I have no idea.  That's something only you can answer for yourself.

I CAN tell you what value I feel I get out of the lifestyle, though, by explaining my background, where I came from and why I want to go back.

I was raised in a small town in southwestern Ohio.  Fairborn, or to those of us who grew up there, "Squareborn".  Whatever the perceived drawbacks when I was growing up, it was a good place to grow up in many ways.

My dad was older when he started the family - he grew up poor during the depression, in a family that worked hard and dragged itself out of the poorest section of town where they lived in a tarpaper shack and bought and paid for a 2 acre homestead on a dirt road 'way 'way (at that time) out of town. 

My grandad built the house my grandmother finished raising their children in by hand.  Dug out the basement by hand.  Made her a quilting frame from a huge old maple that was cut down on the property.  They raised chickens and rabbits and had a truck garden and orchard (including beehives) that fed the family.  The house was tiny, just a bungalow, really, with only two tiny bedrooms.  But my dad, his three brothers and two sisters, grew up in that house.  They were fed, warm, dry, and safe - and they counted that as being a lot.  Maybe even everything.

My dad went to Purdue on a scholarship and became an engineer, but he never left that hard-working, self-sufficient attitude behind.  He never thought he was too good to dig a ditch when a ditch was what was needed, and he never thought he was better than the fellow down the road because of a job, income level, or education.  He got his the hard way and figured others had the right to do the same - or not, as they chose.  He never said much - we didn't get a constant barrage of lectures about hard work and cleanliness of thought - but then maybe a quiet example speaks volumes more than all the self-righteous lectures in the world.

At least, it did for me.

It didn't hurt any that once he was established, making good money, living a yuppie-like lifestyle in the mid-50's and on, that he didn't abandon the way he'd been raised.  Every year from the time I can remember - from the age of 6 until I left home to go to college - we had a garden.  On that city lot, we had grapes, a sour cherry tree, several Stanley plums, apples, quince, and crabapples in two different sizes.  We had a garden that took up half the back yard.  Every year, I canned garden produce, made jam, jelly, and preserves.  Sometimes it seemed the produce piled up faster than I could process it, and my dad still swears to this day that the best jelly he ever ate came from the year the grapes sat on the back stairway and fermented before I could get to them to make the jelly. 

I always assumed that I would live the same way.  Little did I know, and little understand, about the pressures of trying to fit into "modern" society.  I had grown up literally a generation out of step with my peers - most of my same-age friends have GRAND-PARENTS my dad's age (he will be 80 this year, still drives all over the country in the company of my stepmother, who is all of 6 months younger than he is).

I was too busy to notice it much when I was in college, but once I had graduated (with a degree in Computer Science) I discovered that I almost literally had nothing in common with most of the people I was working with.  Not that I didn't, and don't still, have friends among the new techno-elite, but when it came to attitudes and lifestyle, I might as well have been from another planet, with only a few notable exceptions.

The best example of this was the reaction I got from most people when they found out I wanted to chuck it all and move out to the middle of nowhere and homestead.  A few people, who were busily trying to escape what they saw as a childhood of poverty amongst ignorant small-town minds, were so incredulous as to be very nearly insulting.  Some were supportive, however (thanks, guys!)

Well, to each their own, but from my experiences growing up in small-town Ohio, and having lived all over the place since, it seems to me that ignorance and small minds are everywhere endemic in the human race - it has nothing to do with education or money or lack thereof.  Having lived here in small-town Missouri (well, 17 miles OUTSIDE of small-town Missouri) for going on a year now, I have seen nothing to change my mind on that issue.  There are those who are great of heart, and they can be found anywhere in this world when you least expect it, and  there are those who are small of mind, and they are also to be found anywhere in this world, usually when you least wish it.  In either case, be glad for the former and forget the latter and move on.

After a particularly bad experience at my last place of employment - brought on by a complex combination of extremely poor communications between myself and my supervisor, a serious downturn in the company fortunes, and being taken out of my field of expertise at the time (GUI design and implementation in Motif) and put into an entirely different field which was NOT what I had been told to expect, and which, quite frankly, if I had know what I was going to end up doing, I would not have taken the job.  I SHOULD have taken a clue from the fact that nearly all my friends quit the company and left within just a few months - I should have gone as well, but man, I hate changing jobs almost as much as I hate moving.  And I REALLY HATE moving.

Eventually things had deteriorated to the point where it was hopeless on all sides, so I up and quit, cold-turkey, and here I am.  I had originally planned to stay in the rat race one more year and stash up some more filthy lucre, but it just wasn't worth the emotional strain.  It was just not salvageable, and I was close to total burnout.  I had heard things from people who meant well and wanted to help along the lines of "I've met your son, he's what, 12?  He seems responsible - you could leave him home alone more often and put in more overtime."  just one too many times.  And after a year and a half of being treated like I was incompetent, I was starting to believe it all the way down to my bones - and to act the part due to the prolonged stress.

So, for me, enough was too much, and I was gone-outta-there and on my way to Missouri just as quickly as I could pack and load the truck.

I had gradually realized that all the years I spent working my life away, I was not getting a single step closer to my lifetime goal of being able to live the way I had grown up - growing things, making my own jelly and canning my own food, working to live and not living to work.  Instead, I was moving into increasingly expensive areas where my desire to have enough land far enough from large cities to make me happy was becoming an impossible dream, not an achievable one.  So it was time to fish - I'd had enough of cutting bait.  My dad opined at one point that I must have just gotten tired of watching my life flash before my eyes, and I said (and it just hit me how totally true this was, just as I said it) "No, I'm tired of watching KEVIN's (my son's) life flash before my eyes".

Some people ask me why I bought land here in Missouri instead of in, say, Oregon, where I last lived and worked, and where the climate (in the northwestern part of the state at least) is mild.  Well, I paid about $600 an acre for my 26 acres here - in Oregon the best deal I was offered was 5 acres with a problem house on it for over $100,000.  Also, my taxes here amount to around $30 a year.  Prior to having a homesite on the land it was even less than that.  I shudder to think what the yearly tax bill would have been in Oregon.

This particular part of Missouri seems similar in many positive respects to where I grew up.  I felt fairly comfortable in Portland, Portland was not bad as big huge expensive cities go.  But here it's more than that.  I've come home at last.

Last Updated: August 18, 1999

These pages are all about small farms, rural living, cottage farming, homesteading, building barns, sheds, a masonry stove, poultry processing, livestock, raising your own food, being self-sufficient, alternative farming practices, organic gardening, composting, aquaculture, and other types of alternative agriculture.  The Unofficial, Totally Unauthorized, but Very Very Enthusiastic Gene Logsdon Fan Club Home Page is part of this site as well.