We had tried unsuccessfully for days to reach someone to give us a Peak Moment our of Dignity Village. Failing that, we drove there and received a marvelous personal tour that we did not videotape. It was the most moving destination in our journey. This entry was written that same day. Today, on our next-to-last day in Portland, we have experienced community in two different forms that presage, I think, some of the forms community will take in our urban lower-energy futures. One is a village of homes for once-homeless people. The other is a neighborhood community.

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Dignity Village: Home for the Formerly Homeless
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The sun came out this morning, beckoning us northward to the asphalt-covered Dignity Village site not far from the Columbia River. On one side is the city's composting/mulching operation. On the other, a corrections facility. Fenced in between, Dignity Village is colorful, haphazardly creative, vital, and anything-but-institutional.

Gaye greeted us at the small shack at the driveway to the village, and proceeded to regale us with history, stories, wisdom, humor, personal observations, and political critique. An activist in the '60's, she had been made homeless by health problems. She started our tour by recounting the abysmally inadequate human services provided in the city: shelters with insufficient security, long lines for the food kitchens, the endless wait to get a bed for the night when there are many times more homeless people than available beds.

About 38 people live in this almost one-acre village. The villagers have their own non-profit organization, board of directors, rules (like co-housing, it occurs to me). The city permits them to build a shelter 10 x 12 feet for one person, 10 x 15 ft. for couples.

We toured the Village, passing a dozen college student volunteers removing nails from salvaged lumber. Committed to sustainability, Villagers have tried cob--too much upkeep required--and now mostly build stick-built homes with salvaged materials. They're all built on platforms--high enough to remain above winter rainwaters pooling on the asphalt basin, easy to move with big forklifts. Colorfully painted, with boxes for community gardens--each member has his/her own individual expression. They help each other build, but they each have their own place, plus a large communal building. Together they buy propane for hot showers, several portable toilets, electricity. They pay their own bills, they bought their land.

Provisional prospective members live at least one year in camping tents pitched on a raised platform and covered with a rain tarp. Members have to agree to five basic tenets: no violence, no theft, no drugs or alcohol, everyone has to be financially self-sufficient, and must work a certain number of hours for the common good, the Village.

The ethos behind this Village is respect. Respect for one other, respect for the place. "These are the rules we learned by age three," Gaye quipped, "but a lot of us have to relearn them." Like any collection of humans, they have their squabbles and challenges. But here, they also have their dignity. They are not a drain on society: they work and go to school, pay their taxes. They live modestly; but they live, truly, as a village where everybody knows everybody else. Their goal is to help other tent cities of homeless people, to do as they're doing. Why others haven't succeeded, Gaye said, is when they allow alcohol and drugs. Those breed theft, and violence, and the authorities are only too ready to shut it down.

Perhaps these once-homeless people are paving the way for others with more financial means to learn, to relearn, what it is to build and to be community. They are certainly living with a small footprint and more contact than most of us get with our neighbors. We left with our hearts deeply touched at Gaye's poignant stories of lives reclaimed, land brought alive, of people enlivened with self-respect and dignity.

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A Farm Oasis in Urban Portland
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When you drive down the urban residential street, you turn into the driveway between two apartment buildings, and come to a white gate at the gravel driveway. A friendly barking dog greets you. Islanded in this urban landscape you find huge walnut trees, a three-story farmhouse, and part of an acre of land planted in fruits, vegetables and flowers. Pam and Joe Leitch call this Portland Permaculture Institute, where they teach and put into practice soil-building, growing, preserving, collecting rainwater, closing the loops to end waste. They also call this "Home."

We taped a much-too-short conversation including both of them. Pam described the life-changing effects of Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's book Your Money or Your Life, which moved them out of corporate America and into reading and studying the state of the world. Led them to working on resource decline, to Pam's working with the Portland Peak Oil group. Last year she and several others conceived of and brought to their city commissioners the Portland Peak Oil resolution, which passed unanimously. Now she's helping to support the Peak Oil Task Force which grew out of that resolution, a group of about a dozen volunteer citizens who are tackling the job of making recommendations to the city about what they could do in the event of chronic energy decline and economic repercussions.

Joe's five-minute verbal tour of their gardens touched on the building of neighborliness. Wanting to cut down poplars that shaded their garden, they met with neighbors at the adjoining apartment house. Out of that, the poplars came down, and that land was planted in fruit trees chosen by the apartment-dwellers. Joe spoke also of other trees in the neighborhood that they've gleaned, making apple juice and other goodies. And he gave the formula for calculating how much rainwater catchment you need. They now have 6000 gallons and calculate they need about 20,000 to irrigate (drip, of course) in the dry Portland summer.

Portland Permaculture gardens and neighboring apartments

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Hey Neighbors, let's eat!
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After our conversation, we packed up and joined in on the twice-a-week neighborhood potluck on their deck. Sharing tofu and raw-fish roll-your-own sushi, homemade berry cobbler, the neighbors included people of several races and all ages, some from the apartment houses in front of this property, some from down the street.

The conviviality, the easy conversation, felt like neighborhood community as many of us long for. Joe told me later these potlucks took a lot of conscious work: multiple invitations, in many ways and forms. They have a head-start on community building of the kind that we've lost in our fragmented and hyper-individualistic America. May community like this multiply abundantly: meet your neighbors, share some food and talk. Thanks for including us in the fold, Pam and Joe.

Idea for community-building: Eat together!