has-Bins.” It was the first—and perhaps the most successful—item we ever built.

Guy also designed an outhouse seat. We painted the top traditional white, but with sides of green, red, and blue. He planned it to fit exactly into the building itself, which we would build later. Our experience with backwoods outhouses that employed the type of plastic seat-lid arrangement found in modern indoor johns had taught us that in winter these are penetratingly cold. Our seat was made of wood, with the sides of the opening carefully rounded and smoothed. We had already dug a hole in an appropriate spot, up on the hill a short walk from where our house would be located, and far far far from our water source. That first summer we used just the seat over the hole, taking with us an umbrella for when the trip up the hill had to be made during a rainstorm.

We bought Rex Roberts’s book Your Engineered House and a few other books on stud construction. Guy worked on house plans at his desk at General Electric, and we went over them every evening on the train ride back up the Hudson. He was writing speeches for three of the top executives at the time, and each one, conscious that Guy worked for two others, was careful not to overload him with work. As a consequence, Guy had time to draw not only the floor plan but the detailed placements of each board, from the basement headers and stringers up to the rafters. Then he made a list of exactly how many boards we’d need and what sizes, priced it out, and tinkered with it until he got it to fit into the $7,000 we’d budgeted for the cabin. All this design work, which most at GE would have regarded as subversive, was accomplished on GE’s time.

Guy fit his piano—a full grand—into our 512-square-foot living space, locating a window to throw light on the keyboard and music rack. The question most often asked of us over the years was: How did you get the piano to the cabin? The visitor asking that question would have just walked nearly a mile to reach us. But getting the piano to Barra was easier than moving it out of our second-floor apartment in Marlboro. Guy had brought it up the front flight of stairs, but it wouldn’t come out that way. It refused to make a crucial turn around the door and down the stairway. We ended up calling on a number of our climber friends and taking the piano out the back and down a set of rickety outside stairs. For this move we put the piano on belay and lowered it as we would an injured climber —a 600-pound climber—down a cliff face. Once the piano was on the ground, Guy took off the pedals and detached the legs. We tipped the piano on its side and onto a dolly we’d especially made for this purpose. Now the piano was only a foot or so wide and somewhat lighter. We loaded it onto the truck of a friend who drove it to Vermont. Since we had not yet closed our road, we could drive the piano to the door, ease it off the truck, wheel it on the dolly across the floor, reconnect the legs and the pedals, and tip it upright into its new home under the west window.

We knew that by adopting this “good life” we’d be drastically reducing our income. Guy in particular was being well paid by GE, and we started pouring money into the savings account. We stopped going out to eat and going to movies. We started taking sandwiches to work, and if either of us was invited out, we pocketed our homemade lunches until the next day.

During the course of that winter of 1972 we turned ourselves into vegetarians. Jim seemed willing to go along with this too. Though he wouldn’t be making the move to the land with us, he was very much involved and planned to give us a hand when we reached the building stage. We became vegetarians for economic and practical reasons. We weren’t going to have refrigeration, since we weren’t going to bring in electricity or try to make power by other means. It was an essential part of our bare-bones financial plan that we would have no debt and no bills to pay.

Both Guy and I had been brought up in families for whom the meat was the centerpiece of the meal and the roast on Sunday was obligatory. Neither of us had philosophical or moral objections to eating meat. Those came later, after we’d been vegetarians for several years. We liked meat and knew that changing our diet would be hard. We started slowly. First we cut out bacon at breakfast. Since we ate meat every night, Guy suggested we whittle it down to six nights a week, then five nights, and so on. For our first cold turkey (so to speak) vegetarian meal we selected vegetables we absolutely adored, purchasing them fresh from the farm stand. Peas, asparagus, potatoes, and a big salad from our garden in Marlboro. This meal looked appetizing, but would we feel full? We expected to be hungry if we didn’t eat meat. To our surprise, we felt perfectly satisfied. This was working! Eggs were the hardest. Guy and I loved eggs. But we didn’t need them, so we weren’t going to buy them. The only way we could make Barra work financially was by cutting out all unnecessary expenses.

