FOURTEEN YEARS ago, former Seattle restaurateur Robin Woodward posed on the cover of this magazine. She wore a plaid bathrobe, clasped a cup of tea, and laughed in the mid-morning sunshine that bathed the doorstep of her remote Orcas Island cabin. She was the vision, that moment in the summer of 1991, of what we considered a rat-race dropout.

After the excess of the '80s, "dropping out," "downsizing," "simplicity" became national buzzwords of a phenomenon. Or at least the media decided it was a phenomenon. Experts debated whether we were seeing a bold step toward meaningful psychic migration, the start of the baby-boomer-sized mid-life crisis or just temporary attitude relocations.

Before we could decide, the dot.com madness of the late '90s busted in, birthing a slew of millionaires and wispy ideas that created speed, convenience, productivity, greater ability to do several things at once and, above all, no need to wait for anything. Along with the good, Information Age technology revved some lives into a series of high-speed decisions, short-circuited attention spans and created endless expectations for more — perpetrating the insidious dual sense that you really can't afford to be away from work, yet you are always close to being unneeded.

Attempts to simplify as a whole have historically come in boom and bust cycles, essentially reactions to "too much." Today's too much is actually too little. Too little time, or quality time. The expectations of a wired world, sociologists venture, are fueling burnout that nudges folks to search for alternatives (often by necessity). What may make this go-round and the coming years a bit different, they say, is the graying of the massive baby boomer blob that is approaching retirement age and facing career stagnation or downsizing.

Robin Woodward leaves her inherited Porsche parked under her carport, favoring a one-speed bicycle.

It made us wonder about the other side of gridlock and Woodward's idyllic moment on her porch. Did it retain its definition? Did her dreams match reality? Is the other reality all it's cracked up to be for her and others?

It turns out that she never stopped redefining her life. She sold the cabin isolated on the end of a road above Obstruction Pass to her neighbors for "a very fair price" and moved into a dilapidated 1923 beach cabin, which she refurbished, on the outskirts of the Orcas village of Eastsound.

She became immersed in the community — a board member and fundraiser for the Orcas Island Children's House, which aids island families in need. She has befriended young neighbor kids, whom she walks to school a few mornings a week. She renovated a few buildings in the village, renting the spaces out for a gathering place, a boutique, artist's loft, music-lesson studios and her son's organic restaurant, which supports local farmers.

When she's not pedaling her little one-speed bicycle into town, she's walking. She's found the rhythm of and connected into the year-round island life, which is starkly distinct from both tourist season and the lives typically led within the waterfront mansions. The term dropout never applied to her, she says, because she considered leaving Seattle for rural life and more free time dropping in, not out.

Woodward walks neighbor kids Ariahna Tidrington, 8, and her brother Liam, 4, a mile from their home to school, even though the bus, coming up the road behind them, is available to drive them. She wants to ingrain the thought that a little human-powered transport is a good thing.

In fact, the problem with all the catchy terms is that they don't capture the individual gradations, choices, motivations, abilities and mindsets involved. Despite its caffeine-fueled, major-league ambitions, Seattle has also been a stalwart outpost of simple living. On every day in every neighborhood, people work at getting a life rather than getting ahead.

Ever since Thoreau's Walden Pond, we've been attracted to the romantic notion of excavating ourselves from cubicles, meetings, expectations and gridlock so we can parachute into the "better place." But Woodward says the magic is not in the geography. It's in the attitude. And it's not magic, either. Slowing down takes work, too. She's seen many try the island life, fail to get it and leave.

"No matter where you go," she says, "you bring yourself with yourself."

FOR MANY, THE IDEA of escaping the multitasking life and the steady paycheck it provides tends to fall into two main ways of thinking:

1. Out there, I will discover Shangri-La.

Or

2. Out there, I will starve to death.

Reality lies between, but some leap without looking first, and some never leap because their knees are wobbling.

