Fifty years ago this summer, the country was in the throes of dramatic change.

            While I was raising a log cabin in an alternate lifestyle community, all heck was breaking loose in the nation's capital. Do you remember where you were on Aug. 9, 1974, when you heard the news that President Richard Nixon was resigning in disgrace?

            I sure do. Along with a  long-haired homesteader buddy,  Charlie, I was nailing down cedar shake shingles, up on the roof of a log barn we were restoring—as far from DC as we could get. My first wife and I were in "Deep Western North Carolina, " in a remote mountain valley building an intentional community that we Back-to-the-Landers called "Hogwild."

            Here's what I wrote in my journal that day:

            "Charlie and I were working when we heard Jeanette (a neighbor) hollering at us all the way from the Big House across the meadow: "Nixon's quitting! It's on TV! Come see!"  We dropped our hammers, jumped off the roof and ran out of the cove, up the hill,  and down the driveway to the Big House, talking excitedly. Can this be real? Have they finally gotten Tricky Dicky?" Hot and sweaty, clad in cut-offs, dusty nail aprons and brogans, Charlie and I sat stunned in front of the little 12-inch black and white TV. We knew we were watching history."

            Looking back at that date 50 years ago, I now realize we homesteaders too were making our own history. While helping to run a small start-up weekly newspaper in Rutherford County, I got bitten by the homesteading bug.

            Having absorbed The Foxfire Book, Mother Earth News and The Whole Earth Catalog, we figured we were ready to throw in with a cohort of like-minded homesteaders, and embark on an innovative and ambitious lifestyle project: that we could acquire a big chunk of unspoiled mountain land where we could raise our families in peace, harmony and sanity, and raise our own houses, too, as the Beatles sang, "With a little help from my friends."

             Fast forward 50 years: on a sultry Saturday in late July 2024, we marked the birth of that innovative community, one which over the years has grown and thrived. My cabin was the first of at least a dozen fine old log barns and cabins that we found, took down, moved and restored.

            It's been five decades ago this summer and time to celebrate. So, we gathered together the living remnants of the tie-dyed, bell-bottomed, Boone's Farm drinkin' gang of Back-to-the- Landers who raised our cabin's log frame in one furious glorious day. 

            We 20-somethings of the mid-‘70s were young, strong, fearless and stupid. But we had a vision, and no one ever uttered "be careful." And it’s a miracle no one fell to their death, whacked off a finger or got crushed by a log flat as a buckwheat cake.

            Lucky wood butcher that I am, at that recent reunion I was able to assemble three of the brothers from the family Byers who were my stalwarts: Bill, Stuart and Burwell. Additionally other folks who had a hand, literally, in the log-raising, came to revel in their long-ago work.

The photo of our team posing merrily out on the deck attests to the fact that a good time was had by all. Yours truly is the dude on his knees, appearing to propose to my wife, Lynne—she, who put a woman's fine touch on a very humble man cave, resulting in One Happy Fella.  

            Did we revel in old war stories? Did we invent and re-invent lies of our youthful prowess? Did we wallow in self-congratulation? Yes, and yes again. In short, it was a glorious affair, even if four of our unindicted co-conspirators from the Summer of '74 could not attend, due to having died before I could stage this gala. Yet they were with us, all the same, in spirit.

             As Mitch Albom wrote in Tuesdays with Morrie: "Death ends a life, but not a relationship."

            Long live Hogwild!

These exploits are catalogued in the book, "Hogwild:  a Back-to-the-Land Saga," published by Appalachian Consortium Press, Boone, N.C., 1993