- Corcoran, Travis J. I.
Escape the City, Vol. 1.
New Hampshire: Morlock Publishing, 2021.
ISBN 979-874270303-7.
-
In early 2014, the author and his wife left the suburbs of Boston and
moved to a 56 acre homestead in rural New Hampshire. Before arriving,
he had done extensive reading and research, but beyond the chores of
a suburban homeowner, had little or no hands-on experience with the
myriad skills required to make a go of it in the country: raising and
preserving garden vegetables; maintaining pastures; raising chickens,
sheep, and hogs, including butchering and processing their meat;
erecting utility buildings; planting and maintaining a fruit orchard;
tapping maple trees and producing syrup from their sap; managing a wood
lot, felling and processing trees, storing and aging firewood and
heating with it; and maintaining a tractor, implements, chainsaws, and
the many tools which are indispensable to farm life. The wisdom about
how tradesmen and contractors work in the country in the section
“Life in The Country: Cultural Fit: Scheduling” would have
been worth more than the modest price of the book had I learned it
before spending a decade and a half figuring it out for myself after my
own escape from the city in 1992.
This massive work (653 large pages in print) and its companion
Volume 2 are an encyclopedic compendium of
lessons learned and an absolutely essential resource for anybody
interested in self-sufficient living, whether as a “suburbanite
in the country”, “gardener with chickens”,
“market gardener”, “homesteader”, or
“commercial farmer”, all five of which are discussed in the
book.
The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited
subscribers. The numerous illustrations are in black and white in
print editions, but colour in the Kindle version.
August 2021 