Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life - Softcover

Legler, Gretchen

 
9781595349590: Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1595349596 ISBN 13: 9781595349590
Verlag: Trinity University Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“Woodsqueer” is sometimes used to describe the mindset of a person who has taken to the wild for an extended period of time. Gretchen Legler is no stranger to life away from the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-first century, which can often lead to a kind of stir-craziness. Woodsqueer chronicles her experiences intentionally focusing on not just making a living but making a life―in this case, an agrarian one more in tune with the earth on eighty acres in backwoods Maine.

Building a home with her partner, Ruth, on their farm means learning to live with solitude, endless trees, and the wild animals the couple come to welcome as family. Whether trying to outsmart their goats, calculating how much firewood they need for the winter, or bartering with neighbors for goods and services, they hone life skills brought with them (carpentry, tracking and hunting wild game) and other skills they learn along the way (animal husbandry, vegetable gardening, woodcutting).

Legler’s story is at times humbling and grueling, but it is also amusing. A homage to agrarian American life echoing the back-to-the-land movement popularized in the mid-twentieth century, Woodsqueer reminds us of the benefits of living close to the land. Legler unapologetically considers what we have lost in America, in less than a century―individually and collectively―as a result of our urban, mass-produced, technology-driven lifestyles.

Illustrated with rustic pen-and-ink illustrations, Woodsqueer shows the value of a solitary sojourn and both the pathway to and possibilities for making a sustainable, meaningful life on the land. The result, for Legler and her partner, is an evolution of their humanity as they become more physically, emotionally, and even spiritually connected to their land and each other in a complex ecosystem ruled by the changing seasons.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gretchen Legler is the author of On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica and All The Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook, which received two Pushcart Prizes (reissued by Trinity University Press). She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Maine at Farmington. She lives in Farmington with her partner, Ruth.

