The Great Escape
So what is one to make of these two books? Who is the
better guide to making such a drastic change, to upending
the whole urban, timeclocked existence both of these
men imagine as the common American's lot in life? And
who is the better guide for the incremental, measured,
and more careful changes we all make in our lives when
we explore new interests – moves far less dramatic
than the pied-piper calls to nature and rural living
that these books depend on for their momentum and idealism?
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| Peace
River, Alberta, one of the sites in the Canadian
wilderness where Bradford and Vena Angier
once made their home |
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Both authors believe that getting away from it all
is both possible and the solution to many of modern
man's problems, and they aren't shy about it, opening
each book with a chapter or two on the high-stress,
existential morass they call urban life. And both Logsdon
and Angier are in the awkward position of having succeeded
not simply by living the life they claim anyone can
have, but paying for it with publishers' advances –
that is, by promoting said lifestyle and converting
others to it. Back-to-the-land advocates, one might
generally assume, write from an honest desire to help
others change their lives. But the fact remains that
any promises of financial success made by someone paid
not by that work, however hard they work at it, but
by promoting it are as tainted as the promises of any
fly-by-night pyramid scheme. These constraints are the
biggest challenge any professional advice-giver must
tackle: Did following their own advice lead to their
success, or giving it? And does their role as promoter
of the lifestyle compromise their continued involvement
in it, and thus erode their continued development as
experts? The ways lifestyle gurus respond to these questions
play a major part in their ability to communicate with
those not already committed to their plan of action.
And the more dramatic the changes they advocate, the
more their answers matter.
In one sense, it is surprising to discover that it
is Angier's text that more directly concerned with making
money; he is, after all, the same man who wrote five
books about foraging for nuts and berries. There is
a disconcerting get-rich-quick tone to some of his advice.
"Some ten million domestic rabbits are raised for meat
each year in the United States," he writes in his chapter
on raising rabbits and earthworms. "In addition, about
500,000 more rabbits are bred for medical and biological
purposes. And it's all so easy. How would you like a
piece of that action?" This is the kind of language
that makes discerning readers turn around and head back
out of the woods. It is one thing, after all, to be
fooled into believing something that everyone around
you also believes, and quite another to be fooled into
believing something entirely different.
Logsdon's Homesteading feels far better-informed
about its subjects, and more careful with its claims.
He discusses profit and money management, but keeps
his eyes trained on the traditional and innovative techniques
and the life habits and attitudes that make the life
he lives possible and deeply satisfying. Where Angier's
incomplete advice has the impatient air of a medicine-show
sales pitch, Logsdon is clearly doing all of this for
its own sake, and thinks you should, too.
Most striking, Logsdon closes with a brief chapter
entitled "What It's All About," in which he rallies
urban readers who may be put off by all of the hard
labor he has described in the previous eleven chapters:
You may conclude by now that the small organic homestead
is too much work and not enough play. That depends
on how you define the terms. For the homesteader,
work is what you must do for a living, but would rather
not. Everything else is play.
He goes on to offer a twenty-five point list of ways
people while away their free time in the country –
including the obvious hayrides, ice skating, hiking,
camping and whittling ("good for the soul") but also
gathering wild foods, "collecting old barbed wire,"
"hunting antique insulators along telephone lines,"
and "recording folksongs, folktales, and other forms
of rural, oral folklore" – as he did during his
graduate studies at the University of Indiana.
There is none of this thirst for rural living in One
Acre and Security; Angier's heart lies with the
hunter-gatherer, not the agriculturalist. Reading his
descriptions of gardening and livestock-raising techniques,
his explanations of hog-tethering and goat-milking stands,
it is hard not to see him as a prisoner on his own farm,
a restless frontiersman who, after cutting down the
last tree and planting his first garden at the edge
of civilization, watches with dismay as neighbors begin
to dot the landscape, and finds himself gazing out into
the woods beyond his fields, dreaming of a new wilderness
to explore.
His best chapters come at the beginning and end of
the book. He opens with what is undoubtedly the most
helpful, most authoritative, and most complete instruction
in the book, a guide to building a log cabin from start
to finish; after chapter upon chapter about money-making
with livestock, plants and invertebrates, he bolts back
into the forest without warning for two chapters closer
to his true allegiances, one on hiking and another retreading
his favorite ground, entitled "Eating at Nature's Banquet
Table." Here he frolics among the beach plum, snowberry
and sugar maple of the Canadian woods like Shakespeare's
Caliban describing his island home to his Italian guests
in The Tempest:
I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts;
Show thee a jay's nest and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee
To clustering filberts and sometimes I'll get thee
Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me?
Such pleasures are the loves of the hunter-gatherer,
the explorer, the survivalist. They are far different
from those of the gardener or pastoralist. And while
they can be seen as pleasures springing from the same
love of nature, they are, when it comes to decisions
about how one chooses to live one's life, largely incompatible.
Web Resources
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Logsdon | Bradford
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