A Simple Life at a Farm in Maine

Inspired by legendary back-to-the-landers Scott and Helen Nearing, Kate NaDeau lives simply and seasonally in a handbuilt stone house on a twenty-six-acre Maine hillside.

May/June 2001
By Robyn Griggs Lawrence 
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Kate loves to eat breakfast and watch the sun rise from the porch on the home’s east side. She often spends summer afternoons bundling herbs on the porch swing.
Photography By Carolyn Bates
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When Kate NaDeau’s former husband, Phil, suggested they leave Northern California for Maine, she had a typical West Coast reaction. “Maine!? That’s the North Pole. I couldn’t live there!’” she laughs. But Kate, Phil, and their eleven-year-old son, Justin, craved a simple farming life, and they couldn’t afford the kind of acreage they wanted in the already-escalating California market. In his campaign to move his family east, Phil introduced Kate to Scott and Helen Nearing, pioneers of the back-to-the-land movement. As Kate read the Nearings’s simple living manuals, “I was totally blown away not only by the integrity the Nearings brought to the garden, but the fact that they could garden that much in Maine,” she says.

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So Kate’s family traveled to Maine’s central coast in early December, a time when Kate figured she could taste the worst of what the region might offer. “It was raw and open and stark,” she recalls. And in Monroe, Maine, the family found its paradise: twenty-six acres on a south-facing slope bordering a stream.

The Nearings's Rules for Building

Scott and Helen Nearing, whose handbuilt stone homes in Vermont and Maine provided inspiration for Stone Soup Farm, outlined many of their philosophies in Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life (now published as The Good Life, Schocken Books, 1990). In the following excerpt, they provide four general rules for homebuilding.

Form and function should unite in the structure. The symmetry and harmony of a building are not skin deep. They arise out of its innermost being. Neither utility nor beauty can be added to a building, as icing is added to a cake. The building should be so designed that it fulfills its economic purpose and does so without unnecessary expenditures of materials and labor. Utility and beauty must be part and parcel of its line and form.

Buildings should be adapted to their environment, merging with it and becoming so indistinguishable a part of it that the observer must look twice before he decides where the environment ends and the building begins. Both utility and beauty are qualities possessed by wholes rather than parts. If the environment permits of utility and is a thing of beauty, the building must continue the lines of that utility and fill out the exquisite balance and harmony that give rise to that beauty.

Local materials are better adapted than any other to create the illusion that the building was a part of the environment from its beginnings and has been growing up with the environment ever since.

The style of a domestic establishment should express the inmates and be an extension of themselves. “A man’s character emerges in the building and ordering of his house,” says Richard Weaver. In a short story, They, Rudyard Kipling writes, “Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.”

EXCERPTED from The Good Life, by Scott and Helen Nearing. Copyright 1990, Helen and Scott Nearing. Reprinted with permission from Schocken Books.

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