HARBORSIDE, Maine – From day one, Helen and Scott Nearing insisted that we call them by their first names. At the time, when I was in my twenties and they were 50 and 70 years ahead of me, I thought the request odd, not to mention in direct violation of how I had been taught, growing up in Ohio, to show respect for my elders. On the other hand, it would be disrespectful not to address them as they wished, so I did.

Only looking back many years later did I realize what a powerful message that simple request – made to everyone – had sent to me. Not only were they treating me as an equal, but I instantly became a contemporary, during the Vietnam War era, of a man who had been tried under the Espionage Act for writing anti-war pamphlets – in World War I.

I often felt I was living in a time warp during the seven years we were Helen and Scott's nearest neighbors on Cape Rosier. Part of that, of course, was self-induced.

Following their example laid out in ''Living the Good Life,'' we had moved from a comfortable suburban lifestyle, with all the modern appliances, to a homestead without electricity or running water on the 22 acres of land the Nearings had sold to us. I did not grow up hauling water and cooking home-grown food on a wood-burning cook stove, but my mother did, and now my two kids have those kinds of stories to tell.

Once Helen and Scott got me used to being treated as an equal despite my youth and inexperience, I was ready for their next major lesson – to be open to the possibilities by always challenging my assumptions.

An example occurred at one of the discussion groups the Nearings moderated every Monday night in their cavernous living room. With windows on three sides, a huge stone fireplace, and the interior wall entirely taken up with just part of their large collection of books, the room could comfortably hold two or three dozen people.

I was sitting on a bench next to one of the visitors who came by the hundreds and thousands every summer and stayed anywhere from an hour to a season. We were leaning against those bookshelves, which I had recently helped Helen rearrange, when the subject of flying saucers came up.

''Anyone who believes in flying saucers is stupid,'' the pilgrim next to me said with conviction.

There was an awkward pause in the room, Helen smiled her ''I see you're sure of that'' smile, and then the next person brought up another subject. I quietly pointed to the bookshelf behind us. About eight inches of space on one shelf was taken up with Helen's books on UFOs and other extraterrestrial phenomenon. He blanched, then quietly tried to fit unobtrusively through one of the cracks in the wooden floor.

* * *

Theirs was a love story often lost in the details.

Helen Knothe gave up a budding career as a violinist in the 1930s to follow the great love of her life, self-described radical Scott Nearing, some 20 years her senior. From her perspective, she willingly was playing second fiddle to a man who stood on principle and chose a life of severe frugality and country living rather than bend his ideals to fit into a society he could not abide.

It was a relationship that was beautiful to behold in its tenderness and caring, and an inspiration to thousands of people who followed their example of how to live sanely and sensibly in Maine and other rural parts of New England. Some attribute ''Living the Good Life,'' often referred to as the bible of the back-to-the-land movement, with reversing the downward trend in Maine's population in the 1970s.

In 1983, Scott, at the age of 100, chose to die at home by refusing to eat. Helen supported him in that decision, and afterward carried on what she thought was his memory at the home they had shared in Harborside. She wrote a sequel to their earlier book, ''Loving, and Leaving the Good Life.''

Before it went off to the publisher, Helen honored me with an advance draft of that book, and asked for my comments. What I told her seemed to startle her.

I said that the book contained too much Scott and not enough her, that although Scott's economics on how to live simply and sanely in a world gone mad made a lot of sense intellectually, it was her warmth and humanity which made me think going back to the land was not only possible but desirable. While Scott may have designed the system, Helen's touch was the one that put the ''home'' in homesteading. I could not accept the way she characterized herself in the book as a simple tagalong to Scott, because, of the two, she had been the greater influence on my life.

Despite her surprise at my critique, I was glad I said it. And I have been delighted in the years since then to witness others come up to her at gatherings where she spoke to standing-room-only crowds, and express the same sentiment. I suspect we collectively finally got through to her how much she was loved for herself, not for her secondhand connection to Scott.

* * *

I first met Helen and Scott in the week between Christmas and New Year's in 1971, when my then-husband and I stopped by their Harborside home totally unannounced (they then had no phone) during a land-hunting foray. We found Scott out cutting firewood behind the home. We helped for awhile and we were then fed lunch – vegetable soup kept hot on the wood-burning stove, and a remarkably inedible cookie which even Helen called a carrot croaker. (In her frugality, she could not bring herself to toss out the pulp from juiced carrots, and mixed them up with some flour and molasses and baked them in the ever-hot oven.)

The following month, we sent a note, asking if we could stop by again when we took a second look at a parcel of land in Stetson. Helen immediately wrote back on a postcard to ''come ahead, but don't sign anything until you come see us.''

They sold us 22 acres of their farm for $2,000, the type of offer made to only three other couples. We eked out a homestead, built a house with timbers we felled, had two kids, and seven enlightening but nonelectric years later got divorced.

When we accepted their offer, I thought it would be great to have Helen and Scott as neighbors, because we could run to them for advice on gardening and homesteading. And I knew we would need that advice.

I'm sure I share a sentiment with many thousands of people when I say that, in dealing with the Nearings, we got more than we bargained for.

Yes, they taught us how to build compost and grow carrots. But more importantly, they showed us what it looks like up close and personal to treat everything and everyone on Earth with respect and love, to live a life grounded on one's principles, and to find delight in the unanticipated.

In the 23 years since I first met them, I never once got a straight answer from either one as to why they made the offer to us, out of the thousands who were then coming annually to pay homage to this remarkable couple.

All I know is that their faith in us changed my life forever – and that I join thousands of others whose lives they touched in being forever grateful for their incredible example.

 

Helen Nearing died Sept. 17, 1995, after a single-car accident near her home. She had been on her way to Ellsworth, Maine, to see a movie about Cuba. She was 91.

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