Foraging, Liberation Gardens, Transition Towns
“It’s like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It’s like a slumlord signing his eviction notices - Yours in solidarity.”
- Thomas Frank ‘The People, No’
1.
Ibis has evolved eremitic tendencies. The squads have closed off their ranks to her. No matter, she can wait. Squads or not, she believes that the day will come when she’ll be needed again. And she’ll be ready. For although she now lives a solitary life, she still has her track record, her expertise, and her daily regiments. The cabin does not offer much, aside from shelter. That’s all she’ll need until the time arrives. Shelter and her daily regiments. And also the bunker. Ibis spends her days alone, her regiments are strict and follow in this order - morning exercises, breakfast, crop tending, stretching and meditation, agility and stamina work, lunch, tactics and strategy sessions, hand to hand reps, firearms practice, maintenance and construction, dinner, theory and praxis analysis, bed.
Ibis has fallen behind schedule regarding the construction of the bunker. She spends time in free association addressing her latent impulses, searching for something to justify her procrastinations. She thinks, maybe I put it off because should I find that I need the bunker, that will mean that it’s already over. Her modest goal, for now, is a humble cellar to be fortified later. She has done at least some work on it; there they lay, inset into a reinforced mound leading to nowhere but solid earth, the bulkhead doors. For Ibis, they’re something else to look at besides the cabin, the untended grounds that surround it, and the tree line encircling it all. They also happen to be a daily reminder that she’s fallen behind schedule.
This internal cross-examination happens often, a silent interrogation into the origins of the bunker construction falling behind schedule. It can be quite distracting. Debilitating, even. For example, just today during morning exercises, she was overcome with a feeling of severance from the bunker project, it having been so long since she worked on it. She couldn’t shake the nag that some measurement was off, either in her plans or in the positioning of the mason lines. Then she dawdled during breakfast, lingering over her coffee in an unsuccessful attempt at pinpointing the exact moment when she first decided to skip over doing work on the bunker. Afterward, she was able to maintain enough focus to tend to the chaotic garden and pick some mustard greens and wild garlic for dinner; a person’s got to eat. During her meditation immersion, slow to progress, she couldn’t clear her head of concerns about the state of the bunker, which bothered her enough that she forgot about her agility work altogether and went straight to lunch, devouring the previous night’s leftovers. Her study of tactics and strategy has been hampered ever since her arrival at the cabin, having failed to stock her shelves with the prerequisite titles, and she spent the time reserved for CQC and sharpshooting in self-recrimination over it. It makes no difference, she possesses neither a striking dummy nor any guns, ammo or targets. She did manage to stay engaged long enough to repair the stripped bolt on the water pump, but after dinner, her library also devoid of books filled with theoretical frameworks, she skipped her studies and simply lay on her mat in the corner, fantasizing about digging out the rough shape of the cellar until she fell asleep. She might not admit it, but most of her days unfolded in a similar fashion.
Once a month, Ibis hikes the wooded slopes down to the nearby hamlet to restock supplies. She’s able to survive, financially, on her cut of the last heist before her excommunication. On these trips she abandons her worn-out jumpsuit in favor of something more innocuous; roomy jeans, thick flannel shirts, hoods or caps, dark sunglasses. The town itself has fallen into deep disrepair. There’s a general store that doubles as a lunch counter, a small post office that offers limited banking, although few residents still have need for such a thing, and a bar. The rest of the shops, offices, warehouses and so on are shuttered, boarded up or dilapidated. Some facades are propped up by wooden braces, others have already crumbled. She considers the town a dump, but not beyond rehabilitation. And Ibis knows that when the revolution finally comes, when she is once again welcomed into the arms of her former compatriots, that towns like this will reap the rewards of their victorious struggle.
2.
Ibis reflects fondly on her time in the various squads before her expulsions, avoiding a rehash of the circumstances surrounding her exits. First there was The Labor Squad, her premier division. She’d been operating solo for a stretch before she fell in with the Front for Popular Resistance who were providing security for the picket lines of various worker strikes. FPR were a short lived organization who, after a series of early botched bombing attempts, redirected their focus to defensive actions. They supplied muscle for strikes, rallies, community meetings, demonstrations, and even a concert or two. Ibis never considered herself cut out for physical confrontation. Not that she was fearful of an altercation, she just wasn’t built for it; her legs were too long and thin and her torso too bulbous, her center of gravity was all wrong for it, one nudge and over she went.
