HELEN NEARING

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HN: Scott just didn't want to go into the real-estate business. We had what we needed and lots of money would have complicated things and distracted us. Eliot gardened with Scott for two years and he still has a flourishing home there. He's not only gardening for himself and for his own family, but he's doing experiments with growing hardy winter plants.

Other young kids have turned up and were forlorn and needed land, and I said, "Well, look, have some. Okay with me." And some of them are congenial, and some of them are not. But they're about six or seven different parcels of land up there inhabited by young couples.

MEN: I guess that begs another question and that is when I read your new book, Loving and Leaving the Good Life, I was both happy and sad tit the same time. The story is continuously inspirational, but I felt as if the dream you describe has changed dramatically and the younger generation has the responsibility for finding a new one.

HN: Yes, for young couples it's become very difficult. They often come up [to the farm I and say, "Is there any land around here for sale?" I have to say no, and that even if it were, it would be at an incredible price. You'll have to go north and away from the ocean, I say, and up toward Canada, and even then you may have to buy with someone else. The future of homesteading may be a communal life, at least initially.

I don't envy the kids born or young nowadays. They can still be as happy as Scott and I were, but I also think we lived through a particularly good period. And Scott may have lived through even a better period than I because he always felt the world was different at the turn of the century, and that the First World War changed it. Well, I was just in my early teens during the First World War.

MEN: How did he say the First World War changed the world?

HN: He said it befouled the world and made people more criminally minded. Guns appeared and enemies appeared in hugely increased numbers and national boundaries solidified. He had high hopes for the United States and the world before the war erupted, and in that kind of a world he might have played a major part. The war came along, and changed him, and every nation.

So we went on to our garden quietly, and the political movement left him pretty well alone. During the Second World War, they thought, well, he's an old man, he's spent his arrow, and even McCarthy didn't bother about him. Or maybe they didn't want to stir him up because he was a fiery proponent, and it was easier to leave him alone. You should read his trial; it's condensed in one of his books.

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