8. Getting by, getting out, and getting on
"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there," wrote Henry David Thoreau at the end of his 1854 book Walden. It was not too far a trek, in that Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond was just a few miles outside Concord, Massachusetts, which he often visited during his wilderness sabbatical. Likewise, the Prince Edward Island back-to-the-landers – many of whom lived within a half-hour’s drive of the provincial capital – were never truly separate from the broader world. And they did not claim or need to be. They were not so much escaping as experimenting, seeing whether living small, simply, and self-sufficiently would be as fulfilling in practice as it sounded in theory. And we must remember – especially when hearing the back-to-the-landers today, people in their 50s or 60s – that a great many were (like Thoreau) in their 20s at the time, and figuring out what to do with their lives. That is why we should avoid the temptation to judge the back-to-the-land movement simply by whether or not its practitioners stayed on the land, and with the same lifestyle. Some found what they were looking for in that life, some didn’t, and some found it the source of other opportunities. As Thoreau went on to say, "Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one."
David Sobers was perfectly content living a life of what he called "hedonic poverty," making due with very little and growing most of his own food, to the point that his food bill was less than $5 per month. He says,
We would have been quite happy to live with virtually nothing. We didn't mind not having electricity. We didn't mind having to pump our own water .... If we needed clothes we'd go to army surplus and get them for very little. We didn't mind. We didn't feel at all deprived at not having money, but we needed a little bit of money. We had to have money to pay our taxes. We had to buy some things, not very much, but in order to make that money we had to have a car - a vehicle that worked. But now as soon as you have a vehicle, that represents an enormous increase in expense. So once you have a vehicle then you have to support the vehicle.
As a result, Sobers took to doing something he had been interested in doing for some time: selling pianos. It was a bold move, given that he lived on a dirt road impassible half the year and would be showing the pianos by kerosene light. Since he had no phone, he advertised using a neighbour’s number, and had them take messages. "I would call people back and say 'Gosh, I'm going to be in Charlottetown tomorrow anyway, why don't I stop by and ... tell you a little about what we have? So pretty much I sold them out of a brochure." Amazingly, Sobers Music became a success, and he soon opened a store in Summerside, still thriving today. But David no longer runs it. He and his wife had never liked the Island winters, and, as a pianist, David found that the cold weather affected his joints. During a Florida vacation in the early 90s, they realized they weren’t obliged to return. Eventually, they resettled in New Mexico. "But it was with great reluctance that I would leave the Island," David says. "It was only the severity of the winters and health that caused it."
Whereas some like Sobers see circumstance as pulling them away from the back-to-the-land lifestyle, others walked away because it was not for them. Mark and Joyce Arnold found it ultimately tedious. "We were, more or less ... educated-kind of pseudo-intellectual city types that thought we could learn how to live sustainably and wanted to experiment with that. And after four or five years of discovering that when you plant a mixture of oats and barley, all things being equal, and the rains come, it grows and you get grain, the thrill kind of left." Mark Arnold took up a succession of jobs to make ends meet, including becoming a self-taught chimney sweep. (His advertisements promised "Cash or Barter", and he recalls being paid a roast of beef for one job, and giving the owner a chicken as change.) Within a few years, he had to tell his regular customers that he wouldn’t be back again because he was off to law school. The Arnolds live in Toronto now, and admit that things have changed a lot. Their house is worth $1.5 million, they own a Lexus. "We are backsliders, big time," Mark says with a laugh.
And then there are those who stayed, though not always with the lifestyle they had first envisioned. Symbolic of this might be Judith Merrill’s chicken coop, hauled onto her property but never cooping a single chicken. Instead, Judith and partner Steven ended up focusing on bees and woodworking. The couple, who had built their house on the very spot they got married, are divorced now, and she’s a Charlottetown-based massage therapist. Malcolm and Christine Stanley found their back-to-the-living existence supported by crafting, he as a potter, she a weaver. But Christine also was and remains a serious farmer: goats, ducks, chickens, and sheep. "You can see I’m obsessed with it," she says, "I love farming, and I’ll never give it up." Cef Pobjoy, and Marion Copleston and Tony Reddin are others still living the life, or variations of it.
But the times they are a changin’. Malcolm Stanley speaks of fellow back-to-the-lander Phil Corsi as "my guru, as far as living simply. I aspire to how he lives. I was just down there last night. I paid $5 for a...bag of salad stuff, but you get the conversation." On the one hand, his comment expresses a continuity about the back-to-the-land movement. It was about self-sufficiency but never just about self, it was also about meeting other interesting people with some similar interests; it was about the conversation. That conversation continues among and between back-to-the-landers, farmers, rural people, artisans, environmentalists, activists, and others on Prince Edward Island, and elsewhere. On the other hand, it’s hard to miss that the bag of salad stuff is now $5, David Sobers’ monthly food budget 30 years ago. We have organic produce in our supermarkets today, solar panels on our roofs, and even windmills dotting the landscape, and some small credit for this is due to back-to-the-landers’ individual experiments in self-sufficiency in the 1970s. Living the simple life has become a little simpler, and with that comes all the attendant benefits and drawbacks of joining the mainstream.
This is a history that is still being written. Over time, Morley Pinsent’s farm tucked into the woods of South Granville got power, running water, a septic system, and an oil furnace. Some of these amenities were to accommodate an increasingly-successful market garden, some to accommodate a growing family. Through Premier Angus MacLean, Morley got involved in the provincial Small Farms Program, and he worked there for many years. His kids eventually grew up and moved away, and his wife died nine years ago. After that, it could be said that Morley went back to back-to-the-land, making the farm once more largely self-sufficient. He has since moved to the relative urbanity of Rustico, but still speaks lovingly of the South Granville property that he bought for $120/acre, land that "afforded us a pretty incredible life for thirty plus years."
I end with Morley Pinsent because he has always struck me as the archetypal PEI back-to-the-lander, undoubtedly because he was the first I ever met. My family has owned a 90-acre farm in New Argyle since the 1820s, and when the back-to-the-landers were arriving on the Island in the 1970s, we were still working with horses, were still milking by hand, and had only just acquired indoor plumbing. My father arranged to buy a foal from Morley, and our family piled into the truck to bring it home. We went from sheer curiosity, wanting to meet these people-from-away who were living a 19th century existence, in the middle of nowhere, on purpose. I can recall driving down a narrow lane unguided by telephone poles, hay swishing at our truck’s undercarriage, into a wooded valley and finding, magically, a home. In my memory it was a meeting of the back-to-the-landers and the never-lefts (the children planning-to-leaves), and it was a real pleasure. And why not? We were two families not all that different, waving to each other while travelling in what we thought were opposite directions. ●