The River Bend Farm - Intentional Community in Virginia

This trip is less about landscape than it is about friendscape. Our horizons are defined more by the extraordinary people with whom we have communed than the number of miles we have tramped.

And in this spirit we went to visit our friends Peg and Jim on River Bend Farm, an intentional community nestled in the bends of the Clinch River in the extreme western corner of Virginia. Fernne and Peg had been grad students decades earlier, and we have forged ties over the years not only with Peg but her partner Jim, and Peg's sister and mother. They now live primarily in a remote corner of Scott County, Virginia, creating a community and restoring a farm in the folds of ridges and water that characterize the Appalaichans.

Jim gave us convoluted directions to the farm, but when we got the their road we doubted the accuracy of our transcription. It was a road in the Platonic sense, but a bit much for our rented Chevrolet Malibu. But after a few fits and starts - and some help from Frankie, a movie actor who is part of their community - we made it down the treacherous slope to their corner of this improbable farm tucked in a corner of the sweeping Clinch River. Their home - built by them with the help of their community - fit seamlessly among the cedar and forsythia and blue bells.

We spent most of our time walking over this marvelous place, with one excursion to hear a bluegrass band at the "Carter Fold", the product of the legendary family that made Appalaichan music the to ears of the entire country. But the heart of the experience was the soft and glowing hills and cliffs, and the sense of being in someplace both ancient and modern at the same time.

Their's is a sort of practical idyl, and this communal farm goes back to the activism of the Civil Rights movement, and the ongoing attempts to remedy the grinding isoltaion and poverty of these remote Appalaichan mountains. But the key is the sense of the community, that was as radiant as the trees exploding in new leaf with the intoxication of Spring.