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They Were As Gods | Ambrook Research

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The year is 1975. An overloaded UHaul pulls into a clearing in the remote Maine woods. In one corner of the clearing, a bare-bones plywood shack crouches. Out of the truck clambers my mother, a skinny blonde in a bulky sweater with a sleeping baby girl clutched to her hip, and her first husband, a full beard and long hair spilling down his back. In the back of the UHaul are some dairy goats, bleating pensively, and every object that made up their young, newlywed lives. My mother was part of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, a generational exodus to the countryside that was so noticeable it changed census statistics. In sleepy Waldo County, Maine, where I now live, the population grew by more than 20 percent between 1970 and 1980. People around the country went rural — there were movements in the Ozarks and along the West Coast — but Maine and Vermont served as something of a Mecca for aspiring homesteaders. Lie-Nielsen's mother poses with sunflowers in her garden in

In the 1970s, one million Americans attempted an off-grid, self-sustaining homestead lifestyle. It wasn’t easy, but it was life on their own terms. The year is 1975. An overloaded UHaul pulls into a clearing in the remote Maine woods. In one corner of the clearing, a bare-bones plywood shack crouches. Out of the truck clambers my mother, a skinny blonde in a bulky sweater with a sleeping baby girl clutched to her hip, and her first husband, a full beard and long hair spilling down his back. In the back of the UHaul are some dairy goats, bleating pensively, and every object that made up their y

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