By Don Mitchell
Yankee Books, 1986
A dozen years ago, Don Mitchell and his wife swerved out of life's fast lane and into Vermont. Where, in their first taste of rural Camelot, they got stuck. Mired. In thick, oozing mud. Over the shiny wheelcovers of their not-so-practical Porsche. But Mitchell lived to write about it, and in his acclaimed book, Moving UpCountry,chronicled his family's bumpy journey to the simple life.
Now, Living UpCountrycharts the progress of the Mitchells to agrarian well-being. But Yankee practicality and utopian reveries of the back-to-the-land movement blend in curious, often zany ways to make a new breed of Vermonter.
Who is this New Man? He's the one who smirks at the high priests of high tech while planning to dispatch winter's impassable drifts with a single aluminum snow shovel. "Organic!" is his battle cry (until he bales air instead of hay). Weary of the rigors of spring lambing he tries planned obstetrics, complete with a keg of beer and rock-and-roll piped into the barn. His house? It's the one with a septic tank installed in the sunroom. And our New Man is the fellow who learns even more awful truths about Vermont mud (as the $96,000 bulldozer digging his pond slips slowly out of sight).
Mitchell, who now can truthfully call himself the good shepherd, writes in tones of both light and dark comedy, but Living UpCountryis no comedy of errors. The Mitchells do succeed -- against all odds. "When I think of all the inappropriate talents, the varieties of ignorance and wealth of misinformation," Mitchell writes, "I am filled with laughter and amazement. Imagine people like me helping to create a new agricultural industry! I shake my head and say: this is the most unlikely, and the most interesting, thing that I have ever done."
About the Author
Don Mitchell farms with his wife and two children in the windswept and fertile (for Vermont) Champlain Valley. He is the author of four other books: Thumb Tripping, FourStroke, The Souls of Lambs, and Moving UpCountry. His column, "R.F.D.," appears in Boston Magazine.