The Life is This

Eastern Hellbender Semester Blog #2 

“The life is this… wherever you go, there is something waiting there for you.” ~Geova

Geova, long departed, reminds us of the unique connecting nature of our journey and urges us to stay curious about the world and each other, to learn, adventure and to appreciate the community and the land we all belong to. For the community, the family we make, is his favorite part of working at Kroka. We miss you, Geova! 

This is the part where the adventure really begins. 

We embark on expedition to the trill of a lone trumpet, biking under an archway of the interconnected hands of the loving Kroka basecamp staff, and out onto Route 123 going west; a marker of another huge transition. Again, we leave behind our basecamp routines, our Roaring Canyons friends, our great canvas tent at Honey Hollow and the small remainder of our possessions. Strapped to our bikes is everything we need and nothing we don’t. 

Our goodbyes are said, our handlebars are tightened, the path is mostly marked on our paper maps, and in this moment we are wildly free. Eoin remarks that tonight we will not be returning to Honey Hollow – we will be somewhere else along that red dotted line, sleeping in the first of many new places, 20 miles closer to being in North Carolina. Down to Bellows Falls, across the Connecticut River and into Vermont we go, stopping by the Bellows Falls Community Bike Project we had visited a week prior. Bonnie, the owner, gifts us 12 bike bells and sends us on our way. 

We cruise through the streets, a gaggle of neon vested wind chimes, ringing and waving and shouting hellos to strangers who cheer and wave back. “Where are you going?!” “We’re going to North Carolina!”, we shout. “Good luck, then!” they say, though it is obvious that some are thinking, “Yeah, right.” It is as though we are heroes; the traffic is minimal, the people love us, we are the kings and queeens of the road, parading our glorious bikes through a quaint Vermont town. When suddenly, an intersection, a HONK, a middle finger from a blue SUV. People in some cars, it turns out, do not love bikers – and likewise, it’s easy for us bikers to not like them right back… With their big, loud, gassy, no-good polluting, bad smelling death machines. How dare they shame us, we who choose to travel slow and clean and intentionally. But this is the challenge, right? The tension of co-existence. That night, during our evening meeting, Evan challenges us to give up that hate –  to wish the best on all people, nonetheless. He reminds us that we are all just human beings getting around, as human beings must do, in the way that we know how. He is right.

There is a certain honor that is innate to being the first to do something great. The first man to walk on the moon, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. We are in the inaugural Hellbender Semester, meaning we are the first cohort of Kroka students to ever attempt to get to North Carolina on bicycles. But as with all the ‘firsts’, there is that big question: Can it be done? Who’s to say? The road is unpaved (literally) and no one really knows what it’s going to look like.

T’was the case with our second day of expedition, where we set off on a single track wooded bike trail up to the Pinnacle only to find out that it wasn’t a bike trail at all, but a walking trail. The road that day looked like pushing and dragging our 75 pound bikes up the side of a mountain with 1,200 feet of elevation gain. It was bordering on perilous: slippery roots, huge rocks, thin trails on the sides of steep inclines. At one point Soleil rode right into a small beach tree, uprooting the thing and trampling it to the ground before her path of destruction was put to an end by the large oak tree behind it. In total, we counted 21 crashes that day. Nonetheless, we could not be stopped. We toiled our way to the top, arms and legs tingling with exhaustion, where we were finally met with the most gorgeous view of the sun setting behind the green mountains. 

September 20th, Day 5 of expedition

“Rain Rain go away, Please don’t last the entire day… ” We said… and then it did.

This was by far the coolest day of Leg one. We had slept at Grout Pond after biking there from Trollhaugen Farm, which was the birthplace of Kroka and the location of our first layover. The cold crept up on us in the early night during our evening meeting, we had just performed our nightly body washings, and were gathered around the fire when Jae picked up her bandana and it stayed a perfect square, totally frozen.

The next day it rained for a long long time. Raincoats on with the hoods down and the armpits unzipped to release the unbearable heat of peddling uphill: somewhat effective in keeping the rain out, extremely effective at keeping the sweat in. A fun fact about biking in the rain: No matter what you do, you will be soaking wet.

