Mark Sundeen was three and a half years into his book, “The Unsettlers: The Search for the Good Life in Today’s America,” when he gave it to a friend to read. He’d already written two revisions of the book, which was about three couples — in Missouri, Detroit, and Montana — who’d pared down their lives to the bare necessities and become farmers. His editor had accepted the book, and his publisher, Penguin, was completely behind the project.
Then his friend, who also happened to be an editor, told him she couldn’t get past page 150 of the 350-page book. “Because I couldn’t tell why you wrote it,” she told him.
The critique gave him pause. Another friend had remarked at how much she was looking forward to the book and what it would say about Cedar, Sundeen’s fiancee, who was raised in rural Montana and homeschooled, without television or running water. “I’m so interested to see how you are going to write about Ceder, and her being raised back-to-the-land,” the friend said.
“And I was like, ‘Huh. That’s not even in the book at all,” Sundeen recalled.
The book was about people searching for a rough-hewn authenticity amid the blinking splendor and dross that is American life today. It finally occurred to Sundeen why he was writing about this topic. What connected the couples in the book wasn’t just the fact that they’d all become farmers. What connected them was Sundeen himself. The search he was writing about was actually his own.
He was at a crossroads. After a lone wolf adult life spent wandering with few commitments and no permanent home (as he notes in the book, he’d lived at three dozen different addresses, not counting the many years in which he lived primarily in tents), Sundeen found himself, at 41, approaching middle-age and engaged to be married. Life no longer seemed boundless in its possibilities. He was facing domesticity for the first time and wanted to know how to do it well, while maintaining the values — foremost a love of the wild and the wander — that had always governed his best impulses. He wanted to learn how to make a stand.
The first two drafts of the book did not include the word “I.” Yet the thread that bound together the stories within the book was his own search. He’d sought these searchers for his own reasons. In his final revision, the book included his own story.
“I wanted to see if living along lines of radical simplicity brought a deeper, truer relationship to land, livelihood, economy, and spirit,” he wrote. “I wanted to learn the old-fashioned concept of household, a meaningful mix of work, family, and home. How far might we go in rejecting the compromises of contemporary life — and what did we gain or sacrifice? What I wanted to learn was how to lead a good life.”
His search, he realized, began with a frazzling incident with piece of fried chicken he’d experienced at a supermarket on the outskirts of Missoula, Montana.
He and Cedar were living in a little cottage on the banks of the Bitterroot River, seven miles outside of town, “where we grew vegetables and canned peach jam and from our bed watched bald eagles nest in the cottonwoods,” Sundeen wrote. Much about this was idyllic. He bicycled into town every day, where he kept an office for writing. One day, on his way back home, he stopped at the market to pick up some butter. He wanted ethical butter — that is, produced without chemicals, humanely, and locally sourced. But the cheapest slab of this kind of butter was more than six bucks, which infuriated him. He walked to the non-organic section of the supermarket for mass market butter, half the price, and while doing so spied the deli and its ready-made fried chicken. His mind floated back to childhood in Manhattan Beach, to the treat of going to the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Sepulveda and buying buckets of chicken to take to the beach. Cedar had been raised vegetarian, and his life now cohered to hers; their meals together, which he treasured, took hours to make. They usually ate under a dawning bed of stars at about 10 p.m. “The downside of the garden-to-table gourmet was that to get dinner from garden to table took For. Fucking. Ever,” he wrote.
At the deli, the impulse of instant gratification overtook Sundeen, and he soon found himself gnawing a fryer in the parking lot and hiding the greasy evidence from his soon-to-be wife with a pre-packaged towelette before biking back to his countryside idyll with some six dollar butter.
“Simple living was not so easy,” he wrote. “It wasn’t even simple. What was simple was hot ‘n’ ready Chester’s fried thighs.”
The search, which lead Sundeen through large swaths of American history as well as to farms in Montana, Missouri, and Detroit, was the book that would follow.
The Unsettlers
One of Sundeen’s heroes, the poet/farmer/novelist/prophet Wendell Berry, wrote a poem called “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front.” It begins,
“Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.”
“The Unsettlers” begins with an epitaph by writer Jim Harrison, which restates Berry’s sentiment a bit less caustically: “The danger of civilization, or course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”
As best he could, Sundeen tried to leave the stultifying parts of civilization behind at the outset of his adult life. The Mira Costa Class of ‘88 graduate studied at Stanford as an undergrad and then USC for grad school, but thereafter departed from anything approximating conventional middle class life. He lived in a tent outside Moab, Utah, for a while, and spent the better part of a decade living out of a backpack as an Outward Bound instructor across the American West. He later lived among bullfighters in Mexico and fishermen in Alaska and subsequently wrote books about both. Finally, about eight years ago, he crossed paths with an old friend, Daniel Suelo, who was living a cave in Utah and had utterly deviated from any convention, refusing to use money. The book that followed, “The Man Who Quit Money,” was nationally lauded and firmly established what Sundeen’s beat as a writer was — seekers, like himself, going against the grain of the hyper-material American way of life.
