Customer Reviews

We Took to the Woods

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This book is one of the most enjoyable to read you will ever find. It is written in such a clear, humorous and timeless style that you would swear it was written yesterday instead of in 1942. Each chapter answers a question that would arise upon hearing that one had decided to live in the deep woods of Maine---how you do school your children? How do you keep in touch with society? How do you keep house? There are pictures and the kind of nitty gritty details we all like to read! In addition to just being great to read, I think this book is a very important one. I would say it had a part in starting at least two trends. One is the back to the land movement. At the time it was written, you just simply didn't decide to get away from it all and live in the woods! I think this book, which was extremely popular when it came out, put some unique ideas in a lot of heads and may have had a big part in giving people ideas about alternative ways of living. Also, I think it's one of the first autobiograpical books of its type---written plainly but with humor about a unique way of living. I think this book, which in my knowledge has never been out of print, is really one of the key non-fiction works of the 20th century. But don't read it for that, read it because it's fun to read and you will love it!

Louise Rich is not what you might expect a person who has given up the "essentials" of life to be. She is not trying to escape, not trying to save the wilderness, prove a point or return to her roots. Her motivation, quite simply, is that she likes where she lives and is willing to put up with a fair amount of discomfort to stay there. Moreover, she is mightily amused by the questions she is frequently asked by friends and acquaintances, the most common being:
"How do you make a living?"
"But, you don't live here all the year round?"
"Isn't housekeeping difficult?"
"What do you do with all your spare time?"
"Don't you ever get bored?"
"Aren't you ever frightened?"
"Don't you get awfully out of touch?"
"Do you get out very often?"
and
"Is it worth-while?"
Rich's eminently practical, and amusing answers to these questions form the basis of this book and will keep you grinning from ear to ear for hours.

It is clear from the start that Louise and her husband Ralph are more than capable of taking care of and amusing one another, and things only get better with the addition of various family members. These include Gerrish, their friend and handyman, son Rufus, daughter Sally, postman Larry, a skunk, five huskies, a marten and an ongoing parade of visitors, neighbors and "sports" (that's backwoods for tourists).

You will be treated to Rich's opinions on a wide variety of subjects, including women's fashions (and why she couldn't care less what she wears in the woods), the futility of trying to do housework when you're married to a man who loves motors, how to plan meals that take the weather's idiosyncrasies into account, the best way avoid getting lost, cut with an axe or burned by a stove. Even better, you will be taken along on a whole series of hilarious escapades as Rich learns how to cope with life in the woods.

With wry amusement she tells of the day she and her husband delivered their son on their own, her trip to the "Outside" after not having left the woods for 4 years, and the afternoon she spent cooking dinner for a bunch of lumberjacks. Here too are entertaining stories of playing tag with a family of foxes, going berry picking, pulling porcupine quills out of dogs, learning to tie fishing flies and locating hunters who get lost.

The real gift of this book however, is the chance to spend time with Rich herself. Here is someone it would be worth a long hike through snowy woods to visit. You'll feel like you've made a friend by the time the book is finished.

My mother gave me this book many years ago when I was a young woman. I was a bit "blue" at the time and she said it always gave her a lift to read it and hoped it would do the same for me. Did it ever! I've read it at least 10 times over the years and will probably read it ten more. Louise Rich's description of life in the back woods of Maine in the 30's made me want to go there and parts of the book are hillarious. It truly makes one long for a simpler, gentler time.

Like many others, I was lucky enough to discover "We Took to the Woods" in a used book store. From the first page, Mrs. Rich's description of her family's withdrawl from urban life to the peace of the Maine woods transports the reader to another time and place. The long winters spent by the fire with favorite books, the eager anticipation of the monthly mail delivery, the excitement over the first thaw and the opportunity to replenish the barest of larders...her descriptions of everything from her summer and winter homes to the garden and surrounding woods bring you into her world. And is there anyone who after a long day at work and longer trip home doesn't want to turn off the lights and see only stars and treetops overhead? The best bedtime reading, guarantees many nights of sweet dreams.

A friend gave me this book when I was at a very low point in my life. My wife and I read it together, over a long weekend, and packed the car Monday morning. By Wednesday we had our old house listed and Friday we put in an offer on 40 acres with an old farm. We haven't looked back since; but we have given copies of this book to all of our old friends for Christmas.

I was eight years old when Louise Dickinson Rich's thick book appeared, its jacket cover inviting me down a snowy path to a snug home in the pines. It was my first adult book; the fact that Mother was reading it at the same time gave the experience added zip.

