Dreamers of the Red Moss (Part 1)
The New Rural Movement
When they moved from the cities, they left all at once and their future wasn’t clear. It was a combination of things that drove the people away from their comfortable urban existences. Overcrowding had led to a significant uptick in violent crime and rapid-spread disease. Infrastructure was strained under the size of the population, giving rise to the four-hour commute. Depression spiked. Air quality had degraded to the point where you were only allowed outside for twenty minutes at a time without a breathing device, and that was on the good days.
Still, restaurants were better than ever. And the shopping was great. Most of the jobs were in the cities. Management could keep a close eye on worker bees in controlled office environments. There were years of fractured existence that people excused away using all the rationales. If you had to live in or near the city (as many people did) it was better to make the best of it, and look to the good parts. They’d talk about the energy of the city and the culture and the arts. Intellectuals found other intellectuals there, even if in-person conversation was heavily frowned upon due to exposure risks. One common refrain was, “Even if I don’t go to museums, I like to know that I can whenever I want to.” But these were increasingly antiquated, indulgent ethos; band-aids for the life-threatening reality of modern urbanism.
Most folks couldn’t say they had lost touch with nature. To lose touch, you had to once have touch. Sitting under a tree in a park doesn’t really count as a natural connection. But everyone liked the idea of spending more time outdoors. As they left the cities and pushed outwards, they started to push inwards too, which was emotionally trying in its own way. How can one find peace amidst all the silence? How can one ask the questions and still maintain peak productivity in one’s professional field? How can one reconcile oneself in the face of a mighty forest? Who is important and who can start a fire without a lighter? The criteria for self-acknowledgement had changed.
They hired helpers. People who were native to nature. Foragers, hunters, trappers, fishers, growers, builders, scouts, guides and the like. The majority of people found themselves in small towns that had decent amenities. Coffee shops, modern grocery stores, a gallery if you were lucky. The small towns became a lot like the cities. Town natives didn’t love this, so they sold their homes for big money to the city people and moved further out into the country.
With so many relocating, the movement became less about getting back to roots, and more about urban expansion. The city's tendrils were spreading out and overtaking rural areas, one household at a time. Great tacos and local craft beer were available everywhere. Who could complain about that?
Some understood that this was a ticking clock. That at some point the ills of the city would follow them into small towns. People with big money and means pushed ahead of the curve, buying massive tracts of land that they could control in absolute. They created homesteads -- compounds for themselves and their loved ones -- where they incorporated their own ideas of community. These rich pioneers became known as land barons. Every baron was different, with their own style and philosophy. Visions ranged wildly. It became common for barons to invite others to live with them and adopt their lifestyle. Local people got jobs working on homesteads. And as a result, outlying regions of long-running economic hardship flourished with newfound opportunity.
Jane Marshire met Ben Broussard in the early days of rural expansion. She was a first-generation wilderness guide and he was a backwoods truck driver, a logger. His job was to cart huge loads of timber down from the mountains to the mills. It was treacherous work. His handle was Black Bear. That’s what his peers called him. He could drive a truck through the hardest conditions.
As a guide, Jane worked the seasons. In the summer months, she’d lead expeditions along rivers and lakes in search of plump fish. On days when the fish weren’t biting, she’d school her groups in berry picking and medicinal herbs of the wild. The fall brought hunting season: birds, deer, and bears. She was a great tracker and a heck of a shot. She’d line it up for her clients, and they’d pull the trigger. If they were only in it for the sport, she’d find a use for the meat. There were plenty of hungry people around. Winter was her quiet time. Jane took off from December until March. On the side, she made hats from animal skins.
They had both grown up in small, logging towns along the Golden Road, which was a ninety-six-mile-long timber route, unpaved and muddy, that cut through the deep forest sections of the Maine interior. Jane and Ben didn’t meet until they were in their twenties. Ben’s family were seventh-generation Mainers. Jane’s parents had been book editors living on Long Island when they caught a whiff of what was to come in the city and took their twelve-year-old daughter’s lead. Jane had spent a couple of summers at a sleepaway camp in Maine and loved it. That was reason enough for them to relocate to Briarwood Mills, a town on the southern terminus of the Golden Road. It was only a six hour drive from Briarwood to New York City, if her parents had to get back for a meeting. Or a museum.
An architect from Boston, a Mr. Rendish, and his firm were contracted by a new land baron who had purchased 387 acres just north of Briarwood Mills. Jane and Ben were among the first five locals hired. Her job was to lead a team of environmental consultants over the property and surrounding area to track wildlife and habitat, making sure that the upcoming development was as native as possible. His job was to drive in the visiting members of the design and build-out team over the treacherous, undeveloped homestead terrain. Later, once construction got under way, Ben trucked in all of the materials, supplies, and equipment. He accessed the supple valley via a triple switchback dirt road that was prone to avalanches. Each ride was a treacherous one, which suited “Black Bear” just fine.
By Decree of Baron Mike
The valley development was named Calydonia by its owner and baron, Michael Bartholomew, a sneaker mogul with a passion for mythology. The launch team was already three weeks into initial preparations (Phase 0) when Baron Mike visited for the first time. His vision for Calydonia was to create a community that “learns from the earth around us” and “joins us in the pursuit of harmony and self-betterment.” He told his workers that they were artists and visionaries. Together, they would unlock new creativity.
It all sounded great to Jane and Ben. They met at the pig roast to celebrate Baron Mike’s christening of Calydonia. After bonfire drinks they took a walk under a low-sitting crescent moon and fell into each other’s arms.
As central team members, they were on the first list of workers being granted community housing. Since it was two to a bungalow, Jane and Ben jumped in headlong and shacked up on the Calydonia grounds after only dating for three weeks. It felt a bit fast to them, but they were caught up in their newfound purpose and the accompanying romance. Nature had descended on their hearts and souls. Sagittarius was ascending.