Complimentary to the weather is the eerie town of Bennington, VT. We bike in past old run down houses and abandoned mills and into Bennington College, where we spend the afternoon at the Jennings House. Yes, THE infamous Jennings house from the Haunting of Hill House. If you’re not familiar with the show, just know that the house is extremely haunted. This is possibly the location in which we picked up the spirit, though no haunting occurred until a couple days later… That evening many of us showered in the bathroom sinks, before being surprised with PIZZA which was a last minute surprise on account of the fact that we were initially supposed to be eating in the Bennington dining hall which, in a roundabout turn of luck, was closed down due to a school wide stomach bug.

After dinner, we moved our sleeping gear into a building down the road called the Carriage House. Rohan, a semester alum from this year’s Full Circle Semester and now Bennington College student, greeted us and spent the evening with us. Upon arrival we found a big open room with a fireplace, a drum set and a grand piano! It was the perfect setup for a country swing dance class. Gigi, Eoin and even took turns shredding on the drums while Lucca riffed a beautiful jazz piece on the piano. Some sang, we all danced and had an utterly fantastic night while our soaked clothes hung to dry next to the warm fireplace. 

From Bennington College, we biked south down into the northwest corner of Massachusetts. To the east were the Berkshire hills, to the west, the Taconic Mountains. We found ourselves that evening at Caretaker Farm, a small scale farm with a thriving CSA in Williamstown, MA. We spent the night enjoying the beautiful farm landscape and bathing in the freezing stream. A CSA, we learned, stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The way it works is that people in the community sign up and pay a monthly or yearly subscription of sorts to the farm. Then, each week they can come and fill their baskets with fresh, seasonal, vegetables, fruits and flowers from the farm. Caretaker farm was one of the very first farms with a CSA program in the United States.

The next morning we got a tour from the farm’s current owner, Don, who explained to us the farm’s practices and overall mission. The main purpose of the farm is to connect people to their food. The vision of Caretaker’s CSA model is that the people in the community have the opportunity to know and appreciate the land in which their food is grown. Land that once belonged in the care of the indigenous Mohican people who were displaced to the midwest. It’s for this reason, Don explains, that the raspberries are grown way down past the stream, so that when people want to pick them, which they always do, they must walk through the whole farm and out into a field where, if they choose to look, they would be able to see and admire beautiful mountains from New York, Massachusetts and Vermont. 

Reflection from Willow’s journal: “[To be successful] I will have to push myself, grow meaningful connections, write uncomfortable stuff, talk about uncomfortable topics and come home humbled and open-minded. I already feel large amounts of success by pushing myself to come here, try something new, bike all summer and connect with the amazing people I have.  I just hope this feeling grows and grows, and I continue to grow once the journey is over!!!”

Magic

From Caretaker Farm, we biked south along the ridges of the Taconics and arrived at the Schumacher Center for New Economics in Great Barrington, MA. Their mission is to envision a just and regenerative economy and apply the concepts locally. The Schumacher Center hosts lectures and events for thinkers and writers from around the world to present their ideas about our future economies and communities. As luck would have it, there was a talk by two well-known authors, Báyò Akómoláfé and David Abram, scheduled during our visit in Great Barrington. The lecture was titled: Now at the End of Things, a Plea for Magic.

Magic, they explained, is the invitation to realize the world is not still. That, “existence is active… and matter is expressive.” That is to say that everything in the tangible world has senses and experiences. It’s an abstract idea, for sure, but incredibly relevant to the way our semester community is trying to experience and understand the world. 

For instance, a semester student might, one morning during sit spot, come across a beautiful rock and decide to observe it. I know I have. David and Báyò would argue that as we observe the rock we can only do so because we too can be observed. When we bite into an apple and taste the sweetness of its juice, we can only experience its flavor because our own mouths have a flavor themselves that is nothing like the apples. So, in a way, as we taste the apple, the apple feels us – as we experience the world, the world experiences us – and this creates a key idea:

Interactions with the natural world go both ways. If this seems strange or unusual to you, Báyò stipulates, maybe it is time for you to become more strange – if that is what it takes to see the beauty, the reverence, the active existence that is magic in all that is animate and not. 

Reflection from Lewella’s journal: “It’s really hard being a teenager in this consumer culture and making money and trying to figure out how to spend it. There’s so much STUFF people and teens are expected to have in America and so many fads and experiments, it’s so distracting and overwhelming. Experiencing what it’s like to live with so little for so long puts it into perspective.” 