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The cabin sat in a dark glen along what was once the main trail to Mt. Blue, shaded by second growth Maine pines, hemlock, and birch, within easy ear-shot of a bubbling stream beside which hikers, led there by the old trail, once stopped for rest and water. The hiking trail up this popular mountain in Western Maine had long since been rerouted, however, and now the derelict log structure with its falling-in tar paper roof and leaf-strewn porch was hunkered down in the woods off of a short, rarely-trod spur path. My partner Ruth and I had recently moved to Maine from Alaska where we’d spent the first two years of our couple-hood, me teaching at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and Ruth working as an electrician and fire alarm technician. In Maine, we’d bought 80 acres of wooded land with a house and barn-like shed and had launched ourselves into growing our own food, something we’d both done before we met, but put our backs to now with renewed effort as a couple, hoping that our gardens would grow to provide most of our own food year-round. I suppose you could call it homesteading, but with none of the sod-busting and wilderness-taming of times gone by. In the 1970s it was called going “back to the land,” when waves of urban-born, politically-motivated young people moved to rural Maine, inspired by the likes of Scott and Helen Nearing and their book, Living The Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, which chronicled the couple’s move to rural Maine in 1932, and their 20 years of work restoring soil, gardening, farming, and engaging in political activism on behalf of the earth. Ruth and I were both fascinated by people who chose to live close to nature, so of course we couldn’t resist taking the detour off the hiking trail to look at the cabin. We were hiking with Ruth’s sister Elaine, Elaine’s husband Dave, their son Jake, and our 9-year-old summer guest Kyjon Wright from Manhattan, who was visiting us as part of the Fresh-Air Project, which has been bringing city kids to the woods for more than a hundred years. We all trooped off into the woods to take a closer look at what had once apparently been the Forest Ranger’s residence. What we saw was piles of dirt and leaves blown into the corners, spider webs hanging from the beams, a stained mattress that some squirrel had pulled apart for a warm winter nest, a torn shirt or pair of pants in a rotten pile, a rusted woodstove, a pot with a hole in it, a broken down bookshelf, a wooden chair with only two legs and some beer bottles and hamburger bags. Too bad. It seemed like a sweet place. Back on the trail, other hikers came sweating up behind us, exclaiming loudly, “I knew that old cabin was here somewhere.” The pair was an older woman and a younger one, perhaps mother and daughter. The older of the two, huffing and puffing, said that she had hiked this mountain many times in her younger days, and remembered the old trail going by the stream and right past the cabin door, so that you could have a chat with the ranger, if the ranger was in, that is, and not up at the rocky, wind-swept top of the 1,300-foot mountain sitting in the fire tower watching closely for puffs of smoke from the dark, rolling ranges of tree and rock that stretched for many miles in all directions. While we rested companionably beside the trial we all got to talking about living in the woods. Living in the woods, in a cabin such as the abandoned one behind us, was not hard to imagine. Sweep it out, seal the cracks, haul up a cot and a table, install a little gas cook stove, put in a pump that would bring the stream water right to your countertop, light up the woodstove, and viola! You would have a cozy place to live, a place away from the noise of cars and sirens, machines in general, and people. In my youth, I had stayed for summers in places like it while I worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Utah and Wyoming. All my life I’ve wanted to live in a cabin in the woods just like this one. I often felt I should have been born in a different time, when things were slower—when people traveled by horse, by boat and on foot, sent letters, went to bed when it got dark, grew their own food, kept diaries, danced and made music for entertainment. I looked longingly at the derelict cabin and said, “That would have been a nice place to be a Forest Ranger.” Ruth and I told the women hikers about a friend of ours who had lived for eight years in the woods, keeping watch from a fire tower at Allagash Lake in Maine’s Allagash Wilderness. This was one of the first things we learned about our friend, Marilyn, and something that impressed us deeply. Anyone who could do that, live in the woods alone for eight years, was a person with inner resources beyond those available to most of us. Maine is famously the home of what some have called “the last true hermit,” profiled in the popular book The Stranger in the Woods, by Michael Finkel, who writes about how 20-year-old Christopher Knight headed off into the woods in 1986, spending almost 30 years without talking to nearly a single other human being. He was raised in Albion, ME, by what sound like emotionally distant parents, who, by the way, never reported him missing. The woods Christopher built his camp in were not really the deep wilderness some news accounts make them out to be, but woods not much different from those surrounding mine and Ruth’s farm, where there are lots of places among the boulders and knolls one might set up a secret camp. News stories tell of Christopher’s “capture,” his rustic camp, how he survived the Maine winters, stealing propane canisters and other supplies from nearby seasonal cabins, including books. He cut his hair, took baths with melted snow, concealed his tracks, stockpiled so he didn’t have to travel in the winter and leave tell-tale footprints. Finally caught and charged with multiple petty burglaries, which had perplexed camp owners for many years, he was sentenced to time in jail, charged with a fine and served probation. In interviews he was hard pressed to offer motives for his actions, but did express remorse for stealing, and likened himself to famous contemplatives such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Merton, saying that solitude “bestowed” upon him increased perception. When he applied that perception to himself, his ego fell away. “I lost my identity,” he said. “There was no audience, no one to perform for. . . I was completely free.” I think he knew things, or came to know things, that many of us also long to know—namely, how to be at peace in this world, live in harmony with what is, consume only what we really need, and be satisfied with what we have, rather than long for what we don’t. For a while longer Ruth and I, our hiking companions and our trail mates debated the merits of such a life as one lived in the rustic cabin beside the stream, sipped our water and snacked on crackers and raisins. “Well,” one of the women said as we set off again, “I think I’d go a little soft in the head if it was me, you know. I’d go. . . what was it they used to call people who’d been in the woods too long?” She paused while she tried to remember, then suddenly recalled the word: “Woodsqueer!” I looked at Ruth and she at me, and we smiled at one another over those two lovely words joined together. I suppose there are people who think Ruth and I are a bit woodsqueer. We are those geeks you see in nylon, quick dry cargo shorts, the pockets full of binoculars, bird books, wildflower guides, and a pocket knife snooping through the woods. I always pack a raincoat, at least one waterbottle, a snack, a flashlight, some matches, a compass, a whistle, always have a hat and a bandana and toilet...

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Verlag
Trinity University Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1595349596
ISBN 13 
9781595349590
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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