Chris and Ashirah Knapp’s baby will arrive in a world of phones and outhouses, laptops and root cellars. The past and the future, in the present.

Off the grid, in the new millennium.

IN THE WOODS OF TEMPLE, MAINE – It’s a good bet that Chris and Ashirah Knapp’s approach to caring for the earth is more demanding than most Earth Day celebrants are ready for – however committed they are.

Would you want to eat spelt or acorn-flour loaves instead of that baguette you just picked up? Chow on tomatoes only until the last one dropped off your vine? Or how about measure the temperature in your composting-outhouse (a walk outdoors, of course) or bathe in a bucket by the stove?

Both 27, Chris and Ashirah Knapp are a pretty normal young couple. Aside from their choice of abode and food and lifestyle. They didn’t wake up one day and say, “Let’s go live off the grid.” But that’s what they’re doing.

Hard enough, some would say, for even the hardiest souls. Their baby is due in three weeks.

The scene:

On a gray day in mid-April, after their car pulls to a stop on the side of a long, bumpy, muddy dirt road, Ashirah – a small and hugely pregnant young woman dressed in sweat pants and a light jacket – climbs out and pulls on a pair of wooden snowshoes.

“I’ve got to go lie down,” she says, explaining she’s on enforced bed rest for the next few weeks until the baby comes. She then begins to walk through the woods on a heartbreakingly beautiful trail. Chris follows her, up a hill, over a stream, through the woods for a quarter-mile, until they reach their house.

Many young couples with a baby on the way would be focusing on decorating the nursery and picking out the right stroller. The Knapps don’t have a nursery, and one wonders if a stroller would be quite the thing for traversing the path out to their cabin.

What they do have is a gorgeous patch of land and a clearing, filled with gardens and a chicken coop, a pond and a root cellar. And a small “handmade” cabin, not much bigger than a garden shed, furnished simply with a wood stove, a sleeping loft over a small storage area and a bookshelf overflowing with reading material.

Avoid stereotyping them as tree-hugging wackos or society-shunning escapists, however. “We’re not trying to be preachy,” Ashirah says, now settled on her bunk and trying to explain how they got where they are now. “We’re not trying to go back to the past. We’re looking at what’s in the modern world that really makes sense, and what’s in the past world that really makes sense. There are really good things in both of those places.”

Life

Homesteading in Temple is only part of their lives, Chris explains, while preparing snacks – toasted sunflower seeds and cups of cool, sweet maple sap from the taps outside).

The couple grow about 60 to 75 percent of their own food, but they rely on local farms and, occasionally, the store for the rest. He’s in school at the University of Maine at Farmington, taking classes in history and sustainability. They have friends and family, who they go to see and who visit them. They go home for the holidays, listen to CDs on a small CD player, watch movies rented in town on their laptop, and they use lights powered by a solar panel.

And their interests often take them away from their home, according to the season. Summers and some semesters they lead trips through Vermont outdoor school Kroka Expeditions, which calls itself an Outdoor Living Skills School. Some years, they lead a bike trip for younger kids, traveling from farm to farm and working on the land in exchange for food. Sometimes Ashirah leads a trip for adolescent girls, focusing on what it means to become a woman. And they lead a high school semester skiing through Vermont, teaching students the kind of outdoor living skills the couple have honed over the years.

When they are home, Chris explains, it’s much like being home anywhere: doing the chores of daily living – and big home improvement projects when they’ve got time – and relaxing. They get up with the sun, feed chickens, carry water, make breakfast. They clear land, check the produce in their root cellar (to make sure they use the things that are getting close to rotting), keep an eye on their compost, clean their house and cook another meal. He does homework and she reads child-rearing books. They talk, he plays the fiddle.

They don’t see it as work, Ashirah explains with conviction. The daily routine is what drew them in. It makes them happy.

“I think this isn’t the life for everyone,” Ashirah notes. “But it’s the life for us.”

The beginning

“We didn’t start out thinking to ourselves we want to live this way,” Ashirah says, taking a sip of sap and smiling softly. Each of them had an interest in something – hers was plants, his was hiking. “Doing those things made us feel really happy and fulfilled,” she said. “Through pursuing those things more and more, those first interests spread to other interests, and it eventually led to this kind of life.”

“My very first real draw was I liked being on long hiking trips and I wanted to go without a lot of stuff,” Chris, who is originally from Gorham, explains. “For that reason I started to learn different primitive skills and native skills, and I realized that each time I did something like that I was more connected to the land I was hiking through, which made the trip more meaningful.”

For her, Ashirah says, it started with a canoe trip she and her dad – originally from the Midwest – took one year into the north woods, led by Ray Reitze Jr., who founded the Earthways school in Caanan.

“Until I met Ray I didn’t know people still knew how to live off the land,” Ashirah says, an incredulous note in her voice. “He was also a really peaceful person, and I was having a hard time in my teenage years. I wanted to know what’s this (peacefulness) about?”

Ashirah and Chris met when they both apprenticed with Reitze. Chris built a traditional Sami turf hut. They learned to make snowshoes, grow their own food, fertilize with compost.

They got married five years ago.

An earthy, eco-friendly philosophy grew out of the pursuit of their passions, with homesteading becoming a gradual extension of all that, Ashirah explains. “Over time, that good feeling got a little more clear – realizing it makes me feel good because I’m providing for myself and I see the effect that I have in the world when I do this,” she says.

All about food

For Chris and Ashirah, embodied in their homesteading experience is a desire to be as close to the production of their food as possible.

Friends tell them it’s a philosophy shared by Michael Pollan – a writer from California who lives, emphatically, on the grid – who wrote a book about it, and about all the shades of meaning (and politics) between that and eating a fast-food hamburger.

The Knapps haven’t yet read Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which details humanity’s relinquishing of its food production to chemical-intensive agribusiness and the physical, environmental and even spiritual effects. They may not need to.

“We’re really interested in how food, and the need for food, is so important as far as global relations and interrelations, and the ramifications of the food system,” Chris says. He and Ashirah believe that how our food comes to us has an immense effect not only on our physical makeup but on the environment.

It’s a scary thought, they say, that as a species we’ve come to depend on a fast-dwindling resource – the petroleum used to make fertilizer – to grow the foods we need to sustain us. Not to mention the resources spent shipping and storing the food once it’s been grown.

For their part, the Knapps have chosen to eat what they can grow or, in the absence of that, what people who grow food sustainably – and locally – can grow.

“We feel like it’s healthy food and it feels alive,” Ashirah says.

Going forward

The next step for the Knapps will be arriving soon, in the form of a baby.

“It’s a priority, it’s one of my goals, to have a baby in this lifestyle and have it work,” Ashirah says. “This is something I want to make work in a good way, and I want to be able to show other people – being able to raise a kid in this lifestyle and not have it be a terrible hardship.”

“And we both felt that we really love this life and we’d like to share it with someone,” she adds, with a soft laugh.

They’d like to share their lives with others, too, someday. Ideally, as they figure things out and get more settled, they’d like their little patch of earth to be a place people can come to learn, if they’re interested.

“We want to have it be a place where people come and say ‘Oh, wow, that works,'” Ashirah says.

“We don’t want it to be just us, too,” Chris says. “We want more people living here, living in a way that works for the land. And seeing you can live in a way where you’re not destroying the planet.”