Kristi Laguzza-Boosman, 43, was working as community outreach coordinator at Seattle's KCTS public broadcasting station when she took a weekend whitewater-rafting trip in the Methow Valley. After the whitewater, she and girlfriends hung out at a local tavern, where she met a long-haired guy named Bill Boosman.

He turned out to be a socially conscious builder who planned to construct his own solar-powered straw-bale home. But at that moment, he lived in a trailer with limited water and electricity. She was urban, a coalition-builder by trade. She was a single mother of two kids, and lived in a prim Seattle neighborhood.

Not exactly a dating-service match, but they had a spark. He wanted her and her kids to live with him in the Methow, but she wasn't about to leave her ambition and safety net. So he moved to Seattle and waited. For two years.

"I had a million hurdles to leap before I could even consider such a huge move," she says. "There was my broadcasting career. There were my children. There was my house. There were the schools and friends and health care. There were other details, too: retirement and my 401(k) and not being vested yet. There was finding a new job and there was living in the country for God's sakes! With cows! What would I do there? How would I live?"

She was influenced by the work of a colleague, John De Graaf, who produced award-winning documentaries on the effects of over-consumption and over-work (he now is a leader with a Seattle-based group, Take Back Your Time). She began a voluntary simplicity group at work and read "The Simple Living Guide" by Seattle's Janet Luhrs. And she longed to spend more time with her daughters.

Still, the thought of uprooting scared her. Fear was the biggest hurdle, she says, but pain finally motivated her change. It crystallized one holiday weekend with projects stacking, expenses crimping and nerves fraying. Living in a rural community didn't match her dream life, but the life she had was wearing her out.

So she moved with Bill and her daughters to a 1904 cabin in the Methow. They immediately reduced their overhead by 75 percent, but the tiny structure wore on her, especially after the birth of her third child, Janni. They now live in a two-story house in Twisp. "Good thing, too," she says. "Simple living just got too complicated for me. I needed someplace more convenient where little things (lights, heaters, toilets) actually worked consistently as opposed to when they had a mind to."

Living simply hasn't meant the end of work, either. They both have jobs (but flexible schedules), together raise the three children, a toddler, a daughter in middle school and an 8th-grader they home-school. She depends on her computer to operate her consulting business and to work, at times, with people she's never met.

They have only catastrophic insurance and no dental. It's an hour to the nearest hospital and 90 minutes to serious shopping in Wenatchee. They have no college savings program, no large investment portfolios. They have time with their children, though, and peace of mind. It was the right move, she says, and skiing, of all things, helps her reconcile the tradeoffs.

"I'm using old skis I bought at a swap meet, but I fly down the slope because I can ski four or five times a week. I zip past those people who come over with fancy gear but only have time to do it a couple times a year. To me, it's a matter of do you want new gear or a life?"

BEFORE BECOMING PRESIDENT of Furman University, David Shi was a history professor with particular interest in the simplicity movement. In "The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture," he traced its history, ideals and impact — from Quakers to hippies.

He found simple living, in the historical sense, hard to define because it is such a relative term. Widespread interest in simplicity has tended to occur during periods of social or economic crisis such as wars, depressions and energy shortages, he says, and ebbed during periods of prolonged prosperity.

People engaged in what he calls "patriotic simplicity" during World War II with mandatory rationing, victory gardens and raw-materials conservation. But after the war, they rushed back to their old spending ways. Another notable wave of simplicity arrived in the early 1970s when "small is beautiful" was the rage. But Shi says much of the cutting back was again motivated by necessity — oil embargoes, gas rationing, double-digit inflation. In fact, President Carter's appeal to Americans to sacrifice inspired Shi to write his book.

Ronald Reagan's 1980 landslide election washed away the small-is-beautiful '70s. The contemporary wave of simplicity, which began in the late '80s, was a produce-and-spend hangover, he says, and is different from the others in certain respects. For one thing, it occurred during a period of prosperity and affluence.

