CLASSIFIEDS: Biking to my friend's house
The power of a routine, consistency of worry, and being many places at once
Friday Classifieds are my shorter posts. These posts are organized into three loose sections: what I’m thinking about right now, updates on the property, and some links.
Today, I’m also including questions. I would love to facilitate discussion through CLASSIFIEDS, so if you feel it, write a comment below or start conversation with someone.
As always, thank you for reading.
What does a “retreat” mean to you?
What does it mean to find “refuge” and where have you found it?
Do you live in community with others, in a city or rurally?
Is there another way?
Yesterday, I rode my bike toward the river that I always accidentally call a lake when it’s actually, technically, a channel. I’ve been doing this—riding my bike toward a body of water—for three and a half years, since April 3, 2020. That first ride happened out of necessity — I was riding away from, into a space outside of my 1-bedroom apartment that I shared with my then-partner. Back then biking was the only freedom; it has always been one of the few times I feel both close to my body and entirely bodiless cutting through air, in motion, but especially when we had no place to go, biking became the place. When my friend and neighbor Galaan rode his bike up to my house that first morning at 6:40am, we didn’t hug. We were new friends. Over the next six months, until winter hit again, we’d ride twice a week into the sunrise toward the water. He never missed a day, and most days he’d roll up without a helmet and in jeans, right on time. I missed several days, nearly vomiting as my sunrise alarm clock set to “farm sounds” moo’d at me, too tired to understand why I’d do such a thing so early. It was easy to back out, then.
Slowly, those sunrise rides taught me how to commit, how to do something physical, how to feel my way into my body. Over those six months we’d talk about everything while we rode. He’d share his anxieties about moving, we’d talk about love and what we knew about it, mostly revealing what we didn’t know. Those rides with my neighbor became a friendship, a love, a book club, an experiment in what it could look like to do the same thing over and over again out of commitment. Everything in my life deepened because of it.
By the following March, Galaan and I sat on a picnic blanket on a hill near the Rouge River and then hugged each other goodbye as he climbed into the driver’s seat of a 12-foot Penske moving truck and drove to New York. I kept riding.
Yesterday, I biked the loop with Adam, who was wearing the exact same hi-vis biking outfit that I was when I walked out to greet him. This time, we rode east. Detroit, my home for nearly 8 years, grinds me down sometimes. The city’s infrastructure requires us to have cars in order to get most places, despite ⅓ of the city’s residents not owning a car. Public transit is getting better with more bus lines, but the major rail investments include a glorified disney ride around downtown and a commuter streetcar for Red Wings fans, and it’s not reliable. Adam has never owned a car, relying on biking, buses (the other day we ran for the bus and missed it, a window into his daily life), and the generosity of friends, but it works out.
Living in a city affords me the chance to bike to my friend’s house. I can answer a call where I’m invited over for grilled whole branzino because it’s what The Housewives always order and then actually ride my bike there and be eating branzino on the deck within 15 minutes. I moan about needing to drive 22 minutes to get to a grocery store with affordable prices, but I have nearly that many friends within walking or biking distance. In Detroit, you’ve got to cook. This type of proximity to close friends and community is meaningful; to have people close to you who you can cook for, be cared for by, be challenged by and woken up by for a 6:40am ride is, in many parts, the life I’ve always wanted as an adult.
Right now, I’m feeling the glow of friendship. I celebrated a friends’ birthday the other night, walking into a bar to see an eight-foot long table filled with my friends. I cherish this because I’ve missed it and because I know it won’t last. There was a time eight years ago when most of us had free time at 2pm, working gig jobs with irregular hours. We’d bake pies at noon and sit out on the structurally unsound roof and drink beer while at least two people played guitar at once; I knew then, too, that that particular period of expansive time wouldn’t last. Years later, many of us are still here, although I left for a little while. When I returned, I felt relief, reminded that life is so much easier to live when you have friends and community around to spread out the weight. Yesterday morning, I biked toward the water at sunrise and despite three years of doing this, I noticed new buildings, smelled new decomposition, or a blooming flower, or trash death vapor, or some kinda blown-out-candle as I biked past. Once, a rabid dog chased us so we took a detour and saw a deer standing still in a field, illuminated by a beam of morning light. On ride mornings, I feel limitless. Smells are always strongest at dawn and at dusk.