But through FPR, she and a few dozen other similarly disadvantaged members formed the Labor Squad. The gang’s main directive was to instigate more union engagement from the workforce as well as stimulate the commitment and focus of leadership. Unfortunately, they couldn’t agree on a course of action, dividing themselves up into three factions each favoring a different approach. One, a collection of technophiles, proposed a program that included the hacking and leaking of sensitive corporate information as well as the disruption of the strike-breakers’ communications. The second coalition offered up a more holistic approach, with a focus on workforce wellness and a movement towards free alternative-health care. The last, a group of arty types, proclaimed that cultural propaganda was the most effective course of action and began crafting a film script in the post-neorealist style.
Ibis found herself unaligned with any of the three segments, illiterate in the digital realm, absent of any healing prowess, and with an aesthetic that someone once referred to as ‘lunkheaded’. The Labor Squad meetings were intense affairs, with each faction debating the strengths of their strategy against the proposed weaknesses of the other two. The hackers would regale members with readings of stolen confidential, eyes only documents, the naturopaths would hold healing energy circles and therapy sessions, and the bohemians would show rough edits of their film and hold viewings of their agitprop posters. Surprisingly, the Labor Squad lasted a few months longer than the FPR itself, before splitting up for good, although Ibis was, by that time, already long gone.
One night, smoking a cigarette out in front of the squad gathering hub, Ibis was approached by an infiltrator, an undercover headhunter doing recruitment for The Tactical Squad. He’d mistaken her deficiencies for prudence and was therefore very impressed with her, finding her to be a perfect fit for tactics. Barring the events that ultimately led to her departure, he was right. Her time spent framing out some other person’s direct action was one of the most memorable periods of her life. As a matter of fact, she can still recall the exact order of rank distribution from each organizational chart like it was yesterday. The squads and platoons, the mobile propaganda unit and EO up through company command. Then the sections; intelligence, signal, medical. The battalion headquarters and the three companies, etcetera, all the way up to the regimental commander.
The fiasco on her way out, she came to believe later on, might have been avoided had she been more in touch at the time with her frustrations regarding The Tactical Squad’s branding. A freelance unit, the organization self-identified as ultra-modern. They believed that it was imperative to have a partisan army prepared to assemble out of the masses at such a moment as when the people awakened. This, ostensibly, left them in a perpetual state of existing in future time, developing new tactics and then redeveloping countermeasures ad infinitum. In order to feed this strategy, all of their recruitment resources went toward new tacticians, leaving the troop strength at zero.
She was saved, at the time, from having to dwell on the morbid aspects of her separation from The Tactical Squad. Her days spent unattached and moping about were short in number before she found herself swept up in another movement, one that she hoped might soothe her tactical scars. An old contact reached out to Ibis to suss out her interest in joining up with The Loyalty Squad, an organization adherent to the figuration of fantasy and inevitability. She enlisted post haste and it was under the auspice of that antithesis that they drafted the seven obligations -
1. Awakening and mobilizing the masses.
2. Attaining political cohesion and harmony.
3. Setting up footholds.
4. Furnishing armed forces.
5. Rebuilding collective vigor.
6. Undermining the adversary’s power.
7. Reclaiming areas that were lost.
The Loyalty Squad had factored in unification with the Tactical Squad, initially scheduled to occur during obligation two, with full integration to be realized by obligation four, but the endeavor never got off the ground. In all of her time spent with the unit, they never succeeded in achieving even the first part of obligation one. They were ideologues, and so they couldn’t have been more out of touch with the citizenry, an ephemeral clannish horde masquerading as pragmatists who ferociously defended the tiny clod they stood upon, apathetic to everything beyond.