"I characterize it as a phenomenon primarily driven by what I call 'therapeutic simplicity,' " he says. "It is not so much directed at excessive consumption as it is provoked by the acceleration of everyday life — the sheer pace and busy-ness of our daily routines, exacerbated in recent years by the explosion in communications technologies. Work is now a 24/7 requirement. People want out of the rat race but not necessarily off the carousel of consumption. The therapeutic theme is also interwoven with a drug-crazed culture, presuming that there is an available 'fix' for every worry or concern."

Living simply often requires being part of a community and looking for bargains. The Exchange, next to the island’s garbage transfer station, recycles and swaps households items and clothes. It is a hotspot for folks making ends meet on an island with high property values.

It also reflects the collective mindset of 76 million baby boomers. Every generation gets middle-aged, old and, in effect, replaced. Boomers are beginning to retire, taking inner stock and looking for answers to those nagging questions they've been too busy to examine.

When we first visited Woodward 14 years ago, lack of quality time was the big issue. Considering how the angst about it has multiplied since, the complaints back then seem laughable.

Take Back Your Time, a grassroots organization and campaign born from the simplicity movement, cites the dangers, saying overwork is harming health, marriages and community bonds. The group, noting how overworked Americans are compared to the rest of the free world, campaigns for widespread changes from guaranteed childbirth and sick leaves to getting Election Day off.

While his position is dwarfed by American industry's need to produce, De Graaf sees small victories and cracks in the opposition put up by business and government. And books that tell us to chill flood the market. "Happiness," a hot-selling book written by respected British economist Richard Layard, examines the paradox of why, as our societies get richer, we have not become happier. Mary Lou Quinlan, a reformed "Type A" advertising-agency CEO, has written, "Time Off For Good Behavior."

Luhrs, too, sees momentum. More magazines, from "Real Simple" to "Plenty," have been born to highlight the simple way, and more advertisers are packaging the concept, a sure sign of a market.

Bruce Pavitt, founder and co-owner of Sub Pop Records, is one of several well-known Seattle dropouts who have dropped into the San Juan Islands. This past winter he lent his DJ skills to help raise money for Children's House, a charity.

ORCAS ISLAND IS HOME to plenty of well-known Seattle escapees, including Bruce Pavitt, founder and co-owner of Seattle's Sub Pop record label, which unleashed Seattle Grunge on the world (from Nirvana to nirvana). Perhaps most notable, though, is former police chief Norm Stamper, who resigned under pressure soon after the tear gas clouds of the WTO riot dissipated five years ago.

At 60, Stamper hasn't retired so much as he's reinvented his life and himself. Later this Spring,, his book about his career, Seattle law enforcement and politics (which his publisher calls an "incendiary polemic") hits the market.

After a high-octane career that ended in his resignation, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper has reinvented his life, moving to Orcas Island to write, relax, reflect and even try his hand at community theater.

For more than a year after his retirement, Stamper continued to live in his cozy Queen Anne condo. When the anger surrounding how his career in Seattle ended, he turned to writing his thoughts. When he was police chief, his condo seemed quiet enough. But when he took to writing, the noise outside — traffic, car alarms and street fights — virtually screamed.

Now he comes to Seattle only every other month or so, mainly because he has to give depositions in cases lingering from his watch.

His cabin is nearly engulfed by woods and ponds, but he has a mesmerizing view of the water and surrounding islands. The only constant companion for Stamper is his pet dachshund, Gunther. After finishing "Breaking Rank," he went to work on his next book, a novel. He rises early, walks his dog, makes tea and heads to his studio 10 yards from his house for a cursory view of online newspapers and e-mails, then settles into the solitary work of putting words to the screen. He will write about six hours a day.

He goes to dinner with friends, takes acting classes and calls the dump a social gathering place. He's usually in bed by 8:30 or 9.

"My social life is more active than it was in Seattle," he says. "Here, it is purely social — no political obligations or trappings. I went from being an urban hermit to an island recluse. I'm secluded but not isolated."