At Barra we lived on a budget of $200 a month, which over the years, because of inflation, increased to $250. This meant that for our nearly thirty years at Barra we lived on $2,400 a year, which shaded up to $3,000. When Guy went on social security at sixty-two and began drawing a check of $500 a month, well, we could eat all the ice cream we wanted!

We didn’t have to make the belt so tight. We debated sticking it out in the city one more year and saving more money. It would have made a difference. But Guy said that if we put it off another year, things might come up that would cause further delays. He was desperate to get out. I enjoyed my job at Backpacker, but when Bill Kemsley, the publisher, hired me, I had told him about our plan to homestead and said I could give him one year. My mental clock was set for that. I too was ready to leave New York.

Guy made up a budget. We needed to figure out how much of our savings we could draw down on a yearly basis for expenditures like food, gas, hardware, garden items, postage, some clothing. The big expenses were property taxes and car insurance.These were our only bills. We never paid a federal income tax, since our income put us below the poverty level. We paid a Vermont state tax of around $70 a year. We limited the car insurance to us hitting the other guy—liability—only. We dropped health insurance, relying on healthy living and good luck. It was a calculated risk that worked. We incurred a few medical costs through minor injuries, but we never came within a fraction of paying out what annual insurance premiums would have cost us.

Guy called our financial plan “the Twenty-Year Plan,” because in twenty years he would be eligible for social security. In 1972 this seemed impossibly far off. In the meantime, Guy could cash in his GE pension in seven years, though he took a big cut by not waiting until retirement age. We had initially bought two contiguous pieces of land with the intent of selling one. Despite these income sources, we knew we’d have to find some way to earn more money.

Guy was concerned about financing the college educations of his sons and had long been building up the college account. In 1973, when we moved to Barra, Bill had left Western Washington State and showed no signs of going anywhere else. Johnny was traveling and climbing, though he talked about college, possibly the University of Alaska. Jim had just graduated from high school and had no immediate college plans, but might later. Guy felt that he could handle his sons’ college tuitions—just barely. He knew he’d be better off if he worked one more year.

Despite all of this, we kept to the June 9 date.

At the beginning of planning for Barra and before our marriage, we’d had a conversation about children, whether we wanted them. It was a brief discussion. Guy said he had had one family and felt no interest in starting another. I felt no empirical urge to become a mother. What we were planning together seemed fulfilling in the way I imagined motherhood could be to other women. So we were in agreement. It was a decision I did not regret.

Early that spring of 1973 we began our Barra garden in our apartment in Marlboro. We built a tall, narrow structure and set it on casters so we could roll it in front of a sunny window. On its five tiers of shelves we set our flats of tomatoes, beans, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, peppers, leeks, and companion flowers such as marigolds, nasturtiums, and zinnias. We started the seeds in cut-off gallon milk cartons. Guy called this structure “the Sun Shelves.”

Guy suggested we name our seedlings. So we chose names from the Marlboro, New York, telephone directory for 160 tiny plants. If we lost one, we marked the spot with a toothpick cross and Xed out the plant’s name on our garden chart. In this way we bid farewell to Irving Blemard, Walt Metzer, and Albert Lee, who perished, I’m embarrassed to say, because of overzealous watering.

The Sun Shelves structure had a major design flaw: it was tippy. Yes, it was very tippy. One day when Guy had been doing GE work at home he met me at the train station with a long, sad face. In the process of wheeling the Sun Shelves to a sunnier spot he lost control, and the plants on the upper shelves came crashing to the floor, spraying dirt and tiny new leaves everywhere. A mess! A terrible tragedy! It took him about two hours to put things to rights again. Though we sustained great losses, Brian Bush-weller, Father Gregory, and many others lived to thrive in our first garden.

By the time June 9, 1973, rolled around, we were as set as we were ever going to be. Dave Datsun was loaded with all our seedlings and most of our belongings; there was barely enough space left for Ralph, who was now ten and would only be with us another three years, to curl up in the backseat. Jim and our friend Brad Snyder saw us off.As we pulled out of the drive Brad said, “Hey, wait a minute! Don’t you want to think this over?”