53
“Timpsileh! You’re home,” cried the echoes up ahead. “And you must be Miles, welcome to the LG. We’ve been expecting you.”
“Got held up in traffic.”
“It’ll do that. We’ve got a tipi for you, and once you get settled in, I can show you around if you want. I’m Rex, by the way.”
As they entered the outskirts of community, they never left the forest, the living environment was seamlessly woven into the living environment. A few tipis nestled between trees, a bell tent over there, a geodesic dome over here, and then all of a sudden they’d left the suburbs as Miles discovered a full-on ecocity.
Hustle and bustle and work and play and laughter throughout it all, children swarmed the new guy as Timps made introductions, colors floated through the air as the earliest harvest sprouted between their toes. He saw no allocated garden space, no big field of rows somewhere off to the side, instead, they seemed to be tending the abundance from within.
The walkways were lined with nutrition, every structure was surrounded by patches of food, or currently being resown with the next wave of tomorrow’s dinner. You didn’t leave home to work the fields, they were in your backyard, they were your backyard. It wasn’t a chore to spend time in the garden, it was just something you did when you saw it needed doing, and it only took a moment because everybody was doing it. There was no need for a fence, with the vines woven into the scent of human society, their territory was claimed without excessive force. And there was no mine among the people, only ours.
Miles was invited to pick a snack on the way to his new abode, everyone they passed was eager to welcome him home, community frothed from the Earth, not on top of it. Hammocks swung among the cucumbers, custom canvas peeked between the peas, there was even an adult-friendly treehouse in the air, and was that a... was that a zipline?
“There’s three camps here,” Rex laid out. “This is our base camp, Erenbrook, it’s hopping all the time, and where pretty much everyone holes up for the winter. It’s a lot easier to get through the season with a tight knit support team, we eat together, collect firewood together, and the more the merrier when it comes to heating a tipi.
A lot of folks stay down here year round, but it can get a little rowdy as the spring wakes us all up. It’s a lot chiller up top in the orchard, Chippendale, it’s a lot like down here, people and plants living as one, and you get to wake up to apples and peaches on your front porch. They get a lot more sun up there, but its elevation keeps a cool breeze flowing, and as the bounty ripens, they load it into the fruit basket and zip it on down to the rest of us.”
“Is that off of an old hot air balloon?”
“Yep, good eye. We’ve used a lot of salvaged materials to build this place, and we make our own tipis and hammocks. There’s only a few permanent structures, like the treehouse, we like to keep things mobile and shake them up sometimes, keeps the energy fresh and gives the Earth a chance to recover from our footprints. It’s really cool how we never have to cut trails, they just kind of organically appear as our paths naturally intertwine.
As long as we don’t bite off more of the Earth than we can chew, she happily provides everything we could ever need. It’s only when our eyes get bigger than our stomachs, that we find ourselves struggling to ever have enough. We’re physically capable of expanding our domain beyond our reach, but the effort involved grows exponentially the farther we stretch ourselves out.
If we claimed a distant land as human nature, we’d be forced to fence it off and guard against the wild reclaiming its freedom. The roads to nowhere would be less traveled and would require constant cutting back. And if the grass were greener outside of our laid back soccer matches, then somebody would have to chop it down to size before the land escaped our overgrown footprint.
But here, we live within our means, and our way of living automatically renews our lease on life. As long as we don’t insist on taking more than our fair share, we find ourselves sharing in more than plenty.
And the village doesn’t extend past the river to the west, it’s the closest thing to a border wall we have around here. It delivers crystal clear water to all three camps, and when you haul it by hand, you develop a deeper appreciation for conservation. We certainly utilize its flow for many facets of life, it’s the most critical component of our existence, and that’s precisely why we understand how vital it is to share the fountain with everyone else.
So we get our fill from the east shore, and as many trout as we can stomach, but we reserve the other side as public access for the other ninety-nine percent of life. That’s not to say that we never venture over there, there’s quite a bit of edible arrangements that thrive without our thumbs, and because no man’s land is off limits for development, it’s teeming with wildlife, which makes it wildly efficient as our primary hunting grounds.”
“I guess that means we eat meat around here?”
“For sure. A lot of us do anyway, only what we can catch with tools crafted by hand though. There’s no captivity or anything like that, and of course there are some straight up vegans, but most people’s beef with the meat industry is the industry bit of it, not the sacred sacrifice of the life cycle.
If you’re into it, I can drop you off at the kitchen on my way to work, it’s the heart of the camp and a good place to get acquainted with the community, plus you always want to be friends with the chef.”
Miles knew full well the benefits of a kitchen friendship, and the open door recruitment policy, upon his first appearance he was picked for the lineup of tonight’s mystery menu.
“You wanna chop some garlic?” requested the chef.
“My specialty.”
“Cool, I’d say four heads should do us, gotta watch what we eat until this year’s harvest is ready, plus I’ve got a bunch of the dry stuff if we end up needing a touch more. I’m not actually ready for it yet, but we should chop it early and let it sit for a while. So you know Annie, huh?”
“‘I do.”
“So you probably treat your garlic in a special way then?”
“Yep, and I worked with another chef that did that too, Becca was her name.”
“Oh wow, yeah I know Becca, we cooked together a while back. Cool deal, how’s she doing?”
“Really good. She taught me most of what I know about feeding a big crew with whatever’s lying around, we were prepping for about a hundred back there. How many folks eat out of here?”
“It varies by the season. Our population comes and goes, and when fresh food is plentiful in every neighborhood, a lot of people cook at home, or break off into more personal potlucks. But I’d say that in the thick of stew season, we max out at around ten heads of garlic, which roughly equates to two hundred mouths to feed.”