Coming to the island, he says, "I learned you can go it alone. I'm not anti-social, but this suits me. It's an unknown whether you can do it, but I can't imagine another life now."

Barbieri is working to make an acre of land along an Orcas highway a sustainable, low-impact source of year-round food for community restaurants and markets. She calls herself "a low-wage woman with a crazy dream."

THAT PHOTOGRAPH of Woodward 14 years ago made simple living seem simple. And of course it is for the few who can afford it. But for many, it's still work.

Rhonda Barbieri works an acre bordering the highway from the ferry terminal to Eastsound, in an area known as Crow Valley. She's got a grand vision for it — a year-round source of produce and opportunity. She is a "landless" farmer, renting the property from two women who live there while she stays in an old hayloft-turned-apartment on the property.

This is her ninth year of farming. She's been an apprentice and a manager, but the name of her sustainable-agriculture venture, La Campesina — The Farm Woman — Project indicates her level of commitment. The project is a lot for one woman to oversee, especially in low-tech ways — when she jots a list of supplies on the back of her hand she calls it her "Island Palm Pilot" — but at 35, she seems relentlessly energetic.

"I'd like this to be a model for landless farmers," she says, her skin ruddy from morning frost. "I want to make something happen. I'm trying to start a program in which the community supports agriculture from the ground up. This is the only growing food visible from the road on the island, and I think that's important."

She doesn't see herself going it alone, though. John Steward of the island's Maple Rock Farm helped her learn Community Supported Agriculture (in which subscribers purchase food shares before the season in return for a weekly box containing a variety of produce). Folks on the island helped her put a fence around the crop beds; they gave her startup money, too. A millionaire sat next to her at a community meeting, showing passion for saving agricultural land and helping lower-income folks. And local stores and restaurants like The Kitchen, which Woodward's son owns, will likely buy her produce.

Rhonda Barbieri, left, gets help from Kyle Jepson during a fencing party at her La Campesina Project farm on Orcas Island. The project is aimed at building community support, from the ground up, for sustainable farming.

She took a break from putting in fence posts one winter morning so she could head down to the food bank, and her little apartment is furnished almost exclusively with free stuff. "I'm just a low-wage woman with a crazy dream," she says, "but you have to put it out there in life. Simplicity has allowed me to have adventures and self-exploration, but I've done it on two pennies."

Woodward, among her biggest supporters, made her way to the island life on more than two pennies. She bought her first property in the mid-1970s with money she made from her Seattle business, Surrogate Hostess. To get there, she worked long days that began at 4 a.m., and she did it for many years.

At 63, she lives simply now in her wood-heated bungalow. She inherited a 1978 sports car, but she leaves it parked most of the time. She spends much of her time volunteering and tending the gardens of her businesses, and uses her computer to raise money for Children's House and write letters, but for little else.

Barbieri uses the back of her hand to keep track of the parts she needs to shop for in building a fence around her crops. Her hand, she says, is her "Island Palm Pilot."

She is appalled by how people ignore the panorama and stare at screens instead. She knows she disappoints the neighbor children she has befriended each time she gives them books for presents instead of the latest gizmos, but that's the way it's going to be, she says. And she feels kinship with Barbieri and others in the subsistence-level strata of the island who are getting squeezed out by the widening gap between wages and property values.

She helps out at her son's tiny restaurant. One of her buildings in Eastsound is a gathering spot called The Livingroom. It used to be an arcade, but she saw it as a negative hangout so she bought it. Now it is used for community presentations, yoga classes, art shows and music lessons on her grandmother's old piano that sits in one corner.

"I suppose I'm a businesswoman," she says, laughing as vibrantly as she did on that sunlit morning in 1991. "It's good to have a purpose . . . I just can't work for anyone."

Richard Seven is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. He can be reached at rseven@seattletimes.com. Harley Soltes is a Seattle Times staff photographer.