The book is not a biography, not even a memoir. Instead, in a very informal, conversational style, Rich answers key questions people have asked her about her life as a writer, a wife, and a mother deep in the far north woods of Maine. One question per chapter: "Aren't You Afraid? Don't You Get Bored? How Do You Make A Living?" Her answers are candid, funny, detailed, and enlightening.

When, as a young bright college student, Louise had men breathe into her ear, "I NEED you!" she took the avowals with a few grains of salt. But when her husband Ralph comes racing into their snow-wrapped log house with blood dripping down his arm and bellows, "Louise, where ARE you? I need you, goddammit!"--she knows it's stark truth.

Rich's backwoods life details an earlier time, of course (the late Thirties), but even in that time, her way of life was an anomaly. "Outsiders" thought her life must be quaint, or picturesque, or outlandish.

Rich's no-nonsense approach sweeps these fantasies aside and shows us the reality of, say, making a week's worth of dinners out of three tins of chipped beef and a box of soda crackers. Or dealing with a sudden inflamed appendix when the snow has closed all roads to Outside, but the ice on the lake is too thin to drive across. Or why she enjoys being the preferred partner on the other end of a cross-cut saw. And how you make a satisfying community out of two other families, three heavy-drinking loggers, and a picturesque but comfort-loving sled-dog.

I loved this book when I was eight, and again when I was in my twenties. Reading it for the third time now in my seventies (delighted that it was still available at amazon.com), I find it does more than "hold up" as a delightful read; it satisfies as thoroughly as one of Louise's long-simmered deer roasts must have done.

"We Took to the Woods" is as charming and delightful a book as you will ever find. It's the story of a city woman living on a remote Maine river with her husband and children. She's not poor, nor a rube, nor does she display the eccentricities one associates with people who flee to the wilderness. Rather, she seems happy, well-adjusted, and full of sympathetic tales about the few -- very few -- people she comes into contact with in the course of her daily life. And she really did live in the woods --the nearest store was a long boat ride away and she didn't go "outside" for a four year stretch. Her township of Upton had a population of 182.

The book is set up in chapters that answer questions: "Isn't housekeeping difficult?" or "Aren't you ever frightened." One of the better stories in the chapter, "Aren't the Children a Problem" tells about her husband delivering the author's baby in the dead of winter -- and greasing it with olive oil which he kept to dress his trout flies. The new parents discuss what they are supposed to do with the hot water always called for when a baby is being born -- and they decide to make coffee.

For the modern reader, the highlights of the book are probably tales of the trials of living without conveniences. The Rich houses -- they had a winter and summer house -- had no plumbing. Heating and cooking were with wood. What you needed for groceries was delivered by boat once a month; the Sears catalog supplied the rest. For anyone who has ever thought wistfully of fleeing civilization, this is a humorous primer of both the rewards and hardships of such a life. It deserves a permanent place on the short shelf of Americana classics.

Smallchief

This book is a great read for anyone who's ever had the desire to just chuck it all and head for the woods (a desire that seems to wax and wane like the tides, popular one decade [1970s, for example], totally passe the next). Today taking to the woods for many means building a $500,000 "rustic retreat" with pool, hot tub, and wine cellar included. For Louise Rich, back in the 1930s (the book was published in 1942), things were much different.

For one thing, her house had no plumbing. Water had to be hauled to the house in buckets. Supplies and the mail came by boat. Life was no picnic for her and her family. But, of course, there were trade offs. The beauty of the place, for one. The living as one with nature. The need to be resourceful, and the feeling of pride and accomplishment that goes with it. Trade offs worth the hardships, Rich makes perfectly clear.

Rich captures the flavor of her idyllic spot in the Maine woods a few miles east of Upton along the Rapid River (the swiftest river east of the Mississippi, even though it is only about four miles long). She describes what life is like there, how the busy summers are a prelude to the slow, long winters. She talks about her neighbors, the loggers, the animals they encounter, how one endures and enjoys life in the woods. She describes the effects of the hurricane of 1938 and the havoc is caused even there, so far inland. Her prose style is clear and direct, and she truly makes the reader jealous of her situation rather than sympathetic. It's an excellent book, one that I've read a number of times, always with an I-wish-I-was-there enthusiasm. Highly recommended.

Rich, a very resourceful woman, raises her family in rural Maine in the 1930s. The descriptions of the river, the woods, and especially the people are vivid and realistic. I visited the area a few years after reading the book; the area has not changed much.

I bought this book at a used book fair about ten years ago. I recently, on a whim, took it camping with me. A perfect book to read in the woods. I enjoyed Ms Rich's style, her vivid discription of survival in the Maine wilderness, the recipe for baked beans, etc. I will definitely read her other work