This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  “I just need some space,” she said to Heidi and me.

  But there was no space. What we needed were boundaries, but we had done away with boundaries. Boundaries were uncool. And so we felt the loss of each other more deeply because we were all part of each other.

  “I was not born to be forced.” Mama copied these words from Thoreau into her journal, which had evolved from a daily log to a place for quotes from others, reminders to herself that she was not alone in her feelings, and in these musings she hoped to find the strength she sought. “I will breathe after my own fashion. . . . If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”

  When Mama retreated into the addition’s bedroom to rest, Heidi and I ran from the house, screen door slamming, to find engagement in the life of the farm and intrigues of summer.

  “Let’s go to the campground.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Once our minds were set on going somewhere, we never walked, we always ran. Running was as free and light as flying, and the more you ran, the longer it took for the heavy feeling to catch you. Heidi padded behind me with fast little steps as I ran down the sawdust paths of the garden, along the lawn in front of the farm stand, up the grassy lane, across the packed gravel of the parking lot, and into the campground that sloped down from the driveway in the woods between our homestead and Keith and Jean’s.

  At the top of the slope sat the log cabin and cook shack, below which platforms were scattered across the fern-covered ground like floors without houses, topped with the canvas peaks of tents. A laundry line hung between two trees, flapping with drying towels and clothes that never came entirely clean. At the far side sat a granite boulder, the size of a VW Bug almost, smoothed and dropped by an ancient glacier. Hanging from a tree was a rope that you pulled back to the rock; you then hopped onto the knot and swung over the clearing, nearly into the trees.

  Apprentices harvested what they needed from the garden to make their meals and got goat’s milk from Mama, digging little holes next to their tents to keep the perishables cool. “My goat’s milk keeps going sour and turning pink,” Kent complained over breakfast. “That’s one way to ruin granola!”

  “Morning, Franklin,” everyone chimed from the cook shack when they heard the sound of Frank blowing his nose from his hayfever, loud as a foghorn and regular as an alarm clock. Eventually Frank had enough teasing and moved his tent to the back field, where he could make his noises in peace. Trips to town were rare, but when the laundry situation got desperate, everyone piled into the back of a truck and drove the forty-five minutes to Ellsworth to use the Laundromat and indulge in mushroom and onion pizzas at the joint next door, or to Brooksville to dance to the Caribbean sounds of a steel band that sprang up on the steps of the post office that summer. After hearing the unique music in Trinidad, my friend Nigel’s dad, Carl, had bought a Pete Seeger songbook, built some pans from steel drums, and taught himself and friends to play.

  Much to my delight, a girl my age had arrived with her father, another bearded and long-haired apprentice named Michael. “I came to the cape with fifty dollars in my pocket and left with fifty dollars in my pocket,” Michael would say at the end of his visit. He’d heard about the Nearings when working for the photographer Lotte Jacobi, who put together The Good Life Album, a photo book on Helen and Scott. Recently discharged from the army, Michael was looking for a place to stay with his daughter for the summer, so Greg offered him the cabin on the hill behind his house.

  Heather joined me at the beaches where everyone swam after work, and naked and free, we spied for hours in the tide-pools and seaweeded rocks for starfish, sea urchins, and snails. We loved to collect the bleached discs of sand dollars and watch the gulls drop shells on the rocks to break open for dinner. The ancient-looking cormorants perched nearby with wings outstretched to dry in the sun, as S-necked egrets stalked fish in the shallows.

  At night, we hung out at the campground, ignoring calls for bedtime and listening to Frank and Michael improvise tunes around the campfire, the starlight exploding across the navy sky. Frank loved to play bluesy riffs and popular tunes of the time, folksongs and ballads. He and the others also improvised, with much amusement, lines to a song about the high—but often unreachable—values the Nearings were supposed to stand for, though didn’t always meet themselves. There was Helen’s weakness for ice cream, despite her belief that too much dairy and sugar were unhealthy, and the trips to warm places to escape the cold Maine winters, despite tough public personas.

