After my weekend in London, I make my way back to The Community. But first, I look for a bag of coffee beans to give as a gift to the member who’s always sharing his French press with me. I end up in a New Zealand coffee shop that seems to be where all the Americans are hanging out—they even have an American barista in for the day. I linger in the city a little longer than I should—it’s easy to get distracted in London—and as I’m leaving find myself in a crowded station navigating a sea of West Ham United fans in the middle of a rail strike. I’ll spare you the ordeal of the train ride back.
Since the bus is out, I have to walk back to the Community from the station. It’s a little over three miles along a narrow road where the sidewalk is rapidly replaced by tall hedges that hug the asphalt. There’s not a good place for me to walk or even see vehicles passing around curves. I have to run through short sections of it and have to dive into the occasional bush. Eventually I end up crouching through a gap in the bushes and walk the rest of the way into town through the field of a much larger commercial farm. As I emerge back through the hedges onto the road, the plants take their revenge. I am coated with briars and burned by stinging nettles.
“I don’t even want to tell you what you missed,” one volunteer tells me the next morning. What I missed—what I had hoped to get back early enough to enjoy—was a roast pork dinner. A freshly butchered hog, killed that day, fresh garden vegetables, bread pudding, apple sauce.
I also learn that I didn’t have to walk along the road back from the station. As with my walk to Dedham the week before, there are a series of interconnected footpaths that lead you through the Dedham Vale. It’s apparently a beautiful walk.
Another volunteer tells me it’s karma for traveling on a strike day.
We spend Monday digging in the mangold field, listening to the steady boom of rockets in the distance.
Thus begins a more melancholy and subdued second week in the community—if only because there are fewer volunteers. The first week there’s an entire family of six volunteering together, and another five of their relatives show up mid-way through. In all, including myself, there are about fifteen “guests” the first week. Even though it’s the “quiet” time of year, when many people are away on vacation (if only camping in a nearby field), the community bustles with activity. But the second week, it’s just me, a prospective member, and a Marxist graphic designer who’s there for a “working holiday.”
* * *
I pay a few pounds for a copy of an oral history The Community has put together. There’s amusing details: decades-old photographs of people I now recognize, an infographic on a “communal flush” where everyone pulled the plunger on their toilets at the same time in order to clean out the pipes, and an anecdote from a volunteer describing rabbit hunting with the member I hunted rats with:
31st July 1998: Strange day. In the morning I was with F. hunting rabbits with ferrets. At the beginning it wasn’t pleasant but it was an ecological way to kill rabbits.
It also contains recurring sentiments from people who volunteer there:
- It takes a long time to understand the relationships here
- Not feeling at ease in the kitchen
- Unsure of what is OK and what is not
- No personal space to relax in
- Strong feeling of being an outsider rather than an insider
- The friendly welcome and warmth can give the impression that everyone here is wonderful all the time, which is not very realistic.
I feel kinship with many of these points. There’s a lot to learn and adjust to, and the community’s rhythm can disorient you further: everyone eating and working together during the day, and then disappearing to their private spaces during the evening. It can be simultaneously overwhelming and lonely, especially when you’re getting used to it.
Because of that, I’m grateful that one of the new volunteers (the Marxist on a “working holiday”) makes an effort to bond with me and the other guest. The first night we’re there together we take a walk along the footpaths in the nearby Dedham Vale, Constable Country. Around us is the land that John Constable, one of the most famous British Romantic painters, depicted in his art. Half a mile from this rural commune is an honest-to-God tourist attraction.
Our destination is the Flatford Mill, which was owned by Constable’s father and is the subject of one of his most famous paintings. Like much of his work, the human elements are dwarfed by the drama of the nature around them. Trees, clouds, and light appear to be in constant contrary motion. When we get to the mill, the sun is setting and the light is low. It’s calm, still. “I don’t think there was as much duckweed in the pond when he painted it,” one of the other volunteers comments. I snap a picture to compare it to his rendition when I see it in the National Gallery.
We take a different route heading back, but a bridge crossing is out, so we’re forced to take a much longer route back to the Community. In the moonlight, the prospective member tells us about her family. She has recently visited a much older brother who lives on the Isle of Man. He isn’t doing well; the nostalgia of her return is mixed with frustration and sadness over his slow decline.
She tells us about her trips there as a child: the ferry, walking paths that she imagined would be shorter now that she was traversing them on longer legs (they weren’t), and the island’s strange political history. It’s only recently they’ve stopped caning people, she tells us.
