“For the next thirty minutes, I will try to give you a capsule view of this small town. On the walls behind me will be projected images of its people at work and at play. While you enjoy your homemade soup and salad, I will try to reveal to you why this place thrives and why the courses you will be taking may work for you in the future.
“So let’s get started. The simplest way I can illustrate what we do is to toast you with a glass of spirit. It is a tasty example of our industry and our philosophy.” Abel raised a glass. “The liquid in your glasses is applejack, hard cider that has been frozen to remove some of the water. It has a real kick to it. It is as old a beverage as the nation is old. Europeans in the New World made it nearly four centuries ago. We make it here just for occasions such as this from cider pressed from apples grown in our own orchard. We ferment the cider and bottle it. And we drink it, too, you know.” All the mimes about the room burst into action, guzzling from make-pretend bottles, smiling, grabbing their heads, and losing their balance. They fell to the floor one after the other.
Laughter swept the room.
“The glass you are holding was blown here. The glass material itself is simply recycled, discarded glass. We put it to use.”
As Abel talked, the greasepaint crew brought bowls of white bean and cabbage soup to each person. Winnie took a spoonful into her mouth. It was heavenly, saturated with flavor.
“You are about to eat a meal the likes you have never experienced. It is unlike anything people in the Western world consume today. The food is simple, it’s good and much of it is familiar, but it is a meal from the distant past. People in the United States can’t eat like this today. We have lost the ability to do so. The food you are about to eat is grown right here, almost all of it. At Independency, we do what our forebears did and what all humans once knew how to do. They knew how to grow their own food, to process it, to store it for a year or more, to save the seeds for the next year’s crop. Such skills served humankind for 12,000 years, since the end of the Ice Age and the dawn of agriculture. But we as a nation have lost those skills and severed our umbilical connection with the land. We have lost our essential spiritual link to the land, as well.
“So tonight, and all week long, you will eat meals that do not exist in the broad culture any longer—homemade, home-grown meals. You will learn to do things that have been discarded by the mass culture, things that are absolutely critical to the health, welfare, and true freedom of human beings everywhere.”
A great wooden salad bowl was brought to each table, each brimming with colorful greens, two-dozen different varieties of vegetable matter.
Abel clearly enjoyed the master of ceremonies role. He was animated and toyed with the volume and intensity of his voice, always mixing in a bit of humor to keep the proceedings light, playing to and off the mime troupe.
“Tonight you will eat salad. Tomorrow you will meet your salad. We will introduce you formally. You will shake hands with it and talk to it. And you will learn to call it by its many first names.”
Chuckles erupted from the diners.
“We will take you on a tour of our great bank of greenhouses, the orchards, farm fields, and barns before classes begin. But now, I’m going to take you on a fifteen-minute tour of this fully sustainable community we call Independency, juxtaposed against the bloated, vulnerable, mass-consumption society we call the ‘Bud-Lite Culture’ beyond these forests and fields. Then, I think, you will understand something about this place and where your classes may take you in the days ahead. So let’s get started.”
The mimes covered their ears.
The metronome banter from Whittemore began to make Winnie uneasy. His creation sounded so good right out of the box. It sounded too good. She propped her chin on her hand and settled in for a long journey into Abel’s utopian nether world.
“To begin, I will use the illustration of a stool standing on a floor. The floor under the stool is called self-sufficiency. As much as humanly possible, we make or grow everything we can here in this village for our own use. We have a large surplus from our labor that we sell into the mass economy.
“One leg of the stool is agriculture. Most of us engage in agriculture at some time during the week. In the United States, just one person in 400 works directly on a farm, growing and harvesting food. Thanks to vast inputs of fossil fuel, synthetic fertilizers and complex farm machinery, farmers are an endangered species. Here we feed ourselves and we sell fresh organic produce, specialty dairy products, root crops and, believe it or not, strawberries all year ‘round here in Minnesota.
“The second leg of the stool is manufacturing. We sell manufactured products, including a packaged meal-in-a-bar sold wholesale to health food distributors. We make almost everything you see around you, from building materials to parts for cars and equipment.
“The third leg is communications. We sell information. You are the result of that industry. You are here to receive information from us. You paid a fairly steep tuition price for that privilege. We sell books, manuals, seminar CDs and DVDS, music, all sorts of things.
“The final leg of the stool is energy. We actually manufacture energy—electricity, methane, ethanol and firewood—and are almost self-sufficient, with the notable exception of gasoline.
“Finally, now, the top of the stool, the seat, is conservation. We recycle most everything at Independency and compost the rest. We generate almost no solid waste but utilize waste products from the society at large, from glass to scrap metal, to the sawdust that fires our powerhouse boiler.”
The mimes cleared away the salad bowls. As one, they turned to Abel, covered their mouths, and held up a hand as if to say, “Stop.” The audience howled.
“I only have a little more to go, troupe,” Abel teased the mimes, who gestured in mock disgust. Winnie smiled to herself as Abel explained the social complexities of the little society. The speaker sounded as if he were trying to stitch king capitalism and pauper communism together into a social comforter. That, she postulated, was a recipe for disaster somewhere down the road in this community’s future.
“Now, I’ve said enough,” Abel exclaimed, closing his remarks. The mimes reacted with unbridled joy, hugging each other and waving the host goodbye.
“Now, it’s time for a wonderful entree. I have only one request of you right now. I get lonely when I have to eat by myself. I would be most grateful if someone would be so kind as to ask me to dinner. I promise to keep quiet.”
The diners erupted in applause, not polite, but heartfelt.
The mimes brought the four-entree sampler that kitchen czar Penny Markham had been planning. A fruit wine was offered. Stoneware plates arrived filled with cheese selections. Baskets of piping hot biscuits followed. As the diners ate, the mimes attended to their every wish and cleared the table of excess items. The people relished the attention and the performance.
Soon the hall filled with loud chatter. Abel knew from experience that the conversational buzz was a good sign. The ice had been broken early.
Winnie, seated one table over from Abel, watched him intently. She marveled at how well thought-out the proceedings had been. This, she reasoned, was not a sloppy, back-to-the-land hippy commune from the sixties. This was something else entirely. Somehow, he had just preached a sermon demonizing Western culture and lauding a new social and economic experiment, and all the people around the tables, all strangers and spanking new to this brand of radical fervor, seemed enthralled. It was as if he had led a band of children into a candy store run by the mob and given each a $10 bill.