You might wonder why I’m putting this story here in the middle of a bunch of “Back to the Land” tales, but it provides some background for the post that will follow. I also ask that you accept that our actions were “noble” ones. The devil is in the details, and I hope you know me well enough by now that you can accept that there were reasons – too long and complicated to go into here – for believing that Daughter would be better off without close contact with her biological father. We also did everything humanly possible to make this transition a positive and happy one for her. Some affirmation of this came after the move: the "neutral" pediatrician involved in the court ruling sent us a personal letter containing her congratulations and best wishes for us in our new home.

A Child Lost, A New Life Begun

In the summer of 1974, after making the decision to leave the city, I put my condo apartment on the market. My wasband, exercising his rights of visitation, came to take our daughter one Saturday, and upon their return, spotted the “For Sale” sign.

Five days later, the man in the rumpled suit rang our doorbell, said my name with a question mark, I answered “Yes?” and was handed legal papers stating that I was an unfit mother, that my current husband was attempting to sabotage Wasband’s relationship with his daughter, and that the child’s father was a far more suitable custodian. After all, he had a larger income and a larger house near an elementary school. Somehow the petition omitted mention of his mental instability and drinking problem. In these papers he looked like the hero of “Father Knows Best.”

At that time I was a little more than three months pregnant. Maybe it was a bit of a rush on our part (or was it that we were just careless?), but already having a five-year-old, Husband and I were thrilled to be expecting a baby.

In divorces in those days, a biological father almost never was granted custody of a daughter of kindergarten age. It only seemed to happen in the rare case where the mother was so unfit as to be in jail or otherwise institutionalized or perhaps a known prostitute or sexual offender. The law was definitely biased toward the belief that the place for a little girl was with her mother. And yet this “rule” was not set in stone, a fact weighing on any mother facing a custody challenge. I came apart at the seams.

The custody petition was served on me on a Thursday. The next day I began to bleed, and despite bed rest and a great deal of love and reassurance from Husband, the bleeding became hemorrhagic, and our unborn child was lost. My body had traumatically aborted, unable to deal with its sudden awareness that a child loved can also be a child taken away.

We removed the “For Sale” sign and resigned ourselves to fighting the court battle ahead of us.

I’ll spare you the gory details. Six months later, on December 31, 1974, the judge – on his final day on the Family Court bench – ruled that Wasband was to pay unpaid Child Support, seek mental health counseling, and continue the responsibility of visiting the child one day of any weekend in the county of her residence wherever that might be. That last phrase was hand-written into the margin of the document on the morning the case went to court, and it was what we needed to be able to make our move to the country.

There was one problem: There is nothing to prevent a person from filing a lawsuit at any time. Had Wasband thought we were going to move, he could have filed his petition again, and we would have had to defend ourselves again. He could have stalled our plans and obtained an intolerable (to us) visitation agreement. The only way we could move without risking that was to do it under the cover of darkness. That meant keeping our plans a secret, even from Daughter.

On a Thursday less than a month later, the court denied a scheduled Saturday visit by Wasband because he had not yet complied with the order to seek mental health counseling, nor had he paid the owed child support. The next morning we explained to Daughter that we were going to move, rented a 20’ U-Haul and began loading everything we owned into it. Our friends joined in the frenzy of piling dishes, piano, toys, bedding, books, and even canned food into about 1200 cubic feet of truck. We worked well into the night, loading all of our worldly goods, leaving nothing behind, and if that truck’s storage area had been a cardboard carton, the whole thing could have been accurately labeled “MISCELLANEOUS STUFF”. The next morning we were driving east on the Thruway, on our way to a new life.

I have written about our first year in the North Country, searching for and finding land, and a couple of the trials and tribulations involved in beginning to settle on it. Most of this was a joyful time, a relief from the stress of on-going wasband battles, and it was the beginning of an adventure. There was, however, one unhappy fact. During that first year, I was having some medical problems, and in that summer of moving the trailer and putting up the pole, I was diagnosed sterile. Husband and I would have no children.