Rosie

A couple weeks ago, up at the Pinnacle in West West, VT, on our second day of expedition, we received news that something very unusual was being held in the balance. Apparently, a young person had written a letter to Kroka asking if it wasn’t too late to join the Eastern Hellbender Semester. Typically it would be unheard of to let an individual join part way through a semester, but in our case, we did have an extra spot, an extra bowl, and an extra bike after Grace left, and not only that, but we were missing one dance partner.

Ultimately, the letter was read aloud at an evening meeting, we were given time to discuss, and instructors left the decision entirely up to us. There was something extremely moving about the letter she had written. It was unanimous. In a world full of barriers and barricades, if we could, we should strive to be an open door. And so, a week and a half later we found ourselves living at the Schumacher Center, watching our resupply truck pull into the driveway with our 12th Hellbender: a girl with cool pants and orange hair. 

Rosie, an amazing masseuse and our resident ginger, is from British Columbia and had been accepted into the Eastern Hellbender Semester back in May but turned down the offer in order to continue her electrical engineering degree at the University of Victoria. It was a couple weeks into the school year when she was struck with the feeling that there was somewhere else she was meant to be. She began to wonder what that semester would look like if she had chosen to journey down the east coast on bicycle instead. Though she thought the chances were beyond slim, she decided to write to Liz at Kroka about her change of feelings just in case something could come of it. We are so glad she did. Rosie’s creativity, warm energy, and courageous spirit have been a gift to our community.

The Haunting

Throughout our travels during Leg 1, we made camp in many beautiful pockets of New England wilderness and we were often hosted by farms or organizations who opened up homes or buildings for us to sleep inside

The Schumacher Center house was one of our absolute favorite places we stayed, but it was a bit quirky, and sometimes we had the feeling we were not alone.  For instance, the dining room is completely empty except for one small folding chair in the corner and a low hanging chandelier which, every time we hit out heads on it, flickers one or two of its lights on or off at random. One night Uli decided to smack it until all of the bulbs were lit for our evening meal. The downstairs toilet was also suspicious. One night Philadelphia went to use the bathroom, heard the toilet flush so they didn’t go in, waited a couple minutes before knocking, when no one responded they opened the door and no one was in there. Others hear whispers, and Arlo swears he saw a door close by itself upstairs. The strangest event, however, occurred on the last night we were there at around 11 pm when suddenly every single fire alarm in the house went off at once and would not stop for 15 minutes no matter what we did until finally they all just ceased on their own. There was peace in the house from then until around 6 am when we were once again woken up by the alarms, and had to spend the entire morning packing up our bikes to the delightful sound of, “Too much smoke, cannot disable”. Though there very well may have been a real ghost haunting us, Rosie and Philadelphia found that morning that the true evil lurking in the house was in fact the terror we had brought upon the elderly septic system, which had to be plunged and cleaned before we left. 

An Unexpected Encounter

It’s a normal afternoon for us Hellbenders, biking the leisurely 10 miles from the Schumacher Center to Mettabee Farm in Harlemville, NY, when suddenly from out of the bushes jump 3 strange creatures! It’s friends of Kroka, Jasmine, Lily and Dorothy, who had been waiting for us to bike past to surprise us with hot apple cider and cookies. We all ride on over to Mettabee Farm, a hub for community events and projects focused on regenerative agriculture and community building. There we received a tour of the property including the Heart Spring Garden, which is a Biodynamic medicinal garden growing herbs used for homeopathy. We also learned that our host, Elizabeth, had made some calls and pulled some strings within the community to organize a contra dance that very night in their beautiful dance hall. We were beyond excited as we changed into our slightly less dirty set of clothes and gobbled up the delicious meal of chili and lamb cooked by Hanah and Dorothy, who then taught us a new traveling song called, Nap Sack on my Back. As we wait for the dance to begin we sprawl out in the common room, some of us journaling, most of us playing with the small kittens and puppies that were suddenly brought in by one of the arriving families. In the center of it all are Gigi and Soleil who are working on one of Soleil’s many trail tunes, both of them singing and already harmonizing, while Gigi figures out the chords on a guitar. That night the song was polished and pinned on to the community poetry board in the bathroom where it hangs for any curious souls to read. That night we danced with the Mettabee community for nearly 3 hours, half haying and dosey-doeing with strangers until it was way past our bedtime.

