Summer in the Ecovillage

The ferns outside the window from where I sit are waist-deep. Wild raspberries tangle among them, white flowers falling off as small green fruit emerges. I see a bumblebee. A few days ago out this same window I saw a porcupine climbing backwards down an old aspen tree, and for a moment it could have been mistaken for a sloth in some tropical rainforest. North Central Minnesota is a jungle this month, wet and lush, violently green and overrun with buzzing swarms of mosquitos and other icky bugs. Our river is wide and the current is strong — every few days we light a fire on the bank to keep the bugs back and then swim in the after-thunderstorm rush, a wrestling dance with a living force of rainwater rushing toward the sea, tinted with both the color and flavor of tea from the swamp grasses of Northern Pine County.

We really are out here in this ecovillage.

The story that was just a story six months ago has become a real and living thing, living with the other animals in the woods on a hill of oak and aspen overlooking a pond where blackbirds sing morning songs and flash their red and yellow wings when we pass by. We set an intention to build and inhabit an intergenerational ecovillage where we can live in relationship with the Land, the Sun, and each other. All through the winter we gathered in our living rooms in the Cities and made plans and made maps and made documents and we dreamed and we sang and we worried and we researched and now summer has come and the ecovillage has sprouted out of the ground and it is a real ecovillage by any objective measure.

Every day is full of astonishment.

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As I write this, Ellen is out in her garden trying to get the last of her sproutlings in that came up here in plastic trays from the Cities. The sun is rising high over the forest that we call Magic, occasionally breaking through grey rainclouds. In the outdoor kitchen, someone has started a huge kettle of coffee. The kids are waking up and wandering out of their cabins, dogs trailing behind. One of them is down at the beach starting a fire underneath the bathtub. In other cabins scattered over the hill other friends are waking up, snuggling their cats, listening to the birdsong and the wind. They’ll wander out soon, barefeet or high boots squishing through the mud and we’ll hug and mumble good morning.

Our cabins are all repurposed ice-fishing shacks, locally-sourced habitation solutions that have turned out to be practical, affordable, and sustainable. For those who may not be familiar with ice-fishing country or its ways, an ice-fishing shack is a small camper or cabin with several portals installed in the floor so that when it is parked on a frozen lake, one can open a portal and make an ice fishing hole without ever leaving the cabin. The ice fishing holes themselves are irrelevant to our purposes, but a portable, insulated house designed to be cozy in the dead of Minnesota winter is exactly what we need.

We spent much of May buying used ice fishing shacks from Facebook Marketplace. Three thousand dollars will get you about a hundred square feet, enough room for a bed and a desk and a shelf to store your stuff. (Less money than what we’d spend on materials to build a cabin the same size, and this way we’re reusing something that already exists) Many of these things come outfitted already for year-round camping — windows with screens, insulated walls, mattresses, propane heaters and stoves, 12v batteries and LED lights. (Other bonus items that have come with ice-fishing shacks: a chainsaw, a generator, several solar panels, a few small TVs, a heavy-duty car jack, tables, chairs, fans, a small grill, two kerosene lamps.) Because we’re not using them for ice-fishing, we have opted to call these ice-fishing houses SCOUTs instead: Small Cabin On Useful Trailer.

We rented a truck with a high towing capacity and sent Dan and Paul all over central Minnesota to gather these SCOUTs and drag them back to our Village. In May everything was mud and the truck got stuck a lot. One of the SCOUTs sat in my driveway in the Cities for almost a month — I had intended to do a quick insulation job on the floor and everything turned out to be rotten and so we got to rebuild the floor from the frame up. When June came we started carving a Village into the edge of the forest on top of the hill. With Dan’s truck and Daniel’s winch (there are two Daniels in the Village), we scattered the SCOUTs through the Village and made paths between them and this is where we are staying these days.

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Our kitchen is a used screened-in tent, 10×12 feet with a metal frame. We found it on Facebook Marketplace for less than $100. It got wrecked by a thunderstorm once when we weren’t here but we fixed it with boards and screws and stitches and string. Inside the kitchen are tables and shelves, a camp stove with two burners and pot of coffee. There’s also bug spray, peanut butter and jelly, a portable phone charger, bear spray, fire extinguishers, camp chairs if you need a break from the bugs, and a five-gallon jug of drinking water. Our food kept in a parked car loaned by a friend from the Cities, a strange cube-like vehicle which now functions as our pantry bear-box — keeping our food safe from rain and hungry / curious mammals alike. Once when we went back to the Cities overnight, a bear visited the kitchen, ripped the screen and knocked over the dog food and stole a bag a flour that had been left out of the bear-box pantry car. He left his paw print on the window of the bear-box pantry car, testament that he was there and that he wasn’t able to break in.