Next: Water, water everywhere...
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"First You Get Your Pole Up"

Note: this is #5 in a series of stories of settling in the North Country

There are some things we had always taken somewhat for granted: you open a tap and water flows into the sink, you flip a switch and lights go on, you flush and – well, you know. When you live in the country, you play a sizable part in obtaining those things you’re used to having the urban utility companies handle so smoothly.

Although we hoped to one day be off the grid, accomplishing that immediately was totally unrealistic and impossible. I called the power company and asked when they could hook us up.

“Have you got your pole up?”

“The electric lines are on our side of the road, and there’s a pole near the driveway about 100’ from our mobile home.” (We had quickly learned that it was a bit undignified to call your mobile home a trailer…)

The electric company representative then explained to me that we needed to purchase a utility pole and put it up within a short distance of the trailer. “Get your pole up and then call us,” she said, sounding as though there was nothing to it.

The local Agway sells poles. They’re 25 feet long and weigh, well, A LOT. We borrowed a flatbed truck, Agway loaded the pole on it, and we drove it out to the land. It was supposed to be sunk five feet into the ground, so with pick, crowbar and shovels we dug a hole the required depth some six feet from the trailer.

Now think about this: putting a flag in a flagpole holder can be tricky, especially if you can only hold onto the bottom end of the flagpole. You’ve got a lot of flagpole (and flagpole weight) waving around as you try to put one small end of it into a hole. Then think about how to do the same thing with a 25’ long 700# wooden pole. It’s a bit harder!

During our time in the North Country we have been blessed with amazing and wonderful friends. We rounded up two of them – folks who were building a log house from trees they had cut. Here maybe a couple of pictures will shorten the description:
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It drizzled off and on, and the four of us worked all day, but no matter how we tried, no matter how high we were able to prop the truck end of the pole, it would not slip into that hole. Darkness was closing in. We were hungry and tired. I used the Coleman camping stove to put a fire under some water to make spaghetti, and we decided to give it one last effort.

We built an even higher tower of cement blocks on the truck bed and leveraged the top end of the pole up as high as we could. We put a hemlock board in the hole so that the bottom of the pole might slide down it rather than get stuck in the earth and rocks of the hole’s interior wall. We tied a long rope to the top of the pole.
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On the count of 3, Husband and Joe would try to heave up on the truck end of the pole while Cathy and I would pull the rope for all we were worth. 1… 2… 3… They heaved and we pulled, the pole rose (!) and for several seconds seemed to teeter perpendicular to the ground (!) ---- and then it fell, not into the hole, but more in the general direction of the mobile home, missing it by about a foot and landing flat on the ground with a sickening thud.

No one said a word. We stared in silence, realizing both our great good fortune that the pole had not crushed our “house” or any of us, and the grim knowledge that our electric pole had now lost the advantage of being four feet above ground level. We went inside and ate our spaghetti, the silence continuing until the four of us hugged each other and said goodnight.

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So how DID we get that pole up? Well, we had a friend named Jim Brown, a man employed by the local Soil and Water Conservation District to make a soil map of the county.

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Jim happened to stop by one sunny afternoon about a week later, and Jim – almost single-handedly – put up our pole. As Bonnie Raitt sings, “You got to know how!”
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Jim was our hero. Pssst… don’t tell the power company we cut four feet off the bottom of the pole, okay?
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I called the electric company and they brought wires to the pole. One of the neighbors we had met while blocking the road with our mobile home was an electrician, and a few days later he lit up our lives.
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The Owner-built... Mobile Home??

Note: this is #4 in a series of stories of settling in the North Country

It was a Sunday morning and we were still in bed, exchanging groggy good mornings, and then Husband spoke.

“You know, maybe we could buy a trailer and live in it while we build a house.”

“You’re kidding! I was just thinking the same thing!”

And so the plan to move from town to the land was hatched. A little more than a week later we had bought a used 12’ x 60’ “mobile home” and were making arrangements to have it delivered to a small clearing we planned to call home.

