Scott and Helen Nearing are best known for writing the book that helped inspire the back-to-the-land movement. Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World describes their twenty years on a homestead in the Vermont woods, where water came from a hand pump and electricity was largely unavailable. In an era of growing urbanization, they popularized the ideal of living simply off the land. But did they really support themselves entirely by their farming and publishing efforts?
In 2003 Jean Hay Bright published her own homesteading memoir, Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life (BrightBerry Press), about the seven years she homesteaded on land purchased from the Nearings. In addition to telling her own story, Hay Bright used her skills as a newspaper reporter to research aspects of the Nearings’ lives and finances that Scott and Helen had either not mentioned or glossed over in their books.
The Nearings are no longer around to respond to Hay Bright’s account of how closely they did or didn’t practice what they preached. Scott died in 1983 at the age of one hundred, and Helen died twelve years later in a car crash. Even after their deaths, they remain an example to many who live simple, nonconsumer lives. Our purpose in printing this essay adapted from Hay Bright’s book is not to tear down the Nearings’ reputations nor deny their achievements but to fill in some of the blanks in the “good life” for the benefit of those who would follow in their footsteps.
This essay by itself is by no means a complete picture, and readers interested in learning more about the Nearings should consult their books and visit www.goodlife.org.
— Ed.
For reasons I will never know for certain, my ex-husband and I were among the few people to whom Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the back-to-the-land bible Living the Good Life, decided to sell part of their Maine farm. It could have been Keith’s skills with an ax that won them over, or his short haircut in those days of beards and ponytails on men (which Helen later admitted to disliking). Or it could have been the potential for a part-time typist/secretary in their remote community. (I was then working at the Providence Journal.) Or it might have been that, at our first meeting in December 1971, Keith and I were respectful and friendly but did not exude the gushing adoration that was common among Nearing pilgrims — and that the Nearings frequently found irritating.
When people find out that I homesteaded next door to the Nearings in the 1970s, many want to know what Scott and Helen were really like. Did they actually follow their four-four-four plan: four hours each day of manual or “bread” labor, four hours of vocational labor (in their case, writing), and four hours of socializing or community involvement? Those who have attempted to follow the Nearings’ example often ask money questions: Did the Nearings really subsist on the bounty from their gardens and woodlot and on their seasonal cash crops — maple syrup in Vermont and a high-bush blueberry patch in Maine? Or did they have financial assets they didn’t talk about?
When I sat down to write my memoir about those years, I knew I had to include answers to those questions. Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life came back from the printer in September 2003, coincidentally on the eighth anniversary of Helen Nearing’s sudden death in a car crash at the age of ninety-one. Most of the book is an account of how Keith and I homesteaded in Harborside, Maine, one couple in a growing network of like-minded young people living in Hancock County. I wrote about felling trees to build our cabin in the woods; about the many visitors who came to see the Nearings and then stopped by to visit us; about getting our milking goats and a cow; about the threat of a proposed nuclear power plant on land abutting our property; about getting pregnant when Lamaze was a new phenomenon.
I devoted two of the thirty-five chapters in the book to those questions that I had been repeatedly asked over the years about the Nearings. Those chapters are the direct result of one of the most important lessons I learned from Helen and Scott: to question authority and to seek out and tell the truth as you find it. Not surprisingly, they’ve also been the most controversial part of the book.
Since the book came out, some people have been upset by my mild attempt to debunk part of the Nearing myth, but many more have thanked me for writing those two chapters. Some have said I confirmed their suspicions. Others have expressed relief to learn that their own homesteading attempts failed not because they followed the Nearing plan imperfectly, but because the Nearing plan itself was imperfect.
In the 1930s, finding themselves rejected by society, Helen and Scott Nearing decided to leave the city for a life of self-sufficiency in the Vermont woods. For Scott it was academic and political rejection. In a brouhaha that made national headlines in 1915, he was fired from his position as an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania because of his opposition to child labor. He was later fired from the University of Toledo because of his criticism of U.S. involvement in World War I. Then he was arrested under the Espionage Act for writing the antiwar pamphlet “The Great Madness.” (He was acquitted, but his publisher was fined three thousand dollars.) In 1918 he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New York on the Socialist ticket against Fiorello LaGuardia, drawing a respectable third of the vote. He later joined the Communist Party, but soon left its ranks because his writings were in conflict with the official party line.