I don’t yet live at Another Place. Eventually, once there’s a structure, I plan to live there for long chunks of the year and see it through all the seasons. But it will be hard to feel like I’m giving up closeness, giving up friends and these morning rides in order to gain depth of another sort. Of course, it’s possible to have both, or some endless combination of expanse and proximity. This is the creative futures exercise I twist around in my brain when I lay on my couch. Where will I be? How can I invest in Another Place and grow community there while nurturing the friendships and relationships here? How many homes (that is, a place, not a structure) is one person allowed to have? I don’t want to be a snowbird, but I’m so cold…
Co-ops and communal living spaces are beautiful ways to have community, collective care, shared labor, and friendship while living rurally. I’ve been inspired by so many examples of this, some I’ve visited and some I haven’t, a tiny selection of those being:
Rootsprings Co-op in Minnesota, run by Erin Sharkey and Zoe Hollomon
Bread & Puppet Theater in Glover, VT, a legendary radical theater troupe and communal living space I’ve been lucky to stay at and learn from
Folklife Farm in Northern California where my friend Jacqueline (who has a newsletter and a new book about practice that you can find here) lived and helped grow
and programs that facilitate skill-building and community-building, like
Community Rebuilds in Moab, UT
Sable Project in Stockbridge, VT
Art Farm, a residency in Nebraska that relies on its residents and used parts to keep the place running
My friends in Charlevoix County have made a beautiful life at their homestead, close to towns but rural, a life that has inspired me greatly and directly informed much of what I hope for with Another Place. They live as a couple and as partners, now with a baby, and regularly host WWOOFers, friends, and friends of friends in exchange for help with their homestead and all of its endless projects. People visit, and in return people fall in love with the home they’ve built. As a result of that love, their home is built collectively, filled with paintings and hand drawn maps from visitors, sections of fencing done by people from all over the country, a drawing of a mallard reminding you to duck. People leave and feel it’s a place they can return.
I’ve learned that it can get lonely. A friend spent a winter in Benzie County then sold his property, too lonely to see a reason to stay. Another friend started renting an apartment in Detroit because the solitude at their home in Cedar became deafening. Some people can’t find community because with rural spaces there are inevitably fewer options, more distance, less time and proximity. I worry about all of this.
I have a tenuous relationship with solitude. I both desire it, need it, beg for it, and force it if I don’t get it. Once I have it, I have trouble settling in. I’ve lived on my own for the past year, which is heaven, but I have the privilege of being two blocks from my girlfriend and several close friends. Recently, at Another Place, I struggled to set aside my fear to enjoy the solitude and the silence. I’m circling toward the challenge of finding peace in solitude, again and again. I remember a section from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to A Young Poet:
What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain. To be solitary as one was as a child. As the grown-ups were moving about, preoccupied with things that seemed big and important because the grown-ups appeared so busy and because you couldn’t understand what they were doing.
I find myself saying I want to be someone who.. Who can be alone? Who can be perfectly happy, entertained, calm, in a dark field? I think of how Christopher McCandless yearned to be outside of society so he walked as far as he could into Alaska’s wilderness; when a plane flew overhead, he traveled even deeper. If you haven’t read the book or seen the film, I’ll spoil it now: he learns, Happiness is only real when shared.
Life is all balance. There is, of course, more than just “city” and “country” or binaries of “society” and “wilderness.” These are invented ideas, spaces made true by the values we give them. In the rural French village where I stayed back in June, we could walk to the next village by way of an ancient dirt path that cut through the surrounding vineyards. It felt good to be in a place so quiet but reachable by foot. That’s a different kind of rural than Benzie County.
