Have Broadax-Will Time Travel

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UNDERHILL: Well, I should mention that all this was happening about the time THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS and The Whole Earth Catalog were getting started. After I graduated from college, I decided to do the whole back-to-the-land thing. I moved out to Colorado and lived at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain, which is the NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) site near Colorado Springs. It's literally a hollow mountain containing nine buildings and a barbershop. Supposedly, after Armageddon, all the people who had sheltered themselves inside could walk out. Later on, I moved south to El Rito, New Mexico, where Peter van Dresser lived. [EDITOR'S NOTE: For more information about van Dresser, a pioneer in self-sufficiency, refer to the Plowboy Interview in issue 35.]By the time I arrived there, van Dresser had just about had it with unprepared young couples coming out and saying, "Oh yes, where is this wonderful land I can homestead? How can I make it happen for me?" He was incredibly sick of naive young people moving out there expecting to emulate his lifestyle.

Of course, there were many popular reference sources, including MOTHER, that emphasized the rewards of homesteading and selfsufficiency, but they never said it was easy. It was really interesting to see the disparity between real life and the popular mythology that evolved from all that was happening about this time.

PLOWBOY: Do you think of your time spent during this period as a waste?

UNDERHILL: No, not at all. I learned a lot. I decided I wanted to live my life without power tools, which was wise, considering that I was living in an isolated spot, way up in the mountains, and there wasn't a power line for miles. We lived in a tipi for about two years, and then we built what was essentially a hogan it had several tiers; I suppose you'd call it a hybrid hogan—on the top of the mountain. During the whole time I lived out there I never used a chain saw, and still I heated with wood and built houses.

PLOWBOY: How did you do that?

UNDERHILL: Well, to be honest, I had a case of dynamite I used to blast the cellar holes.

PLOWBOY: Dynamite?

UNDERHILL: Explosives seem to suit my personality. Dynamite works really well, and it's loud. I suppose I considered it to be a kind of uncivil, but appropriate, technology.

Despite such occasional excesses, though, I learned that if I wanted to accomplish something, I had to do it with muscle power. Therefore, I became more and more interested in human-powered equipment, like pedal lathes and other nonelectric devices. But there are very few people who can muster the incredible dedication that kind of lifestyle requires.

PLOWBOY: You're making the experience sound negative.

UNDERHILL: But it wasn't! It was fun to be able to have that freedom, to be creative like that. I cherish the experience.

PLOWBOY: What happened to change your direction?

UNDERHILL: Well, Jane and I gave it a really good try. We built houses on mountaintops with solar showers. We kept bees and raised goats. Eventually, instead of asking myself, "What am I accomplishing here?" I started saying, "I'm not accomplishing much more than keeping myself fit!"

Also, as many of your readers know, it's difficult to earn a living under such circumstances. Some of our neighbors were able to make and sell handicrafts, but that's hard to do when you're homesteading full-time. Truthfully, the only people I knew who were making a really decent living in the mountains of New Mexico—people who weren't essentially living on welfare or food stamps—were those who were writing articles on homestead technology!

PLOWBOY: I take it that you decided to head back east at this point?

UNDERHILL: Right. I felt like a sellout when I did it, but I also felt I had to start getting ahead. I looked around at what I could do and eventually went into the graduate school of forestry at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, to get a master's degree. I had very supportive professors who encouraged me to pursue the relationships between people and resources; for me in forestry school, this translated to the history of people and trees. It's exactly what I'm doing now. I put together a multidisciplinary course of study, ranging from basic anthropology to history, engineering, and forestry.

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