A Day in the Life at Earthaven Ecovillage

I wake up when it's getting light out and the birds are beginning their morning chirps and trills. I gaze up through the window-screen opening in my bedroom wall towards the high trunks and leaves of the tulip poplars outside the tiny dwelling my mom and I call home. Now that it's summer, the leaves are full and luxurious. It's still cool at this hour. I love this mountain forest and these tulip poplars. I know the brace and curve of every branch I see from my bed in winter. I love how in early spring the branches wear the barest, most imperceptible hint of green for weeks and weeks, then sprout tiny buds for a few days, then become a lush impenetrable wall of leaves almost overnight.

I get up and head for the composting toilet, an unusual one at Earthaven because it's inside our house, not outside, and moreover, inside an actual bathroom. In this community, my mom and I live in comparative utility luxury, as we have hot and cold running water and a shower. Many people at Earthaven live in temporary small huts with no running water, and walk to the shower and bathtub behind the kitchen building. Others are building real two-bedroom houses with real indoor bathrooms. But many are still living in travel trailers, canvas yurts, or even camper shells until they can save enough money to clear their homesites and build homes.

I look outside to check the water level in the roof water catchment tank behind the house. There is almost always enough to take a shower in the summer, when it rains every few days. Not so in the winter, when we go without showers for several days until it rains enough fill up the tanks again.

Next I check our tri-metric meter on the wall. Is there enough power to take a shower? Like every household at Earthaven, we're off the grid. Our power comes from solar panels, an inverter, and an array of batteries up the slope in our yard behind us. We do have enough battery storage this morning to run lots of water, since running water for a shower or using the garden hose activates the pressure pump, which runs for 10 minutes straight. We also have enough power today to run the blender, the juicer, the computer, the printer, and even the vacuum cleaner (though never all at once!). In the summer, if it's sunny even just half a day, we get enough power to run these appliances all day and into the night. But in the winter we're much more conservative. With a series of rainy, snowy, or overcast days, we've got to ration our power use, or else turn on the generator, which isn't great because it runs on gasoline. Living in an aspiring ecovillage with our own utilities, we count every watt, watch every drop.

There's enough water and power for a shower today. Good!

I say hello to my mom when she gets up. We live in a 512- sq.-ft. passive-solar storage building. It's beautiful. It was constructed partly from lumber milled from trees growing on the land, with recycled cellulose insulation and a green metal roof. The outside is finished in golden poplar clapboard. The windows are trimmed in forest green. Most homes at Earthaven are small because they're built with savings or small personal loans. We don't qualify for construction loans from banks since, although all members own the whole 320 acres, no one has title to an individual homesite. We lease our homesites instead. We don't want mortgages or bank loans anyway, since we're going for economic self-sufficiency. Some of our older or more affluent members make loans to other members for their home construction costs.

So our house is small because we built it without a loan. My mom and I sleep essentially outside, in 8 ft. x 8 ft. sleeping porches on the deck that runs behind the building. Some of the walls of these temporary bedrooms are of uninsulated clapboard, with window screening stapled across the places where the wall stops. Last winter we wore long johns, wool socks, and wool hats to bed and snuggled under down comforters. In a few weeks we'll renovate the sleeping porches, adding walls, windows, and insulation. By the time I see the bare branches of the poplars again, we'll have real bedrooms, with closets even.

Time for morning chores. First I bury kitchen scraps in the garden. Soon we'll have compost bins to turn this valuable stuff into good soil. Before Earthaven's land was covered in a forest of poplar, oak, and hickory (now 70 years old), most slopes were fields where Appalachian farmers grew corn, and since corn is a heavy feeder, our soil is quite depleted. So we return all biomass to the soil, chipping up our brush, making brush piles, returning our kitchen scraps and human waste to the Earth.

Next I empty the buckets from the concrete vault under the compost toilet. Pee gets mixed one-to-ten with water and poured in our garden. The sawdust-covered poop gets poured into the latest of a series of 32-gallon plastic trash cans, where it will sit for a year and become compost for our flower gardens.

I'm going to theTrading Post store for stamps this morning, and will do some errands in the Hut Hamlet while I'm near there. As I walk down the sun-dappled gravel road, I cross over our first low-water vehicle bridge. We're very proud of this bridge. Finally last year we had the labor, funds, and expertise to build it over our first stream crossing and stop stirring up silt and choking the fish downstream every time we drove through it. But we're still driving through the second and third streams, so we have two more bridges to build.

Earthaven has been essentially a construction zone for nine years, and as I walk down the road to the center of the village I pass by various stacks of lumber and other recycled materials. Some Earthaven folks are protective of these storage sites, considering them "highly valuable salvage"; others are simply embarrassed, considering them nothing more than unsightly piles of junk.

I pass the lumberyard and say hello to some folks coming the other way. I cross the second stream over a rock causeway. I turn onto another road leading uphill and climb some rock steps, passing under the deck that runs from the second floor of the timber-framed White Owl Lodge to its adjacent gazebo/water tower. I go left to enter the Trading Post, a small store and Internet café where members can get a morning cup of coffee, snacks, basic supplies, and see their email if they don't have computers (or electricity) at home.

After picking up the stamps, and after saying goodbye to some pals, I go back down the stone steps, and walk down a beautiful stone footpath leading to a wooden footbridge across our third stream. Now I'm in the Hut Hamlet, the community's first neighborhood. Each hut is tiny: 200 sq. ft. or less. Most have earth-plastered walls in peach, apricot, or yellow hues, and green metal roofs. I stop off at the Mud Hut, our small visitor registration building, and pick up our mail. I check the message board, the ride-to-town-board, and the barter board, and pick up some Leap sheets, the forms we fill out to record our quarterly labor hours to the community.

