Living the Good Life

Russet tending our garden

Living the Good Life

“What a wonderful life” a time traveler unfamiliar with our world might exclaim, seeing me tilling my garden on a sunny spring day, as robins peck for worms. But we all know it isn’t.

Like the rest of us, I’m sequestered at home, sheltering in place, because of the Coronavirus pandemic – which has already killed in 9 weeks, almost as many Americans as the entire Vietnam war. I’m sheltering here alone because my partner in crime, Russet, has been in California for the last two months and will be there for the foreseeable future, caring for her son who has developed a life-threatening condition.

I feel like one of the characters in Nevil Shute’s novel, On the Beach, who might appear, at first glance, to be blissfully happy, taking an evening stroll down a breathtaking beach in Australia. But, once again, things aren’t always as they appear.

The protagonists in Shute’s book aren’t thrilled vacationers, but scared souls looking inward, mulling their mortality, as they await the arrival of a deadly radiation cloud circling toward them from a nuclear war on the other side of the world.

Like them, I mull my mortality. And, in the process, find myself reviewing my past.

The soil I am tilling today, I know intimately.  I built my house here on this 21 acres in the 1970s, part of the Sixties back-to-the-land movement. That was a time, like now, with intense polarization brought about by the endlessly festering Vietnam War, coupled with an explosive cultural war between establishment figures and the counterculture about what we should believe and how we should live. 

The back-to-the-land movement wanted to escape that political turmoil and the cookie-cutter, suburban malaise of the 1950s. Personally, I was worn out for being both a participant and protester in the Vietnam war. Parts of the country were an environmental disaster zone with major cities made toxic by thick smog and rivers so polluted they caught fire. 

I was a disenchanted graduate sociology student, chafing at a department that valued statistics more than people. I was sick of ingesting abstract theories in my cubicle and craved the here-and-now reality of the real, physical world. 

Following counterculture guru and farmer Gene Logsdon, I saw success in terms of the independence that comes from “how much food, clothing, shelter, and contentment I could produce for myself rather than how much I could buy.”

I was a perfect recruit for the back-to-the-land movement, inspired by “Living the Good Life,” by Scott and Helen Nearing;  they had quit their professional jobs in NYC and moved to Vermont to live a sustainable life, building a simple house from rocks found on their property and growing their own food.

My mentor in the garden was J. I. Rodale, a major advocate of organic gardening in the sixties and rightfully considered to be the godfather of the locavore movement. He despised industrial agriculture with its reliance on mono-crops and pesticides.  His motto was, “we must go back to nature, if we wish to live long.”

And, I can’t leave out Steward Brand, visionary and creator of “The Whole Earth Catalog.,” a counterculture magazine and product catalog, that covered topics like self-sufficiency, ecology, and learning how to do things yourself. But, his primary focus was on “access to tools,” for which he had a broad definition, including clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds…anything that promoted independence.

Brand was intent on building a more ethical and sustainable world. He did not sell any of the products he listed, only simply listing the vendor’s information, along with a review of the product. 

But that altruistic 1960s ethic, as with other positive aspects of the 1960s,  soon went the way of the passenger pigeon. By the 1980s, a new mantra ruled the day, attributed to Malcolm Forbes: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

This new transactional model soon spawned Amazon. In a very distorted sense, this internet supplier resembles the Whole Earth Catalog. But rather than promoting sustainability and empowering local businesses, Amazon encourages over-consumption and creates value by pitting one supplier against another in a race to the bottom. The ultimate winner is the owner, Jeff Bezos, who is now the richest man in the world – undeniably the guy with the most toys.

Pondering the state of the world, waiting for my peas to come up, I have to question society’s judgment that our sixties generation were  self-indulgent and self-absorbed losers. 

Just imagine, if our values had triumphed over materialism and corporate greed, there would be no climate crisis today – and possibly no pandemic. We would all be having fun together. What a wonderful life!

Just imagine.

xxx