Four days ago, I, my wife, our 9-month-old daughter, and a car full of stuff arrived at a small organic farm in rural Maryland. We were going to live in a cabin in the somewhat nearby woods and learn how to farm.

Well.

We’re both still alive and kicking, generally each other. Nature, I’ve discovered, doesn’t dig in and root out all your bad habits. It merely provides less distractions from them than the average contemporary home. When you’re well-rested and energetic, Nature doesn’t lull you to stupor like the guerilla laziness of the television; it lets you keep the mood and run around. But when you’re tired, cranky, and flat out scared, the trees have little to say.

Now no one explained this to us, or me anyway, before we took up residence in the cabin. I had this vague notion that being out in the woods would automatically give my soul wings. At the sight of the trees and the murmuring brook, I’d murmur back some Emerson (an author I’d suddenly have read) and then go gallivanting off to climb a tree and shout Shakespeare to the wind.

Needless to say, that has not happened. But it could happen. It could even have happened in the suburban home we left, if my soul weren’t so obese. But even a timid guy like myself has no real excuse to hold back in a forest like the one I now call home. Problem is, I’m not holding back. So far, I’ve managed to be (at times) even grumpier and angrier than I was back when a drink of water meant turning a spigot. Nature still waits for me to do something interesting with all this freedom.

Anyhow, so I’m chastened. I was warned so many times that my muscles would ache and that the work of day-to-day life would increase tenfold that I hardly notice or mind that part. It’s that inner obesity that gets me. When I get stressed because we’re a half hour late to get down to the farm (not that our gracious hosts ever seem to care), the breeze doesn’t rustle the branches and whisper peace. At least, if it does, I’m already griping, so I don’t hear. That’s where I’m a little disillusioned. No instant fixes this side of the eschaton, I’m afraid.

Haven’t I said all this before? Oh yes, when my wife and I started dating…

I know you probably expected to hear all about the glorious first steps towards independence and a fully human life, but frankly this has been more like those chapters in Exodus the morning after the big parade out. That Catholic Homesteading guy warned me I’d go through everything the Jews did leaving Egypt, but I never made the connection that I myself would be complaining just as loud as they ever did.

Not that you should cast me in the role of the spoiled suburbanite lost on a camping trip. Truly, I haven’t minded trudging down a little hill to wait while a bucket fills, nor the lack of television and video games, nor the smallness of the cabin (king-size as cabins go). The lost amenity I crave is security. Or the illusion thereof.

I knew I would be scared stiff when night fell on our cabin in the woods, and I was. Beth was there saying things like, “Let’s go out and look at the moon later,” while my mind conjured up an enticing collage of every slaughter-in-the-woods horror movie image it could get its grubby little fingers on. Thanks, mind. If you believe Hollywood, spending a night in a cabin in the woods is roughly equivalent to sleeping on a train track outside Grand Central Station and hoping for the best. Reality is that the homicide rate for the city we left in New York is like 80 a year, but I’m not even sure they have one for this part of Maryland. Maybe per decade.

Deeper than the erroneously perceived lack of physical security is the lack of mental security. I am seriously in kindergarten again. It should be liberating, but the husband-father-college graduate-wage earner part of me (a hefty chunk) screams, “You shouldn’t be taking so long just to start a @#$% fire!!” It’s like being on crutches; tasks that used to be instant are now laborious, different, and slow.

Did I mention fire? Ah, fire. Fire. There’s so much to say here and the Art of Not Starting A Wood Stove Well could easily take up two or three chapters in a less-than-glowing back-to-the-land book. These first few days have been like the first days of college; they feel like half a month. But the wood stove looms large in my affectionate memory. Somewhere, people still think fire is a god, but I now know firsthand that fire is too complex, finicky, and deceptive to be anything higher than a disgruntled minor deity, if not a former actor.

Also, fire produces smoke. Smoke, if your wood chimney happens to be a few inches from its designated slot at the back of your stove, remains happily in the room. This is great for any raw pork that’s hanging from the ceiling, but, not being raw pork, I found the situation has its disadvantages. I also found it’s best to discover the “smoke issue” before you go to sleep and wake up hours later with your head about to impersonate a land mine on impact.

One more thing before we give the wood stove a fond farewell. Of course (of course!) you already know that you start with newspaper, then small sticks, then bigger sticks, then even bigger sticks, and you open the damper all the way and let all that catch fire before you even think about putting a log on. You, fellow suburbanite, know that by heart. What you may not know is that if, (sorry, when, when) you get that fire started, you must choose your log carefully. If you get ambitious and put a whole honking Yule log in there that’s half a tree, it may eventually catch on fire, but your dinner will take literally hours to cook. Don’t ask me how I know that.

Back to the main subject. I was talking about waking up with violent headaches, I think. On that particular night, I also had a violent stomachache, which my Reader’s Digest infected mind promptly diagnosed as food poisioning, or, worse, death by spring water. Gradually, with the help of fresh air, my mind cleared and decided it had to be the intense sunburn on my face, neck, and palms after my first full day outside. Bad sunburn makes me nauseous. My mind may have been wrong, but the ache has passed and I’m not dead, and I bought a hat for the sun.

Had enough? There’s more, but why go there? As long as you get the clear message that your first few days/weeks back in nature may very well be hell, I’m satisfied. Not just ‘hard’. ‘Hard’ doesn’t do it. ‘Excruciatingly painful’ and ‘harrowing’ are more like it. It wasn’t like that for Beth, but then she’s been more athletic in her life, wasn’t in the sun as much, and didn’t feel sick.

And that’s all I wrote. I think I was about to say something nice finally, but I don’t remember…

It was rough, and it will be again. But the next day I went out with the farmer here to get firewood. Out in the forest, he cut and I hauled. There it was, fuel, free for the taking. It was great. Now, when I exercise, there’s a stack of energy when I’m done.

In many ways, this is the best of all possible apprenticeships, with a rustic cabin life on the hill and the training wheels of our new friends and their comfy farmhouse in the valley. It is already a very good life.