HELEN NEARING

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MEN: You've learned so much. Masonry, carpentry, farming, maple sugaring. Did the necessary skills come quickly at the homestead?

HN: No. But we learned every day what we needed to, starting small. Our first house in Vermont was bought already built, but we finished it and later built a small addition, which was our first venture at building with stone. Over time ...many years and lots of mistakes, we learned a great deal. And when we were in Vermont, our neighbors were very knowledgeable. They'd lived there for fifty years before we turned up. We were upstarts. One in particular, Jack Lightfoot, a good old Britisher, was a great source of information on farming and such. I remember one day he was calling to us from maybe a quarter of a mile away, yelling, yelling, yelling across the field that Roosevelt was dead. We had no radio or phone and wouldn't have known otherwise. Our long-distance calling was across to the neighbors. I remember that after Scott died, Jack called me and said "I miss that old bugger."

I was sorry to leave Vermont. We loved the hills, and I still like the mountains more than the ocean. You get a lot of damp weather here, a lot of humid weather. You pay for living by the ocean. I like the mountains better.

MEN: Do you feel, as if your books, such as Living the Good Life, helped people find a different way of living?

HN: To my surprise I find out daily that that is the case. We didn't realize that we were doing anything for anybody else except living decently ourselves, and it certainly has rebounded and it certainly has helped a lot of people. And I thought that after Scott left, it would inevitably calm down, that life would be simpler. But it still goes on, and I'm daily, weekly, surprised at the people who still are influenced, who arrive by the busloads.

MEN: People are still drawn to the farm?

HN: Absolutely.

MEN: Have their questions changed over the years?

HN: They have. People are more ready to go and do it themselves now, more serious about making the transition. They used to be just interested theoretically, but now they're armed with more practical questions on how to mix concrete, how to build a house, how to garden, how to grow vegetables, and a hundred other things. And they know the work involved. Before they didn't realize how much work was involved in a homestead, or if they did, they'd prefer their time in a hammock.

But we didn't do it with that in mind at all. It was just force majeure, we had to live that way, and it was natural to us, with no great effort. People say, "What a lot of hard work you've done in your life." Wasn't hard. It was interesting and worthwhile, and I'm glad we did it.

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