Ten Years Later (26 page)

Roxanne Quimby was born in 1950 into middle-class comfort in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
the oldest of three girls and a boy. Her father, a Harvard Business School graduate,
sold large machinery to manufacturing companies and was always looking to expand his
sales territory. The family moved every year or two to cities around the Northeast
and Midwest. From a young age, Roxanne had an interest in not only creating things
but peddling them, too.

“I was always selling stuff. I always tried to sell stuff to my sisters,” Roxanne
says with a laugh, “and to my parents. I’d bake muffins and go around the neighborhood
and try to sell them to the neighbors.”

When Roxanne was five, her dad made her a deal: he wouldn’t give her money for college,
but he’d match every dollar she earned herself. By the time she graduated from high
school, Roxanne had saved $5,000, which her dad, as promised, boosted to $10,000.
She enrolled in the University of Massachusetts, where she met a senior classman named
George St. Clair who was studying comparative literature. They began dating, and after
one semester, Roxanne became restless for a new view. The two headed west to Northern
California. George had already graduated; Roxanne entered the fine arts program at
the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied oil painting. Once Roxanne got
her bachelor of fine arts, she and George hit the road in search of a place to settle
down. A place where trees were your neighbors.

“I had had it with big cities,” she says, “and I knew I didn’t want to live in the
suburbs, so that was the only thing I hadn’t tried.”

Roxanne had also been influenced in college by the teachings of Helen and Scott Nearing,
a husband and wife who wrote extensively about the art of simple, frugal, and purposeful
living. At the peak of the Great Depression, the Nearings had moved from their small
New York City apartment to a run-down farmhouse on sixty-five acres in rural Vermont
and lived off the land.

“They were very inspiring because they had a lot of control over their own lives and
their own destinies, and never had to punch a clock or answer to anybody but themselves,”
Roxanne explains, “and they lived with their values intact, raised all their own food,
and were very independent.”

In the summer of 1974, Roxanne and George set out in their
old Volkswagen van in search of cheap land. They soon realized they couldn’t afford
to buy in Northern California; there were no deals in Oregon or Washington, either.
Hoping the opposite coast would prove more affordable, George and Roxanne drove the
2,200 miles to Vermont. Land there was too expensive, but rural northern Maine turned
out to be right on the money. For $3,000, they bought thirty acres in Guilford, a
small mill town fifty miles northwest of Bangor. With bow saws and a pioneer spirit,
they cleared the land and built a two-room cabin and planted a vegetable garden.

“It was just trial and error,” Roxanne says of the handiwork. “On-the-job training.”

Roxanne’s mother was supportive of her move to the woods, but her father was appalled.

“My dad had certain expectations about his children and how we would live our lives,
and that was a real curveball. He never expected anything like that. He was very disappointed.
His first reaction was, ‘Wow, I wasted all that orthodontic work on you.’ He spent
so much money on braces when I was a teenager,” she says with a chuckle, “and he thought
I was moving to the tundra, where it didn’t matter whether my teeth were straight
or not.”

Her father’s displeasure with Roxanne’s decision was rooted in more than just teeth.
He felt a productive path in life must include an MBA and a substantial paycheck.

“That was how he evaluated our relationship: could he be proud of my achievements?
And he defined them. He was not very proud of my living in the middle of the woods
and clearly not pursuing any vocation that he could identify,” she says, “and he just
dropped me in a way.”

It was the start of a father-daughter estrangement that would last for decades.

Roxanne and George set up camp in Guilford, sharing the woods with a few dozen like-minded
families in a community known as back-to-the-landers. Each family built a home on
a large piece of property and lived a subsistence lifestyle that rejected modern-day
civilization.

“We spent most of our days outdoors, gardening, cutting firewood, hauling water, hiking,
and camping,” she says. “And that’s what turned me into a real lover and appreciator
of the outdoors.”

In 1976, Roxanne and George married in his parents’ backyard outside of Boston. All
of Roxanne’s family attended except for her father. The couple was content, and enjoyed
the slow pace and self-reliance the rustic lifestyle offered.

“We had no electricity, so we tended not to stay up very late. There were no electric
lights; we had kerosene lamps and candles. We didn’t have television or any kind of
media at night, so we’d read for a little bit and go to bed,” she says. “We’d get
up with the sun and we had a lot of daily chores to do. We didn’t have running water,
so we had to haul water from a spring; we chopped firewood to stay warm; we had a
garden for our food; we had a woodstove to cook the food, so most of our day was consumed
with these chores of eating and cooking and washing and hauling water and keeping
firewood in the house. It was a pretty simple lifestyle.”

The pair maintained a garden and stocked their root cellar, which substituted for
a refrigerator. Once a month, a truck from Boston would drop off fresh food orders
at the local co-op. Both worked odd jobs to pay the annual property taxes: Roxanne
sold her art and waitressed, George worked as a disc jockey at the local radio station.

In 1978, they started a family. Roxanne gave birth at the local hospital to twins,
Lucas and Hannah. Back at the cabin, Roxanne washed diapers in hot water boiled on
the wood-burning stove and breast-fed the babies for six months.

“And then when they started eating solid food, I had a little baby grinder thing,
this little crank-up thing,” she says. “The Happy Baby grinder it was called, and
whatever we were having, like rice or beans or potatoes, we put it right through the
grinder and it would make a mash out of it.”

No refrigeration required some creative cooking.

