Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] Simplified life ?

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Simplified life ?
  • Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:43:24 -0500


On Sep 26, 2008, at 9:21 AM, <eureka AT hctc.net> <eureka AT hctc.net> wrote:

We were talking last night about life without
electricity, and both decided we could make do, if we had
to, except for one thing: hauling water up from our
pioneer well would do us in.

My brother, Don and I recently visited the log cabin built for Starker Leopold, son of Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac and considered by many the father of natural resources conservation. The cabin is in Caney Mountain Refuge, about six miles from Heartwood. The cabin site is magnificent, atop huge rock formations and looking out over heavy woods and creek bottom. Starker was hired to be the first manager of the refuge, which is nearly eight thousand acres and where most notably the Missouri deer and turkey population was built up from very few animals in the forties.

We discovered the negative of living in such an inspiring site. A spring box was poured of concrete to collect water from a hillside seepage. To get to the spring box there is a long set of stone steps down from the cabin. Carrying water up for drinking and cooking would mean carrying buckets up those seventy or eighty steep steps, an elevation I would guesstimate about seventy feet.

My first impression was that this glorious place would be a total delight in which to live. Then the daily reality sunk in.

Nostalgia is nice. Electricity is better.

Who on this list would happily wash clothes by hand?





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page