'Twenty Acres': An off-the-grid memoir

Sarah Neidhardt's rural Arkansas childhood was part of the 1970s "back to the land" movement.

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It wasn’t that Sarah Neidhardt’s parents didn’t have money. It was that they got swept up in the 1970s countercultural, back-to-the-land movement that painted what she calls “some archetypal, pre-industrial past” as the best way to live.

So in 1973, despite the misgivings voiced by their upper-class families in South Carolina and Colorado, the young couple and their baby, Sarah, moved to the Arkansas Ozarks, where they would spend the next eight years living hand to mouth while raising Sarah and her two younger sisters.

My childhood in the forest was cushioned with the remnants of their pasts, with books and paintings, heirloom furniture, silver spoons, and old monogrammed sheets. But we had wood heat and no indoor plumbing for years, and our world was made of miles of woods and dirt roads; old shacks and worn-out vehicles; salvaged and antiquated stoves, refrigerators, and washers; and country music played in overgrown yards. It would take me years to understand that the life that most defined me as once poor was in reality the very thing that most connected me to my upper-class ancestry — the ability to choose to check out.

Neidhardt writes about her family’s Ozark years in her new memoir, “Twenty Acres,” in which she also reflects on what her parents’ ideals cost them and their children. She draws on a treasure trove of materials: her journals, piles of family letters (they had no phone, so they wrote a lot), boxes of photographs, even cassette tape recordings made to share with her grandmother.

From the start, it seems apparent that this experiment in self-reliance is not going to go as envisioned. The Neidhardts pay for their share of a 20-acre parcel, purchased with another couple, with a loan from Sarah’s grandmother. There are no dwellings on the parcel; there’s no paved road to it, so the wives and their babies live in a rental with unreliable plumbing while the husbands live in a tent on the land and try to work simultaneously on clearing the land, starting a cabin and improving the road. Six months in, the other couple quits and sells their share of the property to the Neidhardts, who now have two children under the age of 2 and a collection of livestock. Neidhardt’s mother keeps up a cheerful tone in letters to relatives but dares to voice uncertainty to her husband:

“I don’t see how people like us who know almost nothing about farming can live off the land when all these people around us have been trying for a lifetime and still can’t do it. They all have other jobs and are still barely making it,” Momma remembers saying as they drove slowly along a dirt road.

“Horseshit!” Daddy exploded. “Dammit. Let me do this!”

Reflecting on her family’s Arkansas years, Neidhardt experiences a mix of emotions.

One minute I felt angry with my father and his selfishness and annoyed with my mother and her propaganda and her stoicism.

And:

I felt a wistful affection and pride for my parents’ hard work and determination to create something out of the ordinary for themselves and for us. I also felt a creeping, mournful feeling of how really absurd it all was. I wanted to break down and cry for my mother at times. Every discussion I have with her about those years carries at least tinges of bitterness.

And:

Despite all the hard work and danger, life had been easy and joyous too. Music and woods and play define those years for me.

Upon first picking up this book, I thought, wow, this is really outside my experience. I’ve never been to Arkansas. Nor have I ever been completely off the grid for more than three days, and that was by choice as an adult. But as I read and reflected, I heard echoes of my childhood with immigrant parents. Like my parents, Neidhardt’s left everyone and everything they knew in hopes of building a better life. Like my brother and me, Neidhardt and her sisters grew up straddling one world inside their home and another outside it. Like my family, hers was often beset with tensions that could be attributed to both daily challenges and the underlying uprooting. And like me, Neidhardt looks back and wonders: Were the sacrifices worth it? Did the experiment succeed?