From the Land and Back Author:Curtis K. Stadtfeld This is the story of my farming forfathers, of how they picked a somewhat inhospitable portion of central Michigan, put their roots down, made farms and homes and futures, and how all that they built for generations was swept awaly almost overnight by technological change. It went so fast they hardly knew it was gone. Such change is sand, for it... more » uproots people of long standing, destroys subcultures, and leaves the children without roots.
So this is also the story of how a generation found itself thrown out of its homes because the homes had their foundations cut away. There are many better books to tell how those young people, now parents themselves, are afraid that they have lost their own lives and perhaps lost their children at same time.
But this book tells, besides, of what it was really like to live on the land. At its best, it was a life of great enrichment and fulfillment, and life whole and organic and stisfying. Much of the time, it was a life of boredom and compromise, of brutal work and disappointment, of the harsh realitites of poor medicine and how indifferent nature.
And I have tried to show how fragile a rural society is when it is based on isolation and ignorance of the outside world. That is a lesson that those disenchanted yound people who seek the simple life of the farm should know. They should know, too, that it is not in nature to support man very well. We have always struggled against nature, tried to make ourselves more comfortable, more secure. A few years ago, we thought we had finally conquered nature. Now we see that there may be a finality about it more profound than we had anticipated.
It would be nice if those of us who find ourselves confused by urban living and think it would be better to go back to the land could remember exactly how it was. This is an attempt to remember.« less