We lived at Oilseed for two years before moving four miles down the road in December of 2009. Eventually, the other Oilseeders moved on and the land owners took possession of the houses.

Early on the third Sunday of August, we parked at the end of Bill Thomas Road and walked into what had once been a thriving community, ready to turn and run if we encountered squatters.

Bob used to mow this land and now here I am twelve years later, walking across the overgrowth with our old home behind me.

In addition to mowing, Bob grew potatoes.

He grew loads of other vegetables, including shitake mushrooms.

This is what our trailer looked like shortly after we moved in.

And here is what it looked like last month.

Camelina rests on its wheels, steps and occupants gone, a ghost house, windows open, an empty shell swirling with memories of friendship and community.

I think back to when our younger, more athletic friends did cartwheels across the lawn, back when Camelina had steps, and vinyl skirting to hide its wheels.

We opened the door and peered in at what had once been a hub of activity, our old kitchen, all tore up and abandoned.

Nostalgia washes over us as we remember the good times we had at our old kitchen counter.

Our bedroom windows and the blue boat with a hole in its side. I remember lying on the other side of that blown-out screen listening to a whippoorwill one dark moon night.I also remember the day we decided to remove the garbage from the boat. Some of us thought we might fix it and go out on the lake, and some of us just wanted the trash to go away.

This was the lower house, where Ian, Jessi, Greg, Adah, and Jack lived.

Tim, Jack, Adah, and Link went dumpster diving at night and brought back embarrassing amounts of food.

We cooked.

We ate.

We rotated Sunday potluck between houses, so every third week the gang gathered at our place.

Jessi and Ian made a baby! One birth, no deaths – that’s a pretty good run.

We went for walks. (Dana ran ahead and took this photo)

We went to music Festivals! Shakori’s Grassroots Music Festival is one of the reasons Bob and I moved to this area.

Matt was the Mayor of Oilseed and he kept us all on the same page and working together. When someone new wanted to move in, he took them from house to house to introduce them and later we would decide as a group whether or not they were a good fit for Oilseed. I don’t recall saying “No,” to anyone.

And now there is an empty field where the lower house once stood.

This was the road from Bill Thomas Road to the upper house.

The road looks so much the same now that I half expected to meet one of our friends with a covered dish or a musical instrument.

We called the old farm house the upper house because Camelina and the lower house were downhill. This is where Matt, Dana, Link, Jessica, and Simon lived, where we came for potluck when their turn came, and where we met for our monthly pow wows.

This is what’s left of the upper house today.

It appears to have burned down, whether accidentally or intentionally. Gone, too is the little horse barn where some Oilseeders kept chickens.

I’d like to say, “Easy come, easy go,” but instead I’ll say that we breathe life into the places we touch. Cherish today’s energy because life is fleeting and you cannot turn back the clock.

But all is not lost. Five years later, Oilseed lives. Anchored no longer by infrastructure and space, the community we shared flourishes in our hearts. We feel it when we see each other at weddings, or at the gym, or when we check in virtually each month.

~*~

A history of Oilseed in ten chapters

(see video in “Settlers of Oilseed” and “We’re Not Amish”)

A VERY WARM WELCOME

MISSING LINK

KILL POSSUM, SHOW CHICKEN

MAKING CAMELINA

CAMCORDER AT LARGE

LINK AND THE BONE HEAD

SETTLERS OF OILSEED

WE’RE NOT AMISH

FARMERS ROCK

Death of Oilseed

In 2001, when the original lease was negotiated, it opened up much-needed affordable housing and provided a revenue stream to support the broader community we call the Bubble. Since then, Oilseed Community has been home to college students, farm and fuel interns, and people who worked at The Abundance Foundation, Piedmont Biofuels and Chatham Marketplace. Oilseed provided a soft landing portal into the Bubble.

Abandoned houses on land awaiting development became community housing and revenue. It was a triple win. The developer was happy. The tenants were happy. And the Bubble flourished.

