Subject: Re: [Homestead] Those who move to the land
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 08:27:06 -0700
Here is the rest of Chapter Four from my book:
Boomer burnouts/urban refugees
Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal.
We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other.
The conditions are met, if we keep our independence,
yet do not lose our sympathy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
America’s baby-boomers have met middle age—and they are not ecstatic
about the introduction, never mind the relationship. Boomer burnouts
are rejecting corporate ladders and choosing fruit-picking ladders.
They’re talking health, longevity, ecology, sustainability. They’re
reconsidering family, community, safety, security, the purpose of
life. Many of the 76 million boomers have boarded the wagon train
leaving metropolis for the boondocks.
Urban refugees are moving to the country as well as away from the
city. Often unequipped with country skills, many move to fringe areas
and small towns rather than real country. In the aftermath of mass
layoffs many have redefined their work ethic. Working to live is
accepted—living to work is passé.
This group’s collective profile is: married, above-average education,
affluent, zero-to-two children, homeowner, long-distance commuter, 60-
hour workweeks, fantasizer of better quality life with more time to
spend with family. Those couples who have ever thought, “We just had
sex, so it must be Saturday,” may fit into this group.
Concerned parents
Plummeting academic standards and achievements, schoolyard drug
dealers, guns, graffiti and hoodlumism pervade all but the top city
schools. Concerned parents are homeschooling or moving to carefully
selected rural school districts with high standards. The introduction
to rural school discipline can be shocking to ex-city kids accustomed
to rowdy classrooms.
If you fit into this category, be aware that many rural school
boards have budget challenges as serious as their city counterparts.
Also, not all country communities place a premium on education.
Identify several areas you like, then contact school principals with
questions regarding class sizes, curriculum, gifted and special
education programs, percentage of dropouts and percentage of graduates
who go on to college. Query county clerks on voter response to school
bonds and taxes. Shorten your list, then visit schools and observe the
attitudes of teachers and students. Don’t be put off by modest
physical facilities; although few one-room schools still exist, they
often do a superior job of educating up to high school level. No wonder
—by the time students reach the eighth grade, they’ve already heard
the material seven times!
Environmentalists
Seventy-six percent of all Americans
describe themselves as environmentalists.
There is precious little else
about which we so thoroughly agree.
Joel Garreau
Edge City
Conservationists, ecologists, environmentalists, Greens—however we
label ourselves—constitute the surging swell of citizens who
understand that Spaceship Earth is suffering from bad management. We
are informed people who believe in taking greater responsibility for
our conduct, who understand that we are in fact “all in this together.”
Environmentalists cite cities as inefficient and wasteful of energy
resources, generators of greenhouse gasses, acid rain, toxic waste and
enormous accumulations of garbage. Some stay in the city to effect
change from within. Many move to the country to lead simpler lives in
tune with natural laws.
This group has the greatest age spread, the highest idealism and
perhaps the greatest potential for rural life disaster. If you
identify most strongly with this group, I recommend you spend
substantial time in your chosen area before buying. Rent or caretake
for a year. Learn country skills. Live with farm families, perhaps
with alternative communities. And do not expect to change the
attitudes of the natives. Show beliefs by actions, not words. You will
find similar souls who have preceded you.
Retirees and cashing outers
Once the gold encircles the wrist (what—they don’t do that anymore?)
and the long-dreamed-about check appears in the mailbox, there is the
challenge of what to do between naps. There is also the freedom to
live wherever that check will cover expenses. The usual scenario is to
sell the city house for big bucks, buy a country cottage for a third
as much, then fish, golf, garden and entertain city friends who come
to vacation rent-free. Today, many retirees are breaking the Sunbelt
syndrome and moving to the so-called Cloudbelt—places of spectacular
scenery with moderate-to-cold winters where they find low prices and
taxes, no crowding and satisfying lifestyles.
Retirement destinations are no longer limited to the popular stereotypes
of Florida and the Southwest. Widespread in-migration has occurred
in the Ozarks, the New England coast, the southern Blue Ridge, the
Texas Hill Country, the Puget Sound area, the Upper Great Lakes,
the Sierra Nevada foothills, western Oregon, east Texas,
and the Tidewater areas of Maryland and Virginia.
All of these locations involve dispersed settlement,
and not merely aggregations of people in towns.
Calvin Beale
Cashing outers was coined by Faith Popcorn, who wrote that cashing out
“is a dream as old as America itself: give me a piece of land to call
my own, a little town where everyone knows my name. It’s a dream we
are dreaming with a new heart-and-gut-felt urgency. More than the
romance of the country, it’s a promise of safety, of comfort, and of
old-fashioned values.”
Cashing outers buy or create bed-and-breakfast inns, ink small-town
newspapers, mix goat-milk ice cream, raise sheep and weave wool
products, operate fishing resorts, throw pottery, craft furniture,
consult. They often work harder than they did for the corporate cats,
but they don’t commute, they don't wear suits, they don’t lug
briefcases, and they call their own shots.
Survivalists
So-called survivalists (aren’t we all?) deserve better press. While a
few seem to suffer from a Rambo complex, most are level-headed
citizens, many are sincere passivists. What all share is a fear that
senseless crime, riots, bombings and the fragility of urban food and
utility systems are precursors to chaos—and that when city systems
collapse there will be a mob exodus to the countryside. Alvin Toffler
wrote in Future Shock that “Great cities are paralyzed by strikes,
power failures, riots.” The New York garbage collectors’ strike, the
1965 Watts riots, the 1992 L.A. riots, the 1994 L.A. earthquake, and
the Blizzard of ’96 were examples of near paralysis that illustrated
the dependence and vulnerability of city dwellers when systems break
down. It is at such times that the social condition of a place is
magnified and clarified. In the first 30 minutes of the 1977 New York
power blackout, looters had stolen $150 million in goods.
A dramatic example of a national paralysis began November 24, 1995, in
France with a strike by civil servants. Railroad workers, mass-transit
workers, mail sorters and utilities workers nearly shut down the
country for a week. Cities were choked with traffic jams and millions
of people were forced to walk, bicycle or hitchhike to work. The
economic cost was hundreds of millions of dollars per day (Time,
12-11-95).
Survivalists buy land far from highways, strive for self-sufficiency,
often homeschool. The more militant arm themselves heavily, but they
usually make peaceful neighbors. Their complaints typically focus on
federal and state government, not on locally-elected officials.
In addition to one or more of the above you may find yourself labeled
urban dropout, urban flighter, rat race escapee, yupneck, or new
American pioneer. The diversity of labels shows that the wagon train
is composed of diverse, unique types. The common quest is high-quality
life. Welcome aboard.
Pop quiz
So now, do you know who you are? Did you quickly identify with one of
the above groups or, more likely, did you find something of yourself
in two or more? That’s fine, of course. You pass. What this chapter is
about is getting you thinking about your basic and vital motivations,
your needs and your wants.
Final thought
Country living is conducive to fresh thinking about values. Donald
McCaig, in An American Homeplace, quotes Scott Nearing: “The only
thing more cowardly than a million dollars is two million dollars.”
Nearing lived his words: he and wife Helen refused inheritances and
when they left Vermont for less-crowded Maine they sold their
homestead for only the value of the cash and labor they had invested
in it, one-fourth of its market value. That says a lot for who they were