Maine - Living off the grid:

I have many stories from the years we lived in Maine—years spent in a cabin, on 100 acres, beside the ocean, without indoor plumbing… and so much more. That chapter of my life was a five-year adventure filled with twists, turns, and a whole lot of “roughing it.”

I loved the life we carved out for ourselves. Our time in Maine was deeply transformative.

Today, I’ll start at the beginning. Future posts will unfold as the memories come—likely out of order, just as they surface. I’ll also be keeping my veterinary stories separate from these more personal reflections. Over the years, I’ve often been told I should write a book… and perhaps this is how it begins.

This is a piece of my story.

November 2006 - Bremen, Maine.
For a variety of reasons, we decided to move our farm and family from Illinois to Bremen, Maine. We became caretakers of a property with a small cabin and over 100 acres of land. Picture a two-story red barn sitting in an open clearing about the size of two football fields, surrounded on all sides by dense forest. The bottom floor of the cabin was unfinished with a floor of gravel. The top floor of the cabin was the tiny living space where we spent the first four years of our Maine life.

We found the property through Maine FarmLink, an organization that connects landowners with people who want to farm and steward the land.

Looking back, I’m grateful for our blissful ignorance. We moved in just weeks before winter, with no real understanding of what we were stepping into.

The cabin was poorly insulated. Cold air came up through the uninsulated pine flooring. The wood stove was broken and wouldn’t hold a fire through the night. That first winter, we didn’t even have real windows—just single-pane storm windows. At night, we piled on layers: winter coats, hats, scarves, gloves—etc. We all huddled together on a futon we had brought with us—our dog, Chance, and our cat, Ray included.

We hadn’t prepared any firewood, which—had we known better—is something most Mainers work on year-round.

There were gas lamps for light on the walls of each room, but we quickly learned that keeping propane tanks filled outside the cabin wasn’t sustainable. We switched to headlamps instead.

There was no indoor plumbing. All of our water had to be hauled upstairs in blue five-gallon jugs—for drinking, washing dishes, everything. We used a composting toilet, and I’ll spare you the details… let’s just say that when I once shared stories about it around an Iowa campfire, about 90% of the group was horrified. The other 10% tried to reassure everyone that it was perfectly normal.

We also weren’t exactly welcomed by the neighborhood.

We had arrived right at the start of hunting season and unknowingly disrupted land that had been used for generations. We didn’t realize it at the time, but something was clearly off when cars started coming up our long driveway, only to abruptly turn around—peeling out and racing back down the wooded lane. No one stopped to introduce themselves.

It was… strange. But we kept settling in.

One day, I looked out our drafty bedroom window and saw someone walking across the yard. I pushed the window open and called out, “Hello! Could you wait a moment so we can come out and meet you?”

No response.

I tried again. “Hey—what are you doing?”

Still nothing. But I could see the person was carrying a gun.

Finally, I yelled, “We have a big dog—and I hope he doesn’t bite you!”

That got a response.

“You people!”

Later that afternoon, we discovered a deer stand in a tree—positioned toward the cabin. It was nothing more than a plank tied up with lobster rope. My partner tore it down, carried it to the end of the driveway, and hung it from a large stump.

That was our introduction to life in Maine: we were “people from away,” and we had interrupted something long established.

We were, in many ways, blissfully naïve about what it truly meant to live off the grid.

And yet—I loved it.

This was before smartphones. We read books. We huddled around the stubborn wood stove. We froze through the nights. We washed dishes one cup at a time, the water draining into a bucket beneath the sink.

We joined the YMCA just so we could take real, hot showers.

If we wanted to get online, we had to haul out the generator, run extension cords into the cabin, fire up the satellite, and then—finally—connect. Our little fuel-efficient Honda generator became our lifeline to light and the outside world.

And yes… we probably spent more time (and money) than we should have at King Eider’s Pub in Damariscotta. If you ever find yourself in Midcoast Maine, feel free to look up at the ceiling—our beer stein is still there.

Lucky number 211.