For Helen, society’s rejection came when she took up with Scott, who was then still married to his first wife. In answer to the question of why she’d had no children, Helen wrote in Loving and Leaving the Good Life, “It was bad enough at the time — fifty years ago — to live, unmarried, with a man; to have had illegitimate little Scotties and Scottinas around would have killed my devoted parents. They had had enough to bear as it was with my unconventional behavior.”
Scott and Helen bought land in Vermont, built their own home, and attempted to live entirely apart from industrial society. After nearly twenty years as a couple, they finally married in 1948, shortly after Scott’s first wife, Nellie Seeds Nearing, died at the age of sixty.
In 1954, the Nearings self-published Living the Good Life, a book about their two decades of homesteading in Vermont. By then they had sold their Vermont land and begun a second homestead in Maine. A few thousand copies were sold before the book sank into oblivion. But when Schocken Books reissued it in 1970, sales took off, with several hundred thousand copies sold in just a few years.
Many people of my generation, disillusioned over the Vietnam War and growing discontented with vacuous consumerism, were taken with the Nearings’ claim that we could get personal freedom and independence by going into some remote area and setting up a self-sufficient homestead. All it would require, they told us, was good planning and hard work. Best of all, they insisted in their book that it was possible to do all this on a part-time basis, thus feeding our suspicion that the forty-hour workweek was all a capitalistic plot to enslave the masses, us included.
I believe curiosity, and a heartfelt hope that the whole back-to-the-land dream was in fact attainable, is what drove many to visit the remote Forest Farm on the shores of Penobscot Bay. We needed to see for ourselves that the place actually existed. We needed to touch the stones in the garden wall, witness the lush, weed-free greenery inside, confirm with our own eyes that Helen and Scott were indeed living well. And if, while we were there, we were able to help them out with a little wood splitting or rock hauling or compost turning, it was the least we could do to make up for the interruption we had caused in their lives.
Homesteading appealed to Keith and me. It seemed the perfect solution to Keith’s restlessness after two tours of duty in Vietnam. And I saw it as a fascinating mental and physical challenge. We made our first pilgrimage to Forest Farm in December 1971 as a side trip while hunting for land in Maine. Helen and Scott were warm and inviting. They took to us in a way we subsequently learned they rarely did with visitors. On our second visit, a few weeks later, they offered to sell us part of their 140-acre farm. We jumped at the opportunity, and became one of thousands of couples, in Maine and across the nation, to take the homesteading plunge.
To our credit, we did manage to pull off the financial end of it. We came to the Maine woods with enough money saved up to buy thirty acres from the Nearings at the going rate (about seventy dollars per acre) and to build a house using our own trees, scavenged windows, and a load of rough green lumber. For the rest of that decade, we grew most of our food, lived with little in the way of modern conveniences or clutter, bought hardly anything, spent as little time as possible renting out our brains and muscles for cash, and managed to live warmly and well on an income far below the national poverty level.
What we didn’t do was accomplish all that on four hours of manual labor a day. There were simply too many time-consuming and exhausting tasks. Once we got done what had to be done, we didn’t have much time or energy for anything else. It didn’t take long for progress to be counted in smaller and smaller increments — unless we had visitors and put them to work.
But, we reasoned, it wasn’t the fault of the “plan” that we had chosen to raise animals and make our own cheese and yogurt. It wasn’t Helen’s fault that I defied her example and wasted my time baking bread and pies. And when children entered the picture, all thoughts of limiting homesteading work schedules went out the south-facing windows.
By 1974, after dealing with the Nearings as neighbors on a regular basis for more than two years, we had learned not to take everything they said or wrote at face value. Unquestionably they were robust, energetic, hardworking, and deliberate, despite being well on in years. (Helen was then seventy, Scott ninety-one.) Undoubtedly they were principled people. And because of their organizational skills, they could get more free work out of a ragtag bunch of inexperienced city dwellers than anyone would have ever dreamt possible.
