When Linda Tatelbaum and Kal Winer picked up their hand tools in 1977 to build a small house on a Maine hillside, the former academics didn’t know what they were in for.
They had left their university careers and bought 75 acres to make a self-sufficient home without reliance on foreign oil, supply chains or the corporate world.
The two were among hundreds, maybe thousands, flocking to Maine in the 1960s and ‘70s to live closer to the earth as part of the back-to-the-land movement. Many were influenced by books such as “Living the Good Life” by Maine homesteaders Helen and Scott Nearing. The newcomers were politically aware environmentalists with strong ideals and often little or no homesteading experience.
Some called it the simple life, but it wasn’t easy. Tatelbaum and Winer were among the pioneers of Maine’s modern homesteading movement, and unlike most of their peers, they still live in their original home, mostly off the grid and mostly self-sufficiently.
At first, they were surrounded by other young homesteaders on the dirt road in Burkettville, a village in the Knox County town of Appleton. They lived off the grid because they had to: there were no power lines or solar panels around.
Over the years, many returned to the world they had left. A few, like Tatelbaum and Winer, stayed.
They didn’t know how hard it would be, but in time they added on to the house, became early adopters of solar panels, grew almost all of their food, raised a child interested in computers on a limited power supply and saw Tatelbaum succeed as an author chronicling their experiences and her philosophies.
“I think we’re just stubborn,” she said. “We like where we are, we like our home, we like the work and so we keep doing it. My commitment to it was just because I love it. I love the land, I love Maine.”
In the beginning
Tatelbaum grew up outside Rochester, New York, and felt drawn to farmland in a way she couldn’t explain. Getting her doctorate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, exposed her to rural living, and she went on to teach at a college in New Hampshire, where she met Winer, then the dean of students. They had similar values and dreams.
Winer had grown disillusioned with teaching students how to live internally rich lives while not living one himself, and spent a year traveling the country in a Volkswagen bus seeking answers. After he read Henry David Thoreau’s book “Walden,” he stopped wandering and started to think about living closer to the land.
The world seemed to be splitting in two: many of their peers were rebelling against the status quo, while the generation before them was still at the helm. The oil crisis was underway, and the future looked grim, giving them more reason to be self-sufficient.
At first, their families couldn’t understand why they would choose to live the hard way. If so many others weren’t doing the same thing, Winer said, it would have been very difficult to strike out into this isolated life on the edge of society.
Tatelbaum joined him on the small New Hampshire farm where he was living with family. They learned to garden, got married and set out to find a place for themselves.
The journey to Maine
The couple first traveled to the South, searching for affordable property in areas attracting other back-to-the-landers. They visited famous author and agrarian thinker Wendell Berry at his Kentucky farm to ask about land for sale; he told them to go home, to stay with their roots and community.
Land in New Hampshire was expensive, so they looked nearby to Maine.
They found the property in Burkettville, which had been a homestead a century before, through friends on the same road. It was remote but didn’t feel like it; fellow young homesteaders were everywhere.
Making a home
They planned to put up a small 16-foot by 24-foot home to live in while they built a bigger house.
Fellow homesteaders and local old-timers helped them learn as they cut boards by hand. They worked long, physically and psychologically exhausting days and stayed in an uninsulated trailer at night. All of this concerned an old friend, who told Winer to go home and return to what he was good at.
“But what I was actually interested in was doing what I wasn’t good at,” Winer said. “That was part of the thing that drove me. I was trying to go from being a person who just used their brain to a person who had a body as well.”
They established a garden on the hill and canned fruits and vegetables on a camp stove. The outhouse had flies, they carried all their water 300 feet up the slope and the trailer was getting funky.
The property had two old hand-dug wells, but running pipes to the house was a big, expensive project that took several years. Water still ran dry in summers, when it was needed for canning, and they filled gallon jugs at their day jobs until drilling another well in 1997.
When they moved in, the house didn’t have doors because they hadn’t yet learned how to make them, but the latch they eventually made is still in use 47 years later: a pull handle with a string that raises a bar of wood out of the frame.