Its delivery turned out to be not as easy as we expected. The wheels of the trailer were some forty feet behind the truck that was towing it, and the “driveway” had a drop-off on each side, making it impossible to cut the corner while towing it in. The trailer would have to follow the truck on a more-or-less straight line, and the situation simply didn’t allow for that.


....."I think we've got a problem, Harvey"

If the road had been wider, the driver could have made a sweeping turn and come in straight, but the road was narrow, and across the road from this driveway entrance a rock ledge rose up. A John Deere pulling a manure spreader would have had to navigate that turn carefully, but a tractor pulling a 60’ trailer didn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell, so there we were, blocking the road, kicking stones around and scratching our heads.

Soon we began to meet the neighbors. It was late afternoon, and those coming home from work found a mobile home blocking their way. Rather than turn around and take another route, they parked their pickup trucks and settled down to watch the city-slickers in their predicament. Maybe the news traveled down the road, because there soon was a group on the other side of the trailer parked and watching. Some joked about trading cars with people on the side they were trying to get to, but it was clear that this was an entertainment nobody wanted to miss.


..................Neighbors watch while Herb (lying under trailer) jacks
..................it up again - note tire "skid" marks on the road from the
..................previous landings

Country ingenuity prevailed. The delivery driver jacked up the “home” and then everybody pushed hard until it fell off the jack, thereby inching it slowly more cross-wise of the road. This was done over and over again (as we wondered how the interior could possibly survive all of the bouncing of each fall) until finally the truck was able to move forward a few feet. More jacking and pushing, and somewhat past dinnertime our new “home” was parked in the clearing.


......................The "Homette" and the Happy Homette Owner


It was July 27, 1976. We lacked electricity, water and a septic tank, but we had shelter, and it even came with some furniture, appliances and curtains. We were as happy as pigs in slop.

Next episode: "First You Get Your Pole Up"
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Back to... the Land

Note: this is #3 in a series of stories of settling in the North Country

Fall and then winter began closing in on the realtors. There were no new offerings hitting the market and we had looked at what was available.

We liked the village and were comfortable. The house we rented belonged to a spry but deaf ninety-year-old widow; she lived in the left side of it and we occupied the other half. She was a great landlord who enjoyed our company and got a kick out of my enthusiasm for learning how to can and root-cellar vegetables, sharing some of her “secret” recipes for old-fashioned sauces and pickles. Our daughter walked to school and had many playmates. It was a safe and convenient place to live, and so we felt no pressure to get on with our plans.

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My husband is a very bright guy who has always had a weird interest in helping people find jobs. In the mid-seventies, CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) was a federal government program created to fund/authorize job-training programs for low-income people. The local CETA director happened to know my husband’s former boss in Rochester, and based on his recommendation created a job opening. CETA was growing rapidly , and within a relatively short time, my husband was designing training programs geared to the needs of the North Country.

I, on the other hand, was one of those people who preferred NOT to be matched up with a “real” job… I liked dirt. I liked animals. I loved power tools, whether saws or sewing machines. I was never bored at home.

It seems to me (looking back on it) that I secretly wondered whether my husband would really be happy “on the land.” Not that he wasn’t a worker - for despite his intellectual brilliance, he'll slog through daunting, boring, no-brainer physical tasks with steady energy and never a complaint – but it did occur to me that he might not be happy if his life’s work was primarily of a physical nature.

I had also spent my childhood summer vacations in the Adirondacks. I liked farms, but I also loved the woods.

In early December I was browsing the local newspaper and a classified ad caught my attention:
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Hmmm… sugar bush, timber, springs… Not a farm, but something new and at least worth checking… I called and learned that it was in the Adirondack foothills thirteen miles to the south of town, it had a couple of meadows, and the price was reasonable. The next day we drove out to see it, met a down-on-their-luck family, and were led around over hill and down dale through woods, meadows, and streams for over two hours and what seemed like many miles by the long-legged husband. The land seemed remote and very “Adirondacky” to me. It had every sort of natural wildlife habitat, and snow covered the rock outcroppings that might have tipped us off to one of the challenges of the place. By the end of the day, in the same desperate, emotional way I once craved (and then convinced my parents to bring home) a big-eyed dog from the animal shelter, I wanted it.

