We lived for over twenty-three years on forty-eight wooded acres that we purchased from an old Mainer who had bought up land in the Thirties like postage stamps and sold off a parcel every now and then when he needed some money. We lived off the grid—no conventional power, no electric lines, no light switches, faucets, or spigots, no toaster or hair dryer, no flush toilet, no furnace, and no monthly bill from Central Maine Power. Often when we told people how we lived, they asked us forthrightly how we could live that way. What was with us? Frequently they assumed that we were ideologues of some sort, that we were living without electricity to make a point about the dry rot of Western civilization. Perhaps we were latter day Luddites or devotees of Rousseau or Thoreau. We must be of the company of the sanctimonious, those who live to judge others.
I never blamed people for making such assumptions. Anything out of the ordinary tends to be taken personally. The fact was that we had situated our house a few hundred feet beyond what the power company considered a reasonable distance to put in their poles. Beyond that distance, a customer had to sign a contract and pay a bunch of money up front. We never had that money and so we never got power. We could have situated the house closer to the poles to begin with—there was plenty of road frontage—but that logical consideration never entered our heads. Other concerns—aesthetic, intuitive, and earthy—guided where we built our house. It was on a rise where, once upon a time, a farmhouse had sat. There was a dug well there that we wound up using. Despite the rapidity with which a dooryard became the woods again, there was still something of a south-facing clearing there. We had rented our share of dark apartments and wanted all the sunlight we could get. People had lived for eons without electric lights and water pressure. Though we had never done it, as blithe and hardworking spirits we felt that we could too.
帮帮忙翻译一下
谢谢了
别用金山快译啊