June 2001
By Ruth Cooper Lamb '56
Why
would anyone choose to live 3 miles from a paved road, 5 miles from a
neighbor, 6 miles from phone and electric poles, and 11 winding miles
from a store? Eleven years ago, when my husband, Sandy '55, and I
retired to Wardsboro, an extinct farming settlement in northern New
York state, we did so because of the death of a young AIDS activist.
We chose to move to a newly inherited, slate-roofed 1860 farmhouse in
a wild, isolated valley because he made us rethink what really
mattered. We took early retirement, not to retreat from our busy
lives in the Boston area but rather to pioneer in closer communion
with nonhuman nature before we were too old for such an
adventure.
Sandy is chief problem solver as we face the challenges of living without normal electricity, phone, furnace, and plumbing. When he pauses in his firewood splitting to inhale the view of nearby Catamount Mountain, he can hardly remember his life as a public health physician in Boston when the AIDS epidemic dictated his days. I have emerged from my past life as a nutritionist and council-on-aging director to become his right-hand woman and chief gardener. We take turns as cook (since Sandy has become an avid chef), and I experiment, creating crafts from valley flora and document our environment with camera and pen.
The complexity of simple living keeps us on our toes. The elephantine cookstove in the kitchen and the tiny living-room burner keep our four rooms warm in winter only as long as we feed them wood. For summer bathing, we use the outdoor sun shower--a plastic bag of water that heats up in the sun all day. Hummingbirds keep us company in our shower tucked behind the house, until they leave, and cold weather sends us back inside to the squat, claw-footed tub in one corner of the white-walled kitchen. The sun shower then dangles from a nail in the ceiling ready to spray me as I relax in the tiny tub's mixture of steaming water from woodstove pots mixed to sauna temperature with cold tap water.
No doubt about it, our plumbing is peculiar. Sandy evolved from doctor to plumber in 1990, as he struggled to install a cold-water system emerging from a forest spring into a pipeless basement and connected the unwieldy black snakes to tub and kitchen sink. No pipes needed for the toilet; the outhouse suited us. Later, we shifted to dry-composting toilets that produce rich mulch for the flower gardens.
That first winter was a back-country adventure. We lived comfortably with propane refrigerator, auxiliary stove, and lights, while a gasoline generator infrequently ran the vacuum cleaner. We cross-country skied from the front door, tracked deer and coyotes, tried snow-shoeing, and delighted in boosting our powers of observation. Our eyes and brains seemed better in tune, as we forgot the past and future and really paid attention to the present. When the road flooded, we stayed put. When the water pipes froze, we carried buckets of water from a nearby road spring, until the pipes thawed a month later.
The sole problem that really has frustrated us over the years is communicating with the outside world. We had purchased a cell phone for our truck and promptly entered into a lottery-like phone system. When incoming calls triggered the truck horn, one of us rushed out, even on frigid nights, to catch the caller. We could communicate, but rain, fog, or leaves seemed to interfere. Switching to other telephone companies didn't help. This valley was too far away from cell towers and had too many intervening mountains. New technology has improved our phone, so now we make calls from inside our house. But even so, on some days, making or receiving calls requires the craft of a magician.
By the time we both reached 60, it seemed the opportunities to stretch our minds and bodies were endless. Everywhere we looked, there was something new to learn and do. Tear down old plaster walls upstairs, insulate, and install new paneling and create rooms. Tap maple trees, turn a rusty barrel into a firebox, and boil down maple syrup. Investigate making electricity from the sun, erect solar panels, and wire the house with AC and DC power stored in golf-cart batteries. Spy on beaver, watch turtles laying eggs, survey migrating birds and those that stay as winter companions, and identify and use wild valley plants.
As the urgency of our projects receded, I found myself increasingly diverted from our valley focus. Before I knew it, I was off on a new adventure--this time into the past. After the death of my aunt, Mary Back, I was drawn to learn more about her history. She and her husband, Joe, had pioneered in backcountry Wyoming in the 1930s, before they became well-known western artists. She wore many hats, including naturalist, artist, author, and theologian, and had been an important role model for me. Boxes of her saved letters clogged the living room, where I sat daily, reading, captured by her vibrant written voice. As her life unfolded before me, I knew that her stories and views about how all life fits together needed to be shared.
Her observations and deductions helped me make more sense of the tangled interrelationships of life and death that I observed in the valley. She wrote, for example: "The body of life is immortal. Its parts are constantly changing shape. They grow and change. They 'die', but that is only the word used for their changing into other shapes, within the one whole body of Life, which is immortal. In all its parts, it is constantly resurrected."
"Yes," I thought. "Deer turn into coyotes, frogs into snakes, mosquitoes into bats, and garden produce into me. And what will I become someday?"
Gradually, I put together a book, Mary's Way: A Memoir of the Life of Mary Cooper Back, based on the wonderful letters. I added my voice to Mary's to tie the pieces of her life together.
Although life in Wardsboro continued to teach us and sustain me as the book took shape, by 1998 (the year that I turned 65), we were ready for more stretching. When Ray Hopkins, Swarthmore's Richter Professor of Political Science, told us about his dream of an international service (retirement) community based either in Sri Lanka or Belize (formerly British Honduras), we joined an exploratory trip to Belize. As we visited agencies and toured this small country just south of Mexico, it became clear that volunteers willing to return annually for a month or so to assist with community needs would indeed be welcome. His idea has blossomed in Belize, where several of us have returned each year since then for a month. We become part of a settlement and share our life experiences or professions while enjoying the tropics. We live together in a rented house, experiment with cooking for ourselves, and work out functioning as a "family."
San Ignacio, a small city in the foothills of the Mayan Mountains near the Guatemalan border, is home. Its sights and sounds have become familiar: roosters crowing before dawn, chachalacas noisily greeting the sun, and parrots patrolling treetops. Saturday market stalls feature eggs, chickens, housewares, Amish homespun, Guatemalan crafts, and an amazing wealth of tropical fruits and vegetables. Well-baby clinics impress us with breast-feeding moms, infants screeching as vaccination needles puncture flesh, and toddlers dressed in cherished elegance smiling shyly. American school buses (retired like us) provide bus service across a country the size of Massachusetts with the population of Boston.
We have worked with public health clinics and staff, trying to help in small ways, learning as we go what works and what doesn't. Volunteers are also sought for English-as-second-language classes and church-run, state-supported schools. Other possibilities abound for retirees interested in bringing their skills to another country in an ongoing relationship. Each year, we return to Wardsboro at the end of our Belizean month enriched by new friendships and exposure to a culture that has much to teach us.
Now that we have passed that frontier year of 65, we look back on the past 11 years grateful that we took the plunge into retirement before we really had to. Each year seems to bring new aches or an upsurge of chronic ailments. So far, keeping as active as we can masks these health troubles. The words of that young AIDS activist keep pushing us to set priorities. "Once I knew I was dying, life became wonderful and rich. You, too, are dying, but you don't know when. Make sure you use your remaining days in ways that are truly important to you."
ALUMNI DIGEST / BACK PAGES/ BOOKS BY ALUMNI / COLLECTION / EDITOR'S NOTE / FEATURES / IN MY LIFE/ LETTERS / PROFILES / ARCHIVE / TALK BACK
Swarthmore College. Copyright 2001