From this outdoor kitchen pour forth an abundance of shared meals that nourish our bodies for the work of building the ecovillage. Rebekah manages the kitchen and the food and most nights she oversees the creation of a vat of onions and garlic and tomatoes vegetables with rice or noodles, with curry and herbs, with salmon or sausages or Textured Vegetable Protein. We pour hot sauce on everything and sit in a circle around the smoky campfire swatting at the mosquitoes and scraping our blue camping plates clean while exclaiming, “Damn, Rebekah, this food is so good!” In the morning we eat eggs on bagels, or big bowls of oatmeal. Lunch most days is peanut butter and jelly. There are jars of almonds and baskets of fruit and sometimes Diana brings home a sack of left-over donuts from Tobies for a treat.

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Our enormous wooden outdoor living space is coming to life. Originally planned to be a quick project in the Spring before bugs arrived, this structure has been delayed by rain and mud and is still weeks away from being done but it is being build by our own hands, at the pace which Nature allows, and we are loving the process. The result is an enormous deck, 20×40 feet, rising out of the mud and jutting out over the hill toward the ponds, with a view of the afternoon sun glistening as it slowly sinks behind the trees in the West. When it is finished, there will be a roof and screens and solar panels and rain collection and hammock hooks and sinks and a woodburning kitchen stove and places to sit and space to dance and move and play. Right now there is a half of a deck, with joists in place ready for the next half. There are ten 6×6 posts jutting up into the sky like trees, 12ft in the front and 10ft in the back, and when the deck is done we will figure out how to build the roof.

Building this structure together has been a delightful adventure of teamwork and learning, of patience and determination, all in that sweet spot of growth and expansion that lies just outside of my comfort zone. We have had the advice and support of a few builder friends — Joe and Dylan, especially — and we have had the unskilled-but-enthusiastic labor of our handful of villagers. My long-dormant construction know-how is being called back to service, and we are together learning and re-learning the use of speed squares and circular saws, chalk lines and impact drivers, tape measures and joist hangers and lag bolts and deck screws.

We set the ten posts on ten concrete diamond piers, each pier anchored by long metal pipes hammered deep into the ground. Dylan helped us get the posts set and the first few joists in place, and then we did the rest. One sunny Saturday our nearby neighbor Zac stopped by and gave us a few pointers on joist hangers just at the moment we needed it. I have fallen into the foreman / Dad role on this project, ok guys here’s what we have to do next, here’s how you measure and cut, here’s here you drive a screw at an angle. They learn fast. One day this week I went to the Cities for an afternoon and when I returned to the Village, Rebekah was wearing my tool belt, Paul was flipping sheets of plywood, and they had finished half the deck without me. That’s when I knew I could retire from construction to my writing cabin on the edge of the forest and the work would go on just the same.

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When we were dreaming of this ecovillage project, we sometimes described it as “homesteading with friends”; for me, it was an intentional attempt to combine all the things that make me feel alive: camping, building stuff, being with friends, flowing water. We are living inside that dream. On top of a hill covered in waist-deep ferns, with oak and aspen waving overhead, we are building a giant playhouse with our friends, for our friends. When lunchtime comes somebody will disappear into our makeshift kitchen and emerge with sandwiches. We fall into a group flow state — time slows, shit gets done, our bodies feel good. Someone passes around water, we remind each other to drink. Every now and then Paul throws another log on the smoldering fire to keep back the mosquitos. The dogs are laying in the grass, quiet and at peace except for when they need to let us know we have visitors. When we get hot and tired, we go down to the beach and jump in the pond, still cold and fresh and the sensation makes us feel awake and alive. When it rains we go in our cabins and rest, reading Sherlock Holmes or Wendell Berry, writing or sleeping or snuggling with cats. Later if the Sun comes out again we might put on some music and grab our tools and get another few hours of work on the deck before dark. When it’s dark we make a fire in the woods or on the beach (sometimes both) and we sit around and talk or we swim in the dark pond and warm up by the beach bonfire and go to bed feeling mostly clean except for our feet.

