People thought we were crazy!
Why would we choose to live off grid?
Let’s hop into the Wayback Machine and dial in the 1970s. Back-to-the land was the current desire for some of us. We wanted simplicity, living without the bills of modernity, doing it all ourselves. Forget the foolish rat race of a 9-to-5 job!
Helen and Scott Nearing led the way with their books about off-grid living in Vermont. It LOOKED easy enough!
Scott Nearing was an American radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, pacifist, vegetarian and advocate of simple living. In 1915, he was dismissed from a teaching position at the Wharton School on account of his left-wing politics, becoming a cause célèbre of the American Left.
After all, Scott Nearing was willing to sacrifice his teaching position for his immersion in socialist policies, his desire to live off-grid, sharing what he had, and that should be enough to make him our hero!
Helen and Scott Nearing created beautiful stone houses and fertile gardens in Vermont to provide food for themselves and their many guests. A paradise without a work wage! What could possibly go wrong?
Here’s where the rubber meets the road when living off-grid.
Off-grid living takes serious physical strength and a strong ability to organize the surroundings. Lack of organization causes many a failure, and some of my off-grid friends were a testimony to that. The constant logging for wood heat, the cleanup of dust and dirt, the meals on a wood cookstove, the care for animals hauling hay and buckets of water, the garden harvest with its endless canning on a wood stove, washing clothes by hand, (until we created a person-powered washing machine!) caused some to just quit the program. Off-grid life is a radical paring down to absolute necessity, and this prompts radical changes in what is important and what is not.
For example: No animal is raised that does not benefit the family in some way. That sounds cruel, until extra care and feeding becomes a burden. And, it will, just by dint of the many tasks of off-grid living.
Were we daunted by any of the above?
Why no! We had nowhere else to go. All of our paltry assets were invested in Core Hollow. We learned to organize and carry on, and the Core Hollow book is a testimony to that.
A problem would arise that not one of us had considered.
That problem is old age. It’s a problem for all of us, wherever we may live. Scott Nearing lived to be 100 years old. He lost strength to till his garden and put up food. So, he fasted himself to death! I don’t reccommend that method of leaving the world behind! But, like the animal that can’t pull its weight, you yourself, by simply aging, become a burden in off-grid living. The disability of old age has been a fact of life throughout history, until modern livng modified its harshness. Off-grid living does not modify harsh surroundings.
What about life at Core Hollow?
I didn’t live to be old at Core Hollow. My story had another, and darker, ending; something that I would have never imagined when we began living our dream life off-grid. No, I would have never imagined…THAT.