One thing my wife and I learned from seven years in rural Ontario is that country
living doesn't always mean freedom from money issues, and of all our expenses the
greatest and most persistent was the car. People who live in the country nowadays
are actually more hooked on automobiles than those who live in the city, since there
are long miles of highway between one's home and other destinations such as shops or
a job.
In fact, one of the biggest problems of the truly poor in the countryside is
that they may have no means of getting to a job even if it is offered to them. For
everyone, the obvious alternative to the automobile would be horses, but how can
horses survive at the present time, with the roads dominated by high-speed cars and
trucks?
Besides the car, our big costs were property taxes and house renovations. It was a
good thing we had paid cash for the house and land, because if we had been paying
off a mortgage we would really have had trouble making ends meet. I should add that
at first we were not as frugal as we might have been: we had a fair amount of money
because we had sold our house in Toronto, but because we had so much money we spent
it too freely.
We did not expect money making to be the principal issue in country living, but such
was the case. Although we ran a one-acre market garden as efficiently as possible, a
profit always seemed to elude us. As time went by, we began to realize that there
were not many people in the area who had financial security. Most of the people we
met were living either on pensions or on welfare, or something similar. The
pensioners were sometimes elderly poor people living on nothing but payments from
the government. There were only a few people living on company pensions, which
provided a higher standard of living. One group of people who had a reasonable
income were the few trades people that the area could support - carpenters,
plumbers, mechanics, and so on. The other large segment of the population was the
cottagers, the Torontonians, who were likely to show up only in the summer, but
these people didn't have to deal with the problem of earning a local income.
Most people under retirement age, however, were barely surviving, partly because the
entire area pretty well closed down during the winter. The main industry was
"tourism," which is sometimes little more than a euphemism for "poverty."
My suggestions that people rediscover their rural origins didn't get very far. The
young disliked country living and were rather ashamed of it. The middle-aged took
the attitude, not that "anything worth doing is worth doing well," but that it is
worth doing only with heavy machinery. I remember seeing two large brand-new trucks
going down the road one day with a grand total of four people, merely to eat at a
local restaurant ― not a big crime, just a vignette. The most knowledgeable people
were in their eighties, but the following generations wanted to be part of what they
considered the modern world: they were willing slaves to the urban economy that was
slowly killing them.
After we bought the property, we seemed to find more and more work that needed to be
done to make the place livable, and most of it had to be done before the approach of
the first winter. We knew very little ourselves about renovations, and at the same
time we had very few names to work with, so we ended up hiring people without
getting multiple estimates for the work to be done. As a result, we were sometimes
charged too much money, but we were unable to realize that fact until much later.
I would even say that some of those "renovations" should have been left undone. For
example, we spent a good deal of money for eaves troughs to be installed around the
metal roof of our mobile home, not realizing that a slippery metal roof would result
in avalanches of melting snow in the spring, and that those avalanches would simply
tear the eaves troughs away.
On the positive side, we finally learned many things about house repair and
renovation. In particular we learned how to do a number of carpentry tasks. I even
did a bit of plumbing, at least to the extent of replacing old faucets. Electricity,
however, remained for me a rather esoteric subject, probably because I found it both
dangerous and expensive. Electricity was also unreliable, and violent summer storms
would often mean looking for candles and matches.
We learned a great deal about heating with wood. We not only managed to operate a
wood stove properly, but we gradually went through the entire process of cutting
down trees, sawing them into lengths, splitting the pieces, stacking and storing
them, and so on. I became quite adept at using a chain saw, although I found that
using such a machine on a long-term basis requires a good knowledge of maintenance,
including sharpening the chain, cleaning the entire machine, and recognizing common
problems.
As a long-term "survival skill," operating a chain saw is rather dubious, of course.
How will people operate such things as the world's petroleum runs out? Oil
production in 2030 will be less than half that of the year 2000. In any case,
according to at least one expert on the subject, if you calculate the money required
to operate a chain saw, and the time involved in maintaining the equipment, you may
find that you're better off using a simple bow saw.
I think using a bow saw to put together a winter's supply of firewood might require
many long weeks of labor, but there may be some sense to the theory. Certainly
modern bow saws are quite good. The blades are of hardened steel, which means they
cannot be re-sharpened and must be discarded eventually, but they last a long time,
and buying a lifetime's supply of such blades would be easy enough.