It’s true. The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom, but instead something called the British Crown Dependency, and as a result maintains a greater degree of autonomy over its laws. So, while the mainland outlawed corporal punishment in 1948, the island continued beating people with birch rods into the seventies.
The Rt. Rev. Benjamin Pollar, the former Bishop of Sodor and Man had this to say in a newspaper article on the subject. “They’ve thoroughly deserved it. I am definitely in favour of the use of the cane and the birch. I have always held the view that for crimes of violence corporal punishment is a valuable deterrent. We need it more than ever now.”
So there’s that.
* * *
But conversations often turn to the grand and the personal whenever I’m with a smaller group—especially other volunteers. The first week, I went out for drinks with a few of them (to try genuine English bitter) and it’s not long before we’re going around the table saying whether or not we believe in God. The volunteer who’s considering joining asks the same thing. In her case, I’m less surprised because the last organization she had been a part of was more of a conventional commune, complete with a charismatic leader. It had become a little too cult-like, and the leader’s bad behavior was becoming impossible to ignore. So I don’t blame her for wanting to get her bearings on the situation before getting too involved. She tells me that she picked out The Community from those listed on Diggers and Dreamers because it seemed the most “normal.”
But other volunteers want to establish a bassline and there’s less risk with oversharing when you’re not going to see a person again after the two weeks you’re with them, and sometimes members like to complain about the community to people who won’t stare them down at the next weekly meeting. And then there’s our philosopher member who still wants to debate during the second week. He gets into arguments with the Marxist volunteer about all manner of questions. He’s more receptive to political violence, for example, especially because he’s less convinced that humanity has a tendency towards antagonism that it needs to overcome, but instead that the working class need to overthrow their rules. Later I find out that he works for his political party, explaining the eloquence that I’m initially in awe of.
I try my best to answer these questions when I’m asked them. I think it’s only fair if I’m going to be writing about my experience. But F. was right, when he said I was a guarded soul. My answer is usually something like: “I was raised Catholic, and when I was a teenager my parents started taking us to a Baptist church. Right now I’m figuring out what I believe. I’m seeing what else is out there, but I’m not sure what to think.”
* * *
Work remains much the same through the second week. We gather onions that had been ripening in a shed. We pick purple French beans that will turn green when cooked. We continue to water and weed the mangold patch. And we salvage what we can from the corn patch. The rats have won: anything that can be salvaged is plucked from the stalks, and everything else is fed to the happy cows.
But there are new responsibilities—and new people. One day we’re tasked with stealing as many of the pears from the wasps as possible. The member in charge is relatively new, and part of her responsibility is to decide which of the pear trees they would like to plant more of. Once we gather them up, we’re to separate them and sample them to help her make up her mind.
Part-way through we realize we need another ladder, and so we walk to the orchard to get one. She’s a forager, and so I tell about some of the unique things that can be found where I live in the mountains. She tells me that she recognizes plants here that she had encountered growing up in Nepal. She knows they’re good to eat, but isn’t able to identify them in English. A favorite of hers is a mushroom that strikingly resembles a steak when cooked. It even bleeds.
When we get back, she spreads a few slices of each pear on a plate and has us try them. She’s a little nervous because she’s relatively new to the community and this will be an early “big decision” that’s entirely hers to make. Although the pears all taste about the same to me (many of them not yet ripe), she seems to have come to a decision about her favorites.
She’s going down to the river with some of the other parents and their children, and she invites us volunteers to accompany her. I’m hesitant at first but end up going. It’s idyllic: fields of farmland subdivided by the more extravagantly vegetated river banks, where shade trees and tall grasses grow next to the shore. Everyone is excited about seeing swans, amusingly confirming a British stereotype I hadn’t expected to be true.
The Marxist volunteer talks me into taking the canoe the group brought down the river. He has an interest in the years surrounding the American Civil War, and—inspired by our canoe ride—recommends Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. I, meanwhile, ask him about every nineteenth century European novel I can think of that has anything to do with socialism: “Have you read Germinal?”
“I actually read Germinal while I was working in a mine,” he tells me. It was another “working holiday,” this one clearing out debris from the tunnels so that the mine could be turned into a tourist attraction. The work ended up taking them much deeper into the mines than he and the other volunteers, mostly black French teenagers, had expected, and it was much more dangerous than they had expected as well, as they were forced to navigate around pitfalls deep enough to kill them. At one point he and the other volunteers confronted the man in charge. “We wouldn’t be doing this work if you were paying us.”
