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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] An Experiment in Country Living by Peter Goodchild
  • Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:23:33 -0600


An Experiment in Country Living
by Peter Goodchild 01 August 2010
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/668/1/

One thing my wife and I learned from seven years in rural Ontario is that
country living doesn't always mean freedom from money issues, and of all our
expenses the greatest and most persistent was the car. People who live in the
country nowadays are actually more hooked on automobiles than those who live
in the city, since there are long miles of highway between one's home and
other destinations such as shops or a job. In fact, one of the biggest
problems of the truly poor in the countryside is that they may have no means
of getting to a job even if it is offered to them. For everyone, the obvious
alternative to the automobile would be horses, but how can horses survive at
the present time, with the roads dominated by high-speed cars and trucks?

Besides the car, our big costs were property taxes and house renovations. It
was a good thing we had paid cash for the house and land, because if we had
been paying off a mortgage we would really have had trouble making ends meet.
I should add that at first we were not as frugal as we might have been: we
had a fair amount of money because we had sold our house in Toronto, but
because we had so much money we spent it too freely.

We did not expect money making to be the principal issue in country living,
but such was the case. Although we ran a one-acre market garden as
efficiently as possible, a profit always seemed to elude us. As time went by,
we began to realize that there were not many people in the area who had
financial security. Most of the people we met were living either on pensions
or on welfare, or something similar. The pensioners were sometimes elderly
poor people living on nothing but payments from the government. There were
only a few people living on company pensions, which provided a higher
standard of living. One group of people who had a reasonable income were the
few trades people that the area could support - carpenters, plumbers,
mechanics, and so on. The other large segment of the population was the
cottagers, the Torontonians, who were likely to show up only in the summer,
but these people didn't have to deal with the problem of earning a local
income.

Most people under retirement age, however, were barely surviving, partly
because the entire area pretty well closed down during the winter. The main
industry was "tourism," which is sometimes little more than a euphemism for
"poverty."

My suggestions that people rediscover their rural origins didn't get very
far. The young disliked country living and were rather ashamed of it. The
middle-aged took the attitude, not that "anything worth doing is worth doing
well," but that it is worth doing only with heavy machinery. I remember
seeing two large brand-new trucks going down the road one day with a grand
total of four people, merely to eat at a local restaurant -- not a big crime,
just a vignette. The most knowledgeable people were in their eighties, but
the following generations wanted to be part of what they considered the
modern world: they were willing slaves to the urban economy that was slowly
killing them.

After we bought the property, we seemed to find more and more work that
needed to be done to make the place livable, and most of it had to be done
before the approach of the first winter. We knew very little ourselves about
renovations, and at the same time we had very few names to work with, so we
ended up hiring people without getting multiple estimates for the work to be
done. As a result, we were sometimes charged too much money, but we were
unable to realize that fact until much later.

I would even say that some of those "renovations" should have been left
undone. For example, we spent a good deal of money for eaves troughs to be
installed around the metal roof of our mobile home, not realizing that a
slippery metal roof would result in avalanches of melting snow in the spring,
and that those avalanches would simply tear the eaves troughs away.

On the positive side, we finally learned many things about house repair and
renovation. In particular we learned how to do a number of carpentry tasks. I
even did a bit of plumbing, at least to the extent of replacing old faucets.
Electricity, however, remained for me a rather esoteric subject, probably
because I found it both dangerous and expensive. Electricity was also
unreliable, and violent summer storms would often mean looking for candles
and matches.

We learned a great deal about heating with wood. We not only managed to
operate a wood stove properly, but we gradually went through the entire
process of cutting down trees, sawing them into lengths, splitting the
pieces, stacking and storing them, and so on. I became quite adept at using a
chain saw, although I found that using such a machine on a long-term basis
requires a good knowledge of maintenance, including sharpening the chain,
cleaning the entire machine, and recognizing common problems.

As a long-term "survival skill," operating a chain saw is rather dubious, of
course. How will people operate such things as the world's petroleum runs
out? Oil production in 2030 will be less than half that of the year 2000. In
any case, according to at least one expert on the subject, if you calculate
the money required to operate a chain saw, and the time involved in
maintaining the equipment, you may find that you're better off using a simple
bow saw.

I think using a bow saw to put together a winter's supply of firewood might
require many long weeks of labor, but there may be some sense to the theory.
Certainly modern bow saws are quite good. The blades are of hardened steel,
which means they cannot be re-sharpened and must be discarded eventually, but
they last a long time, and buying a lifetime's supply of such blades would be
easy enough.