The proposal for the book that would follow was a submitted as a paragraph. “This is going to be a book about dropouts who tried to live a more simple life,” Sundeen proposed. Penguin was all in; they gave him carte blanche to pursue his curiosity. He was two years into the project before he found the subjects who would animate the book.
The first story in “The Unsettlers” is about a young couple, Ethan Hughes and Sarah Wilcox, who decided they wanted to homestead and start a family and wrote down a list of 20 qualities that a potential home should have — a list that included affordability, a year-round water source, long growing seasons, no building codes, no use of electricity or petroleum, nearby opera (Sarah was a singer) and ocean (Ethan was an ocean-lover), all within five miles of a train station and biking distance of a college town.
They found 160 acres in northern Missouri for $160,000 and bought it, sight unseen, foregoing only the opera and ocean requirements. They arrived by train late one night and, with a little guidance from a friendly townsperson, bicycled out to their new home. Sarah was five months pregnant.
Their homestead would become more than a farm. They named it the Possibility Alliance and hoped it would become both a community and place of learning. Influenced by Gandhi — as was Sundeen, who had legendary Mira Costa free thinker and teacher Dr. Marilyn Whirry as a key influence in his high school years — they wrote a charter titled, “A Movement for the Upliftment of All Beings.”
They built it, and people came. Over the years, thousands would come and study sustainable farming practices and earth-conscious spirituality at the farm. Sundeen, upon first discovering Ethan and Sarah, enthusiastically called his wife — whom he’d left shortly after their honeymoon to do his reporting — and told her he’d found a place they should investigate together, one that had both simple living and spirituality. “I already have a spiritual community,” she dryly responded.
The second of the stories took Sundeen to the unexpected heart of the urban farming movement, a farm named Brother Nature Produce that had sprouted up among the ruins of inner city Detroit. It was operated by a tough young woman named Olivia Hubert and her maverick-minded partner, Greg Willendar. Theirs is a story of going back-to-the-land without a shred of hippie-dippy sentiment, just two hard-headed people fed up with the decay of their native city and drawn to living a life firmly within their own control.
The third story focuses on a couple, Luci Brieger and Steve Elliott, who went back to the land three decades ago. Their farm had started when they bought a small plot of land along Sweathouse Creek in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana and pitched a teepee. They not only built a thriving organic farm but raised two kids. Luci, like all the women in “The Unsettlers,” is the unsentimental backbone of the operation.
“She insisted they had not gone back to the land,” Sundeen wrote. “She would say we all live on the land, whether we know it or not. She did not drop out. There was, to her way of thinking, nowhere to drop out to. She never yearned for a simple life, a sun-filled yoga studio, a coop full of chickens, tomatoes reddening on the windowsill. She is not vegetarian, vegan, macrobiotic, or gluten-free…She is not the serene earth mother who who accepts the world and its inhabitants just as they are. Even after birthing a child in a teepee without hot running water, she insists that she is neither radical nor extreme.”
What Sundeen discovered is that, contrary to his book proposal, none of his subjects were dropouts.
“I was really inspired by these people,” he said. “The book is not about dropouts, ultimately.
These are people more engaged with the problems of society than most of us…And none of these people were wearing a hairshirt and suffering. They are not martyrs. They’ve actually found work they love to do. And so they find work that is meaningful and by doing that work they are finding some satisfaction, or abundance. That is the takeaway. It’s not that everyone needs to be a farmer; it’s that everyone needs to find work that has meaning.”
In the end, “The Unsettlers” is about many things. Sundeen has a broad curiosity and the gift of delivering succinct histories — in this case, touching on everything from Gandhi’s ashram to the roots of the back-to-the land movement (which is part of what inspired the founding of the U.S., Sundeen notes, quoting the second president, John Adams: “Let us Eat Potatoes and drink Water. Let us wear Canvass, and undressed sheepskins, rather than submit to the unrighteous and ignominious Domination that is prepared for Us.”) to the Great Migration of African Americans to the industrial north of the U.S. and the subsequent White Flight from urban centers that gave rise to suburbanization.
Perhaps most fundamentally it also about Sundeen learning the fine art of domesticity with his patient and poetically no-nonsense wife. “You are attracted to the ideas, but living back-to-the-land is not an intellectual decision,” Cedar tells him at one point. “People do it because they love it…You don’t like to rough it. You don’t like to be cold, or to split wood in the snow. You don’t like to garden. You don’t like to fix things. You like to hire someone to do it. You like to take a hot shower every night.”
He couldn’t argue. The book he would write would ultimately be about the lessons he learned on this search, the arc of his journey into understanding the freedom of fidelity. He wrote to learn, and thereby came to recognize a home when he’d found it. The unsettler settled.
“The paradox of matrimony is that while the bond feels eternal, it tethers us to the finite,” Sundeen wrote. “The people in this book believe — and show — that sacrifice leads to abundance. And that’s the same allure of marriage, that by giving up one element of freedom we gain something greater.”
Wendell Berry understood this. His manifesto also ends on a domestic note:
“Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.”
Mark Sundeen visits {pages} bookstore (904 Manhattan Avenue, Manhattan Beach) on Saturday, Feb. 11 at 6 p.m. B
