Tabula Rosa - An Ecovillage Novel

Preface

CAUTION: This contains SOME spoilers. This is meant to provide some context to the whole story, and offer some insight as to why it means so much to me. Read at your own peril. NOT reading it will keep some surprises and I have to accept that some people don't care that this story is a work of fiction based upon a body of research meant for an actual dream of mine. If that doesn't interest you, and that's fine, please skip this and enjoy the first installment of the story. If you like the context this offers, I hope you enjoy that, too.

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I suspect I was like many, witnessing my life change on or near Christmas 2001. Every person is different, but I believe that in my case, it was directly because of The Shire scene in Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring. As trivial as a movie may sound, it was the visage of that place with Frodo reading a book under a great tree with birds chirping in the background, to the well-worn paths, vibrant green grasses and happy, busy members of the community puttering away at their errands. Magic and mythology aside, just the visual details of the place slowed my pulse and animated my mind like excited fireflies.

At that time, I was in the 10th grade and so woefully ignorant of the challenge ahead of me in the cognitive realization of this dream that it is a classic case of "if I knew then what I knew now, I would never have started". As luck would have it, after hearing the same nonsensical madness for, perhaps, the sixtieth time, my father mentioned that we have a block of land "somewhere in St. Fintan's", just a few kilometers from my ancestral home. No one knew where it was, other than "on that half of town", somewhere, along this stretch of asphalt. It took a few years of google earthing, asking neighbors, and studying historical data but I discovered it's location to within a meter or so in each direction; having had to convert an old survey map circa 1910 to something a little more first-world, "In the Name of Our Most Holy God & King Henry", of course.

So I had a grand ambition and actually had physical land to realize it upon. The property was 35 acres, and 264' wide by 1 mile in length (80m x 1601m = 14.164 ha), it's length running approximately 45' south-east to north-west, away from an asphalt highway with grid broadband internet and electricity on power poles, but no water or sewer infrastructure to tie into. For my purposes of an off-grid community, this suits me fine. What suited me even better was limited-to-no building inspection, building codes or property taxes in the local service district. The heavily (black spruce) forested grounds provided many options, and the slope of the land was 5% across its width and 2% across its length. Discovering the soil is quite rocky, high acidity and had spots of standing water, I had a body of information from which I could grow something wonderful, at least on paper, and at least at first.

As we fast-forward 17 years, imagine a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Gosse-ling like myself feeling consumed by the passion of building a community in which I'd wish to live. My whole life during this span of time has been exploration and study of the world in such a way to provide me the tools to realize this dream. Two years in the army, two dozen part-time, summer jobs and 11 years in post-secondary was a great start. I have academic courses in computer science, civil engineering, psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, folklore, environmental studies, chemistry, fisheries, wildlife, political science, and agriculture. All these things make me just qualified-enough to have a scary resume, but not really qualified-enough to work in ANY of these fields. That, at the time, made no difference to an autistic kid so blinded by passion for a single goal to lose track of the forest for the trees. Yes, pun intended.