It's been 15 years since anyone else has taken Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life by Raymond Mungo out of the Forbes Public Library. The cover has a trippy line drawing of a branched tree with a yellow and green sunburst background. Raymond, on the back cover, flashes a smart-assed twenty-something smile. The prose is an exuberant account of 1969, his second year living on the Total Loss Farm commune in Guilford, Vt. It is also a year in which he, together with the Poet of the Farm, Verandah Porche, recreates Thoreau's 1839 journey on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and takes a Christmas road trip from Vermont to California, picking up other jolly slackers along the way.
Raymond wrote this account at the age of 24. Raymond thinks that the American public doesn't have the power to stop an unjust war, that economic collapse in the U.S. is imminent, that petroleum products are best avoided, and that going back to the Stone Age is a virtue. He believes that the best answer to the world's problems is to live a sustenance lifestyle with friends.
A youthful veteran of the peace movement and co-founder with Marshall Bloom of the Liberation News Service, a radical spin-off of the College Press Service that provided weekly packets of international news stories and photographs for over 500 underground newspapers in the U.S., Raymond gave up on urban activism in 1968—the year I was born—and chose, with a group of friends including Porche, to found a new agrarian world order on 100 acres in Vermont. They "dropped out" (Raymond's phrase).
And what's stopping me from doing the same? I ask myself regularly. I see the world imploding—endless war and violence, famine, natural disasters, peak oil and a rapidly slimming comfort margin for most adults—and I'm groping for answers. Pampered being that I am, I also want the changes I make to be . . . gentle. My fondest hope now is that the knowledge so earnestly being shared on the national level by writers like Bill McKibben (Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future) and Richard Heinberg (Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines) begins to take root in the minds and hearts of ordinary people, myself included, who are willing to recognize some personal responsibility in this scenario. How bad does it have to get before we achieve some solidarity?
In search of brotherly and sisterly love, last fall I decided to find out if commune cultures exist today, in Western Massachusetts. They do. Now they're called intentional communities.
Intentional communities, groups living in consciously designed and structured dwellings, roles and relationships, are on the rise in the U.S., according to statistics published on the website of the Federation of Intentional Communities. There are, at this writing, 50 intentional communities (14 of these "forming") in Massachusetts. Over a dozen of these are within a 45-minute drive of Northampton.
I visited five sites representative of types I'd observed in my Web research (www.ic.org was my principal source). The people I encountered were farmers, gardeners, solar experts, meditators, believers, social justice activists, and education consultants. They had committed themselves to their places and their people. They were disciplined and thoughtful about what they wanted their lives to feel like. I met founders and initiates, and every one of them was oriented toward doing something constructive and living with a consciousness of land and neighbors.
No one was dropping out. I saw a common push to divest from standard utilities and to use alternative energy sources like the sun and wind. Three of the five places I saw used wood heat. A sense of urgency has grown into practice for many of those I met; they're interested in food security, they're sharing their knowledge about sustainable energy with their towns, and they're sheltering the homeless. They are coping with and preparing for hardship.
The Micro-Farm
Daniel Botkin of Laughing Dog Farm in Gill got hip to food security issues in preparation for Y2K, when it was widely warned that major systems reliant on computers might fail in the dawn of 2000. He decided in preparation for possible chaos that what would ease his mind the most was stored food and the ability to grow enough food to meet his family's needs in his own back yard. When 2000 arrived without incident, his urge to increase his food production ability on his three acres remained.
In his essay, "On Politics, Vegetables and Community-Supported Agriculture," originally published in the Montague Reporter in 2005, he writes, "Many say the world is ruled by money, some say oil; now others are talking about the coming 'Water Wars,' as global aquifers become stretched, depleted, polluted and lost. … Myself, I tend to see food as the common denominator, the great and illuminating mega-issue that links us all in the global community. Think about it: when all talk of economics, war, politics, terrorism and ethnic difference is said and done, food is left standing as the last and most hopeful thing between us."
Daniel learned organic micro-agriculture farming techniques that produce a wide variety of crops: the integration of multi-use beds that are heavily mulched to retain moisture. He has a 65-foot long hoop-house, an arched tunnel of translucent plastic. The hoop-house produces tomatoes in November. Daniel and his wife Divya grow food for 10 families, who purchase shares of the yearly harvest and collect vegetables all growing season. The operation doesn't pay for itself yet.