Ibis was deep in her nihilistic phase, having been expelled from The Loyalty Squad over a propaganda of the deed squabble that ended with her denouncement of the director as an incrementalist, when she made initial contact with The Goon Squad. The unit was a grotesque jumble of a reverse fifth column and a half-committed double agent; a sock puppet insurgency operation run by the administration yet still, privately, actively involved in revolutionary action, from kidnappings to bank heists to bombings. The group exploited every commitment and all at once, pocketing money on both ends, double dipping while adhering to the edict decreed to them - The objective of this novel counterespionage initiative is to uncover, hinder, discredit, defame, or otherwise render ineffective the actions of subversive entities and factions, their commanders, representatives, adherents, and advocates, and to counteract their inclination towards aggression and social turmoil. Ibis was exposed to the darkest corners of the human psyche during her time with The Goon Squad, and although she didn’t actively participate in their direct actions, finding herself relegated mainly to kitchen duties, her revolutionary spirit was tested on many an occasion. Despite the fact that their time together ended poorly, it still held a more tender place in her heart than the lonely years that preceded it, and the tumultuous period even before that.
3.
The first long stretch of isolation Ibis experienced was not that of her current status as a lonely hermit, but that of a lone wolf from a previous cycle, a solitude formed by the kind of defeatism that preys on shattered illusions. It’s a chapter of her life that she reflects upon infrequently, if ever, referring to it simply as her time as the scapegoat, living a life full of ‘myths without mythology and mysticism without religion,’ and then moving on. Some years before, in a moment of desperation, she’d latched onto Vogel Tzipori, a legendary maven of abusing his own status as a legendary maven. Part-time powerbroker and a born letch, it was Tzipori who, during their time spent as mentor and pupil, instructed Ibis in how to locate the weakest links in any organization with revolutionary fantasies and how to exploit them. At a bar, she once overheard someone discussing her patron, I’ve never seen a more amusing prevaricator, quite a careless risk-taker, such a perjurious raconteur, very much an underhanded charlatan, that sort of an overbearing autocrat, a remarkably clever accountant, that caliber of misleading impostor... Vogel Tzipori is a skilled performer, oscillating human emotions and animalistic instincts.
Tzipori would orate constantly, from his first smoke accompanying his coffee each morning until he stumbled back to his lair to lay his head down at the end of every night. He would chatter at anyone within earshot, especially those who he knew to be involved in subversive organizing. When they were alone, and Vogel was properly lubricated, he would often speak of his own advisor, Sid; his eyes would turn soft and glassy, his voice would soften like warm butter. During these retrospections, Ibis slowly grew to realize that, at its core, her pathfinder’s tale enlightened her with nothing more than a facsimile of her own, contemporaneous experiences with Tzipori himself. For instance, in the following part of his oral memoirs, if Ibis were to replace Sid’s name with Vogel, the words could just as easily have sprung from her own future mouth - It was a revolutionary party because the agitators, they were very radicalized in those days. We had revolutionary food and there was revolutionary music, of course, but background music, no one performed. Sid was there and all the crew. There was a lot of inquiry, a lot of thought. But Sid did most of the talking. He was presiding and there was not much pushback. His ideas about revolution were different from the faux revolution that people are plotting today. He was venerated, he was a sage, so we had to bestow honor.
Still somewhat naive, Ibis began to employ dialectical principles to synthesize Vogel’s words and his actions. Before too long, she noticed that there was little value in his interference regarding his so-called consultations. His statements such as, When the aggressor penetrates deep into the core of a vulnerable nation and seizes control of its territory through harsh and oppressive means, undoubtedly the geographical features, weather, and overall societal circumstances will do little to hinder their advancement, and will never provide strategic benefits to those who resist them, were so blunder riddled that she found herself wondering if he was motivated purely by greed and a desire to be considered erudite. Never one to ignore the cracks in a foundation, Ibis’s newfound enlightenment, ultimately, signaled the coming separation between teacher and student. She’d had enough disingenuous idealism in her younger years.
4.
Long before Ibis embraced her reclusive limbo, while still but a tiny fledgling, she gradually came to realize the chasm between her ambition and aptitude as the evidence of such piled up like the dirty dishes in the cabin sink. Her inauspicious beginnings might have made this clear to someone observing her from a detached position but, sadly, most subjects require some measure of hindsight to spark even the smallest of internal illuminations. One possible genesis of her antimony occurred while she was still in primary school, jealous of the clique who referred to themselves as C.O.D.E. They were the kind of kids that played Assassin, Decrypted, Killer and Spyfail all year long, went to the shooting range together on weekends, held secret rendezvous under the gym bleachers and so on.
