The New Pioneers
(Page 4 of 8)
September/October 1971
By David Gumpert
As the sun breaks through the early morning fog that hangs over the trees and raises the temperature about 10 degrees to nearly 70, Eliot soon finds himself soaked in sweat and removes his sweater. By the time he's ready to come in for breakfast at 7:30 a.m. he has already removed four stumps. He hopes to be able to plant a quarter of an acre of the field in corn this summer.
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Inside the house, Sue, dressed in baggy brown work pants and a red and white striped pullover blouse, is also busy. She has already started the wood-burning stove, using paper and some small twigs to get it going, and now she's grinding wheat into flour using a cast-iron hand grinder. Later she will use the flour to make chapatis, an unleavened bread that resembles the Mexican tortilla in appearance.
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Does she miss any of the modern kitchen conveniences most women her age long for? Not at all, she says. "I just thoroughly enjoy doing things by hand," she says. "Like grinding wheat. I'd much rather grind it by hand than use an e lectric grinder or blender."
Besides, Sue contends, her kitchen has its own versions of many modern conveniences. For instance, she can regulate the heat on her stove and oven according to the type of wood she uses. For moderate temperatures she uses softer wood like spruce or birch and for high temperatures she uses apple or cherry wood.
The house, although it consists of only one room, is divided into four areas— the kitchen with the wood-burning stove and two counters with storage shelves above and below; a dining area with a picnic-style table and the wood stumps for chairs around it; a living room area with two benches, built into the wall and covered with thin red mats, that serve as couches and as the lids of storage areas; and a sleeping area consisting of a large double bed built into the wall about five feet off the floor to take advantage of the rising heat in winter. Two-year-old Melissa sleeps in a corner of the bed. The only obvious signs of contemporary life are the books, many of them on organic farming, that fill the bookshelves built into one wall. There is also an old pedal-operated sewing machine. The toilet is an outhouse about 50 feet from the house.
After starting the stove and grinding the wheat, Sue heads out back to a small fenced corral to milk one of the Colemans' three goats (the other two, daughters of the oldest goat, are too young to give milk as yet). The first month or so after Sue started milking the goat, which must be milked twice a day her arms and hands were sore, she says. "But they say you develop milker's hands after a while," she observes.
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