I even bought some antique timber saws, those gigantic devices, often several
feet long, that our ancestors used for dealing with logs. I learned how to
set the teeth (bend them to certain angles), using tools that I had made
myself, and how to sharpen them properly. I soon concluded that I didn't have
the ancestral muscles for such saws. Part of the problem, however, may have
been that even after I had done my best to polish the steel surfaces they
were not really smooth, since rust had caused pitting. Much later I heard
that such timber saws can be bought brand new, and that a new timber saw will
cut firewood much more quickly than a bow saw.

We learned that there are many other ways of dealing with firewood and
heating problems. A smaller house needs less firewood, and so does one with
fewer and smaller windows. Good insulation is an enormous help. Another trick
from the old days is to use less firewood by sealing off unnecessary rooms in
winter. For similar reasons, the stove must be located in the room that will
be used the most in the daytime.

We learned many things about vegetable gardening that we didn't know before,
although the locals were not of much help, since they lived mainly on
supermarket food. We discovered the importance of starting with good soil
(which we didn't have), and the importance of keeping an eye on dates and on
weather. We learned to identify and defeat many species of harmful insects.
We also tried a great many crops and developed a good idea of what crops work
in that area and which ones don't.

We gained a good knowledge of grains. Corn is by far the best grain to grow,
since the yield per unit of land is quite high, and it requires very little
in terms of equipment for growing, for harvesting, or for processing. By
"corn," however, I mean the older varieties once grown by the native people,
not modern corn, which is susceptible to insects and diseases. The other
grain that did well was rye, mainly because of the sandy soil.

Our brief experience with raising chickens was quite educational in two
senses. The first is that I learned something about the construction of
buildings with frames made of 2x4s, and as part of that learning experience I
did everything with non-electric tools except for the somewhat tedious task
of cutting chipboard.

I built the first chicken coop with a poured concrete-slab foundation and a
"shed" roof (i.e. one slope rather than two), and the outside was made of
board-and-batten (vertical boards, with the intervening gaps covered by thin
strips). The roof was covered with roll roofing.

For the second coop, I deliberately used entirely different methods, partly
so that I could gain further experience. The foundation was of concrete piers
rather than a solid slab, the roof had two slopes (and hence two gables), and
the outside of the walls was covered with chipboard, which in turn was
covered with vinyl siding, all of it admittedly not very "traditional" but
perhaps "transitional." The roof was covered with the same material as the
first coop, but in the form of shingles rather than rolls.

For the most part, I preferred what I did on the second coop, although I now
think concrete piers are very difficult to build and position neatly without
preformed molds and pre-mixed concrete.

The second and rather odd thing that we learned, or seem to have learned,
about chickens is that our long hours of acquiring an education in modern
poultry-raising may have taken us somewhat in the wrong direction. Just as we
were closing down our entire chicken operation, I began reading a few
articles which seemed to indicate that from a survivalist perspective it
would be better to get away from modern methods. These methods are designed
to maximize production of either eggs or meat.

But our chickens -- eventually totaling fifty -- were living mainly on
purchased feed, which was expensive to buy and transport, and out of that
feed they ate only the types of grain they liked, and simply left the rest to
rot. They were also living in highly fortified buildings with well-fenced
yards, all of which protected them from foxes, raccoons, and weasels, but
their isolated existence meant they were not roaming the fields in search of
vegetation and insects which could have provided free food.

It may well be the case that a better approach to poultry may be a
less-modern one. The chickens raised in more-primitive cultures, in other
words, may be relatively unproductive but might have greater resistance to
diseases and predators, and the actual varieties of chickens worth
considering may be smaller and hardier birds that are closer to the ancestral
types.

Perhaps above all, we learned that it is possible to live with some
independence from modern civilization. On the four acres that were ours by
law, but in reality belonged more to Nature, the seasons followed one
another, even if we were sometimes too busy to notice. In spring the river
roared and bellowed and foamed along its banks, and in winter that same river
was a tranquil study in black and white. None of that will ever change. But
there are other things will certainly change one day: the cars will be gone,
and so will the money economy.

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American
Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus
[at] live.com.

Peter Goodchild's previous articles on Culture Change are
The Century of Famine
Post-Peak Economics
Food and Population
Depletion of Key Resources: Facts at Your Fingertips
When the Lights Go Out
Crime in the Post-Peak World
How Much Land Do We Need?
Putting Meat on the Table
Laborers Before Sunrise
The End of Electricity
Growing Your Own Grains
After the Age of Exuberance.






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