The confidence and worldliness and stubbornness that attracted people to them made it all the harder to understand the inconsistencies that kept cropping up. So many times the Nearings drew a line in the sand, stepped over it, and then ignored or denied the footprints they had left behind.
Some inconsistencies were obvious on the first reading of their books. They lambasted “animal slavery” in all its forms — including the owning of pets. Yet a photo in Living the Good Life shows their garden being plowed by draft animals, and another shows a team of horses hauling their maple sap through the snow to the sugarhouse. Did that mean their principles would fall to any expediency, or that they did not hold the principle as strongly as it sounded? Or was it something in between? If they did not actually own the animals in question, were they off the hook?
Take Puss-O, Helen’s cat. In Living the Good Life, she and Scott write:
Cats and dogs live dependent subservient lives under the tabletops of humans. Domestic pets kill and drive away wild creatures, whose independent, self-respecting lives seem far more admirable than those of docile, dish-fed retainers. We enjoy the wild creatures.
Scott disavowed ownership of Puss-O, thereby keeping his own record clean. Being a cat person, I understood Helen’s affection for the animal. And I knew that no one ever really owns a cat. It is the cat who decides whether or not it will reward you with its presence. Not only that, on any homestead with a garden, a root cellar, and a pantry, a cat was the best way to keep your crops and stored food rodent-free.
As for those independent wild creatures, rather than build a stone wall around his cash crop (as he had around his home garden) or install a cheap but effective battery-powered electric fence, Scott, that self-avowed nonviolent pacifist, chose to use cruel steel-jaw leg-hold traps to rid his income-producing blueberry patch of raccoons, porcupines, and skunks who were only following their natural instincts.
We could only shake our heads in wonderment.
Another issue was the Nearings’ use of electricity. The Nearings wrote eloquently about cutting the umbilical cords to society, and implied that they lived happily in Vermont without any electricity. Of course, at that time, they had no choice. Electric lines were not extended to that corner of the world until more than a dozen years after their arrival. In Maine, however, the electric line had already stretched to the farmhouse they bought, and they took advantage of that convenience. Twenty years later, when the Nearings built their new stone house a few hundred yards away, it too was fully wired.
Discussing that fact in Our Home Made of Stone, Helen explains that it cost only thirty-five dollars for the new house to be hooked up to the line running along the road. She then quotes Frank Coffee in The Self-Sufficient House: “If an umbilical can be stretched to a power grid at reasonable cost, the convenience of a central system may be preferable to an alternative on-site system — even one that insulates you from an uncertain energy future.”
And although they disavowed electric refrigeration in Living the Good Life, the Nearings had a freezer filled with blueberries and ice cream in the basement of their new stone house. This I certainly did not begrudge them. Our cabin had no electricity, and refrigeration turned out to be the trickiest part of food storage, particularly in the summer. So when a friend of ours six miles away offered us floor space for our own freezer if we paid the extra cost on his electric bill, we jumped at the chance. It was much easier to freeze meat than to pressure-can it, and we liked ice cream too.
The Nearings’ new stone house in Harborside turned another prior pronouncement on its head: their disdain for architects and master craftsmen. “If we are worth a snap of the fingers,” they write, “we can build with lines as good or better than our great-grandfathers. If we cannot, we do not deserve to live in a well-designed house.” Even though Keith and I had designed and built our own home and were happy with the result, from the beginning I thought that their statement doomed many otherwise good and well-intentioned people to living in badly designed homes. Everybody has special talents. God forbid we should be limited in our lives only to those that we possess ourselves.
In Our Home Made of Stone, Helen writes, “We are not architects and never employed one.” It appears that employed is the operative word here, because later on in that same book, as well as in Continuing the Good Life, she and Scott state that “a Dutch architect friend drew up the first plans from Helen’s initial drawings.” His name was E.M. Kraamer-Ferguson, and he worked at the Bureau of Interior Planning in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Their friend must have donated his services, and therefore was not “employed.” But why did the Nearings feel the need to play word games like that? And why did they then leave evidence lying all around?