  Each stanza detailing the various Nearing commandments was followed with the refrain: “Likely it’s not, with Helen and Scott.”

  It was rebellious humor of the best kind.

  “Milk and honey, milk and honey,” I’d always beg for my favorite song, referencing as it did Heidi’s and my beloved bedtime snack.

  “Michael row the boat ashore . . . ,” Frank hummed in reply, a tune he liked to play for Michael. “Halleluuujahhh”:

  Sister help to trim the sails,

  Hallelujah.

  River Jordan’s deep and wide,

  Hallelujah.

  There’s milk and honey on the other side,

  Hallelujah.

  He explained it was a slave song sung by freed black men as they rowed from an island off the southern coast, and that the Jordan was a river in the desert, and Michael—wink, wink—the angel who took you across when you died.

  “You get milk and honey when you die?” I wanted to know. By then Heidi was asleep on my lap, and Michael told Heather it was time to row home to our beds.

  That June, everyone was talking about the Rockefeller Commission’s report exposing the CIA for “unlawful and improper” activities, including the opening and reading of mail belonging to private citizens. Dot Crockett’s possible involvement at the Harborside post office was certainly not disclosed, but Helen and Scott were indeed on the list of watched citizens.

  Two days later, we appeared in another big article on homesteading, this time by the New York Times. “Self-sufficiency, the distant call of a small band of young enthusiasts in the early nineteen-seventies,” the reporter Roy Reed began, “has become the battle cry of a full-scale back to the land movement. . . . Established politics and economics are beginning to feel the movement’s pressure in several places, especially in New England.”

  “Mr. Coleman,” Reed went on to report, “is a leader of an organized effort in Maine to promote a return to biological agriculture, as he calls it.”

  “There are just not enough resources in the world,” the article quoted Papa as saying, voicing what was then a still novel concept. “Especially the oil and natural gas from which the chemical and nitrogen fertilizers are made, and the resources to transport the other chemical fertilizers, to continue farming the way [this country] is farming. And so it’s necessary to think in terms of large-scale nonchemical farming.”

  The article was not the glowing first-blush portrait that the first Wall Street Journal pieces had been, but a harder look at a movement that was becoming an often contentious segment of the public consciousness. The reporter pointed to Census Bureau numbers showing population in nonurban areas growing faster than the cities since 1970, but said that while many were serious about the move to the country, “some portion of back-to-the-landers are leftovers from the escape culture of the sixties who were chiefly interested in smoking marijuana and sitting on the porch talking philosophy.”

  “Self sufficiency,” the article also noted, “proves too difficult for many. Marital stresses, for example, are exaggerated in isolated areas around the country.”

  Certainly, our isolated tribe was not immune. The increased foot traffic and drama over Mama’s departure and Papa’s hyperactive behavior led Keith to cut a new path so people would no longer walk through his property on the way from the campground to the Nearings’. Chip, who had been working for b
oth us and Keith, decided to work only for Keith and take a break from the tensions at our farm, but her choice also marked the beginning of the end of Keith and Jean’s marriage.

  More and more, the farm was overrun with reporters interviewing Papa about advances in organic farming. When a reporter showed up, everyone did the “pants dance” and Papa talked a mile a minute, his excitement over his experiments with natural fertilizers doubled by the hyperactivity of his thyroid.

  “This farm is like a large canvas, and I enjoy making paint splashes all over it,” he told the Ellsworth American reporter, sharing his discovery that planting cabbages in soil with tilled-under oak leaves made the cabbages immune to maggots, and onions and asparagus seemed to grow twice as well in beds spread with calcium-rich clamshells.

  “Healthy plants aren’t troubled by insects,” he explained to the Country Journal writer, laying the foundations of his plant-positive theory. “Insects are symptoms of ill health and disease. Substituting [natural repellents like] garlic spray for [the chemical pesticides of] DDT removes the symptoms. It doesn’t create healthy plants. It’s like removing the spots of chicken pox; you still end up with the disease.”