During one such meeting, Ibis sat above the formative agents stewing in an angsty sweat of undefined origin, fielding dueling streams of unidentified distraught emotion. For one thing, she was unaware of how very badly she wanted to be a member of C.O.D.E., whose members wore their identities as naturally as the geeks or the soon-to-be athletic nuts; but she didn’t share their easy detachment from the status quo. At the same time, she was in the process of being crushed by her first, of many, bouts of self-abasement. The commingling of the two induced Ibis to draft a list, right there seated on the bleachers above the meeting, that documented all of the shortcomings which would prevent her from ever participating in C.O.D.E.’s clandestine games -
lack of physical ability
lack of military aptitude
overall laziness
softness of the body
softness of the spirit
softness of the mind
trouble with repetitive activity
bad hand to eye coordination
sluggish reaction time
&c
A few years later, Ibis joined the local chapter of The Spark Brigade, provoked by what might have been a similar passionate fit of self-rebuke that, many decades later, would drive her to the secluded cabin. The Spark Brigade was a youth pioneer group, with a focus on survival skills training and political education. The other members, the little fiends, approached their daily tasks with a solemn focus that Ibis was unable to muster. Her failures at hunting, guerrilla strategies, shelter building, revolutionary history, crop growing, first aid and so on mirrored the current lapses in her regiments, not to mention the bunker setback. She was eventually expelled when she was caught in a propaganda session writing middling stories full of sophomoric imagery, cartoon violence, and an alarming mish-mash of ideologies.
During her high school years Ibis fell in with an anarchic crowd that was driven by a penchant for hands-on maneuvers devoid of revolutionary optimism. Her views had grown fatalistic after The Spark Brigade incident, as they would again and again over the years whenever she found herself between dogmatic systems, but she couldn’t quite muster a sense of comfort around these autonomists. The lack of privacy, the street vigilantism, their looseness in handling firearms, the huge, ferocious dogs everyone seemed to have, all set her on edge and kept her disconnected from their bizarre, individualistic mutualism. She found herself increasingly on thin ice with the collective, there were rumors that she was a mole, a dilettante, a slumming heir. One exhausted morning, having spent the night unable to find anywhere to sleep other than a small corner of floorspace by a radiator, she let slip a few choice words about the menacing dogs keeping her from the kitchen. One of the participatory members chided her, “You don’t understand these dogs, you’re unfamiliar with the use of firearms… What’s the explanation? It’s because you have no use for them. Be honest with yourself, why is that?” Some might have taken this as a challenge, a chance for self-reflection and personal growth. Ibis, on the other hand, was packed and gone by the end of the day.
In the intervening years, before she crossed paths with Tzipori, she bounced from one movement to another, one cause to the next, supporting herself with part time work, petty crimes and occasional support from her comrades, when she was in their good graces. She caught herself on more than one occasion feeling covetous of her compatriots’ ability to fully give themselves up to their preferred distractions, the ways in which they were able to strike a functional balance between the demands of the movement and the rest of their lives. Although she had accomplished very little up to this point, her outwardly projected credo was that of an absolutist. Her constant urgings-on of others to engage with direct action, a sort of precursor of her time with The Tactical Squad, earned her the unflattering nickname the Nag.
As she got older, people warned her that it was too late for the revolution; technology was advancing too fast, the administration had turned its resources away from the motherland dividing the populace as they fought over scraps, the proliferation of paramilitary groups made organizing too dangerous, and so on. We should be preparing for what comes next, they said, and focus on the politics of what comes after. And they were right. During these years there were fleeting moments of real camaraderie, notwithstanding, nothing much was truly accomplished. The lifespan of participation in those days was markedly short, nothing like when the squads began to show up a few years later. Ibis thought back on those people often, usually in the cabin at night when she was meant to be studying. Some of them migrated to the private sector, non-profits, law firms, the art world and so on, but what of the others? Sitting alone in the cabin surrounded by the nighttime rustles, whispers and howls, she wondered how many of them were living their own parallel solitary existence. Sometimes, right on the edge of drifting off to sleep, she would conjure them in her mind, a picture of when they once stood proudly beneath sloganeering banners, an image that would slowly atomize into a network of hooded faces under-lit by a pale, electric glow as she slipped into a deep slumber.