Bob and I moved to Oilseed in November of 2007 after approval by the community. Because Oilseed was more about community than cheap rooms, we were screened like everyone else. We were very grateful to move into the trailer, which we cleaned up and renamed “Camelina.” On many an afternoon, it wasn’t unusual to open our door to find see either Matt or Greg and the fresh, new face of a prospective tenant.

During the two years we lived in Camelina, we formed lasting friendships with many wonderful people including Simon and Jessica, Link, Matt, Dana, Greg, Kathryn, Jack and Adah. Revenue from Oilseed rents fueled the bubble, helping pay for Biofuels Coop remediation projects and helping Lyle and Tami keep their many philanthropic projects afloat.

None of the original tenants live at Oilseed today. We bought Trouts Farm. Greg moved to Michigan. Simon and Jessica bought a home in Durham, Link in Siler City, Matt in Bynum. We all fledged.

Although we know many of the new Oilseeders, I have yet to meet them all. Most of them are snugly plugged into the bubble. But sadly, the Oilseed revenue stream that used to benefit the bubble is over, dammed up by the tenants themselves. In a bold move, the new crop of Oilseeders re-negotiated their lease with the developers.

When I first heard about this, I assumed they had discussed their intentions with the current lease holders. Given that assumption, I accepted that they were taking their destiny into their own hands. Empowering themselves.

It sounded like a positive move except for the part about removing all financial support from the bubble. Making payments instead to the developer when they weren’t asking for money seemed like a waste. But hey, if this was the new direction of Oilseed, who was I to protest?

Come to find out, no one knew except for the tenants themselves. It was a surprise to everyone else. The bold move began looking more like a mutiny.

We all assumed Oilseed would die at the hands of the bulldozers one day. None of us could have guessed it would have come at the hands of the community itself.

As a subscriber to “The Small Farmer’s Journal,” I was obviously already dreaming of life on a small farm. My attraction has always been the horses. I love them and need to breathe their aroma as surely as I need air.

Bob and I intentionally moved to North Carolina to get closer to the farming community. We have discovered that “Farmers Rock!” – something Bob often shouts out the car window when driving past our new farm buddies. We’ve even met Jen in Pennsylvania; someone who has actually farmed with horse power.

And now, Jack has expressed interest in learning the trade. This is exactly the catalyst we need to push us to the next step – find someone who is hitching up horses and using them and learn from them the ins and outs of planting, mowing, raking, logging and maybe even plowing. They say every journey begins with a single step and I want mine to be behind a horse with lines in my hands.

We also think Quakers are pretty neat. Especially as regards their Peace Testimony. Over the years, many conscientious objectors have been Quakers. The tireless promotion of non-violence earned Quakerism the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947.

However, Quakers and Amish often get confused with one another, probably because of the photo of the man in the Quaker Oats logo.

In this short video, Rob Jones, Quaker and soon to be famous rock farmer, sings a song clarifying the difference between the Quakers and the Amish:

The Sunday night potluck is one way our eclectic and busy group stays current with each other and our ever-evolving ideas. There are eleven of us living at Oilseed Community, six at Biofuels Coop two miles down the road and another half dozen regulars from other neighborhoods.

The food is always interesting. Among the offerings last night were tamales made with rabbit and pigeon and a variety of fermented chutneys and slaws. One night the gang at the upper house surprised us with a freshly butchered guinea.

Most of the food is locally grown or intercepted from the locally landfill. We really enjoy the variety and look forward to tasting new dishes although we have to admit we have not sampled any of the meat.

Ping pong, fooseball and the latest rage – a board game called Settlers of Catan are standard after-dinner activities. Settlers, in which players build roads, settlements, and eventually cities is appropriate for our group in the same way Monopoly was appropriate for our parents.

And for the non game players, there is always conversation, ranging from silly to serious. Lately we’ve been discussing the future of our community. All of us seek to reduce our dependence on petroleum products and some of us fantasize about creating a new settlement. Each week we share tips and stories for reducing our ecological footprint.

