One of my fears showed up this week, which is that I injured myself, and, as I thought to myself repeatedly over the next four days, “in the middle of nowhere, to boot.”
Liz here, to tell a tale of rural life and catch you up on the latest from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.
My situation is slightly different from most people here, in that I am a licensed acupuncturist with pre-med courses, and CPR and Western medical exam training under my belt. I am likely to become matter of fact, rather than frightened, when I’m hurt, even as I mentally begin my own injury assessment and course of action plan.
When people become seriously ill or injured at DR, there are several tiers of care. We have access to ambulance transport to the hospital, which is half an hour away and maybe 30 minutes for the ambulance to arrive. We also have any number of willing neighbors within DR to drive us to the hospital. We stock basic first aid supplies, ice, and crutches to borrow in the Common House. We can send an email to the entire DR community and ask if anyone has what we need–and invariably, someone does.
We also have a committee that coordinates everyday logistics on someone’s behalf for community members to bring meals and drive to medical appointments if someone is sick or injured for a longer period of time.
I happen to be fiercely independent, which I hear is a trauma response, although it’s hard to say what trauma exactly, when the people who raised me were also fiercely self-reliant. I woke up one day with sharp pain in my left leg, unable to walk on it or straighten it fully without a great deal of pain (for you medical nerds out there: no swelling, no bruising, no recent falls, no change in my routine the day before, and the pain was centered around the knee, not the calf). The affected leg has a slightly bum knee, which occasionally “tweaks” painfully, and I’ve been strengthening the muscles around it for years now, which has reduced the frequency of the knee pinching.
Luckily, I live in a one-room cottage, which means everything for daily living was within a few hops on my unaffected leg. This injury didn’t fit into any particular category, at least in Western medicine, so it was no use going to a doctor, which was a huge relief because it meant I didn’t have to ask a Rabbit for the favor of driving me to a doctor. But as an acupuncturist, there was a symptom pattern that it fit into, and yes, a course of treatment. For the next four days, I put in needles and took an herbal formula, and slept in my armchair because I couldn’t climb the ladder to my sleeping loft. And the pain lost its grip on me, and my leg returned to normal.
Of course I didn’t tell anyone about it until I was feeling better!
In other news, the Hub strawbale build project is chugging along at a reasonable pace this year. Lindsey has been doing a work exchange on the project with me since June and we work well together. We finished the guardrail on the balcony of the Sunrise loft and screened it in. I addressed issues with carpenter bees (a record number of them this year!) who were drilling holes in roof support beams, and trimmed some Asian pear tree limbs that a squirrel was using to jump over to the loft balcony and chew a hole in the new screen (mischief managed!).
This month, we are doing prep work for a work party taking place in the first two weeks of September. Our focus will be constructing a living roof over the patio. Originally, we were going to rent a telehandler (a large machine with a crane that can lift heavy objects into place) to lift heavy logs into place as rafters. But after several years of trying to coordinate people, the machine rental, and a machine operator, I applied some out-of-the-box thinking to the situation, and let go of the original plan.
Our prep included tearing down the patio sitting wall, made of strawbale and clay plaster, that was falling apart from years of rain and wind without a roof for protection. We uncovered all manner of living things making their home in the wall, including a large colony of carpenter bees (easily 30 or more) and the waxy capsule clusters they create for their nursery. We had no idea they were making a home in the wall until we pulled the bale apart. Just as I was reassuring Lindsey that wild bees don’t sting, one of them bit me on the side of my head. Lucky for me, they don’t have stingers or venom, so the bite never swelled up, as stings from yellow jackets do. After a few hours of applied ice, the bite stopped hurting. I write more details on my new plan for the patio sitting wall on the Hub Substack website: thehubcollective.substack.com.
There has been a giant pile of soil and gravel next to the patio, leftover from excavating the drainage trenches for the patio. We set to work to spread out the pile and liberate it from overgrown brush, making more room to maneuver the rafter logs into place, and create more air circulation for the eventual patio space.
My tasks for the next few weeks are to build a sill on the front of the Hub to attach two of the smaller rafters and the support post to, order metal hangers for the rafters, transport a large support post that we picked out from a lumber resource yard available to the community, which is about a football field’s distance from the Hub, cut the rafter logs to length and shape the rafter ends, and bring boards for the decking (what covers the rafters as a first layer of the roof) over to the Hub from the resource yard. Oh yeah, and I have to make sure we’re ready for the co-op kitchen we will set up for those two weeks to feed our volunteers from the Hub kitchen.
Dancing Rabbit just finished hosting visitors for an Ecovillage Adventure Weekend, followed by a visit from students at Earlham College. There are the usual visits from family, friends and Mercantile Inn guests, and I offer tours of the Hub to any and all who want to see the building.
Check the Dancing Rabbit website for info on events such as Singing Rabbit coming up at the end of August, and the next visitor session.
Liz Hackney is the editor and a rotating writer of this newsletter. Nowadays she can be found at coffee group in the early morning and the Hub after that.