The new stone house in Harborside was not cheap to build. The building materials, the professionally poured concrete foundation, the bagged cement used for the walls, the Douglas fir beams shipped cross-country, the Swedish Clivus Multrum composting toilet, the electrical wiring, the wood stoves, the slate flooring, the windows, and the many hours of paid labor by skilled craftsmen all cost money: more than eighty thousand dollars for the house itself; more than a hundred thousand for the entire complex, including the stone garage, stone outhouse (used primarily by visitors), walled garden, and greenhouse.
Where did that money come from? We find the answer tucked away at the end of a sentence in Our Home Made of Stone, where Helen writes: “I was the instigator, the planner, the chooser of the site, the designer, the interior decorator, and, through a kind legacy from an old Los Angeles friend, the one who paid the bills.” What friend? She doesn’t say.
Only many years later would I learn that the California legacy that paid for their new Harborside house was not the first substantial windfall in Helen and Scott’s life.
Helen and Scott’s little inconsistencies did not bother me the way they bothered some people. Some of their firm pronouncements (“When enough bread labor has been performed to secure the year’s living, we will stop earning until the next crop season”) I had long ago dismissed as not only shortsighted, but downright irresponsible.
What did trouble me was that their economic formulas just didn’t add up.
The Nearings started their Vermont tale by stating that they bought a sixty-five-acre run-down farm in 1932 for three hundred dollars down and an eight-hundred-dollar loan. I always thought it odd that, in the middle of the Great Depression, the Federal Loan Bank would allow a mortgage amounting to more than a full year’s wages to be assumed by a man of fifty with no job, no income, and no farming experience.
Living the Good Life goes on to tell us that the first spring they were in Vermont, Scott and Helen decided to buy the “large tract of cut-over land on Pinnacle Mountain, adjoining our place and lying back from the town road.” Then they turned around and bought the land next door, which had a “sugarbush” on it, a grove of sugar maples used for producing syrup.
After a little digging, I discovered that in the twenty-eight months between December 1932 and April 1935, Helen and Scott went on a land-buying binge that netted them 930 acres of land in three towns: almost one and a half square miles. Adding up the figures found in the deeds and elsewhere, I calculated that the couple had spent at least $7,535 to buy those parcels. The mortgage on their first piece of property was paid in full a year after they moved to Vermont, and none of the other properties carried mortgages. That was a lot of money to drop into a rural community at the height of the Great Depression. Where did it all come from?
In Loving and Leaving the Good Life, Helen mentions a legacy from a former Dutch suitor. According to Helen’s biographer Ellen LaConte, he was J.J. “Koos” Van Der Leeuw, whose family was in the cocoa-importing and -processing business in Amsterdam. Helen had met Koos on her travels in the 1920s, and for a short while she had worked for him as a secretary. During that time Koos had asked Helen to marry him. LaConte told me that Koos, a private pilot, died in a plane crash in the early 1930s, shortly after Helen returned to the United States at Scott’s behest. LaConte believes the legacy was in the neighborhood of thirty to forty thousand dollars — at a time when the yearly pay of the average Vermont worker was about six hundred dollars.
But that one-time legacy was not their only source of unearned income. Among the documents filed in the registry of deeds are two agreements between Helen and Scott and a man named Floyd Hurd. The agreements state that Hurd would collect the maple syrup from the sugarbush the Nearings had purchased. He would provide all the labor and most of the equipment and would take two-thirds of the syrup, leaving Helen and Scott the remaining third. Of this arrangement Scott writes in Living the Good Life:
In a syrup season lasting from four to eight weeks, owning only the maple trees, the sugarhouse and some poor tools, and doing none of the work, we got enough syrup to pay our taxes and insurance, [and] to provide us with all the syrup we could use through the year, plenty to give away to our friends and to sell.
This is the same man who blasted the moneylenders for being “able to enjoy comfort and luxury, without doing any productive labor.” Yet despite his strongly held and publicly proclaimed communistic and socialistic beliefs, Scott apparently did not hesitate to accept a third of the take based solely upon the fact that he and Helen owned the means of production — the sugarbush, the sugarhouse, and some of the equipment.
“That summer, however,” Scott writes, “we discovered that maple syrup in Vermont is better than cash.”
