Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader's Story

I was drawn into this book by Tatelbaum's style. It's a thing of spare, unpretentious beauty, like a finely crafted Shaker meeting bench translated into words. Tatelbaum's book describes her two decades of experience as a homesteader in rural Maine. You don't have to be an arm chair back-to-the-lander to enjoy this book because the book goes so much deeper than a mere recounting of water fetched from a distant well or negotiating an unpaved road during "mud time." As a fellow Baby Boomer, I most appreciated Tatelbaum's unflinching description of her journey from idealistic hippie,("We live in a one-room cabin...built by hand in the woods. We eat from wooden bowls, drink from stoneware mugs, use chopsticks. Nothing metal, or plastic or china will ever touch our lips again.") to conflicted middle age, pondering the emotional and environmental costs of "selling out." Should Tatelbaum and her husband agree to hook up to Central Maine Power, now that the power lines are in view? Or continue using wood, kerosene and solar energy to run their homestead. Tatelbaum considers questions many members of our generation have forgotten in their stampede from the communes of our youth to the newest SUV, the bigger house, the higher salary. Thank you, Linda Tatelbaum for reminding me of the truly important questions, and that the answers are rarely black and white.

Linda Tatelbaum is a master at her craft. This should not be surprising, given that she is a professor of English at Colby College. Still, she imparts life to ordinary words, forming holistic images that invoke all the senses. It is easy to smell the freshly split wood and salivate over her home-made pickles. One can hear her footsteps in the snow as she struggles with heavy water jugs. One can even feel her aches and soreness and sadness as she stands sixteen feet underground at the bottom of a shallow well she has reclaimed, as she recalls the tragedy that wiped out the earlier homesteader who first dug the well. On one level, Carrying Water is indeed a homesteader's chronicle, a story told with passion, sometimes with humor, and sometimes with anger. The author tells of victory and defeat, jubilation and disappointment. Mostly though, there is a peacefulness that transcends the impracticality of, as she puts it, "living in this space age when all things are possible, living for just a moment of every day as if none of the modern world had ever happened." It's hard to imagine a clearer representation of her simple but far from easy lifestyle. On another level, though, the lifestyle simplicity itself generates a complexity in her life, as "alternative lifestyles provoke controversy." She describes the changes she and her husband had to make in their routines and their environment when they had a baby, and the trade-offs she has to make to live her professional life fully and responsibly while homesteading. Finally, the author has some strong opinions, as one might expect. About trash disposal? Or the need for a new highway to by-pass a town? Anyone who has participated in town debates about such things will identify and enjoy Professor Tatelbaum's perspectives. Many readers, too, would support her position on speculative land development. Her resistance emerges in her maybe not so tongue-in-cheek proposal for a new ordinance. It would require, among other things, that before the developer may re-sell land, he must live on it for a year, grow or gather his own food from the site, serve on a town committee, and attend and clean up after every bean supper! Carrying Water As A Way Of Life is an elegant, easy read that celebrates a hard but satisfying way of being.

This was a much more readable book than the Nearings', and, unlike Thoreau, Linda and her family have stayed on their land. The trasformation from idealistic twenty-something to realistic (TV-owning) forty-something is an asset to this book. I would like to believe that those who start out as simply as Linda can remain so, with minimal "worldly" intrusions, but, we can't hide from the world, we must contribute. There absolutely is a readership for your work, Linda, and a community supporting the philosophy of subsistence and low-impact living.