I always look forward to Sunday evenings – to the people, the food, the games and the conversation. When all is said and done, we return home with full heads and hearts and an empty pot.

I try to pretend that it is just Simon in his bone outfit. I try to carry on like normal, but I keep a wary eye on him. My brain tells me that it’s Simon under those old bones, but my gut tells me to run. If he gets too close, I lose control and take flight.

The first time Simon blew the lid off my cool was at Potluck Sunday. Dave was there with Giant, his dog, and Giant started barking furiously, all the hair standing up along his back. I jumped up and didn’t know what to do for a second. Then I went over and put a hand on Giant to calm him. Dave was surprised I didn’t get bit. Giant has a reputation.

There was a big going away party for Chris over the weekend and we were encouraged to dress up. Bob dressed as an Arab and I wore my chi pao. He introduced us as representatives from the country that supplies our oil and the one that helps pay the bill. And Simon wore his bones.

So, over peanuts and beers, they filmed this:

Something tells me this is just the beginning…

In the case of “The Trailer,” it took about twenty hours of Bob’s hard work before I would even consider living there. He wiped down the walls, shampooed the carpets, killed the mice and replaced the refrigerator and stove before I was won over. At that point, we renamed it “Camelina” after the oilseed plant.

I had been talking with Jessi, Ian and Greg about renaming our new home and we bandied about a few names, the most amusing of which was Ian’s “The Tackle Box.”

When I told Bob about this conversation he immediately suggested Camelina and I took to it right away. After all, we are living in a community which calls itself Oilseed. I also like the name because it sounds like Camille and Camelot.

With that, we moved our stuff in, including our houseplants and started putting pictures on the walls. With a little bit of effort, we managed to haul off the residual piles of trash. Bob installed under the counter lighting in the kitchen. Then we started cooking, made a compost pile and put up a couple of bird feeders.

Camelina really feels like our home now. A home we can be proud of. So much so that we’ve invited houseguests and are hosting the first phase of a triple house oilseed party this weekend.

Bob and Greg had been talking about Biodiesel as they strode off under the full moon to check for eggs, so I assumed they had chewed their way through to some kind of processing or testing breakthrough.

“We killed the culprit that was eating the chicken eggs!”

Link, Beth, Caleb and I blinked at each other uncomprehendingly for a moment. Either we had misheard them or they were pulling our legs. “Bob killed a possum with a stick,” Greg explained.

And then the whole story came out. They had stepped into the chicken house to find broken eggs everywhere. Sitting quietly among the roosting hens was a fat possum with egg on its face. Greg poked the possum with a stick but it didn’t want to budge. It bit the stick Bob tried to prod it with. Three times they got the varmint moving towards the door and three times it doubled back.

“We need to shoot it.” Greg said. Bob asked, “Do you have a gun?” There was one at the house. “Do you want it dead?” Bob asked and Greg said, “Yes.”

With that, Bob took the stick and killed the possum. It took about four whacks. Then he picked it up by the tail and walked it out to the woods and flung it. The next day he went looking for the possum, half thinking he had only stunned it and it was still there.

They have a saying in China, “Kill Chicken, Show Monkey” which means, basically to make an example of someone to bring the others into line. As the realization that the possum killing story was true began to sink in, I wavered between revulsion, pride and fear.

And then I vowed not to ever push my husband’s buttons.

Ten years ago, we knew something was missing in our lives and set out to find out what it was. After a few months of working together on a piece of property in Belize with the families who lived there, we realized we were missing a sense of community.

Ever since then, when we lived in disconnected communities, we felt isolated. The missing link in our modern auto-based commuting consumer culture is a sense of place and community. For a long time we thought we had to leave the country to find that third world camaraderie we so craved.

And then we moved here and became part of an integrated community. A community of hard working, intelligent, educated, mindful, generous people all striving to create sustainable community.