Cleaning, Cliving, and Thriving
By Rachel Pelletier & Clara Locke
October 28, 2024
A shrill scream rings out across the village on a chilly Thursday morning. “Pee on my pants, pee on my pants!” cries Arcadian Clara Locke from the entrance of the trail to Tenderfoot Cove. She’s caught her foot on a root hiding under the leaf litter, sending the five-gallon bucket of pee-tea in her hand sloshing over the rim of the bucket and right onto her pantleg. A pair of Arcadians nearby throw down their broom and sponge, mid-clean of the sauna, to steal a peek at the commotion. Their eyes go wide at the scene that has unfolded before them, and they make a half-hearted effort to smother the laughter that’s bubbling up inside them at the unfortunate yet undoubtedly funny mishap. Talk about bad luck.
You may be wondering, what even is “pee-tea?” And why is it being carried around in a five-gallon bucket? Well, we promise it’s not as weird as it sounds. Here at Arcadia, we students are responsible for maintaining the systems that make our village run successfully. This includes our composting toilet, the Clivus Multrum (aka The Clive), which requires weekly emptying. This means pumping out the liquid component (aka “pee-tea”) that has been strained out of the waste and dispersing it into the woods via five-gallon buckets. One must walk very carefully when completing this task or else risk ending up like Clara with pee-tea on their clothes.
The next step includes raking and spraying the chamber that fills with solid waste to the consistency of cookie dough. While slightly stinky, this chore is a necessary part of keeping our village running and allows us to live more sustainably. Using the Clive lowers our energy and water usage and creates compost that can be returned to the soil.
As Clara and Rachel wrestle with the innards of the Clive, pairs of Arcadians complete the remaining chores in the rotation. Not far from the Clive, two Arcadians are outfitted with brooms, sponges, and Dr. Bronner’s soap to scrub and sweep the wood-fired sauna. Another component of the sauna chore includes chopping wood to make kindling to stock in all of the community spaces for use in the woodstoves. The swift and crisp chop of an axe can be heard throughout the morning, intermittent with the chit-chat and laughter of the choppers conversing.
For many Arcadians, using an axe and chopping wood is a new and sometimes daunting skill to master, but the sense of satisfaction and empowerment it provides to many of us is worth the sweat and sore backs. And there’s something about making a fire with the very wood you chopped yourself that feels pretty amazing too.
Living off the grid in the woods also means there’s nowhere to dump trash or food waste. This is where the pack-out chore comes in. Five-gallon buckets of food waste that have been filled from the week’s meals are barged across the cove and driven to a compost pile. The week’s trash and recycling are also packed out to be discarded in the dumpsters on Massawepie property. When heading to drop off this compost, one must be sure not to miss the discrete turn-off marked with a boat hitched to a trailer of unknown origin. A few feet away, sheltered behind tree brush, lies a small shed that houses our compost. Upon the first visit to this site, the shed may be hard to notice. If you’ve gone so far as to disable an electric fence to peek inside an empty storage container, as Clara once did, you’ve gone too far.
After dumping the compost, the buckets must be rinsed out in the spacious mop sink at Gannett Lodge. While this step is being completed by a brave member of the chore team (hopefully with a strong stomach), the other Arcadian will likely rummage through the filing cabinets of food to grab items needed back at the village. After that, it’s back in the truck to return clean buckets to the village. While the week-old food scraps tend to make some Arcadians slightly queasy, having the chance to drive the truck and listen to some tunes often makes up for this. As Arcadian Hannah Bennett exclaimed, “When I’m driving the truck and playing The Grateful Dead, I feel like my dad going to the dump, and it’s, like, my favorite thing ever!”
The easiest chore (in most opinions) is community spaces. This chore entails cleaning, vacuuming, and organizing the learning yurt, community yurt, and outdoor patio. The kitchen, our most heavily used and dirtiest space, is a chore rotation of its own.
The debate over the worst chore is long standing, but the kitchen, rather surprisingly, is a top contender. Cleaning the kitchen requires one to clean out old vegetables from the pantry and fridge, clean food containers, and scrub every surface including the sinks, windows, and floor. Arcadian Roy Duffy claims that he “would rather pump a week’s worth of Arcadian urine than touch a single rotten tomato.” This is a sentiment many others share. However, Megan Uribe argues that “Clive and pack-out are so much worse because the smell is so terrible.”
Despite the hard work and less than pleasant smells, weekly chores are some of the most important things we do as Arcadians. These chores keep our home happy and healthy, and there’s something uniquely rewarding about being the people who take care of our home. Arcadian Ella Pecor explains how chores “foster a sense of reciprocity with the land and have taught me a lot of self-reliance.” Ella’s thoughts are echoed by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, a book we’ve been reading for our Knowing Nature class. Kimmerer claims that “one of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world,” and chores allow us to do just that. We see the impact we have on the land and we work to minimize it in return for the services it provides us.
Our weekly chores all relate to systems that keep Arcadia running smoothly. Systems, and systems thinking, is an important theme of the Adirondack Semester. Director Jacob McCoola defines systems as “processes designed to create negative entropy.” Entropy is the tendency of the world to trend towards chaos. Negative entropy is the opposite of entropy; it creates order in the chaos. Essentially, without our chore systems, Arcadia would descend into an entropic state of chaos.
Our chore system stands in stark contrast to our experience on campus, where almost everything is completed for us. Our food is served, our plates cleaned, our trash removed, and our bowel movements flushed away, all by people we don’t know. Here at Arcadia, doing chores together to keep our spaces clean and our village thriving requires effort from each one of us. There is a shared understanding that it is for the good of each individual as well as our community. Our collaboration to make these things happen creates a sense of shared responsibility, thus bringing us closer to both the place we live and each other.
At the end of a typical chore session, the group reconvenes in the kitchen. Stories are told in vivid detail about that day’s chore triumphs, trials, and tribulations. Exclamations like, “Guess who spilled pee-tea on themselves today?” and “Those pickled onions fermenting in the compost buckets almost made me yak!” spur unanimous laughter from the group. Despite our commiserative complaining, it feels good to share meals in a clean kitchen, see the wood huts full of freshly chopped logs for the woodstoves, and breathe easy without a stench rising from the Clive. It feels even better knowing it can all be attributed to our hard work and the respect we share for this place and these people.