cultural vagabonds in the Ozarks

We are traveling again after several month's sojourn in Vermont. We have left the Winooski river, the goats at Long Field Farm, the land of luscious green sheltering forests and cool, clear still waters of the Green Mountain state. The rivers we are encountering now have BIG names - the Mississippi, Tennessee, Ohio. We spent a night in a cornfield near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

Lewis and Clark spent 5 days in 1803 encamped here. Along with their "Corps of Discovery" team they spent their time here "teaching each other astronomy and surveying skills" that would become very useful in their exploration work to come.


Further up the Mississippi, the Republican National Convention will start today. Many, many dedicated people have taken time out of their lives to show up in that city along with the delegates to be a visible dissent to the current policies of this government. Not unlike Lewis and Clark, they have also been gathering to teach each other the critical skills to create a true democracy of the people to resist the forces of a government that consistently acts with disregard for the basic values and rights of life on this planet. They have been tackling the questions we are all grappeling with daily - how to voice our individual and collective horror at the disregard for the life of planet Earth and how do we take ethical action together to resist the destruction of our only home. The gathering place was raided on Friday and the people held for hours before being released. Anyone who has helped the people gather (organizing meetings and trainings, providing food or places to sleep) are being detained. This kind of police action in response to visible dissent has become the norm and the effect is surely making people think twice about saying "NO"...

We saw Obama's acceptance speech at a "watch party" in Asheville, NC. We were reminded that this was also the anniversary of the 1963 March On Washington and, also on August 26, in 1920 women got - finally - the right to vote, 72 years after the Seneca Falls Convention. A speaker offered a welcome balance to the Obama-as-savior frenzy by telling us that "change won't come FROM Washington, it will come TO Washington."

Our few days passing through North Carolina we discovered two delicious food ideas that might come in handy at this point in your garden harvesting: add chard and beet greens to your pesto for an out of this world taste and glorious color; and substitute slightly steamed zucchinis for beans next time you make humus (with tahini, garlic and lemon).

We will spend several weeks here in Missouri at a place called Diana's Grove where our friend Charles lives and works. It is a beautiful open landscape of undulating hills and open meadows. This is also a dog rescue facility (http://www.dianasgrove.com/dogs/index.html) taking in unwanted dogs and finding homes for them. At any given time there are 50 - 100 dogs here, many of them running free. Fitting in here is not unlike learning how to be in a dog pack!

We plan to convert Magnolia to run on waste vegetable oil in preparation for driving - again, though this time in Magnolia!- across this huge landscape of the United States to spend the winter in California. We're gathering storage barrels, filters, hoses, 3 port valves, switches etc. and discussing ideas to create a second fuel line with filtering and storage setup. We'll be sure to document the process as it unfolds!

There is a 1,000 acre clear cut going on in the forest adjoining this place. We took a walk up into it this morning. I am spoiled by the land use laws that I take for granted that would prevent such a huge clear cut in Vermont. Here in Missouri, there are no "best practice" requirements for loggers. The folks here are working on buying and protecting a small piece of that land. You can find out more about this work here:http://www.dianasgrove.com/landproposal.html. We walked up in the clear cut yesterday, but I didn't bring the camera, but next time I'll include a picture looking out across the denuded hills to the far beyond...

Lev will leave for 3 weeks in Egypt and Morocco from St. Louis, Missouri in the middle of September. I will make my way to New Mexico in Magnolia and meet him there. I'll be caretaking a friends house in Santa Fe. Maybe we are cultural vagabonds... We'll keep you posted.

Anatomy of a Plan

It's been raining quite a lot this summer so we haven't really gotten to test the full capacity of our solar panel yet. Though every once in a while the clouds open enough to let the sun through for a brief brilliant moment. Here is a picture of one of those sunrise moments in through our sheltering trees and of Magnolia with early the dawn light filtering through the trees.


Hardly a day goes by when I don't find myself describing our lives in response to a casual question like "where do you live?" or "what did you do today?" and, so far I am not satisfied with any response. We live in a school bus, but I think of it more as a home and safe haven than a magical mystery touring vehicle. We aren't traveling across the landscape with a new view from the windows every day like the "full timers" with whom we have in common a living space on wheels. Like nomads, we migrate with the warm weather since we can't live in the lovely Magnolia in long extended cold, but we do not have a community that travels with us. We tend to settle for weeks at a time and engage with the land and people who become our neighbors - sojourners perhaps.

We are vagabonds wandering to places that call to us. We have been exploring the territory in northern Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom. Here is a picture of a "living roof" we discovered there. My friend Rebekah suggested that we build a series of these roofs without walls, to shelter Magnolia in all the places that we return again and again.

Mostly though, the last two years have been flowing with the River Cancer. That river and we have parted company now and we are free to GO. Here is a picture of Zpora taking the very last of her chemo medications.


So what next? We have decided to convert Magnolia to run on straight veggie grease (we'd only need to collect and filter it). This means figuring out how to filter and store the ...er... smelly stuff and putting in a separate line and filter to the engine. Our friend Charles has agreed to help with that. I'll document the whole thing and post it here! We have an emerging P L A N, but it still needs to "mature" a bit before it's worth posting here. Stay tuned.

Watch this film!

Imagine urban gardens supplying half of the fruits and vegetables for the nation’s largest city. Imagine flourishing ecovillages set in the midst of lush food forests. Imagine a country whose agriculture is 4/5 organic thereby reducing almost to nothing its dependence on petrochemical fertilizers. Imagine compost-producing worm farms as a major national industry and yoked oxen taking over from diesel-starved tractors. Finally imagine this: farmers being among the society’s best paid workers. It’s not just a permaculturist’s daydream, it’s Cuba today.

We just watched The Power of Community, a 53-minute documentary directed by Faith Morgan and produced by a group called The Community Solution. It was inspiring. The film tells the story of “how Cuba survived Peak Oil”, a story that needs to be told more widely, especially here in the Fox News-addled, gas-guzzling Estados Unidos de America. Surely it skips lightly over the questions of widespread hunger, authoritarian government and the many painful mistakes that must have been made during the so-called “Special Period” of the early 1990s when Cubans had to learn to do without the oil, subsidies and markets of the defunct Soviet Union. But the film doesn’t try to give a comprehensive history of Cuba in the end of the 20th century, it focuses instead on how “community” pulled the country through its energy crisis and why we need to pay attention to how they did it.

Cuba had to face “energy descent” with breath-taking suddenness. Their transition from a fossil fuel-based economy happened almost from one day to the next with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. In particular, oil from the Soviets had powered Cuba’s “Green Revolution” in the face of the 30-year-old U.S. embargo. Suddenly, they had to feed themselves and run their modern country without fuel for trucks, tractors, buses or cars. Their economy had depended heavily on export crops (sugar) that needed chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. When the flow of Soviet oil stopped abruptly, Cuba ground to a halt. The emblem of that period, shown several times in the film, is the image of a man slowly pushing his car up the road.

The Power of Community shows how Cuba survived. They learned how to get around on bicycles, how to implement organic agriculture, how to eat healthier foods, the importance of building the soil, the value of local food production for local use. They learned that they had to break up the big state collective farms and encourage private initiative. They rediscovered the power of the sun for hot water and electricity production. They used the Problem of an energy famine to come up with the multi-faceted Solution of locally oriented, self-sufficient communities.

Watch this film to find out what’s ahead for us Yanquis and how ill-equipped we are to deal with it. Watch it also to marvel at what the Cubans have accomplished and to be, at least a little bit, reinvigorated with hope.
See you in the streets and gardens!
Lev