Content in Canvas

by Stacey Chase
Boston Globe Magazine

Eighteen years ago, two Maine guides pitched a tent. They have lived in remote happiness ever since.

One night last winter, Alexandra Conover woke to the sound of trees splintering and crashing to the ground. She and her husband, Garrett, lay in the dark, afraid a falling tree would hit their wood stove and start a fire or crush them. "You wake up and think, 'Oh, my gosh, did we cut all the trees around the tent that looked weak?' " she says, recalling the harnnving night when gale-force winds buffeted the canvas walls of their home.

While many people might dream of pitching a tent and living in it all summer, the Conovers live, year-round, in a 12-foot-by-20-foot wall tent. The tent was erected on 19 heavily forested acres that the couple own in remote Willimantic, Maine, 18 miles northwest of Dover-Foxcroft, the Piscataquis County seat. This isn't some romantic notion of camping run amok, Alexandra, 51, and Garrett, 48, have lived in a tent for 18 years.

"When you live close to the land, or you live simply, you can't help but live in the present," Alexandra says. ''It's almost like being an 8-year-old again. And I was a very happy 8-year-old."

Dyed-in-the-wool backwoods Mainers, the college-educated Conovers earn $20,000 a year as canoe and snowshoe guides and deal with fast-paced modern life reluctantly. For them, tent living

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ance and its frequent companion, frugality. Suffice to say: The couple's tented home is way, way off the grid.

From the clapboard offices of their business, North Woods Ways, off Route 150, it's a roughly eight-minute commute down a narrow footpath - deeper and deeper into blossomy woods ripe with the pungent smell of wet earth in late spring - to the Conovers' unpretentious :; tent alongside Big Wilson Stream. The tent is nothing more than a kind of glorified, albeit grounded, tree fort sprouting beneath a copse of beech and firs.

The wilds of Maine have long been a haven for people leading unconventional lives. From : hippies in the 1960s to back-to-the-landers in the 1970s, counterculture Mainers - who traditionally vote left and say they live right - have ., set up house in everything from tiny A-frames to ' geodesic domes to tepees and yurts.

The Conovers have taken that homesteading tradition' to heart. "It's impressive that they're living so closely to their ideals and minimizing their use of resources and energy consumption," says Heather Spalding, spokeswoman for the very hip, very retro Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association in Unity. "If you can do it in Maine, you can certainly do it in other bioregions." The Conovers' austere outpost is remarkable not only for its Thoreauvian setting but lacking fussy amenities like electricity and running water and plumbing for a toilet. "We're not into suffering in the least," Alexandra says. "We're just into simplicity."

Writers as well as guides, they make do with propane lamps and candlelight and keep their extensive library at their offices, which they jokingly refer to as the "upstairs." They cook on a three-burner gas range and bake in a Coleman folding oven, which resembles a small bank safe.

A Vermont Castings wood stove supplies the tent's heat. The stove is vented to the outside via a silicon "stove jack," a transition piece with a gasket that allows the hot stovepipe to pass through the canvas wall. (Given Maine's harsh climate, the wood stove is hardly ever out.)

The couple drink water from a nearby spring; they wash dishes and take sponge baths with stream water at the kitchen sink. The Conovers luxuriate, often with friends, in a homemade Finnish-style sauna constructed nearby from poplar logs taken from their land. When nature calls, they opt for an outhouse or lean-to or, sometimes, chamber pot.

In an effort to keep their public and private lives separate, the Conovers stick to a hard-and-fast rule: Thev don't talk about North Woods Ways business in the tent. That would spoil the serenity. "Lying there in bed, I can hear the thrushes. I can hear the rain on the roof- every nuance of what is going on in our woods," says Alexandra. "The foxes walking by at night. Or the raccoon family gamboling by the tent. I can hear all the sounds of nature, which, to me, is like a symphony."

But in order to run a business, the Conovers are forced to make concessions to 21 st-century life that chafe at their notion of autonomy and are antithetical to classic wilderness guiding itself - notably, maintaining the North Woods Ways offices and a 2004 CMC Safari minivan. They have acquiesced to having a land-line phone and a couple of word processors at the offices, but no televisions, cellphones, or Internet access.

The pair, married 24 years, take clients on about a dozen canoeing and snowshoeing trips a year, mostly in Maine but occasionally in Canada's Labrador region. They are on the road - or, rather, river or trail - roughly 125 days out of 365. They sleep in a tent when they're away, too. "

After being out in the woods all winter guiding, when I'm in a building, the first thing I notice are the ceilings," Alexandra says. "I feel hemmed in. I feel captured somehow."

Though both are lifelong outdoor enthusiasts, neither ever imagined they'd be permanent tent dwellers. In 1987, while caretakers for a local nonprofit arts center, they pitched a wall tent - so named because the canvas walls hang flat off a sloping roof - for temporary shelter. A week in, they decided it was too good to give up and gave up instead on hunting for an apartment. They bought the Willimantic property three years later.

Family and friends aren't exactly shocked that the Conovers, who are childless, have tried tent living - only that they have lived in one for so long. Alexandra's 95-year-old archeologist father, Donald Brown of Stow, Massachusetts, quips: "I may have thought it, but I didn't say, 'For heaven's sake, why don't you live in the [office] building and keep your canoes in the tent?' "

As they age, the Conovers wonder how long they'll be able to continue their quirky, woodsy lifestyle, but they don't obsess over it. "Sooner or later, you won't be able to lug wood or sled groceries or get your wheelchair up and down the trail - whatever it comes to," Garrett says flatly. "So then you do something different."