  “If you use aspirin for a headache,” he elaborated for the Maine Times, “you mask the symptoms rather than find the reason, such as your hat is too tight or your glasses aren’t right. If the bugs ate plants indiscriminately, the world would have been defoliated long ago. So when a bug is on a plant, it shows me that the plant is unfit.”

  After numerous tests with different soil amendments, Papa was ever more certain that the secret to healthy, happy plants lay in creating good soil.

  “At first people thought we just sat around and blew pot,” Papa told the Country Journal reporter. “But when they came out here they saw we work hard. New Englanders appreciate hard work.”

  “It’s very exciting here,” an apprentice named Marcie was quoted. “Last summer I worked in a bank. Next year I’m going to get a job in a greenhouse.”

  “We don’t get too old with young people around,” Papa added.

  As much as Papa’s public face had a genuine enthusiasm and true excitement over the magic of clamshells, he possessed an uneasy skepticism about the outside world that sometimes alienated him from a mainstream audience.

  “New York City is an aberration,” he was quoted in none other than the New York Times. “If we can do anything so places like that don’t exist, we’re doing the world a favor.”

  “Lunch!” Mama called out the door every day at noon.

  “Lunch!” Papa echoed. Summer was, as always, a match struck in the darkness burning furiously until spent, with farm lunch the centerpiece of our days.

  Frank emerged bearlike from another unsuccessful well hole he’d been digging. Julie, Naomi, and a new girl with long blond hair unfolded from seminude prayerlike crouches for weeding the garden patches. Kent came up bare-chested from tending the farm stand, and Michael unstuck his ponytail from the sweat on his back and leaned his pick against the stump he was extracting in the back field. Michèle helped Mama bring out the usual fare of soup and salad, along with Helen’s sourdough bread made with sprouted rye berries.

  After lunch people practiced throwing the wooden curve of a boomerang in the back field with a visitor who was the previous year’s national boomerang champion, and relaxed in the shade of the tree as Kent practiced walking on his hands, a sheen to his brow and jaw as he moved upside down across the yard, forever trying to beat his record of twenty steps.

  “Come on, Eliot, catch him,” someone called. Ever up for a challenge, Papa sprang to his hands, skinny legs twisting out of his shorts like crooked tree branches, vying to match pace beside Kent’s ramrod-straight gymnast’s form, all to the cheering and laughter of the audience. Heidi sat on the lap of the apprentice whose golden hair hung in thick sheets on either side of her face. She could have been the mother to Heidi’s fair hair and blue eyes. As Skates always said, Heidi looked like a Coleman, while with my dark hair and wide face, I took after Mama. Cheering erupted when Papa’s wiry upside-down form began to gain on Kent’s solid one, until Papa teetered sideways and snapped back to his feet with a good-natured laugh.

  “Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,” Kent bragged aloud with each additional hand step.

  “You gave him a run for his money,” the new blond apprentice said to Papa. He smiled, the silver in his hair catching the light as he bent toward her to lift Heidi onto his shoulders. I watched from the patio where I sat with Mama, part of me wishing I had blond hair, too.

  Seeking attention of my own, I went with my fingers out in front of me to tickle Frank. “Tickle you till you cry,” I giggled. Then I ran screaming around the yard until he caught me and tickled me so hard the laughter made my stomach ache and tears leak from my eyes. Then he would try to tickle me when I was crying to make me laugh instead. Laughing and crying were opposite sides of the same coin that summer.

  There was a cookout at Secret Cove, a pebbly beach accessed by an old wagon road that led across the uninhabited head of the cape. The curve of the starlit sky over the cove was edged with the swaying of fir and spruce, and the waves tap-tapped the pebbles against each other as apprentices relaxed after dinner, talking-laughing-singing in the warm evening. Having chased each other across the rocks and eaten too many berries, Heidi and I were tired and “winding down,” as Mama called it.

