Modern couple find themselves in the past

In 2001, Logan Ward and his wife, Heather, made a bogglement of trades: e-mail for quill pen and paper, supermarket for garden, flush toilet for outhouse, beat-up Taurus station wagon for a Percheron and an even more beat-up wagon, streetlights for stars. Offhand, only the last trade sounds like a good one.

But with an almost manic determination, Logan and Heather left jobs at a nationally known magazine and a think tank and moved themselves, bag, baggage and 2-year-old son, Luther, from New York City to acreage and an 1885 farmhouse in a rural community in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The driving force was their need to find an antidote to fast-paced city living and the consequent burnout.

Logan and Heather are seasoned travelers; their jobs -- magazine writing and working for justice reform, respectively -- took them around the globe. But in this case, they gave the journey a challenging twist: "If it didn't exist in 1900, we will do without." So they traveled back a century in time.

When they returned to the present, they brought with them stories of their adventures in living as their great-grandparents had, and Logan Ward records them in "See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America." It's a lively tale, told with admirable honesty.

The year begins officially in June, after their old house has been stripped of modern-day plumbing and wiring. They install wood-burning stoves, acquire milk goats, till up a sizable garden and battle snakes. A week before Day One, Belle, the Percheron, arrives. "The only thing I know about horses is that you never stand behind them," Logan writes. Then Belle's owner unloads her from a trailer. "My God, I think. Only a fool or a blind man would loiter within striking distance of those meaty haunches."

And Belle, a headstrong animal, becomes as much a character in the story as Logan, Heather and Luther. To begin with, she provides an intensive learning experience: how to connect horse to wagon; how to give commands that she'll obey; how to calm her when she's spooked by a bridge or a passing car. One February day, she scares Logan witless when she decides to race a freight train. But man and beast reach rapprochement later when he hitches her to a sled for hauling rocks and fence posts.

Making a living off the land means grueling work. The tasks divide themselves along gender lines: She cooks, cleans and does the laundry, while he splits wood, pumps water and cares for the livestock. Working from dawn till after dark makes for an exhaustion that threatens not only their physical well-being but also their marriage.

"Though we experience small pleasures -- ladling cool drinking water from our crock on hot days, finding letters from friends and family in the mailbox, cutting a crisp stalk of broccoli for dinner -- our days are marked by frustration and a growing bitterness toward one another." It doesn't help that drought is withering the garden, and the well is drying up. Is their "at-home adventure" a terrible mistake?

With the coming of long-hoped-for rain, the dust, both real and psychological, settles. And without understanding the phenomenon at first, Logan and Heather find that they have been drawn into a community. Cowboy Joel brings five gallons of cherries that give lessons in canning skills. An itinerant farmhand arrives out of the blue and teaches Logan how to drive Belle. Neighbors bring bounty from their gardens, and the Wards, deciding not to be 1900 charity cases, learn to trade. Work -- picking, cleaning, shelling, shucking -- proceeds apace and finds a rhythm. The root cellar fills. Heather "perfects her goat's-milk cheese and masters the subtleties of woodstove baking." New confidence infuses Logan.

The first black frost brings a modicum of leisure, though there is always wood-splitting, cooking and milking to be done. Heather, preparing for the holidays, makes moist, brandy-soaked fruitcake loaves that line "the countertop like newborns in a maternity ward." (The recipe is included in an appendix.) Their once-doubtful families join them for truly joyous celebrations.

In many ways, "See You in a Hundred Years" resembles Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." Both deal with a return to the land and living off its bounty. But the books differ significantly. Kingsolver sermonizes ("Do as I do"). Logan Ward focuses on the "inalienable realities facing humanity since the dawn of time -- food, water, nature, community. The project is about finding our place in the continuum of history."

(Janet Lembke is a frequent contributor to these pages whose books include "From Grass to Gardens: How to Reap Bounty from a Small Yard.")