Living in Connection

LIVINGIN

CONNECTION

Story By Spencer Clifton | Design by Morgan Rosentrater & Katie Jo Stewart

Connectedness. In recent years, this idea may seem like a far cry from the current state of humanity. News is no longer spread by word of mouth, asking your neighbor for a cup of sugar seems like an ancient practice and your community may seem more divided than ever. Sound familiar?

While this status quo may seem like the new American average, for some individuals a simpler, alternative form of living calls to them. From hippie communes to off-grid communities, these are the lives of small community dwellers that have stepped away from mainstream living.

Serious Israel, an original founder of the well-known Love Israel Family, sought community at the height of the hippie movement in 1970 to provide a better life for his family.

“When I learned about [my] child coming into this world, I really felt a strong pull to find a community somewhere that would support me in a way that I would feel comfortable in raising a child,” says Serious Israel. “I didn’t feel that great about society overall at the time.”

Following his calling, Serious Israel set out to Canada in search of a small community. As he was passing through Seattle, Serious Israel stumbled upon the Love Israel Family; a Christian-based group led by Paul Erdmann, who called himself Love Israel and rented a 2-bedroom house on the Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. He opened his door to anyone seeking community. Little did Serious Israel know at the time, this community would grow into a network of interconnected homes and outposts throughout Washington.

Serious Israel’s spiritual conquest to find community for his family was only just beginning, along with the expansion of the Love Israel Family. While his experience was sought out for spiritual and familial reasons, others may seek community to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Marguerite Cummings, Oregon realtor and Three Rivers Recreational Area community member, moved to Three Rivers Rec. for that very reason. Cummings explains, Three Rivers Rec. is an off-grid, 4,000-acre gated community in Deschutes County, Oregon that has been operating and expanding for the last 50 years. Drawn to the remoteness of the off-grid lifestyle, Cummings notes the unique experiences she is able to have at Three Rivers Rec. that she claims you can’t get anywhere else.

“I go to sleep counting stars,” she says. “In the summertime we can see the milky way cause there is no white wash.”

45-minutes away from the closest retail store, and operating on community-gathered resources, Three Rivers Rec. embodies the true meaning of an off-grid community. “Off-the-grid means we don’t have any Public Utility Districts (PUD),” says Cummings. “The water that you get from a city is from a PUD. We do not have access to a sewer system or public water or public electricity.”

The absence of a PUD turns some of the responsibility for managing sustainable resources to the Three River Rec. community members.

It Takes a Community

Zack Kaplan-Moss, River Farm community member, explains that part of what makes a community successful is the ability to meet all of your needs. Those needs include: “your food needs, your shelter needs, your spiritual needs, your social needs and your economic needs.”

He adds, “One of the big things that we work on at River farm is sort of sustainable living where we try to grow as much of our own food as possible.”

Cummings explains that the Three Rivers Rec. community utilizes a local water service that refills community cisterns and well water in place of services PUD’s provide. Aside from these amenities, residents have adapted methods of conservation and energy recycling in order to keep Three Rivers Rec. sustainable.

“There are about half a dozen families up here that do rainwater capturing,” she adds. “They will have a way to capture the water … it’s mostly off the roof [and] the water would go into a cistern, and they would use that water to either flush their toilets, or water their garden, or wash their cars … They are recycling water coming out of the sky.”

For electricity, most residents use a photovoltaic system, or solar panels, to generate power for their property. “[Solar panels] captures the energy and stores it into batteries. The batteries are what you pull off of to run your property,” explains Cummings.

Three Rivers Rec. did not start with all of these advanced resources. It was only 7 years ago that they were able to get their own fire station, claims Cummings.

“We are now a registered fire district in the state of Oregon,” she says. “Back in the olden days it was all volunteer. People would go out in their flip-flops and shorts and wet towels and try to put a fire out; not anymore.”

Up until they became a fire district, Cummings and her husband were a part of the volunteer fire department. “It was hysterical when I look at all the training I went through, and my husband went through with people going out in their flip flops to fight a fire,” she says. “Now that we are a fire district, we got good coverage.”

Three Rivers Rec. is not the only community that has advanced their methods of sustainability. Serious Israel explains life on their property closely resembled a “pioneer life.” Members of the family started by staying in large army tents, which quickly grew into self-crafted yurts. The skills that members of the Love Israel Family learned from this lifestyle prepared them to start a business and have some form of income.

“Building our own homes gave us the experience to develop the talents that we needed to become hired by other people to build their homes,” he says. “Eventually, that evolved into an actual formal construction company called Israel Brothers Construction, and we built a lot of homes for people up in the Arlington area over time.”

For Serious Israel, making his home in an outpost outside of Arlington, Wash. sustainable with the Love Israel Family was a team effort. Utilizing third party resources, Serious Israel mentions that along with construction they taught themselves organic gardening.