Daniel greeted me kindly on an unseasonably warm day in early November. The CSA operation had concluded and he had a bit more time for curious strangers. My son communed with some Nubian goats while I was shown the hoop-house, full of ripe and ripening Sun Gold tomatoes (other varieties as well) and a few blooming zinnias. Daniel picked and allowed me to help. He introduced me to Divya, who was cutting down some outdoor tomato vines. I trudged about the raised rows and observed how small the total cultivated space was.
I asked Daniel, "I have a quarter acre. If the shit hits the fan, can I feed my family on that?"
"Yes," he answered, "if you've done your homework and prepared."
"What's the first thing I should do?"
"Build a hoop-house," he answered without hesitation.
Laughing Dog Farm sits on a steep hillside with a view of the massive, 1970s shingle-style mansion of a dorm that housed many in the Renaissance Community from the mid-'70s to 1988. Daniel and Divya's house, another Renaissance Community relic of '70s architectural optimism and grooviness, is ample and was also built as a dormitory. Daniel and Divya consider the idea of sharing the house and property with one or two like-minded families. According to the entry for Laughing Dog Farm on the Intentional Communities website, they "seek a serious-minded, committed individual, couple or small family to join [their] venture, with the possibility of eventual business partnership and/or co-ownership or land trust establishment." They train, feed and house interns in return for work. Their house is open to screened strangers.
They're making it work with sacrifice, and they've learned to grow enough food to live on—in case they need to one day. At one point during my tour I burst out, "But it all seems so hard." Daniel smiled.
The Ecovillage
"We've been talking about the fact that we will take in refugees one day," Wendy Germain informed me at lunch recently. She was referring to Americans. She is a new member at the Sirius Community, a 30-year-old ecovillage in Shutesbury. Members, most of whom live on or near the 90-acre wooded site, meet weekly as a community.
Scotland's famous Findhorn Foundation defines ecovillages as "communities with tightly-knit social structures, united by common ecological, social and/or spiritual values. Working with the simple principle of not taking more away from the Earth than one gives back, ecovillages are consciously diminishing their ecological footprint." Two of Sirius's founding members, Bruce Davidson and Linda Reimer, originally met at Findhorn.
When I visited the Sirius Community during one of its Sunday open-house brunches (a creative vegetarian buffet and the best meal I ate all growing season), I was shown around by Germain, who had been living there only a few months. She took me through the October woods to the site of the community's wind turbine, which was on the ground and being worked on by Bruce Davidson and some other men. Deeply involved in the task at hand, Davidson was living up to his reputation for being a never-ceasing maker and fixer. His wife, Linda Reimer, prepared the brunch and is the community's master gardener. It was obvious that they were respected leaders.
The community center is the largest structure on the property, which is abutted by several community members who own their own land. It's an octagonal post and beam structure with solar roof panels, a green house with raised beds, a frog pond for insect control, a dining hall, several dorm rooms, composting toilets, and a top-floor octagonal meditation room. Carved details are everywhere. Bruce was the foreman and a principal builder of this and other buildings at Sirius. Almost all the building of the sizable community center was done, over the course of several years, by volunteers.
Bruce serves on the town of Shutesbury's Energy Committee. In 1999 the Sirius Community's wind turbine was erected and evaluated by the town's Board of Health, which issued a provisional permit. The turbine provides the electricity for one multi-unit residential building. In 2006 the Energy Committee presented the town a proposal to build a 10-kilowatt wind generator behind the Shutesbury town hall. According to the proposal, the generator would "provide 30-50 percent of the annual electrical power needed by the town hall." Bruce predicts the electricity bill will be reduced by $250 a month once the turbine is up. When the project was originally proposed, nearly all the money for it was expected through grants. An objecting abutter threatened to sue the town over it, citing bylaws prohibiting cell phone towers. A new zoning bylaw explicitly permitting wind generators had to be voted for in Town Meeting. The measure barely passed, and the proposal is again active. A hoped-for grant for the project is pending.
Living in an intentional community does not necessitate giving up on civic participation and the local governmental structure. Rather, the community living ethic is well suited to the collaborative solution of pressing practical problems.