At the Hut Hamlet kitchen/dining room I post some committee minutes on various clipboards hanging on the wall, and say hello to more folks. I drop off a notice reading, "Garden labor needed/plant fruit trees," on the dining room end of the kitchen butcher block island, the customary place for notes like this.

I walk across the wooden footbridge again and down the stone path, the rock causeway over the middle stream, the long gravel road, and over our bridge. I've had six hugs already this morning and haven't even had breakfast yet.

Back home, I fix a quick meal and start the morning's work on Communities magazine. It's so sunny today I can run my computer, printer, even the fax machine. And it's getting hot! It's cooler here in my office than it is outside, though.

At 2:00 o'clock I've got a promotions meeting in a neighborhood just beyond the Hut Hamlet, but I want to drop off a second copy of the committee minutes at the Council Hall first. This 13-sided timber-framed building on the far side of the lumberyard is where we hold monthly business meetings, many committee meetings, and social events like birthday parties and dances. In December some of our young people and work exchangers put on a play there, spoofing Earthaven royally. Almost all 60 of us were there, as well as many neighbors. We laughed nearly nonstop at the young actors' antics and visual puns--and especially the parodies of creeping mold and mildew, crowded breakfasts in the Hut Hamlet kitchen, and the "shadow side" of our consensus process. At the end the actors said we work too hard here and need to have more fun, and right then and there invited us all "on stage" in the center of the Council Hall's wooden floor, handed us drums, and invited us to join them dancing and drumming. It was one of our finest moments.

I spend a few minutes in the Council Hall enjoying the small herd of lively toddlers at the Forest Children's Program. Various parents take turns offering supervision and homeschooling activities for children of members and neighbors two days a week.

I walk through the Hut Hamlet past the large cleared field which a couple of members are leasing from Earthaven as a market garden. My mom and I eat salad greens from it regularly. I pass the sauna and swimming hole, and hear the splashes of people cooling off in the creek. I continue on to the A&A House, a massive three-story residence beyond the Hut Hamlet where our promotions committee is meeting. This large building houses an extended family, guest rooms, workshop space, a crafts room, and Earthaven's library. It was constructed almost entirely of recycled plywood pallets for shipping cranberry juice. I'm not kidding!

In the promotions meeting my friends and I discuss Earthaven's display ad, brochure, newsletter, and which conferences and fairs we may exhibit at this year. We talk about larger issues--do we want to invite the public or community seekers to visit Earthaven, or do we want to spend our energy cleaning up the place first and making it more hospitable? We decide to do both. What about inexpensive reed-matting fences to cover up our storage sites of highly valuable salvage?

Back home again I type up minutes of the meeting, then get ready for dinner. I'll be eating at home tonight. But last winter my mom and I walked to the White Owl for the dinner co-op, where we paid a small amount for a near-gourmet meal with the co-op's 12 members. Sometimes the menu included shiitake mushrooms grown on oak logs by other Earthaven members. We always had a wonderful time; the conversation was congenial and stimulating. It was the cheapest, most enjoyable family-style almost-gourmet restaurant I'd ever gone to, and we didn't even have to leave the village.

After dinner I've got several choices. There may be a video at one of our members' homes, or a weekly dance and contact improvisation session at the Council Hall.

Or maybe I could go to another committee meeting, just to sit in and learn a few things. Last year I was on the site planning committee. The other committee members were four knowledgeable guys who know how to drive the tractor and operate the excavator. I learned about cool stuff like land-use planning, water runoff, erosion control, storing biomass, and stream remediation.

But this evening I decide to go see a friend at Earthaven, because (sigh) we aren't getting along so well lately and we have to make some time to work it out, and this is hard. So my friend and I visit, and tell each other what we feel and what we need, and what we wish the other would do instead. And end up in a hug, understanding each other just a little bit better.

I walk back down the gravel road. It's cooled off; the air feels wonderful. The moon is full, so I don't need a flashlight. The night is friendly, the fireflies are winking along the ground, and I'm at home in community. Like everyone here, I'm perfectly safe walking anywhere around our forest mountain village at night. As I near our house I see my mom has left a light on for me (low-watt, compact florescent).

I climb into bed, and gaze out my window-screen wall at the moonlight between the poplar leaves.

As you can see, living at Earthaven isn't all sustainable systems and natural buildings. It's also hugs, challenges, hard work, congenial times, fights, and conflict. And meetings, meetings, meetings.

Committing to this place is financially difficult for many. It's also really hard work, physically. We've got lots of trenches to dig and brush to haul. And it's sure hard work emotionally. Sometimes it's quite painful. And, as in most intentional communities, you can never hide. All of you is revealed to everyone. You know each other's foibles and shining qualities like the closest of kin. You fight. You cry. You hug. You love each other. Sometimes you can't bear being here. But most of the time you know you're extremely lucky. Unlike most North Americans, you get to live your values with like-hearted friends doing the same.

I drift off to sleep to the chirpings of cicadas in pulsating waves. Planting myself at Earthaven, I realize, is the hardest thing I've ever done.

And the best thing I've ever done.

Diana Leafe Christian is editor of Communities magazine (see: www.ic.org), and author of Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities (New Society Publishers, 2003; see excerpt and review in TL's Fall/Winter 2003/2004 issue).