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Family Eschews Conventional Life For Rural Rat Race

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By PENELOPE GREEN, The New York Times

Published: November 5, 2007

Updated: 11/03/2007 04:11 pm

WARNERVILLE, N.Y. - Shannon Hayes makes her own soap, composts her garbage and plans to home-school her unvaccinated daughters, who have grown huge and pink-cheeked on unpasteurized milk from the cow she milks herself.

Hayes eschews white sugar, white flour, television and plastic (though she has harvested the odd baby walker from a Dumpster).

Hayes eats food that she has raised with her husband, Bob Hooper, and her parents here at Sap Bush Hollow Farm, where the livestock is grass-fed, or that her neighbors have grown, some of which she preserves for winter.

She dresses in used clothing, sits on secondhand furniture and lives in a solar-powered house made from (untreated) pine trees that grew here.

Hayes, 33, also writes cookbooks (in the predawn hours before her farm work begins), advocates for local causes, lectures national organizations about sustainable cuisine and advises those closer to home, like the staff members of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

And though she is a third-generation farmer, Hayes is a newly minted paradigm, an exemplar of the pastoral, in a year the pastoral ideal cycled back into the zeitgeist with such force that hardly a month goes by without another urbanite declaring his intention to eat locally in order to save his family and the planet (and to write a pastoral memoir and secure a book deal).

Before you roll your eyes at Hayes' now-voguish alternative lifestyle, you should know that she has beaten you to it. In an essay for her blog at shannonhayes.info, she acknowledged her lifestyle represents a new stereotype, and cautioned that it is one tucked into a very old type indeed: the supermom.

The Ubermom Code

Hayes, who has undergraduate and graduate degrees in writing, sustainable agriculture and community development, had written, "We are the overeducated overachievers, sidestepping the conventional rat race for an alternative maelstrom."

That maelstrom, she said, was wearing her out. She could not get help because that, she said, would violate the übermom code. She had no alternative but to do less: "Our family has settled for a life of radical domestic imperfection."

That means she has stopped mowing the lawn (it saves gas), weeding the garden, cleaning the drippings at the bottom of the fridge and folding the laundry (it's easier for her older daughter, Saoirse, 4, to grab her clothes out of the laundry basket anyway). "I just don't invite any übermoms over for lunch," she wrote.

On a recent October morning, Hayes had been at the farm since 8 a.m., processing lamb with her mother, carving seven animals into chops, legs and stew meat, all of which she wrapped into packages and stowed in a room-size freezer. After driving six miles back to her house, she said: "We don't live a cluttered lifestyle, but it's not exactly clean. It's not House Beautiful."

There were signs of decay, but of a photogenic kind: a pergola was disintegrating and the Virginia creeper that twined around it had died over the summer. The Hooper-Hayes home is actually two houses, a three-room "hippie shack" built sometime in the 1970s married to a 1,200-square-foot solar-powered addition cocked due south on 15 acres of scrub and wood. "A surprise for all seasons," read the ad for the shack in a local paper eight years ago. Its asking price was $110,000. Hayes and Hooper offered $78,000.

"I wrote the owners and said, 'I don't think it's what you deserve,'" Hayes said. "'It's just what I have.' They took the offer."

When their daughter Ula was born last spring, said Hooper, a lanky environmental educator, "we thought we'd build another bathroom and maybe another bedroom, and look what happened."

He gestured at the large, lofty extension, which cost about $170,000.

The first floor is filled with a long kitchen with poured concrete counters and floors and a masonry fireplace that heats the whole house. Cobalt blue pottery lines the open shelves. (A potter friend in the Adirondacks barters his work for their chickens.) Upstairs is an open loft with clerestory windows facing south. Hayes and Hooper's bed is on one side of the loft; their daughters' beds are on the other. A huge closet holds everyone's things.

The bathroom has an eco-flush toilet and a sink made from a sewing table.

When Hayes graduated from Cornell, her father said he figured he would never have any grandchildren because Hayes was so particular. "I told him I'd just order a husband from L.L. Bean," recalled Hayes, explaining that L.L. Bean was one of the few stores she shopped from. "If I didn't like him I could send him back."

Passing through L.L. Bean that year with her father, Hayes saw Hooper behind the optics counter. (He was a Maine guide at the time, leading eco-tours for the store.)

"I was already on remainder," said Hooper, 49, "so she couldn't send me back."

Hayes and Hooper may be exhausted - he killed and plucked 300 chickens the day before - but they are not throwing in the (organic cotton) towel.

"The thing that I really get tired of is defending my prices," said Hayes, who told the story of the $64 leg of lamb. "I'm at a farmers' market, and two ladies come up and poke at my meat. And one says, 'This must be really expensive.' And I say, 'It's $15 a pound.' And they say, 'That must be a $50 leg,' and start complaining. And I say, 'Actually, it's $64.' And that enables me and my family to live at 200 percent of the poverty level, to qualify for assistance, if we so desired. To not have health insurance."

'The Enlightened Homemaker'

Hayes, her husband and their daughters live on $40,000, she said, an income derived from their farm's proceeds, their investments and her cookbook sales. She is gestating her own how-to memoir-manifesto, though the NPR-listening audience for farm-lit may be alarmed by its title. (Hayes has, in fact, been a National Public Radio contributor.)

"The Enlightened Homemaker: How to Save the Planet by Putting the Family First" is the working title for an examination of what Hayes sees as the high cost (financial, social, psychological, ecological and nutritional) of working outside the home. Her idea is that home-based businesses such as farming are better for communities and families - and more cost-effective (no babysitting, travel costs, prepackaged food costs, etc.).

"And I don't think the homemaker is a woman," Hayes said, pointing to her own household, where she and Hooper share all tasks except cooking, which is her territory.

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