Living The Good Life With Helen And Scott Nearing

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Aesthetically, we enjoy the procession of the seasons. In any other part of the country we would have missed the perpetual surprises and delights to which New England weather treats its devotees.

Physically, we believe the changing weather cycle is good for health and adds a zest to life. We even enjoy the buffeting that comes with extreme winter cold.

Geographically, we found New England in closer contact with the Old World, from which we did not wish to sever connections.

We took our time, and during many months looked through the northeastern states. Finally we settled on Vermont. We liked the thickly forested hills which formed the Green Mountains. The valleys were cozy, the people unpretentious. Most of the state was open and wild, with little of the suburban or summer vacation atmosphere.

On a chill day in the autumn of 1932, we signed an agreement to buy a typical run-down farm, with a wooden house in poor repair, a good-sized barn with bad sills and a leaky roof, a Finnish bath—and 65 acres of land from which the timber had been cut. "Conveniences" consisted of a pump and a black iron sink in the kitchen and a shovel-out backhouse at one end of the woodshed. The place had a plenteous spring of excellent water, a meadow, a swamp or two, and some rough land facing south.

The first spring after we moved onto our little farm, the Hoard boys, who lived with their mother on the next place north of us, burned over their pastures. When they got down in our direction, we noted with alarm that their land ran to within about a dozen feet of our house and not much farther from our barn. The boys kept the fires under control that day, but the flames came too close for comfort.

We decided to ask Mercy Hoard to sell us a strip of land that would protect our house and barn from future pasture burnings. We found she wanted to move away and she then and there offered us her entire place with its down-at-the-heels buildings, its better-than-average sugarbush, and its decrepit sugarhouse.

The sugarbush, overgrown with softwood and thick with brush, was being sugared on shares by Floyd Hurd, his wife Zoe, and such of their eleven children as were big enough to lend a hand when sap began to run in the spring. We talked things over with Floyd and Zoe, and continued the original share arrangement.

Here was something on which we had not counted. 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, to provide us with all the syrup we could use through the year, plenty to give away to our friends and to sell. We realized that if we worked at sugaring ourselves, syrup would meet our basic cash requirements This gave us hopes for a solid economic foundation under our Vermont project.

The finding of a spot in Vermont which appealed to our reason, enthusiasms, and pocketbooks answered our first question: where to live the good life. The possibility of sugaring for a living answered the second question: how to finance the good life. Our next job was to determine the way in which the good life was to be lived.

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