Roxanne Quimby for Governor!

She learned quickly that Maine is not California. "It was always 20 below," Quimby recalls now. She and St. Clair--whom she later married--worked feverishly to survive. Lacking electricity, they had to cut and split their own firewood by hand to heat the cabin and boil water. Within a few years, twin babies arrived, and the task of simple living became more complex. Quimby would fetch freezing water from the stream, heat it on the woodstove, wash diapers by hand, and then pin them to the clothesline, "where they'd immediately freeze-dry stiff as boards."

Isolation, hard work, and poverty took their toll, and the marriage eventually ended. Quimby and her husband sold the land and split the proceeds. The break didn't shake Quimby's faith in her low-impact lifestyle. She simply bought 30 more acres, built another cabin, and started all over again. But as her children grew, she says she felt increasingly obliged to provide them with a good education--just as her parents had offered her. So she began looking for ways to make money beyond waitressing, and in 1984, she met local beekeeper Burt Shavitz.

Shavitz taught her the art of keeping bees, and before long, Quimby was experimenting with uses for beeswax. The fragrant, translucent raw material inspired her, and suddenly--in her mid-30s--the artist within her reawoke. Soon, she was stirring hot wax on her woodstove, dipping candles by hand, and selling them at crafts fairs. She discovered a recipe book of 19th-century balms--everything from boot wax to saddle polish--and began to cook up all kinds of potions, rubs, and salves.

At the outset, Quimby had no idea what would sell. "I'd lived without money for so long," she says, "I had no idea what people bought or didn't buy, so I was forced to watch people closely and see how they made decisions." Her own detachment from any kind of conventional materialism became the source of strategic wisdom. "Very few people seem to be able to remove their own desires from their vision of what the consumer wants," she says, "and so they miss it." Even more important, she found that those needs often go unexpressed and have to be intuited. "By the time a consumer is able to vocalize a need," she says, "I think it's already too late."

Inevitably, for Quimby, some of those needs touch on politics. Pick up any Burt's Bees product, and you can tell: This comes from a woman who still believes that the best-lived life hurts the planet as little as possible. She has always insisted on using recycled materials, and almost all product packaging is itself recyclable. Every product Burt's Bees makes, from skin moisturizers to facial scrubs, is made from at least 90% natural ingredients.

Quimby's purist approach has proven lucrative. In 2002, sales grew by almost 30% to $43.5 million, and Quimby expects another 30% increase in 2003. Pleased as she is by her company's success, though, Quimby has never been particularly attached to it. "I guess I wanted to see if I could do it because the odds were all against me," she says. "But I was never that interested in it; it's more like a game." Part of her desire to run for governor comes from wanting to find her own internal edge again, to push herself back out into the wilderness and to explore new terrain. "It's like going into the unknown," she says. "If you're afraid of that, you're going to get stuck."

For the past two years, too, she has felt increasingly squeezed by the demands of her double life. She has shuttled uncomfortably between her beloved mushroom of a house in Maine and her company's headquarters in Durham, North Carolina, where she camps out in an executive hotel. "It's very schizophrenic, and--especially as I get older--I just see this as completely unsustainable," she says. "I look at my suitcase and think, My God, that's probably what I look like." For a woman so deeply connected to her physical home, she spends a lot of time away from it. This, she knows, must change soon.

Time to Raise Some Hell

Maine has never had a female governor, much less one like Quimby. But both its current state senators are female, and it was one of the earliest states in the country to elect a woman to the U.S. Senate. "Maine people don't get too stuck in stereotypes," Quimby says. "They don't think that politicians have to be middle-aged men in blue suits and ties."

But some do get stuck on the question of origin. There are those who were born and raised in the state--"Mainers," in local parlance, who live there year-round braving snow, sleet, and subzero temperatures--and then there's everyone else. If you fall into the "outsider" demographic, you may be excluded by many Mainers for consideration for certain opportunities. The governorship, say.