“We lived close by to a farm that raised chickens, so they always had a lot of eggs.
They would have to grade their eggs by size, and any size that didn’t fit the grader
they would sell really cheap. They keep pretty well in a root cellar, so they’ll last
for quite a long time. So, I would get a lot of eggs and mix milk powder in them.
They still hate that,” she laughs, referring to the twins. “To this very day they
won’t eat it.”

But the couple’s once-simple lifestyle soon became quite complicated.
Raising twins in the woods was a backbreaking challenge; there was no room for error.
Their idealistic life had been hit with a double dose of reality.

“At first I embraced it all because I had chosen that lifestyle. I was a very conscientious
environmentalist. I felt that when you haul water and you heat it up with wood that
you’ve cut, dried, and hauled, you certainly don’t waste water. You don’t really waste
anything. If you brought something in, it was through a lot of effort, and you used
every bit of it. I remember buying old coats at the Goodwill and then cutting them
down to make little jackets for my kids. We were just very conscientious, because
we didn’t have a lot of money and that was by choice. But by the time the kids were
ready for school, it became very cumbersome to live that lifestyle, and I did start
to get restless and feel that I just didn’t think I was going to be able to do this
the rest of my life. I had proven to myself that I could live that way, so I got a
little bit restless and felt penned up.”

By 1982, the back-to-the-land philosophy had created a back-to-the-wall lifestyle
for the couple.

“It put so much pressure on our relationship. There was a lot of work to do. We had
to carry everything into our cabin because it was a mile off of a dirt road. We had
twins, and all of their clothing was washed by hand. We never had a telephone so we
didn’t feel we could leave our kids at home with a babysitter; our lifestyle just
wasn’t set up for that,” Roxanne says. “We had very little money and we had to stretch
it as far as it could go. We had lots and lots of chores and two babies, and the mounting
responsibilities and hardships eventually became too much for the relationship to
bear and I believe was a major reason why the marriage didn’t last. I got married
too young. I met George when I was nineteen and we lived together from then on, so
I didn’t have a lot of experience. By the time I was in my thirties
I was like,
Wow, I wonder if he’s really the right guy?
” She chuckles. “He was the first guy who came along. I should have waited a little
bit longer and evaluated it.”

In 1983, Roxanne told George she wanted a divorce.

“That wasn’t so good. He was a lot more committed to the relationship,” she admits.
“He’s not as much of a restless soul as I am and he was into a routine that suited
him quite well, but I was just feeling bored and restless and I just needed more change,
more variety, more stimulation in my life. So, I went out and pursued that, and he
was pretty resentful that I had made a promise to be in a relationship till death
do us part, and then I reneged on that promise; that did not go over well.”

Roxanne packed up the kids and her belongings on a toboggan and pulled it to a nearby
cabin owned by a friend who was living elsewhere for several years. The setup was
just as rustic—no electricity or running water, a well, and a woodstove. She and George
traded the kids each week.

“His fathering of our children was really great. They loved him,” she says. “He’s
a very patient man, plays the guitar, he really loves them and spent a lot of time
with them. They still have a very close relationship.”

Despite the divorce, Lucas and Hannah embraced their down-to-earth upbringing in the
woods. Dirt roads provided endless miles of bike trails.

“It was wonderful,” says Lucas. “I grew up a very serious baseball fan and would often
bungee-cord a transistor radio to the handlebars of my bicycle, and we would ride
our bikes listening to Joe Castiglione, the Boston Red Sox radio announcer.” He laughs.
“We spent a lot of time doing that.”

A nearby pond provided swimming in the summer and skating in the winter.

“I remember one ice-skating party we had with a bunch of different families and kids,”
Hannah recalls. “We spent a lot of time there.”

In the community the twins called home, “modest” was mainstream.

“They took it as completely normal that they didn’t have a TV and that we lived a
very simple lifestyle,” says Roxanne. “I think that, especially looking back on it
now, they really appreciate how unique their life was growing up. We never had to
warn them of the dangers of civilization and strangers and traffic and those kinds
of issues you face when you’re living in the city or suburbs. They had a very idyllic
lifestyle. They could get on their bikes and go for the whole day. The only rule was
that they had to come home before dark. So they would go pick apples and had a lot
of freedom to go fishing or biking. One day they rode sixteen miles away and got a
flat tire and had to deal with it.” She smiles. “They had an old-fashioned childhood.
I know when they look back on it now, they’re very proud of the way they grew up and
they tell their friends about it. It’s a story they love to tell.”

Alone with two children to raise, Roxanne began to worry about her paltry income stream.
She was earning about $150 a week buying and reselling items at local flea markets.
She continued to waitress but admits she was not cut out for the role of server.

“I had a real problem with asserting my independence,” she says. “I was a very independent
person. I had my mind made up about the way things were done, and I never failed to
tell my boss what I thought they should do, and that didn’t go over well. So, I ended
up not being a very valuable employee because I was not very compliant.”

There were three restaurants in Guilford, and Roxanne got fired from one. And then
the next.

“They had started having this Thursday-night pizza night where it was all-you-could-eat
pizza. They were trying to get people to come in during the week, and they only did
it for four or five weeks
in a row. They decided they didn’t have the turnout they were expecting, and they
stopped doing it. I remember telling my boss, ‘You gotta keep after it a little bit
longer than four or five weeks. It’s gonna take a while for people to tell each other
about it and for the word to spread. You gotta hang in there with it.’ I look back
now and think that was pretty inappropriate.” She raises her eyebrows. “Telling my
boss how to run her business. I’m sure she didn’t appreciate it at all, but that’s
the kind of thing I would do.”