The Hill That Will Never
Boast a McMansion
Never without a red or orange hat, miyaca (pronounced "me-yah-cha") dawn coyote is a well known figure in Shelburne Falls. Having suffered a stroke at the age of 56 while wintering on her land in a teepee in 1996, she now uses a walker and makes trips into town on her tractor Critter. Her corporeal home is the elder-housing community in Shelburne Falls, and she hopes one day to live on her Shelburne Falls land in an intentional community that is "sacred, sane, and humane." The community of her dreams will adhere to her creed: "We need to become outdoor creatures that occasionally go in, and stop being indoor creatures who occasionally go out." Her ardent description of the future "Healing Grace Sanctuary" on the Intentional Communities web directory led me to her—the first person I met on this journey.
Minutes before I met miyaca, I found a stray copy of the West County News in a booth at McCusker's Deli. It reported on the recent protection of 73 of miyaca's 90 Shelburne Falls acres: a long term project of miyaca, the Franklin Land Trust, and the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. In exchange for four acres on the same parcel of land that the FLT had purchased recently from the town of Buckland, miyaca granted a conservation restriction on 73 acres. That conservation restriction permanently protects the land. Miyaca told the West County News: "The exchange was the long-awaited, oh-so-welcome dream come true. The land is no longer at risk of multiple, conflicting agendas, and no 'McMansion,' ever. I'll sleep much better now. . . All parties are smiling." I wonder how much she could have sold that land for, had she no wish to protect the land from development? The vow of poverty comes to mind.
Elders as effective as miyaca may be rare. So too may be those idealistic and courageous enough to strive for what I can only describe as lived virtue. But I met these folks, too, the younger initiates who are new to the life. What led them to choose to live in these well-defined places? Was something about explicit rules of conduct and high standards in neighborly interactions appealing to them all?
The Urban Mission
Prayer is the core spiritual practice at the Nehemiah Community on Union Street in downtown Springfield. My last community visit so far, my meal at Nehemiah was a pleasant, talkative affair. The community had invited me after my initial conversation with new member Jonathan P?rez. A Nehemiah Community member since May, 2007, Jonathan P?rez is an Americorps VISTA program employee. He attended a week-long program with Nehemiah called Urban Project while he was a student at Amherst College. What he got from his initial taste was total immersion into Springfield, a city he's "come to know and love." Witnessing "Christianity in practice," a group of adults interacting deeply with a troubled and abandoned urban center, changed his life.
Jonathan is the first 20-something I've ever met who is willing to make a serious commitment to a community that asks members to "avoid even the appearance of impropriety." The community's two houses are owned by two couples, Patrick and Debbie Murray on Union Street, and Paul and Katie Foster on Dartmouth Street. These couples, older than most of the other members, assume leadership roles and administer authority that it's hard to imagine most people my age acquiescing to. Each member strives to be a "peacemaker" as opposed to the more passive "peacekeeper;" airing problems with the goal of resolution is, as P?rez describes it, "definitely a work in progress."
I attended one of the weekly communal meals, and there were 12 of us around the huge table in the old urban mansion. Before dining, we stood in a circle holding hands in the kitchen and sang a devotional song. Just before that, Paul Foster, who assesses the effectiveness of programs run by the city of Springfield, brought me around the huge house, answering questions like, "Are you a creationist?" (sort of, in that he thinks God made the world, but he's not anti-science or anti-evolution) and "You are also concerned about people's souls, right?" (yes, but their current lives matter too). The visit sanded down some of my prejudices and preconceived notions about evangelical Christians doing service work.
Members of Nehemiah go out at night, looking for the homeless people that they know. They make sure they have blankets and food if there are no beds in the city's overflow shelters. They are aware of who dies. A new project they are organizing is a quadruplex in Springfield called The Village for single mothers and their children. Jonathan organizes Mission Phoenix, twice-weekly designated art space at Christ Church Cathedral in the Loaves and Fishes kitchen. The program provides free materials and art classes for low-income and homeless people. In 2006 they held the first holiday sale of their art.
Social justice work and Christianity have combined with community living standards to serve Springfield. Some of the younger single members of the community relate to a Christian movement called New Monasticism, which promotes living simply and serving troubled urban centers. You might say they've set up headquarters in the landscape of decline and they are ministering to its victims.
