July/August 1976
By the Mother Earth News editors
I have just two words of advice for anyone who wants to move to the country: "Do it!"
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We started "doin' it" on Independence Day, July 4, 1975 ... exactly one year before some of you will read this. Armed with ten issues of MOTHER, a few books on how to build log cabins, and a truckload of determination, the five of us—Mom (49), Linda (22), Gary (17), Erika (5), and myself (30)—made our move to the woods of New Hampshire.
Upon our arrival, we set up a campsite and then planted a small, late garden. (We didn't hold high expectations for the vegetable patch—our intent was just to see if anything would grow—but we did get a harvest.) For most of the summer, we felled and dressed logs for our long-dreamt-of cabin (although I confess we took off many a hot afternoon to go swimming in one of the numerous nearby lakes).
Since we were interested in salvaging any free building supplies that we could, we quickly made it our habit to keep an eye peeled—any time we drove anywhere in our van—for old wooden structures that we could get permission to tear down and salvage. As a result, it didn't take us long to scrounge enough usable wood to build a privy and a small shed to hold our belongings.
Just as we'd laid the first row of logs for the cabin in September, however, we really hit pay dirt. A family about 25 miles away advertised that they'd gladly give their three-story barn to anyone who would tear it apart and haul it away. We hadn't the vaguest idea how we could accomplish the feat, but said we'd do it nonetheless.
And we did! Despite the fact that I have a permanently disabled right arm, and despite the fact that none of us had had any previous experience at this sort of thing (except me ... I'd worked as a carpenter's helper for six months when I was 16 years old).
We purchased a hammer and two nail pullers, borrowed a pair of wrecking bars, made a hole in the barn's roof, climbed out on top of the structure ... and worked our way down! As Gary and I tore boards from the building, the womenfolk pulled and saved nails. The way things turned out, a good 75% of the wood was salvageable ... and the rest made great kindling.
