REPORT FROM NEW ZEALAND

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Tim and Jos Vos left the Netherlands a few years back to escape the rat race there, found the same scene in urban New Zealand and left again . . . this time for a remote coastal homestead. The following report was originally written as a letter to a friend who passed it on to MOTHER, with Tim's blessing.

THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS® has arrived . . . all the back numbers. We haven't read every one of them yet, but those we have looked through were terrific. They came just when we made the jump and started living off God's good land.

I had been working for quite a while in a sawmill and logging camp in the forest to meet some expenses when we finally severed the last ties. Like a ship leaving port for a long voyage, we had stored enough honey, salt, coffee, oil and wheat to last us for a year. We comforted ourselves by saying, "As long as there's oil in the jug and flour in the pot, we'll survive." I must admit, though, that I still felt anxious and the responsibility weighed heavily on me.

Just then MOTHER arrived, and it was a fine, reassuring experience to read the contributions from other pioneers. Some topics were of immediate interest. I couldn't have done without the horseshoeing know-how, for instance, when we got our packhorse, and we found help in the magazine when we had all sorts of trouble with our chickens.

While we looked for a permanent home, I found a temporary job in a sawmill (where I also got loads of good building timber in all sizes, dirt cheap). We settled close by in a vacant farmhouse built by the last pioneer in this district, Mr. T. Hargreaves, who cleared the land out of the subtropical rain forest while he and his wife and child lived in tents on the beach.

In the beginning, and for most of the way, the farm's owner struggled along without power tools. Around us in the yard we could see the handmade implements: pit-sawn and split wood used for barns and fences, horseshoes, the horse-drawn plow rusted, the old dray rotted . . . but still there to show us how the homestead was cleared, roads and bridges built and swamps drained. We wondered and admired.

But there were also piles of liquor bottles (left by a later tenant?) that told the end of the story: first the introduction of mechanized, motorized equipment and electrical appliances, then the loans and financial burdens . . . and at last the attachment, gobbling up the land with the empty farmhouse, wrecked cars and bottles.

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