Welcome to Rumpel Strip, Vermont. I'm Erica Heilman.

20 years ago, Ben Hewitt and his wife Penny bought 40 acres of land in Cabot, Vermont, and started their first homestead.

In Vermont, the word homestead generally refers to people who build their own houses and live self-sufficiently to one degree or another.

But when I say homestead, I worry a little bit that it makes people think of beautiful tiny houses and chickens outside of tiny houses and that doesn't really get at it.

In this state there have been waves of people who come here to build their own houses,

make their own power, grow their own food, not all of them comprehensively, and with varying

degrees of success.

All the homesteaders I know are people who prefer project-based lifestyles.

In other words, they like to have more control of their own time

than most regular jobs afford.

Also, a lot of them seem to brew beer.

But one of the most important characteristics of the homesteaders I've known

is a deep affinity for the physical world,

knowing how it works and how to live in it.

Ben and Penny and their two boys are some of the most committed homesteaders in this state.

They run a small hill farm and raise 90% of their own food. The boys are educated at home by a life learning

process known as unschooling, which in their case means a lot of chores, a lot of building

and foraging in the woods, and a lot of activity that stems

from their own voracious curiosity. Ben makes a living writing about this life they've made.

He's an author of several books. He's a magazine

writer and he maintains a blog that has many ardent followers. I visited him at his

new homestead in Stanard and we sat and talked by the wood stove that currently

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