Music 

I have mentioned before the importance and place of music in our group, and the overwhelming lack of silence at any given point in time, even now at nearly 9 pm, after one of our heaviest days of travel, Lucca, Arlo and Evan can still be heard singing Circles by Post Malone as they process firewood. It is woven throughout the very fabric of our days. Each morning we awake to song, we sing before we eat, as we pack our bikes, we sing strong as we set out for the day, we sing heavy and out of breath as we climb the tallest hill, we sing loud when we reach the top and louder still as we fly back down. Sometimes we sing for ourselves under our breath, barely heard. Sometimes we sing for each other our favorite songs, the soundtracks of our lives, this is the sound of me, of you, of us. Once, we stopped by a pasture to sing to a horse, who, upon hearing our serenade, trotted right up to the fence to receive tons of pats and apples from Evan and Soleil. As the trip goes on, the significance of music as a connective thread is becoming more and more obvious.

Us students, strangers who join us for a meal, the dancers of Mettabee, a horse who loves Queen, – everything sings, everything dances, everything is loud. 

Cows Have Aura

Our next stop in our Journey is Hawthorne Valley, an organization that hosts a Biodynamic dairy and vegetable farm, a Waldorf school, an ecology research center and more. We stayed there for 3 nights, learning about Waldorf education, helping out with the squash harvest, and learning about the farm, its natural areas and its beautiful cows. 

On the rainy day we picked squashes, we found ourselves to be much faster than the tractor could keep up. Once again, humans triumph over the machine. In this extra time we congregated in the center of the field to create a celebratory beat-box remix of one of our favorite dinner time songs: I got food in my belly, I got food on my plate. Which we later performed for our very confused and startled teachers at lunchtime. In the later half of the day we got to explore part of the school and ended up on the basketball court where Arlo and Lucca made two half court shots in a row and Eoin found… a unicycle? And he’s riding it around and dribbling the basketball, a skill he picked up from his time in the circus. 

Camphill Copake 

Our time at Camphill Copake was one of the most interesting parts of the trip. For those who don’t know, which is likely all of you,  Camphill Copake is an intentional agricultural community for people with developmental disabilities. There we spent two days living and farming with a handful of individuals who we got to know quite well. It was extremely hopeful to have encountered this collection of radically kind, compassionate and humorous individuals who have found a way to thrive in a society that undermines their very right to co-exist with the same privileges as the rest of us.

The Most Ridiculous Day in Kroka History

Our travels south along the Hudson River brought us to spend an evening at Bard College. As the title would suggest, the journey to Bard might just be the strangest day in all of Kroka semester history. Here is a list of the highly unusual events that went down…

The first unusual event of the day was that in a surprising rush of extreme (unexpected) expediency, we were ready to go with butts on bikes by 8:30, which is about 2 hours ahead of our typical departure time. Secondly, ice cream happened. It was awesome. Two more unique events took place en route, including; encountering a huge snapping turtle with beautiful eyes in the middle of the road, and the view of the Catskills mountains on the Hudson.

At this point we have reached Bard college, showered (another unusual event) and are making our way towards the Center for Spiritual Life to take part in a Shabbat dinner and the holiday of Simchat Torah, organized by the Jewish Student Club. The ceremony consisted of standing in a circle and unraveling the Torah, handwritten in perfect black ink and penmanship on a 40 foot scroll of deer hide paper, bound with intestinal thread, entirely handcrafted nearly 150 years ago. We learned one Torah takes a full year of work to make. Joshua, the Rabbi who kindly organized our visit, explains that they read a passage each week for the entire year, until Simchat Torah, when they finally reach the end, reading the very last passage before going back and reading the first, beginning the 1 year cycle again. After the ceremony was Shabbat dinner. The food was delicious and the Bard students were all extremely welcoming and interested in what we were doing.

After dinner a band began to play called Green Faye, who performed mostly Green Day cover songs with a “bisexual twist”. Then It happened, the most unusual event of them all: Green Faye ends their set, pack up and hands the (nonexistent) microphone over to a heavy-metal-screamo-experimental-sound-reverb-band and a full flung bonafide mosh breaks out right outside the Zen Buddhist Center where were sleeping that night. Naturally, we Hellbenders are glad to take part in any cultural festival of any kind so we throw ourselves right into the pit. They’re going hard but were going harder (in a safe and respectful way). After a loud and raucous evening of Simchat Torah festivities, we enjoyed a night of rest in the serene Zendo. No doubt excited for what was coming next… An unlimited dining hall breakfast!

