Searching for Community

As we search in this nation and in the world for community, we come up against some interesting questions: how many of us are prepared to make the sacrifices of our individual wants and purposes for the sake of a group?

This is the question of The Greater Good—an ideal harder to define now than when the expression was well known.

The protests are forms of community, formidable forms, where people are united by an ideal and the action required to sustain it. But they may also be short-lived; their intensity may mean the participants wear out rather quickly. Less likely, they dissolve because their aims are achieved—that would require massive systemic change and the discomfort and dislocation that goes along with it. The powerful always oppose that. Agreeing to allow obnoxious statues to be removed is one thing, agreeing to remove obnoxious laws and customs is quite different.

Assuming that at least we may need additional forms of community, how to build on that need? A lot of us who can afford it seem to find community in restaurants, bars and coffee shops, but this is inevitably superficial. Wait staff here finding resistance when they ask their patrons to leave their face masks on while ordering may be the first to sense the limits of this form of community—if it is community at all.

There has to be some kind of work, it seems to me, to bind a group together. Socializing and shopping together are not enough. And this brings me to my fascination with old mills.

This week I drove some 150 miles east and north to the town of Mora, central to the county of that name. My only pandemic objective is to drive to every county in this enormous state that I haven’t yet visited, an objective I may not achieve because of the great distances involved (and nowhere to stop safely along the way).

Mora is a small agricultural town—I followed a tractor moving at a stately pace for many miles—very much alive as the two-lane highway winds down from the high cliffs to the north to the immense plains that stretch west of Las Vegas, N.M.—the old Comanchería, hangout of the feared tribe called Comanches.

Mora has one of the few remaining stone mills, a “roller mill” that used to grind all the local wheat to flour. Farmers bringing wagonloads of their wheat would gather to wait for the flour, joined by their common endeavor and its difficulties and rewards—the weather, the insect infestations, the rise and fall of flour prices in the market—all important, even consuming topics of conversation.

That’s what is needed to bind a group together, as well as frequent and regular meeting; and of course in this case it was all men.

The same function was provided by Wolf Pen Mill in Kentucky, another historic stone structure where a seventy or eighty years ago, local farmers would bring their corn to be ground. “Water ground meal”—at both mills, the big wheels are turned by streams—has a special quality, and people who have baked with it don’t want any other kind. As part of the food revolution, Wolf Pen Mill is now beginning to grind nuts into flour.

Work, talk about work, regular meeting, the informality of sitting around on benches or even on the ground—is all of this essential to the sense of belonging for which so many of us are searching?

In New Mexico Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm coronavirus