“For years, we ran a high stall at the [Pike Place] Market selling our organic produce,” he says. “It was basically creating a very hands-on economy based on developing all these skills that we ourselves needed to be building our own communities in the various outposts that we had.”

In modern communities, learning new skills and using individual-based talents continues to be a major reliance for residents. While this can perpetuate a pioneer lifestyle like Serious Israel described, Kaplan-Moss explains how this can also leave a community without a functioning utility.

“The thing about community is that

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in order for things to happen there has to be someone who has the desire and the expertise to make it happen,” says Kaplan-Moss. “I think we’d all like to be power sufficient, where we’re actually not drawing any power from the grid but that’s going to require somebody with a desire and the ability … to make it happen.”

Kaplan-Moss explains he works on what he calls “closing the loop,” or finding ways to make River Farm more sustainable by utilizing all materials and waste in different systems and cycles on the farm. “If we can get successful at managing our grass [through livestock], possibly even producing hay, then we’re feeding the animals, the animals are creating fertility, we’re using their poop [to] make compost and then growing vegetables [and] basically feeding them through that cycle,” he says.

Kaplan-Moss says sustainability continues to be one of River Farms goals, so River Farm residents, “[can] produce everything they need right there … and it would be a system that could perpetuate itself.” As it stands now, he expresses that River Farm is developing certain aspects of sustainability.

Despite the various ways these three communities operate, one theme remains similar across their experiences: connectedness.

“Looking back on it, it was a very high ideal to share everything; to share the land, to share all the resources, and to manage them together in a way that was fair and equitable for people,” says Serious Israel.

Cultivating Connection

The culture of sharing and closeness is echoed across these three communities. “The people that live up here [that] we do know, they are exceptional,” says Cummings. “If somebody needs help it’s like the olden days. In the olden days, if the neighbor was going into town and you needed flour, they would bring it back to you.”

This sense of community is exactly what Kaplan-Moss also found at River Farm. “I was looking for a deeper fulfillment and a deeper connection to the people around me,” he expresses. Cummings and Kaplan-moss testify to how cultural practices in their communities exemplify this deeper connection among residents.

“Up here at Three Rivers we have a couple of yearly events,” says Cummings. “The first thing we have is a full-community event is the easter egg hunt.” She explains that the eggs are colored and sponsored by different businesses or people, and then hidden for kids in the community to find. “It’s a hoot,” she says.

This is just one of many events that Three Rivers Rec. throws within their community. These events are open to everyone, though not required among residents.

River Farm isn’t shy about community events either, claims Kaplan-Moss. Among numerous pizza nights, the annual Camp-A-Thon community event invites individuals to come and enjoy music, eat farm fresh food and camp out at River Farm.

The Love Israel Family experienced something similar. “We considered ourselves a Commonwealth in the sense that all our personal claims to ownership of land were thrown in together,” Serious Israel says. “[We] recreated this much larger sense of landholdings where any of us would be welcome to visit or live within the flow of the dynamics of our relationships with one another.”

The Love Israel Family grew into this functioning entity that took on a life of its own. He explains, “We created a document that was broken down into chapters, where we defined how we would approach things like marriage, things like child raising, and we just began to basically create a civil culture from scratch.”

In 1984, 14 years after Serious Israel found the Love Israel Family, the once-growing community lost about two-thirds of its members. The remaining residents all congregated onto one 300-acre outpost outside of Arlington, Wash. claims Serious Israel.

“We continued to create a community there for basically another almost 20 years,” he says. “But it was a much smaller group, it was less than 100 of us were living there with our children. But it was … [a] more focused kind of experience, because we were all living on one piece of land.”

Serious Israel explains that people were divided into households, though they had converted a barn on the property into a common house. “A lot of cultural events happened on that property,” he says. “And a lot of the former people who used to live in the family would come and attend some of those events.”

All three of these communities cultivated their own unique culture and community amongst the chaos of the modern world. While Three Rivers Rec. and River Farm are both still active and functioning today, the Love Israel Family’s story is a little different.

“It wasn’t a utopia,” says Serious Israel. “It was an effort to create a better way of life [for] ourselves and our children than [what] we felt was being demonstrated [in] the world around us.”

Serious Israel explains that management of the internal economy didn’t provide sustainable income to some members of the family. “I just don’t think we succeeded at it,” he says. “And as a result, people fell back on what was available to them in the mainstream economy, that made me feel like they had a better chance at supporting our household apart from the Commonwealth.”

Though the family disbanded, Serious Israel explains that many of the positive influences of community living carry on in the lives of his children. Though Serious Israel no longer lives in a small community, he reminisces on what moved people of the Love Israel Family so strongly during that time.

“We decided that we didn’t have to buy into what was being offered us by the society around us,” he says. “And that there was something that we could find if we made our own personal inquiry into our own hearts and into our own spiritual core ... I think that’s the main thing I would encourage all of us to do, especially the young people.”

Though these three communities have different cultures and lifestyles, the experiences within all of them form a connection that is hard to find in mainstream society.