He acknowledges Dostoyevsky’s conservatism but counters: “Ah, but he gave the socialists the best lines.”
It’s nice being on the river, and I suppose this is part of what makes the community special. I imagine this would be true if I were to stay longer, if I were a permanent member: there are rhythms and routines to the community, a pulse that modulates with the time of day or the seasons, but everything is equally in flux. The melancholia will pass. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever is happening will pass. The community had a long history up to the moment I arrived, and it will continue to change for as long as it exists after I leave.
* * *
A few days before the end of my stay at The Community, I attend a small Quaker meeting that’s held on the outskirts of the dining area. I double-check with the organizer to make sure it’s okay for me to be there. I don’t want to intrude on anything private, but I do have a genuine interest in participating.
We all gather together a few hundred yards away from the dining area. We’re offset from the building by ancient trees and vegetation, and the atmosphere is very much like one of Constable’s paintings: all dramatic light and trees in motion from a high wind. The organizers for the meeting have arranged ten red stackable plastic chairs in a circle and laid out a few books that describe Quaker values on small tables.
After a brief introduction, we all sit in silence. The structure of any Society of Friends meeting is that everyone is supposed to sit without speaking, but if you feel compelled to say something you’re supposed to share it with the group. No one does. For forty-five minutes we all sit there together, listening to the wind in the trees, children playing in the distance, scattered conversation, and people washing pots and pans after dinner. As much as I would like to have a transcendent experience, I don’t have the right disposition for mysticism. I can’t be Annie Dillard receiving a vision of the baptism of Christ on the shore of the pacific ocean. The moment is peaceful, and I’m trying to regulate my breathing and slow my heart rate—but that’s it.
When our time’s up we chat briefly together. One of the members mentions that she finds the book beautiful, but she thinks she would like it better if it didn’t mention God.
Inspired by this, I share my own doubts, my own desire to search for an idea of God that makes sense to me and the juvenile rebellion I have to fight any time I’m confronted with something religious.
The organizer tells us that Quakerism is essentially a set of values. In the UK it’s a leaderless organization and it draws people from all walks of life. There are Buddhist Quakers. Atheist Quakers. At its core it’s about an understanding of something larger existing outside of (and within) yourself, about engaging in a set of values and practices that reflect that.
If I’m going to expand this anecdote to what it means for the community as a whole, I’d say this: One of the debates around communities like this is that you need some sort of higher power guiding your actions, otherwise the whole thing will fall apart. I’ve read this in both literature about intentional communities and I’ve heard it from religious groups who share everything in kind: you need to believe in God for it all to hang together. A philosophical or political or environmental position isn’t enough. And while it’s true that many experiments in communal living—almost all of the communities that sprung from the back to the land movement—ended in failure. In her book Heaven is a Place on Earth, writer Adrian Shirk suggests that failure is inherent to any utopian project. The whole point is to try new things, to experiment. These experiments will inevitably lead to the dissolution of whatever project you’re engaged in, but that’s better than getting stuck, becoming calcified. But this community has persisted for fifty years. Fifty years of people deciding they all want to live in a big house together without any religious convictions tying them together. The values guiding that decision may be personal, and they may have shifted over time, but it hasn’t changed the overall structure of the project.
* * *
Before I leave, I make the rounds of saying goodbye. People share phone numbers and email addresses and tell me that I can be their guest if I’m ever interested in coming back. I write a message on a chalkboard thanking everyone for their hospitality.
On my last night, I’m trying to finish up a book that one of the members has loaned me, The Third Policeman. He had given it to me after I’d expressed admiration for mid-century British experimentalists like B. S. Johnson and Ann Quin.
Another volunteer joins me in the loft-like dining area connected to the kitchen. He’s going to be up all night studying for a certification test the next day. And as we’re sharing each other’s company, he offers me a beer from his private stash, and we talk about how he doesn’t trust his phone not to listen to everything he’s saying, about his ex who still lives on The Community.
He tells me that the member who loaned me the book doesn’t have many friends in the community, and that he mostly hangs out with volunteers. This saddens me, because I’ve enjoyed spending time with this member. He’s been kind and generous in every interaction I’ve had with him. But I also suspect that what this volunteer is telling me is not entirely true. He still contributes to the farm, and he seems happy to be around so many people, especially the children, who seem to serve as surrogate grandchildren for him.
That’s the shape of most stories, right? You start with a simple question and end up embracing the muddle and complexity of where looking for the answer takes you.
Frequently We Sort the World Out 