In the summer of 2002, I was a gardening intern for Long Branch Farm here at Dancing Rabbit. At the end of September I left, grateful for the learning experience I had here, but also very excited to return to Buffalo, New York, where I had been living for several years.
Back then, I certainly never expected that I would be coming back to Dancing Rabbit for any extended period of time. I grew up in a rural area of western New York, and I spent a significant part of my adolescence cursing my parents for their choice to live out in the middle of nowhere.
Under no circumstances, I told myself, would I ever live in a place without at least several tens of thousands of people. I wanted to live in a place with sidewalks--sidewalks that would bring me to exciting places. And lots of old buildings. And parks, with lots of huge trees and soft grass underneath the trees. I had this very vague notion of what sort of place I would like to live in, and in many important ways, Dancing Rabbit was pretty much the opposite of that place.
But here I am, back at DR and not planning on leaving anytime soon. This is a mystery, yes? Well, not really. It turns out, you see, that Dancing Rabbit is home to an exceedingly rare creature called Thomas Kortkamp, and I fancy that fellow quite a lot. So he's the reason I decided to come back, and, happily, I no longer think of this place as the opposite of my ideal living situation. After growing up a bit, I've realized that any place has characteristics that make it both a wonderful place to live and a horrible place to live, and even though I still believe that cities are the place to be, there are good reasons for folks to live in a place like this, too.
Back in Buffalo, I had a goal of leading a simple life. For me, that meant not trying to earn very much money and also not spending very much money. I found that I could stick to that financial framework while living in a grand old house with lots of lovely people and eating tons of delicious food. Looking back, the whole set-up seems really mysterious and magical. Cities are like that. You just show up, and there are tons of people to watch and houses for you to live in and stores to go shopping in and shows to watch, and it seems like someone must be making it all happen, but who? Everything more or less works, so who cares?
In Buffalo, that feeling--the feeling of there being these unidentifiable, untouchable forces at work--was really strong because the city has been dying for well over fifty years now, and just about everyone is convinced that the powers that be are just speeding the process along. That combination of abundance and decay could make life there seem unreal, like it wasn't necessary to think about consequences. It felt absurd at times. I liked it.
The flip side of that sort of insouciance was that things started to seem pretty dismal whenever I did sit down to think about what was making everything run. For me, the symbol of everything that was really messed up about city life was PACKAGING. At work, I would grit my teeth every time someone asked for a take-out container. At home, I would almost lose my appetite thinking about how much landfill garbage just one dinner would produce. (I say almost, because it takes a LOT for me to lose my appetite.)
I threatened to beat up our co-op house's grocery shopper if he brought home one more new plastic grocery bag. Every week, our two huge garbage cans would be whisked away from the curb, so we never had to worry about all the trash we were creating. Except, for some reason, I did worry about it, and it sort of made me crazy. I hated that feeling of knowing that someone somewhere would have to live next to a landfill because of our thoughtless lifestyle.
When I think about it, there were probably about a hundred aspects of city life that could have and should have made me crazy. Many of those aspects don't exist at Dancing Rabbit. That mysterious force that makes everything run doesn't exist here, either. I know who builds the buildings here, who grows the food, who creates the systems that we operate by.
It's comforting and empowering to have that level of familiarity with the processes that are required for me to maintain my lifestyle, but at the same time it takes a lot of the glamour out of life. It's hard for me to romanticize a place that has been around for fewer years than I have. So, in many ways, learning to live at Dancing Rabbit has been about learning to live with certain realities that I would rather ignore. Life can be hard here, and I think, life is hard everywhere. I can pretend that's not true, but that means that I'm foisting the consequences of my lifestyle on someone else. It's nice to be in a place where, even if it's only relative to the way I've lived in the past, I can lead an existence that's not so burdensome on others.
(artwork by Nicole)
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