Jacob's Adventures...

Hello Friends!

I'm sorry this isn't a personal note to each and everyone of you, but better to send this out to you all than to not write anyone, and this is about all that I've got time to do. Still, I'm thinking of you and would love to hear back. For those of you trying to figure what the heck all of this is about... my apologies if I haven't contacted you yet to give you the news that I left NU to pursue environmental work.

If you want to be taken off my list of travel log recipients or if you know of someone who should be added on, just email me and let me know.

I will now attempt to return to my travel logs that have been neglected since I left Chicago. Since it's been over a month since I left, this first installment will be a bit lengthy. I hope to send this out on a weekly or biweekly basis hereafter, so they should be shorter after this.

A SUDDEN CHANGE OF PLANS
The first thing to explain is that my plan for this quarter got mixed up a bit by some sudden and unexpected changes in my personal life. To make a long story as short as possible, Lauren and I broke up. Many of you already have the scoop on this. For those who don't, write me if you want more details -- I'm avoiding this level of personal detail for this particular installment. As a result I was only in Missouri for one week before heading back to Chicago for two and half weeks. I left Chicago almost two weeks ago early Wednesday morning, drove to Missouri, gathered a pack together from my things that had been in Missouri, then hopped on a train to California. I just got back into Missouri two days ago and will be here until I return to Michigan for the holidays with my family. After that I will most likely return to Chicago to stay with my brother while deciding what to do next in my life. More details on that later. So that's the skinny on my movements. Again, I'm leaving the relationship concerns out of this account, but there are plenty of other juicy details of my adventures to share. Read on....

MY FIRST WEEK AS A RABBIT
My First week here in Missouri (back in October) was a very strange one for me as new developments unfolded in my personal life. Nonetheless, the actual work going on here was cool, so here are a few highlights. The Kellogg Foundation has a big grant in the area and in several rural counties of Michigan and Nebraska for exploring and developing more ecologically sustainable communities. The grant's approach is much more mainstream than the work going on here at Dancing Rabbit (DR), and is a great resource to have in the area. Once a year, they bring together people from the recipient communities in each of the three states to see what is going on in one of the states. This year it was Missouri. The person who is administering the grant in NE Missouri is a friend and fan of the Dancing Rabbit Project and so arranged to have the visitors spend a couple hours getting a tour of the work here.
About 30-40 people showed up for the tour. These are all people interested in reducing the use of pesticides in agricultural, building the economy in socially responsible ways, etc. They are also all average rural Americans and not eco-freaks or any such stereotype that you might normally get. From Farmers to Housewives to Carpenters, the crowd was interested and friendly about the work being done here. We were a little surprised to find a U of Nebraska sociology professor in the crowd who started asking academic questions about human-scale populations theories and so forth, but that was fun too. He was especially excited about our work and was interested in setting up internships for his students and giving them college credit for working out here. I helped the DR folk set up their first internship program just last year. It was a huge success with 5 happy interns and lots of great work getting done. We're beginning work soon on setting up next year's internship program and we're hoping this prof might be able to help us set up college credit for student from other schools (as a transfer credit) as well. I'm contacting him this week to talk to him about all of this.
The whole tour provided us with good feedback and was a nice example of the kind of outreach work that can be done here.

One of the tour highlights, which was also what I spent the most time on during that week, was DR's first strawbale cabin. There's lots more detail about it on the DR web-site but here's the basic idea: Houses can be built using strawbales for walls, which are then covered in stucco. They are cheap to build, extremely well insulated (thereby making them cheaper and more ecologically sound to heat and cool), and don't rely on chopping down forests to provide lumber. They also feel very sturdy and provide great sound-proofing. Despite many people's concerns, they aren't any more of a fire hazard than wood houses and there are strawbale houses in Nebraska around a 100 years old that are still in fine condition.
DR has nearly completed it's first strawbale cabin, a two room building with a wood stove, which is a load-bearing building. This means that it is designed so that the strawbales themselves actually hold the weight of the roof and therefore no wood is needed except for the frames of the doors and windows. Another two room cabin, which is a timber-frame design (the timbers were all salvaged from a dismantled barn) is half done and will be finished in the early spring.
Since most DR people currenty live in the rental housing right across the road from DR property, it is exciting to have buildings actually going up. Housing is probably the biggest most important factor for growth of the project at this time.