The building was designed to absorb sunlight to reduce heating needs. Nestled against a hill to protect it from wind, it was framed by wood boards with a sloping roof and a loft inside. Some of the building decisions show their inexperience, but the house works for them.
Instead of another house, they later built an addition and a dining room. An indoor composting toilet layered with peat moss is emptied outside a few times a year. In the cellar are shelves of canned goods, cabbage heads wrapped in newspaper, cardboard boxes of peppers and bulk containers. Against the far wall, 30-year-old solar batteries store energy from the panels. Shelves in the walk-in root cellar hold more food.
Getting power
They heated the homestead in Burkettville with wood. Water had to be hauled up the hill. Their son, Noah, lived his early years by the light of oil lamps.
Homesteaders dreamed about residential solar power in the early years, but they didn’t know if the technology would catch up. Before there were large companies, state subsidy programs or fields of solar panels, it was almost an underground pursuit. Winer scoured specialty magazines and wrote letters to people all over the country and in Europe.
Then, in 1981, David Sleeper, a pioneer of residential solar in Maine who electrified homes on Monhegan for the first time with panels, arrived unannounced in the middle of the night. He brought four 35-watt panels the couple still use today — enough electricity to run two light bulbs and a water pump.
The low-wattage panels required wiring for direct current power, which travels from batteries, instead of the alternating current power in typical buildings. Rather than outlets, the home has plug ports like car cigarette lighters.
The systems were expensive, typically taking three decades to pay off.
People would save up to buy more over time, and Winer and Tatelbaum now have a small museum of solar technology. Altogether, the setup produces 2,000 watts.
They used a special efficiency refrigerator, rationed their power use, and sometimes ran out anyway. If their son had a friend over, they played downstairs because there wasn’t enough power to keep a light on in his room. When he got into computers, they tried to find ways to run one on a battery.
Writing it down
Tatelbaum and Winer worked part time; they needed income and weren’t interested in commercial farming.
Winer became a family therapist. Tatelbaum returned to teaching, was an English professor at Colby College and wrote about their homesteading journey in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“I found I had a place where I could write from that was fluid, and I found out I’m a good writer, and I wanted to share it,” she said. “I wanted people to hear about our life, and also a lot of my perceptions.”
Frustrated by traditional publishing (“I didn’t like the term ‘no’”), she started and ran About Time Press for about a decade. Editors told her there wasn’t a market for her subject matter, but personal experience said otherwise.
“Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader’s History,” a 1997 book of essays detailing how they lived and why, generated floods of letters from readers, including one who made her a yoke to carry water with. She still regularly gets fan mail.
Tatelbaum was even invited to appear on “Oprah,” either before or after she sent the television personality a jar of blueberry jam — she can’t quite remember.
That was followed by another book of essays, “Writer on the Rocks: Moving the Impossible,” exploring her relationship to physical labor, followed by “Woman Who Speaks Tree: Confessions of a Tree Hugger.” Tatelbaum also published a novel.
These days, she’s retired and doesn’t have much to write.
But people remain interested in their lifestyle — that hasn’t shifted over the years, even as the back-to-the-land movement’s peak crested and new generations of homesteaders arrived.
Looking back, looking ahead
With the home built, the panels wired, the garden established, the books written and the child raised, the hardest parts are in some sense over, Winer said.
Now the work lies in keeping things going and deciding what changes to make as they age. That also means adjusting the working partnership they’ve relied on for decades.
In their 70s, the couple connected to the grid to occasionally run a heat pump in the spring and fall instead of starting a fire every night. They sell power to reduce their electric bill, and they’ve added a backup generator.
If Tatelbaum had to give advice to new homesteaders, it would be to start small and learn from what you’re doing. Plant one row of lettuce first, instead of a huge bed.
In their garden, Winer learned to pull weeds backward, so he faced the work he had completed and not the overgrown bed still ahead. If he looked the other way, it would have overwhelmed him.
“Sometimes you can work all day and forget to take a moment to stop and say, ‘This is terrific what I’m doing,’” he said. “Take the time to enjoy and appreciate what your hard work is accomplishing.”
