For my last birthday, my mother gave me the DVD of the PBS series Frontier House. In case, like me, you are not a follower of "reality shows" or PBS, this is the one where three families go to rural Montana and pretend that it's 1893 and they're homesteaders.
Well, I finally got around to watching it. Despite (because of?) my stupid useless history degree, I am not a fan of historical re-enactments, so the whole premise of this struck me as kind of silly. Real 19th century homesteaders did not try to live like 18th century colonists; instead, they used best of the technology available to them at that time to help themselves survive. Why shouldn't 21st century homesteaders do the same? The longer I watched the show, the more I came to see the historical aspect as a pointless handicap. The show that I would really like to see made would go something like this: the families would be given a plot of land on which to build their individual homesteads. The challenge would be to see if they could, while working within reasonable real-world limitations, become self-sufficient. Each would have a limited budget but would be free to utilize it however they thought best. Ideally the families would be chosen from the start for their different outlooks; maybe one would invest in lots of machinery, one in lots of livestock, one would go for modern, high-tech agriculture, one would be all low-tech and organic, and so forth. The payoff of the show would be the comparison of the different approaches, as well as lots of how-to information for the audience.
But I realize that the reason that show didn't get made, and Frontier House did, was that the historical stuff was the hook. People enjoy romanticizing the past, and they also enjoy laughing at it. And when all is said and done, it's good that the show got made at all. I think viewers can learn a lot from this show. Some of the participants certainly did. After returning to the modern world one of the children commented that he was happier having a few possessions in "1893" than he was now having lots of stuff in 2001. (Smart kid: I sure didn't understand that at his age.) Two teenaged girls complained that the now found their lives boring and lonely, and that hanging out at the mall just wasn't satisfying anymore. One man mused about how much more time he had to spend with his kids on the "frontier." Overall, the "homesteaders" seemed to feel that there was something lacking in the easy modern world.
Less happily, Frontier House also demonstrates the ugly truth that the biggest challenge in any human endevour is... humans. One participant claimed to believe that the three families could have made a great community if they'd been able to stay for five years instead of five months. He seems to have forgotten how much snark, bickering and gossiping there was in those five months! People like to promote the idea of "community" (Eric Brende, I'm looking in your direction) but don't realize that community is hard! So is family, for that matter. In fact, one of the Frontier House marriages falls apart on camera. It's hard to watch, but is a reminder that relationships are difficult at best, and really difficult under stress.Anyway, if you're interested in homesteady stuff (and if you're not, what are you doing here?), and your local PBS affiliate is re-running Frontier House, it's worth watching. At least until I can persuade someone to fund my show idea. :)








