Treading Softly
by Sally Baker

Associate Professor of English Linda Tatelbaum moved to Maine in the late 1970s as a back-to-the-land idealist who wanted to live a simple life. She and her husband, Kalman Winer, bought a few acres in a town near the coast, parked their "funky pink trailer" in the middle, hired a local contractor to dig a hole and pour a foundation, imported some friends and built a one-room, passive solar house, sweating and swearing and making mistakes. They ate fresh vegetables from their garden and drew water from their spring. Tatelbaum canned their excess produce--enough for a year--using a Coleman stove. She stored the bounty in jars in the cellar. On October 16, 1977, Tatelbaum wrote in her journal: "I've been hard cider, fermenting, caught in a bottleneck. Hard cider, hard times. But today I feel uncorked, effervescent & free."[BOOK EXCERPT]
What Tatelbaum has learned in the subsequent decades is that, trite as it may sound, freedom really does have a price. In Carrying Water As a Way of Life (About Time Press, 1997), Tatelbaum writes of becoming a homesteader--and about the difficulties of sticking with that choice. The book, a collection of essays, tells stories that are broader than Tatelbaum's alone. It is about the imaginary Maine that attracted hundreds of homesteaders in the 1970s and the realities that sent many away again. It is about finite resources and seemingly infinite demand, about trailer parks and clearcutting, choked streams and video machines and little town variety stores that have died. It is about snowshoeing across a brilliant white field, cracking through an ice skin to dip a bucket in a spring, realizing that there is life abroad in winter's silence. It is sad, noble and beautifully written. It is a book to reread, one that teaches.
"The Rockland That Was," for instance, could stand for the ambivalence of the adoptive Mainers who, like Tatelbaum, know that by coming over the bridge from Portsmouth to Kittery to stay, they contributed to the changes Maine has seen in the latter part of this century. Tatelbaum describes Rockland in 1977 as a hard-working but quiet coastal town, "a town without pretense, a town without a single fancy restaurant or anyplace to buy the New York Times." You went to Rockland, she writes, to buy things like rubber boots or lumber or because you cut your hand sawing down a tree and needed stitches. "You came to Rockland, in short, because you needed it as much as it needed you, and you were in it together, for life."
Newcomers found they needed more from Rockland than Rockland had to offer, however. And they discovered that some of the hardscrabble Mainers around whom Down East lore arose preferred making money to being poor and quaint, preferred to sell land to developers and to take the cash and run if some New Yorker wanted to turn grandpa's hardware store into a boutique. Thoughtful newcomers like Tatelbaum stand back and wonder what they have wrought.
"I like to buzz into town and sit in a nice cafe with art on the walls," Tatelbaum writes of these latter days in Rockland, "I'd be lying if I said it was all romance, the old days, living on the land, kerosene lamps and woodstoves, hauling water and eating rhubarb or rutabagas each in its season, and coming to Rockland only to buy nails. . . . [But] I'm worried about our choices, all of ours, because a croissant is nice, but nails are necessary, nails hold things together. . . . I have trouble admitting that even though I arrived before `the boom' and brought my own compost in the back of a pickup truck, I am part of what transformed the sleepy midcoast of Maine forever."
Tatelbaum also is uneasy--but decidedly unapologetic--about the concessions she and Winer and their son have made to the modern world: jobs, cars, three rooms instead of one, computers, things made of plastic. Their electricity is "off the grid" (from photovoltaics, which were expensive enough to make anti-fossil-fuel-anti-nuclear-power Tatelbaum and Winer feel they'd put their money where their mouths were), and they still put by a year's worth of food from their garden. But, Tatelbaum writes, things have changed.
"[In 1983 we] build an addition with a bedroom for our son, a study for me. We install photovoltaics to power lights and a water pump. We put in a drain. We get a 12" black-and-white TV. Our friends are shocked. They are homesteaders, too, but they have long since put in power, washing machines, freezers, taken jobs in town, and they regret to see us change. We are the last `pure' homesteaders around. They want us to die for their sins."
But it isn't the Tatelbaum-Winers or the other homesteaders who die for "sin," it is the way of life they sought. There are house lots and dwellings on the lane where Tatelbaum lives, electric lines cross her turnoff, and she has neighbors--perfectly nice ones, too. But something has been lost. A homesteader's innocence, perhaps.
In the essay "The Language of Trees," Tatelbaum takes us on her most familiar walk, along a ridge near her home. She writes that she once felt herself kin to the birds and other fauna and even to the trees on the ridge. But with skidders and bulldozers in the woods, machinery that will alter the landscape forever, she sees things differently; she knows she is kin, most of all, to the humans who brought the machines. In a passage that draws tears, she describes what will happen when the trees are gone: the birds and animals that sustain themselves there will go; the topsoil will run down the ridge into the stream, making it unfit for the moose and beaver and others that depend on it for water. The land, as it is now, will die.
Tatelbaum writes: "I admit by now that I came here, too, adding my own human life sounds to the call of the whip-poor-will, woodcock and grouse. I swore to live an honest life, but I could have settled here even without that promise, and the whip-poor-will and I would be the only ones to say if I've been true to it. People have to live somewhere, and I am people, too. Once the trees are gone and the profit made, the land will still be here, FOR SALE, someplace to call home. . . . The land will still be here, but once the woods are gone, how will the new neighbors learn to speak the language of the trees? Who will teach them to plant again?"
Maybe the answer is that words, in a way, are seeds.