Why did they have to wait until summer? For the simple reason that rural Vermonters did not buy maple syrup. Those not in the syrup business could make enough for their family’s consumption by tapping a few trees in the back woodlot and boiling the sap down on top of the wood stove that was going hot and heavy at that time of year anyway. Any excess would be passed on to friends or end up as Christmas presents. Maple syrup was the zucchini of the Vermont woods.
On the open market, however, it was a luxury item. It wasn’t until the “summer people” and tourists showed up, bringing their disposable incomes with them, that Helen and Scott realized what they had.
Yet Scott does not write kindly about the summer community.
Summer people do more than upset Vermont’s economy. By living on their places during the summer and closing them for the balance of the year, they turn sections of the state into ghost towns. Neighborhoods, to be meaningful, must have continuity. Part-time towns are parasitic dead towns.
The contemptible summer people and the detestable tourists who took home a cute and pricey jar of maple syrup as a memento were the only ones who had the money and the desire to buy what Helen and Scott had to sell. Upon this contradictory base, Helen and Scott built their Vermont self-sufficiency.
But they didn’t just let the customers come to them. Despite their anticapitalist stances, Helen and Scott were both excellent marketers. A friend sold both syrup and maple-sugar candy for them in the Midwest. Several shops in Vermont carried their products, and stores in New York City clamored for all they could get.
Near the end of Living the Good Life, in summarizing the self-sufficiency of their Vermont experience, the Nearings proclaim, “We bought no candy. . . .”
Of course they didn’t buy candy. They sold it.
The Nearings also made money when they liquidated their Vermont land holdings, beginning in 1937. Although Helen and Scott donated 550 acres of their land to the town of Winhall for a municipal forest in 1951, they sold the rest in pieces to several people over the years. After buying and moving to an old farm in Harborside, Maine, they appear to have been a few thousand dollars to the good.
In Harborside, the Nearings decided they would plant 228 hybrid high-bush blueberries for a cash crop: another high-value, luxury commodity. (As hard as it is for people in Maine and Vermont to believe, millions of people in this country have gone their entire lives without once tasting real maple syrup or fresh-picked blueberries.) But blueberry bushes are slow-growing plants. It was seven years before the Nearings had blueberries for sale. The pick rose steadily to a peak of 1,296 quarts in 1971, then settled down to around 800 quarts a year. At roughly three dollars a quart, even at the peak of production (and even if they sold every quart, which they did not), the Nearings could not have made a living selling blueberries. And for the first seven years in Maine, they had no blueberry income at all. So what did they do for money?
Their Vermont property sales gave them a small cushion.
Then in September 1950 Scott became eligible for “a minimal monthly Social Security check based on my work with Federated Press in the 1920s and 1930s.” Some are surprised that Scott would have accepted a check from a government he clearly despised. I do not see a contradiction. The concept of a national income-security plan for retired people was certainly compatible with Scott’s professed socialist beliefs. Social Security and the First Amendment were probably the only pieces of the U.S. government in which he saw any benefit.
According to Social Security records, he did not get a lot of money. His monthly benefit was $40 in 1962, and had grown to $182.90 when he died in 1983 at the age of one hundred.
Helen began receiving Social Security in January 1968, based on her earnings from secretarial work. Her first monthly check of $52.90 grew to $795.10 by the time she died twenty-seven years later.
For expenses beyond that, the Nearings probably dipped into whatever was left of Scott’s inheritance from his father’s estate. According to Scott’s son Robert Nearing, Scott’s father, Lewis, left his six children a sizable sum.
“I’m sure it was one million bucks in 1940,” Robert Nearing said. “Scott kept his share to write a book.” Robert Nearing remembered his Aunt Dorothy commenting that Scott’s “writing a book was the last thing Papa would want” to have happen with his money.
It is not clear how or where Scott spent that money, but he didn’t have any of it left when he died. Robert Nearing said his entire inheritance from his father was a thousand dollars from Scott’s life-insurance policy.
Scott also wrote about two other revenue sources that do not seem at all in keeping with his antibank, anticapitalist philosophies. Those were “a modest annuity from paid-up insurance policies, and a like amount from a trust fund left by my sister Mary [that] keep me on the black side of the ledger.”