TRAIN TRIP
In mid-November I had a business meeting/conference to attend (more about that below) in California. It was hoped that I would be able to find as inexpensive of a way out there as possible. Since my time is much more flexible these days, I arranged to take the train out. I have long liked travelling by train, but have only travelled as far as the trip between Chicago and Ann Arbor, about 5 hours. This was a totally different experience. On the way out I was travelling with my friend Tony, one of the founders of Dancing Rabbit. He and I got a ride up to Ottumwa, Iowa the closest Amtrak station from Cecil, another friend and DR founder (I'll send out a who's who in a future installment). At the train station, as the three of us checked our baggage (mostly merchandise being taken to be sold at an event in California), Cecil was saying hi to a couple of guys hanging out in the train station. He explained to me a few minutes later that these two guys weren't going anywhere. He knew them because they love trains and just hang out at the train station all the time.
The Califonia Zephyr runs from Chicago through Iowa and Nebraska into Colorado with a 40 minute layover in Denver. Most that portion of that trip took place over night. The Zephyr's route is specifically planned to provide really gorgeous and dramatic views during the daylight and keep the prairie states and flatter areas of Utah and Nevada in the nighttime hours when one can't really see anything out of the tinted windows of the train. The trains west of Chicago are primarily double decker trains. The coach seats are large and spacious with footrests etc. so that sleeping is as comfy as kicking back in a lazy boy (sans armrests). The view from my seat was good, but with a 50 hour train trip one needs excuses to walk around the train. Fortunately, there was a lovely excuse in the lounge car. The downstairs of the lounge car was similar to what you find in the eastern train lines, tables you can sit at and a small convenience shop. But the upstairs was the real treat. Here, the car is filled with rotating seats and benches that face out either side of the car. The windows are huge and curve up over half of the roof of the car. Sitting in these while travelling through the mountains, tunnels and canyons of the Rockies and Sierras... I can't begin to describe it. "Gorgeous" will have to suffice.

THE FELLOWSHIP FOR INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY
In California I was attending the board meeting for the Fellowship for Intentional Community (the FIC), which is one of my part time employers right now. The FIC is a national clearing house for information about building community. Its roots are focused on Intentional Community (co-ops, co-housing, communes, etc.), but it's general mission is to provide people with the tools for building community wherever they live. The organization's board operates on a consensus basis and several of it's board members are some of the best consensus facilitator's in the country. As a result attending the meetings is very educational and provided some great examples of conflict resolution and creative approaches to meeting-based problem solving.
Being a national organization, whose members are spread out, the semiannual board meetings are held in a variety of places around the country. This meeting was held in Willits, California about 3 hours north of San Francisco (just north of the Real Goods Solar Living Center, for those of you familiar with Real Goods). The conference space was provided by a christian community called Church of the Golden Rule, a really interesting group. It's a loosely grouped community of christians who are essentially nondemoninational, but who strongly believe in the creed "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." It's been around since the 30s and many of its members were conscientious objectors to the war in WWII. It was blacklisted by the FBI during the McCarthy years and kind of went underground for a long time, but has been more public this decade. It's nestled in a lovely mountain valley that continually struck me with it's changing leaves, fog encased mountain tops and it's feral herd of white deer.
The meetings were a great chance to meet up with a few friends of mine in the communities movement and to meet a lot of people who I've read about or talked to by email before. Rarely have I met such a concentrated group of friendly, self-confident, intelligent and ethical people. I'm happy to be doing work for this organization and look forward to being connected to it in the future. Currently, I am on their recently constructed development (i.e. fundraising) team and am focusing on grant-writing. I have also been donating illustrations to the organization's nationally distributed magazine called, surprisingly enough, "Communities Magazine". This winter, I will also be doing some freelance work for the organization's most popular book, the Communities Directory.

BACK AT DR
So now I am back at DR, but in the past few days, most of the folk here have left to spend Thanksgiving with friends or family. Right now there is just one other person and myself here. Still, the weather is scrumptous and I'm enjoying the place. We'll head over to Sandhill to have a big Thanksgiving tomorrow. What's Sandhill? Well, I think I'll just have to wait until next week to give a low-down on all of that.

Until then, I'd love to hear from folks and hope all is well in your worlds.

Love,
Jacob