Up there, it’s harder to bike to a friend’s house. Nights are mostly occupied by crickets and I don’t have many friends there yet. I worry about being lonely, and I worry about not getting the alone-time I need to develop a personal relationship with the land. Not too much I haven’t worried about. And then, sometimes, a bunch of friends come up at once and we have a talent show and sing Flaming Lips around the fire way too late, O Yoshimi echoing through the woods.
With Another Place, I want it to be co-created. It’s becoming something I can’t even imagine because it isn’t from my brain or hands alone. This place doesn’t require solitude the same way I do. A sculpture will be left behind and become an important marker to the entrance to the woods. Someone will stay for a few months, and maybe build their own small cabin. I may get sick, like Anna writes about in Unsupervised, but it will be okay because someone will be there to bring me a lemon ginger garlic tonic. Sometimes, I’ll be there alone, and I may be afraid, but I’ll remember that so far, Another Place has felt special for everyone who has visited and through that, I’ll remember that I’m protected.
For now, I’m savoring the place where I am. I’m biking to my friend’s house.
Property updates
My neighbor Jim tells me that the abandoned natural gas processing facility property on the corner, two over from mine, sold in the public auction for $15k. Before the auction, we snuck over to take some photos of the wreckage. I’m angry at how these contracted natural gas companies have treated the land, and scared about what happens next. For now, we don’t know what will happen next, but all of this has launched me into learning about government-owned land, natural gas contracts, and holes in the system. I’m writing about it.
The available time to do land projects is dwindling for 2023. I’m noticing how far in advance you need to plan for building projects. Next year we’re building a toilet, outdoor shower, and an outdoor kitchen.
With any luck, there will be a rainwater catchment system with a filtering method by mid-summer, and eventually, there will be a well.
Some links
I really like Anna Fusco’s writing this week on “the life-changing magic of living together”, and recommend it. This piece got me thinking and directly inspired today’s Another Place Times
It’s Month of Design in Detroit —
Tonight, Friday Sept. 15 there’s an open studio at 556 Custer St + 560 Custer St. See the studios of Simon Anton (@simonantonstudio / @hellothingthing), Patrick Ethen (@patrickethen), Tony Rave (@tonyrave), and @studio_for_now (Ellen Rutt + Emilia Nawrocki) will have 1of1 things for sale. Stop by between 4-10pm.
Saturday, Sept. 16 there’s an open studio at 5001 Grand River Ave. Grand On River hosts Nick Tilma (@nicholastilma), kit parks (@grandpabarbie), Lily Kline/Umbel Studio (@fiveugly), and more. Stop by between 1-6pm.
Saturday, Sept 23 Detroit Vacant Land CDC is hosting a Land Lab workshop and tour of vacant land use in the city that looks really cool
When I worry too much I put on Hideyuki Hashimoto’s music, or anything by Saweetie and those are the two moods
What does a “retreat” mean to you? What does it mean to find “refuge” and where have you found it? Do you live in community with others, in a city or rurally? Is there another way?
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I'm thinking about how "retreats" in this country have historically been racist and directly taken land from indigenous populations in order to serve the travel & leisure of white people; I'm inherently tied up in that, and am committed to intentionally working to make this a space that feels comfortable and safe for everyone who wants to be outside and be here. I think that's what "retreat" and "refuge" means to me — it can be a feeling in my body, a moment of finally feeling safe, comfortable, and not thinking about how I appear and instead settling into a state of noticing and being. There are sensory clues; it's quiet, I can go days without bathing because I'm so relaxed that my pheromones are too, I feel spaciousness to explore. Finally, "retreat" implies an ending. A retreat implies a return to someplace else, and like all endings, it's inevitable.
elle! finding and reading through all of another place times this month has been such a beautiful and hopeful experience. as a queer writer based in northern michigan, so much of what you write in the newsletter resonates so deeply. i was born in and spent my best childhood years in benzie county and now split time between traverse and bear lake. knowing you are creating a space like this in this area that is both so dear and difficult to me is inspiring, and i would be glad to support it in any way i can/visit/make connections to the fairly broad web of folks i know around here.