“And this place stays put all year long?”
“Yes sir, it’s one of the few worksites that doesn’t rotate shifts. You can see how we’re cooking, it’s all cob and other built-in appliances, plus we like to serve in the center of town, so it just makes sense to let the kitchen keep its flavors simmering as it evolves into the perfect recipe. This old tent’s seen better days though, thinking we’re probably due for a renovation once the leftovers warm up a bit.
Say, I gotta run to the pantry for a minute, if you want, I could take you on a quick tour of downtown.”
The dining hall next door was a massive eight panel octagon, the sides were removable once the summer called for more of a gazebo, but in the meantime, two opposing woodstoves ensured a warm retreat for anyone whose fire fizzled out at home. A long shelf of cubbies lined the wall by the front entrance, each held a wooden bowl, all unique, and some with quite a bit of artistic flair, but all bore the same essence that Miles found subtly familiar.
“We make all those here,” pointed the chef. “There’s a convivial wood shop down the way. We’ve got a pedal powered lathe and everything. A lot of folks made their own, others have been turned into gifts, either way, there’s something special about eating your heart out of a labor of love. It makes you want to wash your own dish, and put it away. It’s a sacred piece of the Earth, and you can almost taste it’s influence in your food, could just be the garlic though.
There’s also something deeply therapeutic about turning a raw piece of wood into a well done work of art. You start with this rough blank of infinite potential, and as you chisel away through its revolutions, it starts to speak to you, it starts to guide you through uncovering the gem that was always hidden beneath the surface. Plus the same thing happens to the wood.
And next door to that place, is our stitchery, that’s where we made this octagon, and tipis and hammocks, and that old kitchen rag, got two treadle Singers down there, most of us make and repair our own clothes too. A while back we even designed a custom treepee for this other camp, it was really more of a pyramid though.
Listen, I gotta get back over there and stir the pot a bit, I don’t even know what I’m making yet, maybe pizza sauce. I’d say you should come with me, but I see a couple folks you oughta meet, stop by whenever you want though.”
June and Thomas were the founders of the LG, along with some other folks back in the day, but it had been their vision and drive that brought it to life.
“It was just after we had our first child together,” recounted June. “And we knew that we didn’t want to raise our family in the conventional way of TV babysitters and public miseducation.”
“And that was even before the reality of child rearing today,” added Thomas. “Where three-year-olds have cell phones and snapchats.”
“Plus the food out there was not what we wanted to nourish our traditions with, which has also gotten exceedingly worse over the last few decades.”
“So we decided to disappear into the woods and do a Swiss Family Robinson,” he flashed back. “It wasn’t easy though, not at first anyway. But we knew that we weren’t doing it for convenience, we were doing it for quality of life, and those two don’t generally mesh that well together.”
“We met these two other families that wanted to create community, so we did, and it was pretty magical those first couple years. A lot smaller obviously, and just the basics of survival as we got the food situation figured out, but we finally found a rhythm that just felt natural.”
“Then slowly more people started trickling in. Some we met on our various travels, others we’d known in our previous lives, seems that there’s a lot of folks out there fed up with life in the colonies. Eventually, both of the other original families moved on, in a good way of course, one to an eco-village in Puerto Rico, and the other’s traveling the country in a school bus. But anyway, once they left and started crossing paths with like-minded folks, well, we started feeling the growing pains of a family campout turned festival.”
“Everybody was here in a good way,” assured June.” It’s just that we didn’t really have any focus. We were just surviving, but with the swell of communal energy, we knew that we had a responsibility to harness it and pour good back into the world.”
“So we had talking circles with everyone and fleshed out what was really important to us all. Food was certainly a common denominator across the board, as well as developing a way of life in harmony with the Earth, not against the laws of nature”
“And that’s what we like to think we’ve done here. And it’s constantly evolving. We’ve raised six of our own, and been a part of countless other lives that have grown into some of the most phenomenal people you could ever imagine. Some have stayed to start their own families, others have ventured into civilization to share our energy with the world, and a few have even founded their own spin-offs out there in other pockets of Turtle Island.”
“But it’s really been in the last couple years, that most of what you see now has bloomed from the seeds we planted so long ago,” expounded Thomas. “A lot of us went to Standing Rock and met so many of the most amazing people you could ever meet.”
“Yeah,” said Miles. “I’ve met quite a few myself.”
“So then you know,” continued Thomas. “And when that was all over out there, a lot of them had nowhere to go. Camp felt like home in a way that many of them had never felt, and the thought of returning to a world they no longer believed in was simply not an option, so of course we invited them to help us evolve this place into its next iteration of liberation.”
“Everybody that showed up after camp was so innovative, and inspired to live their change, and this place was the perfect breeding ground for the solution that we all fell responsible for bringing to life. It’s just been incredible, the stuff that some of these kids came up with, we’ve even got a bicycle powered projector for our weekly movie night, family friendly of course.”
“Well isn’t that convenient,” rated Miles. “This place is something else, alright.”
He gave them the highlights of his own journey here, and of his vision on the rez, and how uncannily similar this place was to the trip into space that he’d been convinced was only a dream.
“It was so vividly like this place, I think it was this place, all except for the piñons and Earthhouses.”
“And you brought both of those with you, didn’t ya?”
“I guess so, huh?”
“And you don’t still believe in coincidence, do you?”
“No, I dropped that one from my vocabulary a while back.”
“Well then there you go, who cares if it was a dream or something more, either way, you’ve followed your heart and it’s led you to ours, and now I’m thinking that maybe our new kitchen should be a project you head up.”