Howdy y’all. Greetings from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, which might be renamed Squishy Bottom, Missouri by the middle of this week. This is Ben, attempting to bring you the latest happenings from our quaint utopian burg. What is primarily important to convey is the climatic condition of our region, currently classified as excessively damp. I project that friends and neighbors may be experiencing frustration relating to these conditions, as I have heard the rumble of planters on and off during our previous dry spell. Flowing, standing, and then again flowing water has saturated the bottoms throughout NEMO, potentially erasing much of the local plantings. Raised garden beds throughout the village, particularly those on contour seem quite quenched yet content. My corn patch is maybe about a week behind others in the area because I waited until the winds reached 50 mph to plant, not desiring to water the bed manually. As a dyed in the wool lazy person, I prefer to let natural phenomena do most of my jobs for me. The rains have been good for that, significantly cutting down on my dish washing responsibilities, slaking my lime, and filling our water barrels to the brim. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten around to building an ark.
While those denizens of our community who dwell in tents and other fabric structures may be experiencing some anxiety surrounding the torrent of precipitation, I take comfort in the fact that the planetary unit, via climate, is also helping me organize my life a little bit by laying waste to all but the most durable possessions I hold. The items that I hold the most concern for in my life right now are the animals to which I am partially entrusted, and they seem to relish the rain. The baby doll sheep do not care if it rains, because they have lanolin, the muscovy ducks don’t much care either, being that they are waterfowl, and in fact will roost in a thundershower and extend their wings, buzzard style, for personal grooming, and the goats, though more rain shy than the other species have been producing a particularly sweet, grassy milk unlike anything I have tasted.
Now I could tell you all about the latest happenings ’round here, like the improvements to both the Skyhouse and Mercantile porches, or the new toolshed, or the fabled Mindfulness Bell which was heard to toll for a couple of days before passing into the mists somewhere silently, but I don’t really know much about those things and am a poor researcher. I was also off-farm for approximately 42 hours on a whirlwind trek over the hills of northeast Missouri and into the heart of Iowa in search of the Henry O. Studley toolchest.
A little background information: H.O. Studley was a piano and organ builder of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, much obscured by time but famed for his toolchest, a meticulously crafted if not slightly gaudy display made from mahogany, rosewood, walnut, ebony, and mother of pearl. When it was featured in Fine Woodworking magazine, tool geeks around the globe salivated and pawed at the centerfold, relishing the densely layered arraignment and appealingly cluttered aesthetic. When we heard that a presentation would be delivered by author Chris Schwarz and conservator of fine furniture Don Williams in Amana, Iowa the decision was simple. This was to be a journey for the Backpedalers, a newly formed collective of cyclists with no stated goal, only a common interest in backroads, midwestern landscapes, and the thrifty curating of gastronomically acceptable nutritional fodder.
The wend was to be 136 miles in one direction as the tire rolls. Departing at a little after 6am, breaking the mists of Scotland County’s gravelly lowland roads we arrived at the state line before breakfast, we stopped in at The Dutchman’s General Store in Cantril for a spell to obtain starches and sugars of various sorts. Thereafter, the Backpedalers abruptly left behind the steeply rising highlands with which we have much familiarity for a state where they use numbers instead of letters to title the roads and the lay of the land is much more graduated, with long gentle sweeps in elevation. Heading due north brought us to the top of many a hill and bottom of many a valley. The architecture took on a more Gothic style. We made it to Fairfield by lunch, that fabled place where Transcendental Meditators the world over flock to for the seminars and university classes, yet tractors still rumble through the main square. Having located our desired caloric quarry, an all-you-can-eat Indian food buffet, and laying waste to all the panier and curry in sight, we paused as a trio near the railroad to stretch and digest, bidding farewell to leg one of our three-legged stool, a man whom we will refer to only as J.S. for the purposes of this document. After our culinary items passed out of our esophageal region and into other realms we mounted our steeds, covering vast stretched of heartland and quaint burgs and burrows. We got things in our eyes, swallowed some bugs, and developed an acute condition known as “The Jello Knees” before arriving at the auto-carriage infested Amana Colonies, a place where people all over the midwest drive to get away from visible powerlines and buy expensive popcorn. An all-you-can-eat sauerkraut buffet could not be found, but we took shelter in an old barn through the night’s rain, rising a bit like Lazarus in the early morning hours to enjoy coffee, pastry, and farm-related conversation at The World’s Most Beautiful Casey’s General Store.
Now, the Amana Colonies, as you may know, had at one time much in common with Dancing Rabbit and the tri-communities, being a somewhat interdependent grouping of communes, replete with their own rotational grazing policy and communal kitchens, and generally united in their spiritual and political practices. However, the German settlers dispersed sometime in the thirties. The 26,000 acres that they owned were titled to a corporation, and they began making refrigerators, or at least that’s how I understand it.
After drinking lots of coffee, experimenting with water-resistant black plastic trash bag fashion, and impressing the local populace with our feets of endurance we entered the Festhalle Barn for the Handworks tool event. After a fascinating and often hilarious presentation on the aforementioned Studley toolchest (conclusion: Hank was crazy!), we milled about, took guesses at how much rain, wind and cold would be thwarted upon us for the journey home, and had the MC for the event advertise our spoon-carving and fuel-purchasing services in exchange for a ride south. Well, my remaining riding partner, let’s call him Thermos, did in fact fashion a spoon while I walked around touching things I had no business touching, and a kindly doctor from Olathe finally volunteered to bring us south out of the rain, from which point we patronized one more Casey’s and rolled on Northeast Missouri’s rolling hills once again from then ’til midnight.
I wish I could provide to you some message, some offering of insight related to this long and often arduous story, but I do not have that for you. Sometimes our activities carry very little meaning. Having returned home, tired and generally deprived, I lurched back into village life, attending a business meeting on the future of our governance. When the Amana colonies dispersed, it was due to the “Great Change” in communal life. Newer generations wanted less restrictions in their daily life. They wanted to play baseball. Here at Dancing Rabbit, we have lots of games to play, and though some villagers may wish to have less restriction or bureaucracy present in their day to day routines, it appears to me that the village is headed in a different direction, wanting to find ways to better organize and create structure for our unique little social universe. These seemingly opposing forces are not entirely disharmonious. I reflected upon it while truing a bicycle wheel this morning. In order for a wheel to function, it must have a sturdy hub, a smoothly operating core of well maintained bearings which can reliably create movement. Now the rim of the wheel, that is the true conveyance of travel, but when it is not anchored to a hub, it remains a distant fantasy, a ring of potentiality, unable to function on its own. As I tensioned the spokes in an alternating pattern this morning, it came to me that in order for this whole endeavor to work, some spokes would have to pull one way, and the others the opposite. It is a physical necessity that each spoke be in perfect, opposing balance not only laterally, but also radially. Maybe there’s a lot of zen things someone could say about that, maybe it applies somewhere. I don’t really know, and I’m too busy fixing bikes to care. At least I’m not building refrigerators.
Dancing Rabbit is an intentional community and educational non-profit in Rutledge, Missouri, focused on sustainable living.We offer a tour of our village on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month, April through October. The tour begins at 1:00 pm and generally lasts one and a half to two hours. You do not need to make a reservation for regularly scheduled Saturday tours. If you need directions, please call the Dancing Rabbit office at 660-883-5511 or email us at dancingrabbit@ic.org.