The Suburban Cohousing
Community
At the more familiar and bourgeois end of the spectrum of intentional communities is Rocky Hill Cohousing in Florence. A condominium association, the development comprises 28 homes in 15 buildings (mostly handsome duplexes) on 28 acres. The architect for the homes was Bruce Coldham, who has traveled the world studying co-housing communities and is also designing homes for the future ecovillage being built at Touchstone Farm in Easthampton. Anyone can get on the waiting list to buy a unit, and applications to be on the waiting list are considered and approved by residents.
At David and Dorothy Entin's Rocky Hill home, I met Brandt and Eva Passalacqua and their three-year-old, Ezrah. They had come from Brooklyn, where, as Eva described it, living in a heavily populated city and apartment building resulted in one's "wearing blinders," shielding oneself from others, and tuning out people-noise. She and her husband had been researching intentional communities for years, and when they learned about Rocky Hill's vacancy, they took the opportunity to alter their lifestyles significantly and change their relationship with their neighbors.
The sequestering of all cars to a parking lot (homes face each other and share common land; residents use carts to bring groceries to their houses) encourages greater freedom for children, who are more apt to play together spontaneously when they see each other outdoors. Arranged play dates are no longer required for kids to play together. One oft-traded commodity there is childcare. Kids my son's age had roamed freely in the woods of the Sirius Community, too.
I'd tasted the fruits of communal child care practices over Thanksgiving when my husband, our almost-three-year-old Otis, and I shared the holiday with a friend and her teenaged son who'd just moved to an apartment in an old house. Below them lived other good friends, a couple with a baby. The upstairs/downstairs, open-door lifestyle of the holiday weekend added immeasurably to the joy of our time there. The day after Thanksgiving, Otis, for the first time ever, used the toilet by himself without prompting or assistance. Engrossed with something else, I heard his voice call out, "I pooped, mama!" The luxury of my not paying all that much attention to him—because I knew my friends were aware of his whereabouts—promoted independence. His mood soars in group settings, and he doesn't hesitate to tell me so.
Friends living with friends—it just may be the heart of the revolution. Expanding from an exclusive nuclear family focus to considering other people and families as having reciprocal claims in our lives is a way to take radical responsibility while, perhaps, regaining some freedom. In 1971 Ray Mungo mused, "What remains to discover is why the kids here can look on each other as brother and sister, protect each other from all harm, and cast their material lots together without concern for the fraudulent privacies of yesterday: why have they not quarreled over money, how can they live all in a heap, do they not find each other's manner offensive, never fight over a woman or man to love as property, why have they no ambition?" His answer, in part, is that it's easier together, and that together they have true freedom, having no jobs, no sole proprietorships of home or business. For him the sacred task is survival. "Togetherness" is a voluntary arrangement.
Total Loss Farm did not run on a community-service model. I can't imagine one of that household tolerating the kind of discipline, adherence to code, and direct service work that the members of, say, Nehemiah Community practice. Being apart from the sadness of cities is the Total Loss bent. They invoke the child as the ideal being: smart and free and beautiful. The modern iteration of the communal living impulse—in our neck of the woods—is more a portrait of adult problem-solving in and with towns, neighborhoods, and cities.
Ray Mungo and his companions sought to spread their good news, and an evangelical voice infuses his words. The models I'm witnessing in Western Massachusetts address the overuse and waste of resources of all kinds. One can see it as the professionalization of the commune. In every case, members of these communities have not flinched from worst case world (and therefore local) scenarios.
On a municipal scale, we need to work on crafting community "Sustainability Plans" that squarely address peak oil, an evaporating job market, and the increase in poverty that both trends will cause. We need to do it together. Raymond Mungo might add that love is necessary. I emailed him the other day. I wrote, "I read your words of personal revolution in the face of the failure of a movement and I balance them with my responsibilities, and work little by little on cultivating some Total Loss spirit on our quarter acre of suburbia. Today a clothesline hung. Tomorrow a new rain barrel. Can the magic combination of self-reliance and solidarity exist on a quiet residential street in a small city?" He wrote back:
dear Hayley,
Thanks for your letter. You should consider attending the 40th reunion anniversary of Total Loss Farm this August 22-24. There will be people there from many other communes around southern Vermont and western Massachusetts, as well as returning alumni from TLF like myself. You will find that your dream is possible, including a place where your child as well as you can have many friends! ?After 40 years, Total Loss Farm is still there and we still don't have any money. Who needs it?
love
Ray
I'll be there.