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In and around all of this adventure is Baby Wonder, just turned two years old and she is a feral beam of sunlight everywhere she goes. She puts on her yellow boots from grandma and stomps in the deepest mud she can find. She goes down to the beach and yells at the mosquitoes: “Go away, bugs!” She picks daises and chases frogs and she sits in a chair in the makeshift kitchen and eats cheese while we chop onions. She talks to the trees. She introduces herself: “Hi, I’m Baby. Nice to meet you.” She asks about everything she sees and hears: “What’s that?” She embodies her name, leading us all in an adventure of Wonder — curiosity, play, movement, imagination.

I’ve been writing for a few hours now and Ellen is still in her garden. This makes my heart glad. The Sun seems to have broken through the clouds for good, sending golden rays across the ferns and through the window of this small cabin on wheels to my grandfather’s desk where I’m sitting now. There’s much more I could say about this project — an infinity of texture and depth to the experience we are having here. I find it difficult to do this work of putting it into words, publishing it on the internet. The world of these woods is slower and quieter than the world of published words. I find myself reluctant to leave the silence of the woods for the hum of the internet, even to tell the remarkable story in which we find ourselves. Documentation seems essential, and it also lies in tension with the sort of thought-free flow state which one seeks and often finds in the enveloping of the Natural world (what Wendell Berry calls “the peace of wild things”).

Each one of us here is undergoing an intense, beautiful, challenging transformation as we unroot ourselves from relatively normal lives in the Cities and attempt to find a more direct encounter with the world of Nature. We are undergoing an experiment to see if we can thrive, to become a little more wild and find “our place in the family of things” (Mary Oliver.) I can feel the forest changing me. Parts of my soul long-buried are coming alive, and I am shedding layers of anxious programming given to me by a world of manufactured excess. I am also far beyond my comfort zone in many ways, acutely aware that I am at the mercy of Mystery and Nature. I keep these things close to my heart most days, for two reasons: the language of trees is deeper and slower than written words, and I don’t know how it’s all going to turn out.

We really are out here in this ecovillage.

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We celebrated the Summer Solstice a day or two ago and it was for me a quiet celebration this ecovillage’s birth. This organism was once just a seed, an idea that lived on typewriter pages and Facebook pages and in the hearts of those who have dreamed it into being. Now it is taking root on this hill by the ponds, sprouting little cabins and makeshift kitchens, beaches and bathtubs and firepits, solar panels and outhouses and a garden full of seedlings. We do not know what we will become. We’re not quite sure how we’ll make it through the winter, or if we’ll need to go back to the house in the Cities and try again in the Spring. (We are hoping to aquire a common house of sorts; currently we are looking for a doomed farmhouse slated for demolition that we could pay the housemovers to deliver to our little hill in the country, just like in the children’s book I read to Wonder at bedtime.)

There’s a poem by Wendell Berry called “Healing” that came to into my house a month or two ago and has been a grounding scripture to me as we’ve navigated the liminal transition from dream into reality, from Cities to Village, from isolation to community. When I get worried I return to those pages and read them again. In this poem, he says,

Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?
But one is afraid that there will be no rest until the work is finished and the house is in order, the farm is in order, the town is in order, and all loved ones are well…
In ignorance is hope. If we had known the difficulty, we would not have learned even so little.
Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance the teachers will come to.
They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.
The teachings of unsuspected teachers belong to the task and are its hope.
The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task, and are its health.
Rest and rejoicing belong to the task, and are its grace.
Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night.

Seeing the work to be done, we are wanting to be the ones to do it. To carve out a Village on this hill where humans can thrive in harmony, where we can get our food and our energy from the Sun. It is full of uncertainty and difficulty, but we are learning. Learning to use tools and build stuff, learning to live and work together, learning that it is not by my will that the house is carried through the night.

At night we watch the stars and planets whirl overhead. Twice we saw Northern Lights swirling like a vortex of energy straight above our Village. We learn to let our lives move with the heavenly bodies. Here at the zenith of Summer, the longest days of the year, we are turning our faces toward the Sun, tuning our bodies to every movement of the clouds and breeze. We are learning to sleep and wake up with the rhythms of light. We are learning to welcome the wind that chases away the bugs. When thunderstorms come, we close up the tents and shed our shoes and run feral and free through the rain, the best (and only) showers we’ll have all week.

The Sun is shining now, which means I need to leave this tiny wood-walled cabin and immerse myself in the big blue sky, and hopefully the solar panels will have picked up enough energy from the Sun to send these words to you. I’ll intend to write more, more often, but I have a feeling I will continue my transformation into a moss-covered bog creature who forgets about the internet for days at a time.