Why make it this hard?

I wanted to enjoy Logan Ward's See You In a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America, but I just couldn't.

I could sympathise with he and his wife's decision to leave behind the rat race and New York City and try to make a go of it living on a farm. But they took it a step further: they decided to literally go back to 1900, not using anything that wasn't widely available after that date (no phone, no computer, no electricity, etc.).

Now that I just don't understand. What, it isn't hard enough to go and try and grow your own food, you had to go and give up indoor plumbing? No way, man. When I read about his wife actually going without modern-day, ahem, sanitary supplies, I was done with this book. And then there were the snake stories:

"Over the next few weeks, as we grind ourselves down preparing to begin our experiment--bickering, fretting, racing to and from town on the single-lane farm roads--the snakes haunt us. I find a snakeskin hanging like a giant condom from a limb outside Luther's second-story window and another poking out of the backyard downspout. I shoo snakes out of the barnyard and the grass encircling the house." (p. xi.)

Ye gods. Paragraphs like that make me want to go join the city rat race instead.

Comments

[laura]

The snarky part of me says, "Well, if you leave the rat race but don't do your 1900 gimmick, then you don't get a book contract." I am getting a little sick of the "I did this thing for a year" book--or at least of the apologetic books of that nature.

[rachael]

Another interesting book of this type is Better Off, about a guy who lives among the Amish for a fair amount of time. Better, he meets a woman and almost on a lark they decide to get married and go live like the Amish. Really interesting, though not without its provocations.

[Citizen Reader]

Laura,
Snark away! My sister also opined that this was mainly done to write the book, which I suppose is why it annoyed me. And normally I don't mind the "year in the life" books, but this one just seemed too much of a false construct. You're right though--there's getting to be a lot of them, and not all of them are done well.

Rachael!
Thanks for the suggestion! I read "Better Off" a long time ago and enjoyed it--I think the difference was that that guy and his wife were really going to try to make a go of it for life--none of this "let's avoid computers just for a year until we get our book material" stuff. I agree that it was a much more interesting book.

[Sarah]

Speaking of, um, snakeskin condoms, I wonder if they gave up birth control as well (not having read the book, I don't know how old they were, but if the wife gave up "supplies" . . .). And then she had a baby at home without anaesthesia etc. etc. etc.

[Citizen Reader]

Sarah,
Well, I'll admit I only read the first season (of the "four seasons") and then I skimmed the rest: but I think there was some talk of sheepskin prophylatics, and after that they seemed to be trying to get pregnant. In the middle of the book his wife started suffering from abdominal pain and was diagnosed as having an ovarian cyst--which was enough to give me the screaming heebie jeebies after recent experiences. (Evidently her cyst just went away? By the end of the book she was pregnant--and I'm pretty sure they left 1900 in time for her to have the baby in a twenty-first century facility.)

Interestingly enough--in the "Better Off" book referenced above--I seem to remember that that woman did give birth at home, which I thought was gutsy. I don't trust the medical establishment at all, but holy cow, all you have to do is look at mortality rates for women in childbirth from centuries past, and you start to feel a bit better about modern medicine. Just a bit, though.