Stepping away from modern life

At first, they were terrified of rats, snakes, horses, fire, botulism and boredom.

They also had no experience in cooking with wood, heating with wood, splitting wood, planting seeds, pulling weeds, driving a horse-drawn buggy, milking goats or canning a harvest, among 100 other things.

But Logan and Heather Ward jumped into their experiment anyhow. It was a good book concept: Take a year off from New York City to live as folks did in 1900. Other writers were chronicling similar adventures: cooking every Julia Child recipe, climbing Mount Everest, having sex every night for a year.

If you take Logan Ward at his word, he and his wife didn't have much sex in the dirty, exhausting, doubt-filled early days of their year on 40 acres in the Shenandoah Valley, where they lived far from bright lights, secure salaries and hot showers.

Eventually, they figured out a reliable aphrodisiac. And they figured out everything else, too -- astonishing, since so many of us can't manage our more convenient high-tech lives.

But that was their point. "Living in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation at the wealthiest moment in history," the book begins, "Heather and I should be happy. We aren't." He describes himself as burned out, he and his wife "killing ourselves to keep up," eating from takeout menus, their 2-year-old son largely raised by a nanny, none of them able to see the stars.

Enough. Many of us say the same word to ourselves. But Logan and Heather took action, with little Luther toddling behind.

They begin their year of living in the past in the spring of 2001, selling their Brooklyn apartment, planting in dry soil peas that never grow. Their timing means they won't see the 9/11 tragedies unfold on TV, a blessing most of us might wish for. They do, however, accept newspapers from newfound friends, just as they accept a gallon of cherries, a tin bucket of ice cream they chose to believe was homemade, and lots of other favors true to 1900.

As the year passes, they briefly long for the crisp, clean clothes that visitors wear, for handy automobile headlights as they bike home in the dark, and for ... well, it turns out, for not much else. They enjoy writing blotchy letters to friends using steel-nibbed pens dipped in ink. They savor bourbon on their porch, reading to each other from 19th-century bestsellers.

I finished this book with deep regret. As I closed it to news that the Dow had plunged off a cliff again, I envied this couple's self- reliance, commitment and isolation from the sad, sorry news of the larger world.

Things were harder a century ago, but they were simpler, too.

Susan Ager is a former columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Contact her at susan@susanager.com.