Although they budgeted carefully, grew a lot of their food, worked hard, and didn’t spend much money, it was trust funds, annuities, monetary gifts, inheritances, and unearned income from other people’s labor that kept Scott and Helen Nearing going for most of their frugal homesteading lives, as far back as the early sugaring days in Vermont.
Then, with the republication of Living the Good Life in 1970, the Nearings began to earn a substantial income from their books and lecture fees. But Scott repeatedly dismissed that money as if it were entirely separate from their other income. In Continuing the Good Life, he writes:
Our supply of printed matter, postage, and stationery comes to us via our Social Science Institute, to which organization we hand over all royalties and lecture fees. Our travel expenses are paid by those who ask us to talk.
In the 1970s I attended some of the annual meetings of the Social Science Institute. The financial reports I read detailed a yearly income of about eighteen to twenty thousand dollars, with a carefully documented account of how the money was spent on postage, shipping, newspaper and magazine subscriptions, printing of Scott’s less-marketable writings, “research” expenses, and buckets of peanut butter and other food for the visitors and itinerant workers who helped with farm and building projects. (In their later years the Nearings spent most Maine winters away on speaking tours or doing “research” for their books — and in the process became the sort of summer people they had railed against in Vermont.)
A book-and-lecture income of eighteen thousand dollars was impressive to me at a time when Keith and I were living on about three thousand dollars a year. The Nearings may not have pocketed the money, but those travel and business expenses added greatly to the “good” in their good life.
Because Keith and I didn’t give lectures to people who paid our travel expenses, we didn’t get to see as much of the world as the Nearings did — although our relatives in Ohio were generous with gas money when we visited them. Because we didn’t write and sell books, we couldn’t afford magazine and newspaper subscriptions like those that filled the Nearings’ mailbox — although I did get a free paper when I worked for the Bangor Daily News as a part-time community reporter. We didn’t have a business “research” account to cover phone bills, postage, car expenses, or trips to nonlecture locations all over the world. The people who helped us with our building projects were fed out of our own garden or with food we bought with our meager earnings.
I think Keith and I proved to ourselves that it is possible to live the homesteading part of the good life the way the Nearings recommended. But after a few years as their neighbors, we knew why our version of the “good life” didn’t match the one in their book.
Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life indisputably changed my life for the better. The book came along at a point when I needed assurance that a different way of living was not only possible, but attainable. Like most people, I took from the book what my soul said I needed and pretty much ignored the rest — at least for the time being.
The Nearings were the reason Keith and I became homesteaders. In the 1970s, Scott and Helen lauded our homesteading efforts and smoothed the way with encouraging words, warm housing that first winter, and paid part-time work at critical points. From homesteading I learned that the simple life may be uncluttered, but it is not simple, and that life itself only gets more complex the older one gets.
The magic of the Nearings was in the way they urged all of us to be who we knew ourselves to be, whatever that meant for us. Personally, they encouraged my writing and newspaper reporting. They taught me to question authority, even theirs.
As their neighbor, I learned that these two riveting writers and activists were exceptional, but at the same time real, people. I took to Helen more than to Scott, and told her that she put the “home” into “homesteading,” making Scott’s stark economic plan seem desirable. In the years after Scott’s death, the continuing flow of people to Forest Farm took its toll on Helen, who shouldered the burden as best she could. Only a remarkable woman like her would keep inspiring people when she would have preferred privacy and solitude.
And I understand how she might have wanted to protect and even enhance the reputation of the man to whom she had devoted much of her life. But she was not prepared for the unintended consequences of her and Scott’s embellishments, and she could not bring herself to correct the record. She left that to Ellen LaConte, her designated biographer, who took flak for correcting some of Helen’s omissions concerning Scott’s care and condition near the end of his life.
I expected, and have received, similar criticism for probing into other areas of the Nearings’ lives. But I think it is important for people who are contemplating a major life change based on the Nearing model to have as many facts as possible at their disposal. Having learned the hard way, I have more than a little sympathy for people who believe everything they read in a book and then go out and try to live their lives by it.
Parts of “The Good Life Revisited” are excerpted from Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life, by Jean Hay Bright. © 2003 by Jean Hay Bright. The material is used here by permission of BrightBerry Press (www.brightberry.com).