I even bought some antique timber saws, those gigantic devices, often several feet
long, that our ancestors used for dealing with logs. I learned how to set the teeth
(bend them to certain angles), using tools that I had made myself, and how to
sharpen them properly. I soon concluded that I didn't have the ancestral muscles for
such saws. Part of the problem, however, may have been that even after I had done my
best to polish the steel surfaces they were not really smooth, since rust had caused
pitting. Much later I heard that such timber saws can be bought brand new, and that
a new timber saw will cut firewood much more quickly than a bow saw.
We learned that there are many other ways of dealing with firewood and heating
problems. A smaller house needs less firewood, and so does one with fewer and
smaller windows. Good insulation is an enormous help. Another trick from the old
days is to use less firewood by sealing off unnecessary rooms in winter. For similar
reasons, the stove must be located in the room that will be used the most in the
daytime.
We learned many things about vegetable gardening that we didn't know before,
although the locals were not of much help, since they lived mainly on supermarket
food. We discovered the importance of starting with good soil (which we didn't
have), and the importance of keeping an eye on dates and on weather. We learned to
identify and defeat many species of harmful insects. We also tried a great many
crops and developed a good idea of what crops work in that area and which ones
don't.
We gained a good knowledge of grains. Corn is by far the best grain to grow, since
the yield per unit of land is quite high, and it requires very little in terms of
equipment for growing, for harvesting, or for processing. By "corn," however, I mean
the older varieties once grown by the native people, not modern corn, which is
susceptible to insects and diseases. The other grain that did well was rye, mainly
because of the sandy soil.
Our brief experience with raising chickens was quite educational in two senses. The
first is that I learned something about the construction of buildings with frames
made of 2x4s, and as part of that learning experience I did everything with
non-electric tools except for the somewhat tedious task of cutting chipboard.
I built the first chicken coop with a poured concrete-slab foundation and a "shed"
roof (i.e. one slope rather than two), and the outside was made of board-and-batten
(vertical boards, with the intervening gaps covered by thin strips). The roof was
covered with roll roofing.
For the second coop, I deliberately used entirely different methods, partly so that
I could gain further experience. The foundation was of concrete piers rather than a
solid slab, the roof had two slopes (and hence two gables), and the outside of the
walls was covered with chipboard, which in turn was covered with vinyl siding, all
of it admittedly not very "traditional" but perhaps "transitional." The roof was
covered with the same material as the first coop, but in the form of shingles rather
than rolls.
For the most part, I preferred what I did on the second coop, although I now think
concrete piers are very difficult to build and position neatly without preformed
molds and pre-mixed concrete.
The second and rather odd thing that we learned, or seem to have learned, about
chickens is that our long hours of acquiring an education in modern poultry-raising
may have taken us somewhat in the wrong direction. Just as we were closing down our
entire chicken operation, I began reading a few articles which seemed to indicate
that from a survivalist perspective it would be better to get away from modern
methods. These methods are designed to maximize production of either eggs or meat.
But our chickens ― eventually totaling fifty ― were living mainly on purchased feed,
which was expensive to buy and transport, and out of that feed they ate only the
types of grain they liked, and simply left the rest to rot. They were also living in
highly fortified buildings with well-fenced yards, all of which protected them from
foxes, raccoons, and weasels, but their isolated existence meant they were not
roaming the fields in search of vegetation and insects which could have provided
free food.
It may well be the case that a better approach to poultry may be a less-modern one.
The chickens raised in more-primitive cultures, in other words, may be relatively
unproductive but might have greater resistance to diseases and predators, and the
actual varieties of chickens worth considering may be smaller and hardier birds that
are closer to the ancestral types.
Perhaps above all, we learned that it is possible to live with some independence
from modern civilization. On the four acres that were ours by law, but in reality
belonged more to Nature, the seasons followed one another, even if we were sometimes
too busy to notice. In spring the river roared and bellowed and foamed along its
banks, and in winter that same river was a tranquil study in black and white. None
of that will ever change. But there are other things will certainly change one day:
the cars will be gone, and so will the money economy.
* * * * *
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus [at] live.com.
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