Innocent Bard students and staff watched on in horror as we ravenous hellbenders politely and gracefully piled our plates half a foot high with food – a glutenous matrimony of waffles, ice cream, eggs, sausage and other breakfast delights in a vortex of flavors and textures no one had ever considered mixing before.

A Gift

Our last 3 days of Leg 1 were spent biking along the Empire State Trail and the Croton Aqueduct Trail from Poughkeepsie, NY all the way to Brooklyn. Somewhere outside of Poughkeepsie, we had stopped on the side of the road to examine our paper maps and figure out how to get onto the trail head, when a big red GMC pulled off the road to scope out our group of 15 hi-vis vest wearing bikepackers, and out came this magnificent man named Marlon, offering us food and water and asking us about our trip. He explained that he ran a nonprofit of sorts called the, “Pay It Forward Mission,” and that he and his mother cook food for all sorts of people in need, whether it be the local homeless, or people in Jamaica whose lives had been impacted by hurricanes. Now, seeing us, he insisted that he would love to cook us dinner if that was something we wanted. He gave Jae and Evan his phone number, along with some directions, and we parted ways. Focusing back on our mission to bike to New York City, we mostly forgot about the interaction as we pedaled onto the Empire State Trail. Until the next day, to our immense excitement, Marlon’s red GMC pulls right up to our campsite at Croton Point Park, and he delivers us a huge tray of jerk chicken, beans and rice, and salad. Evan had secretly coordinated the delivery with Marlon and kept it as a great surprise. Marlon offered us this great gift of a home cooked meal from his home country of Jamaica and all he asked for in return was that we continue to travel safely down to North Carolina. This is the story of the best dinner of the whole semester. 

It is important to note that all around us, at all times, the natural world is draped in this breathtaking autumnal beauty. Thinking back to the beginning of semester, when the leaves at Kroka basecamp were only just starting to turn red, we look around us now and see nothing at times but a sea of bright sunshine yellow leaves. It is especially breathtaking on those long roads through the New England country side, and now, on the Empire State Trail which goes through miles and miles of deciduous woods. It is a gentle sight, humble and undeniable – a different kind of beauty.

 

The Grand Finale

We awake before dawn, to a unique rendition of a Biggie Smalls song sung by our student leader of the day, Liam. It’s our final day of Leg One. Headlamps begin to glow, sleeping bags rustle, the “psssssssssss” sound of deflating sleeping pads fills the cold air. We must be quick, we must make haste, we’ve got 50 miles to bike before we make it to NEW YORK CITY! The city that dreams are made of, where streets are said to make you feel brand new, and where city lights will inspire you! Let’s hear it for New York!

Picture, if you will, 15 neon vested Hellbenders with matching bicycles and multicolored handmade fanny packs, riding in (almost) perfect 2 by 2 “schoolbus” formation” smack dab in the middle of the Bronx. 

Some would rightly describe us to be crazy people, to go from beautiful rolling country hills – picking apples leisurely on the side of the road, watching the mountains in the distance slowly maneuver across the horizon as we bike through peaceful rural wilderness- then straight into the unforgiving jaws of the concrete jungle. All around us are cars and people and motorcycles and cars and electric scooters and cars! And then… an angel! Descending through the chaos; another hi-vis wearing cyclist, Jason, a friend of Kroka, meets us to save us from the excruciating work of navigating into the largest city in the country with outdated paper maps. Jason took to the front of the pack, alongside Liam, and led us through 7 way intersections, busy streets, bumper to bumper traffic, right over the Brooklyn Bridge and to the doorsteps of his classic brown brick home. There we showered, feasted on New York pizza and ice cream, and closed out the final night of Leg One, falling asleep to a lullaby of washing machines, cars, sirens, and a few screaming passersby- in the city that never sleeps!

The Tracks
by Eoin
as the rattle of the train
sends us sleeping down the tracks
rusting chain links, cracking concrete
and the scrub of strangle trees
twix the massive frowning buildings
and the scrawling scribbled streets
take a fragment, drink the music
try to walk a painted line
but the only smiles shining
are the ones we stand beside