Jane was already four months pregnant when she led a team of visiting biochemists into the outlying grottos. This would be her first experience with red moss. A few of the caves had been overtaken by a fuzzy, crimson spore, which appeared to respond to touch. The biochemists were excited by the discovery and began taking samples. Jane ran her hand over a coated stalagmite. The plant matter clung to her. At that moment she blurted out the word “fawn” and knew that the baby in her womb was going to be a little girl.
They named her Grace. She was the first child born in Calydonia, in its newly-erected clinic. The main house was nearing completion and Baron Mike was thrilled about the arrival of little Gracie, so he threw another pig roast bonfire. That’s when he announced that the temporary worker housing was going to be upgraded into permanent lodges. Jane was elevated to property manager and Ben to homestead Head of Logistics. They would raise their daughter in Calydonia.
For a time, it was remarkable. The community of forty full-time residents that called Calydonia home spent their days journeying inwards in group meditation or outwards on sojourns into the woods, and continued the good work of the homestead, which was winemaking.
Now, winemaking in Maine is tough due to the severe cold during the extended winters, but Baron Mike had gotten around that with massive solar-panel fields and sixty acres of greenhouse vineyards. It was part of everyone's job to make the wine, including the kids. By the age of eight, Grace had a keen sense of grape acidity and skin thickness just from intuition.
She was a curious and awesome child, prone to long stretches of silence and reflection. Her favorite activity was running barefoot through the forest. She made sculptures from fallen branches, leaving them to never be discovered. Her mind raced with the possibilities of what humans could become, if they left their modern-day principles behind them and truly returned to the earth. By the age of ten, she started to publicly challenge Baron Mike during Calydonia’s community circle discussions. Why did Calydonia make alcohol, which was bad for you? Why were the inhabitants raising animals for slaughter rather than hunting beasts in the wild? Why were people still allowed to stare at their devices during group meals? She asked the hard questions and, more often than not, Baron Mike didn’t have the answers.
Grace’s propensity to push buttons and challenge norms was something that made her parents uncomfortable. That’s not quite accurate. Truth be told, it made her mother quietly proud. But Ben was old fashioned and had grown to love their life in Calydonia. He didn’t want to rock the boat, for fear of being jettisoned from the community.
Baron Mike took Grace’s questions to heart. On her eleventh birthday, he announced at a community gathering that he was suspending all wine production. They would be pivoting into the development and farming of red moss.
In Calydonia, they were sheltered, and no one who lived on the homestead had heard of the breakthroughs being made in the outside world with red moss spores, the same variety of land plants that Jane and the team of biochemists had discovered in the outlying grottoes over a decade earlier. The chemists had quietly kept on with their research at a lab on the far end of the property. At the gathering, Baron Mike gave a demonstration. He brought up a woman from the community who had been suffering from terrible eczema over her arms, which were dotted with rash. He uncovered a section of red moss resting atop a table and instructed the woman to lay her arms on it. She did. Within moments the spores drew out the rash, leaving her arms fully clear. It was miraculous.
They chopped and burned the grapevines and converted the ash into fertilizer for the red moss. Everyone in the community was encouraged to interact with the new plant life as needed to tap into its medicinal qualities. But there was something more to the moss. It was mildly addictive, but not in the chemically-dependent way. It just made you feel better. Really, really better. Heightened, electrified. Calydonia residents would describe its effects as “hyper-focused” and “euphoric.” There was debate over the nature of the plant -- was it a drug or a catalyst of spiritual connection? Or was it just a really good vitamin? There was grey area therein, and it fractured the Calydonia community.
Ben had taken to red moss. He would lie in a bed of the stuff for as long as he could, sometimes sleeping for days in a moss bog. Jane hated it. Said it made her feel “loopy” and “detached.” “Detached from what?” Ben asked. “Detached from being human?”
Jane shrugged. Yeah, that was it. Detached from herself. She liked herself. And, moreover, detached from each other.
Ben encouraged his wife to join him in the moss bog and to bring Grace in as well. “We can all be in touch, together.”
Jane wasn’t having it. Just because something was a natural organism didn’t mean using it (or overusing it) was natural. To her, it was a drug and it was destroying Calydonia. She wasn’t alone in this estimation. But Ben pressed on. And between him disappearing into the moss for so long and the endless debates whenever he returned, their relationship started to crumble.
It was early fall in their twelfth year living on the homestead. Jane and Grace were searching for Ben. They couldn’t find him in the moss bogs or at the farm. He wasn’t at the spore lounge next to the commissary. When they were heading back to their lodge they ran into a neighbor who said that he’d seen Ben going into the main house with Baron Mike.
Jane put Grace in her bedroom and locked the door. Told her not to open it until she got back. Jane snuck into the main house and listened outside of Baron Mike’s bedroom, which was now covered in red moss, floor to ceiling. Like a room coated in a living carpet.
Ben and Baron Mike were discussing plans to move Jane into a “mandatory retreat” where she would be placed with a group of “dissenters” into a red moss pit for five days and be evaluated afterward. Baron Mike said, “If she doesn’t get onboard after that, we’ll have to ask her to leave Calydonia. But we need to keep your daughter here with you.”
Ben was in full agreement. He said, “I’ve tried to get her to come around. If extended time in the pit doesn’t save her, I’m not sure what will.”
Jane raced back to the lodge and packed quickly. She snuck out under the veil of night with Grace. Her daughter was very much up for the adventure, having already concluded that her father was a mess and plotting something bad. “They’re icky-gross assholes right now and I don’t even believe that the red moss is natural. I think Mike did something to it in one of his labs,” she said to Jane as they repelled down a cliff.
[Part 2]