Sunset over Dubuque

A leaf falls in the middle of the River, and the endless summer is over. The cicadas sing an elegy for August. Don’t they know it will come back again next year?

Maybe the cicadas are not crying. Maybe they’re playing with the seasons. Maybe the reason August comes back is because they sing.

A mist drapes over pool 15, blurring the borders between walls and water. Against the grey uniformity of the fog the silhouettes of two distinct bodies stand out. Gradually they come into focus. It’s the St. Paul paddlers again. They accompany us on our travels, and together we play a game.

The game is a simple one. The paddlers lead; we try to catch up. Together we catch our breath in Lock and Dam no. 15, and together we descend farther from home. We know we cannot keep up this pace forever, but we hope we can for awhile.

_ _ _ _ _ _

The doors open, the fog lifts, and we disappear into the area that the 19th Century knew as the Neutral Zone, which has since disappeared into history.

The Neutral Zone was a strip of land 40-miles wide south of the Wisconsin River, a tool used by the white settlers to strip the land from the Winnebagos. The settlers relocated them into the Zone to serve as a buffer between two warring tribes, the Sioux and the Fox & Sac.

The government pushed the Winnebagos into neutrality in 1846, the same year Iowa arose into a state. The same year the Mormons arose from the River in Nauvoo to walk the mountains in Utah. The same year John Murrell arose from the dead to walk the Earth again. Every step is a decision, left or right, forward or back.

_ _ _ _ _ _

Neutrality is a myth. The River demands tough choices. We block, we reach consensus. It becomes harder and harder to stand aside. How neutral is neutrality if you have no other choice?

But if neutrality is a myth, it may be a necessary one. Like the myth of Eden or the myth of Utopia, it gives us a fighting chance. Hope, as they say.

On the River the floods have yielded. But the gates have already closed. There is no going back to Eden, there is no going back to the River as it was. The past has already disappeared. What lies ahead?

_ _ _ _ _ _

Every dichotomy is a conceit, but even conceits can help us make up our minds. We draw lines because the whiteness of the page resembles a bottomless whole. Trying to carve meaning out of the vast oneness of the world, our minds get confused. This confusion leads to fear, fear to anxiety, anxiety to desperation.

And so to ease our minds, we tell stories.

One story tells us that if we can’t return to Eden, we can at least go back to Arcadia, the idyllic days of life in harmony with nature. Arcadians gaze at the mental pictures of green pastures and goatherds and see portals into the possible. By searching through the ruins of history—the arcades—gleaning useful parts of the past and discarding the rest, we can uncover the secret path to return to Arcadia once again, or so the story goes.

The other story tells us that the past is dead, and Utopia is our only hope. Our visions of the future will pave the roads on which to move forward, illuminated by the lights of our imagination. The Utopians say we’re wasting our time retracing our steps, cutting ourselves on the broken glass of history, waiting to heal again.

The Arcadians strive to go back home. The Utopians feel there is no home to go back to.

Maybe home is a myth. But maybe it’s a necessary one.

_ _ _ _ _ _

The roots of family anchor us in Dubuque and connect us to the Hope Community Farm on the edge of town. A self-organized group of Catholic Workers runs the Farm, a satellite of the Hope House in the middle of the city.

An idyllic strip of land it is, fertile enough to support a movement of organic resistance to Empire with enough food left over to barter for grapes. They even have hammocks, which rock gently with the weight of a body after lunch. The Farm is a gateway into the simple life, but as one of the workers reminds us, simplicity is complex.

The Catholic Workers here live communally off the land, so they’ve got a life sentence under two benevolent masters: their work and their group. They build structures that fall outside the definitions of a house, so permits are no issue. They don’t ask for permission; they live their lives, not wild, but free.

Are they building Utopia or rediscovering Arcadia? We can’t make up our minds.

What makes the Farm so alluring is its place in the middle. It’s a dappled place, a place in between, with the bluffs cascading above and the shadow of the city cast in the valley below. With the whispers of possibilities on both sides, the Farm is a brook of resilience babbling softly, murmuring myths of safety and comfort in our ears.

A renegade cow, oddly enough named Eve, roams into the chicken pen. The fence separates the two sides, and because of it we must make a choice: the freedom of Eve, or the chickens’ sanctity. Choosing not to choose allows Eve to mow down the coop. If we sit on the fence, we choose the side that owns it.

