07-15-2008, 06:46 AM
Second post to go back to JW's opening thoughts:
JW, I agree with your first post. I was around during the first back to the land movement, and most of us were CLUELESS, and there was so much BS floating around that anyone would buy and repeat. The real lessons I learned were from the rural communities I moved to where life had been very different all along than the suburbs where I was raised.
To be candid, my fellow hippies were mostly naive and pretty full of it, and were constantly creating health hazards knowing nothing about living in the country and having new kinds of waste systems. I will never forget moving to Taos and living on this mountain with seven hippy families, and one day the couple with the baby who moved there from NYC or something, come ask to borrow our pressure cooker because they have hepatitis and need to sterilize stuff by doctor's orders ...
Um, they had been washing their baby's diapers out in the open stream that provided drinking water to all the houses on the hill. Washing the diapers out ABOVE where the water entered their pipes. No clue. Luckily, we lived above them.
And these same groups of people with this level of knowledge, knew EVERYTHING there was to know about diets, and cures, and living off the land ... from listening to them. Luckily we had one lady among us, from Louisiana, who had been raised in the country and knew how to create a great veggie garden, and taught the rest of us.
City kids going back to the land. My housemate, who was really into the idea of having goat's milk, had no idea how to get clean milk, so it all soured in big jars in the frig. Once a week she would make "homemade vegetable soup" by opening ten cans of vegetables and throwing them in a stockpot. Seriously.
Several people I know burned their houses down, not understanding how to use wood stoves, or propane gas stoves for that matter, or lanterns.
And lest I sound too smug about it all, I was pretty dumb myself. 16 when I went to "live on the land" and raised in a nice home with indoor plumbing and all that. I did know enough to boil the water we pulled out of our groundwater/rainwater well, but not much more.
The good news is, those people from those times who are still alive, are a lot more akamai now, having paid a whole lot of dues for being idealistic and naive.
JW, I agree with your first post. I was around during the first back to the land movement, and most of us were CLUELESS, and there was so much BS floating around that anyone would buy and repeat. The real lessons I learned were from the rural communities I moved to where life had been very different all along than the suburbs where I was raised.
To be candid, my fellow hippies were mostly naive and pretty full of it, and were constantly creating health hazards knowing nothing about living in the country and having new kinds of waste systems. I will never forget moving to Taos and living on this mountain with seven hippy families, and one day the couple with the baby who moved there from NYC or something, come ask to borrow our pressure cooker because they have hepatitis and need to sterilize stuff by doctor's orders ...
Um, they had been washing their baby's diapers out in the open stream that provided drinking water to all the houses on the hill. Washing the diapers out ABOVE where the water entered their pipes. No clue. Luckily, we lived above them.
And these same groups of people with this level of knowledge, knew EVERYTHING there was to know about diets, and cures, and living off the land ... from listening to them. Luckily we had one lady among us, from Louisiana, who had been raised in the country and knew how to create a great veggie garden, and taught the rest of us.
City kids going back to the land. My housemate, who was really into the idea of having goat's milk, had no idea how to get clean milk, so it all soured in big jars in the frig. Once a week she would make "homemade vegetable soup" by opening ten cans of vegetables and throwing them in a stockpot. Seriously.
Several people I know burned their houses down, not understanding how to use wood stoves, or propane gas stoves for that matter, or lanterns.
And lest I sound too smug about it all, I was pretty dumb myself. 16 when I went to "live on the land" and raised in a nice home with indoor plumbing and all that. I did know enough to boil the water we pulled out of our groundwater/rainwater well, but not much more.
The good news is, those people from those times who are still alive, are a lot more akamai now, having paid a whole lot of dues for being idealistic and naive.