Revisiting the Good Life
The principles that guided legendary homesteaders Helen and Scott Nearing still resonate today.
October/November 2008
By Roger Doiron
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The late Helen Nearing, socializing with visitors in her Forest Farm food gardens.
LYNN KARLIN
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The phrase “the good life” conjures up different things for different people. For some, it’s about possessing sufficient material wealth to have and do what you want, whenever you want. For others, it’s about the spiritual riches that come with living in harmony with one’s values and natural surroundings. Others see it as a careful balancing act between the two.
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My own search for the good life led me to The Good Life, the classic book by Helen and Scott Nearing that was first published in 1954 and expanded upon in 1979. I discovered the Nearings about a decade ago. I was in my early 30s and looking for a lifestyle that would allow me to live closer to the Earth and soil, literally. I was living in a sixth floor apartment in Brussels, Belgium, more than 3,000 miles from my Maine homeland.
The Good Life recounts how the Nearings escaped the urban jungle during the Great Depression to create a more meaningful, self-sufficient life in the country, initially in Vermont and ultimately at their Forest Farm homestead in Harborside, Maine. Reading about their life’s journey helped put me on a path of self-discovery that would take me back to Maine to establish a homestead of my own and ground me, literally and figuratively.
This year offers an opportunity for taking stock of the good life — the Nearings’ version of it and my own. It’s the 25th anniversary of Scott Nearing’s death and the 10th anniversary of the founding of The Good Life Center, the nonprofit formed to perpetuate the Nearings’ philosophies and life ways.
To understand the lasting nature of the Nearings’ work, it helps to travel to their Forest Farm yourself, as I did last August with my family. The pretext for my trip was a talk I was giving at the Center’s public Monday Night Meetings series, a community tradition started by the Nearings.
The first thing one notices upon arriving at Forest Farm is the rugged, natural beauty of the setting. As its name suggests, Harborside is a small coastal community located on Cape Rosier, a 10-square-mile peninsula jutting into Penobscot Bay.
Finding a Homestead
The Nearings had three criteria in choosing their homestead site: arable soil, water views and isolation. They weren’t antisocial but, rather, anti-modern-society. Living in relative isolation allowed them to build and test their self-sufficient household model free from modern distractions.
My criteria for establishing a homestead resembled the Nearings’, but differed in a significant way. I, too, sought a simpler, more natural life with nearby ocean views and fertile soils. For a while, my wife and I considered buying seven isolated acres, imagining the outdoor adventures it would offer our boys. We opted instead to embrace society rather than flee it, buying a house in Scarborough, Maine’s fastest growing community with a population of 20,000. Socially, moving to Scarborough allowed us to build a stronger relationship with my parents, who still live there. My wife and I felt it was important for the emotional grounding of our children to have this close connection. Our three boys now live within walking distance of their grandparents, a rarity in America today.
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