There is no neutrality in times like ours, times of conflict. Even Switzerland owns banks, and banks feed the wars. We take the chickens’ side.

We are fond of edges. Many of us feel safe, physically and psychically, in the edges of civilization and wildness. Either one in its pure state can turn violent. Many of us want to run from one and take shelter in the other.

But if the edges spread endlessly, we cannot.

_ _ _ _ _ _

We go back and forth from city to country, performing in town, plotting on the Farm. The third night on the Farm we play games—we are all cows in the chicken pen, poop smoothie. And the city plays games on us—fill out a form to see if we’re eligible for food assistance, fill out a form to see if we’re eligible to perform in a park.

Every game is played voluntarily. Players rotate, but the structure of the game remains the same. Freely the rules are accepted and respected, so there can’t be hard feelings when we lose. Once inside the game, there are no neutral players. But some games we’ve grown tired of playing.

_ _ _ _ _ _

Dubuque is now a shadow of its old self. Industry, once the backbone of the city’s economy, has stiffened and cracked. Like many River towns, Dubuque has hedged its bets with tourism, gambling on their casinos to generate enough revenue to support the city’s infrastructure.

Tourism, it appears, is the steel wool that scrubs out the insides of the industrial skin. The skin out here is thick, so desperately the tourists rub harder. But as hard as they rub, they still struggle to see their images shining beneath the rusty ruins of their past.

_ _ _ _ _ _

Back in the city, we face the civility we’ve grown accustom to in the middle-west. Polite folks offer us reverse-osmosis water because agricultural runoff has left the tap water undrinkable. At least they give us the choice.

People have tried to stretch the middle by building up suburbia. But as the city expands, and the countryside retreats, suburb links to suburb, and the scale of civilization is blown up to unrecognizable proportions. Like a ripple moving outward from the center, the wave of the city broadens and softens into a vast tract of sameness.

The waves of sprawl displace country towns at a turbulent rate. Farmers can choose to dive into the labor pool of the city or travel to another county, where the problems may be different, but they’re just as unstable. Healthy rural communities are not made overnight. Certainly not at the same rate as the suburbs.

A book of light bathroom reading tells us nearly half of Americans now live in suburbs. We don’t believe everything we read in bathrooms, but the statistic of ‘nearly half’ sounds honest enough.

We’re left to wonder, how many people can live in the middle?

Since the modern suburb was developed for the car, the middle is becoming harder for people to leave without one. And since both the city and the wilderness are too far away, the adventure takes the form of consumption.

_ _ _ _ _ _

Endless consumption is a myth, but a necessary myth for industrial agriculture to grow endlessly.

Iowa contains the highest concentration of prime agricultural land in the world. For every bushel of corn the state grows, it sheds two bushels of soil.

And now, after just a century of farming, the rich prairie soil the land took over a millennium to create is over half gone. In the wake of industrial agriculture, the scorched land and the roiling River both writhe in a mound of petrochemicals with the pain of the half-dead.

How can a system so unstable spread so ferociously? As a Geologist told us before we left home, stable systems don’t need to expand to meet their needs.

Fire consumes everything in its path in search of more fuel. Parasites destroy their hosts virulently in search of more bodies. Agriculture depletes the soil it rests on in search of more fertile land. And industrial agriculture, more destructive than any other form of farming, expands like wildfire. Nothing succeeds like failure.

Does that mean successful models of living are doomed to fail?

Water connects; walls separate. People along the Mississippi are raising walls of resistance to stem the expansion of industry. The River connects the network of this resistance.

_ _ _ _ _ _

More memorable things happen, but our weary minds fail to retain them.

We play more games in hopes that they will jog our memory, but now, in the middle of the night, we are too tired to keep playing. The pasture is just as demanding as the River. Summer is disappearing with our memories of its offerings.

But we don’t forget the sides that we take.

Arcadians or Utopians: which side are we on?

The question we ask ourselves is whether it’s too late in the game to change the rules. If it is, then we have to decide whether or not we want to keep playing.

Then we have to decide if we can move past the game, past our personal differences, and at least sing a song together, a song of lamentation for August, like the cicadas, hoping it will come back again next year.