My husband was less enthused. It wasn’t, after all, a FARM. “But it once was a farm,” I countered, suggesting that we could do a reasonable amount of "farming" there if we wanted to (a totally unrealistic argument). After all, I reminded him, the Nearings grew food; they didn't keep animals. The price was $10,000, the seller willing to hold a mortgage without interest charges.

Maybe he mentioned this and I failed to hear (or register) it, but Husband – who never has found it easy to say “NO” to his pleading wife – rationalized buying it by thinking we could always sell it when we found the farm.

The seller was eager. He had three kids and they had no money to buy Christmas presents. (Should we not have seen through that?!?!)

We bought the land. The timing was such that we couldn’t close until January – after the holidays – and so we also bought an old wood-burning cookstove that the seller had, shoving $125 in cash into his hand the week before Christmas.

We had found our place in the country.

Stay tuned for the next episode: The Owner-built...Mobile Home??

Funny what a difference a day can make. Got up this morning still with some leg pain, but not too bad. Turned the computer on and discovered a new visitor: Slip. Of course all of you "old" visitors warm my heart, but I was curious to see who this Slip person was. When I checked out his blog, it sure looked like he might be somebody I know (maybe even a friend or neighbor). Or not. Anyway, Slip's enthusiasm for life and the road ahead began to tickle a bunch of memories, and before I knew it, I'd written a blog piece. Here it is, and probably the first of a short series on building a home in The North Country.

Nearing Home

The seventies sound like a long time ago. The Vietnam War officially ended, Nixon resigned and four of his major Administration officials were found guilty in the Watergate cover-up case, by January of 1974 the oil embargo by several OPEC members had gas pumps running dry, and we were all wearing hip-hugging bell-bottom pants.

The America I grew up believing in unquestionably had changed, or maybe my eyes had been opened. I lived in a condominium in a city then, had remarried, and we spent our evenings poring over the United Farm Agency real estate catalog and geography books. My husband and I were convinced that the country was going to Hell, and that the one feasible hedge against that was to go “back to the land” and become self-sufficient.

In 1932, some forty years before us, Helen and Scott Nearing had gone “back to the land” on a homestead near Stratton Mountain in Vermont, built a low-cost house of stone, and raised their own organic food, attaining an attractive (to us) measure of self-sufficiency. We read their book, Living the Good Life, and took their story to heart. Another book, How to Build A Low-cost House of Stone, bolstered our belief that this was something we could do, and in the summer of 1974 we made our first feeble attempt at growing some vegetables in a small plot in my parents’ yard.
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After leaving Peace Corps service in South America, two good friends had taken up dairy farming in The North Country of New York State. We had visited them several times, always awed by the space and quiet and clear skies. We helped in the barn, probably adding to their actual workload, and the smell of cow manure was sweet to our senses.

In early 1975, it was time to make the move. We set out from Rochester on a planned exploratory journey to northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, southern Maine, and finally Massachusetts. We never went beyond the first stop. Our hearts had already been won there, and after a small bit of rationalizing about the other planned destinations being “too far” or otherwise unsuitable, we rented an apartment in an old house in the county seat, a small town of less than 4000 residents.

We weren’t the only ones. As we gradually became acquainted with the area, we found a sizable group of like-minded folks, people from cities following the real estate catalog to a place where a young family could still manage to buy enough land to farm. We formed a social network we called “The Rural Life Association,” periodically meeting at one homestead or another for a potluck supper or picnic and the chance to trade stories and ideas. We were homesteaders; we were college graduates from middle-class America, turning away from the path many of our parents had worked hard to put us on. We were poor, and we were happy.

Next: Almost Farmers
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