  “It’s time to get you girls home to bed,” Mama announced, bending to put some things into her pack, her hair falling around her face in long sweeps that caught the light from the kerosene lantern. There was the sound of paper bags being crinkled up and the smell of raspberries that had become dark pulp on the rocks.

  “Leave them,” Mama said. “The sea will wash them away.”

  Mama shouldered her backpack, and Heidi and I followed her without dispute, pebbles grating against each other under our bare feet.

  “Where’s Papa?” Mama muttered, turning on the jar-size red flashlight with the white padded knob on the top. She shone the light across the beach, its beam making monster shadows of the rocks and catching on bodies in various states of re-dressing after swimming, a bare back there, the side of a face, white butt cheeks.

  My eyes narrowed on the beam of light leading the way. Laughter came from out on the water, and the beam jumped to the sound, illuminating for an instant the pale color of flesh, arms and legs entwined.

  “Oh!” Mama gasped, and the tunnel of light skittered out into the emptiness of sea and sky. Then the spotlight moved back like a magnet to the bare bodies.

  “Oh,” she said again. There was the glimmer of blond hair, pale skin.

  “Come on,” Mama said, snatching my hand. “Let’s go.”

  There was a feeling in her grip of something broken, or lost. I knew she thought Papa was out there, though you couldn’t see for sure. Mama swung Heidi onto her hip, and the flashlight zigzagged across the woods until she found the path. Dark columns of trunks took us in, the wind calm down low on the path but whistling high up in the branches like something trying to escape. Distant laughter echoed behind us as we hurried too quickly to ask questions, my breathing coming in gasps.

  We all pretended to be asleep when Papa came home. His footsteps creaked across the floor into the addition.

  “You took the flashlight,” he said to Mama. “We nearly got lost in the woods.”

  “Well,” Mama began, but that was all she said. Her uncertain fears had no words.

  I lay in my bunk staring into the humid night air of the farmhouse. When I closed my eyes, the darkness was broken by a beam of light catching bare skin. A leg, an arm, a breast. The pieces fell apart and came together and fell apart again to the lapping of the waves.

  Cheap to buy and quick to set up or take down, tepees were especially popular with apprentices that summer. Chip lived in one at Keith and Jean’s, Greg had one up at h
is place, and a handsome visitor named David set his up in the back field while studying and working with the Nearings. Tall and dark-haired, David came from Arizona, where he’d lived in this tepee the winter before. I liked to visit David in his home made from buff marine canvas stretched over the pointed triangle of twelve thin poles crossed at the top. Wooden slats across the front held the canvas together, and a flap opened for a door, with wooden pegs to secure it. The space inside was roomy, about the size of a bedroom, and David set up a ring of stones in the center for a fire that puffed out through the hole in the top where the tepee logs met. At night the canvas was lit up by the fire inside, glowing in the darkness of the back field like a paper lantern.

  While kind, David never became as friendly with me as Frank and the others. Mama later admitted that she thought him magnetic and found herself wishing he would take an interest in her. If Papa was no longer in love with her, as she feared, she might as well get her needs met, too. Everyone else, it seemed, was doing it. Scott Nearing himself, in his younger days, had often strayed. Soon Keith next door with Chip. This apprentice with that one. It was the 1970s, after all. But though adulterers were not stoned in our tribe, a memory of the ancient moral code lingered deep in the bones. Mama, while she may have found David attractive, was not the type to stray, even though she suspected Papa of flirtations.

  By August, these distractions were lost in the frenzy of ripening vegetables. The farm stand was a hungry mouth to feed every day with an abundance of produce, and the three-hundred-some mason jars of vegetables and fruits had to be put away for our winter sustenance. We were consumed by picking. Beans, corn, raspberries, tomatoes. Picking the crawling yellow-black-striped beetles that appeared on unhappy potato leaves—much to Papa’s disgruntlement—and putting them in a metal can. Most of all picking, in my case, on Heidi to show it was not fair that she had gotten to go with Mama when she left.