May 25, 2024

Walt:

It’s been a long and rocky road since our last blog update, and it’s well past time that I filled you in on what’s been happening here in the Windward woods. The last five years have been a period of transition and consolidation, but that’s nothing new for our community. Things have been quiet, but we’re still here and still looking for folks who are drawn to helping create a viable alternative to the status quo.

Here’s a sketch of what happened over the last five years. A sequence of events started unfolding on Thanksgiving morning of 2016 when I sat down on my couch to tie my shoelaces. The next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital. Lindsay had found me sitting on my couch unable to get up or even talk, so she and Andrew packed me into the car and drove me to the local emergency room.

They did an initial evaluation, and packed me into an ambulance for transport to a regional care center in Portland, OR. For the next four days, I underwent treatment for a transient ischemic attack (a TIA), what’s commonly known as a “mini-stroke.”

One of the advantages of living in community is that when a serious heath issue arises, you’re not alone—you have friends and neighbors who can pitch in to help. In my case, I was weak, disoriented, suffering from vertigo, and had to spend a lot of time in bed. Over the next few months, I was able to substantially recover, and at this point I figure that I’ve regained about 90% of my prior capacity.

It was a traumatic experience for me, but it was also a traumatic time for the community since in the months after experiencing a TIA, about a third of the patients will go on to have a full blow stroke. Since there was no guarantee that I would recover—and secondary strokes are often fatal—the community had to figure out how to replace my skill set.

Then the community was devastated by Andrew’s death in an automobile accident in November of 2018. Andrew had been lead on developing the cemetery, so that was another key skill set that had to be replaced.

At that point, Windward  went into “anchor watch” mode as we focused on keeping the community going and sorting out  what direction Windward should take as it embarked on the next leg of our organizational journey. We decided that the best option was to focus on developing our natural burial cemetery known as the Herland Forest.

Going one step further, we’d come to see the interment of human remains in a forest as an important way to minimize the adverse impact of the funeral industry on the environment. We refer to those who choose to use their remains as a way to help protect the living forest as Guardians, and we’re pleased to report that as of 2024, more than than 200 Guardians have chosen to help us build a living memorial to love enduring. As a result, we’ve come to see that a major theme of the next leg of our journey will be to work with the grieving in ways that help sustain the forest.

If you’ve worked in the death care field, or feel a calling towards helping folks navigate their way through the grieving process, we’d invite you to check out our death care internship.

Over the past few years, we’ve worked with the Foundation Group to get the Herland Forest recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(13) tax exempt, non-profit cemetery. This will allow Herland Forest to grow and incorporate more forest land into the sort of permaculture forest that was described in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s 1915 utopian novel Herland. Gilman described a sustainable culture that derived its food, fuel, and fiber from the forest instead of from plow based agriculture, and we believe that forest burial is a viable path towards realizing that vision.

It was during our anchor watch period that Washington state passed a law allowing for the Natural Organic Reduction (“NOR”) of human remains. For the past thirty years, we’ve been using that process to transform the remains of large mammals into oak trees. From nature’s perspective, humans are a type of large mammal, so adapting our process to composting human remains was straight forward.

During the Covid lockdown we constructed a facility to do human composting. In the summer of 2020, we became the first facility in the world to be licensed to perform NOR on human remains, and in the fall of 2020, we performed the first human reduction in the country. At the same time, I became the first person licensed to operate a natural organic reduction facility.

We also continued work on various infrastructure projects such as completing work on our two story log cabin. It was a long time coming, but this spring the county granted us our Conditional Use Permit for the cabin.

Our goal was to create a place where the terminally ill could come and spend time in the forest as they prepared for their death. Our thought is to set up the downstairs space for the patient to stay in, and to use the upstairs for the care giver. Here’s a pic showing the west facing deck were someone can sit and watch the setting sun through the ancient oak trees.

Windward stewards 126 acres of forest land. Our Herland Forest project started out utilizing twenty acres of that land as a cemetery, and last year we completed the formal transfer of another twenty acres to the cemetery; we call this area the “North Forest.” In order to fully incorporate the North Forest into our cemetery operations, we had to apply for an amendment to our conditional use permit. Turning land into a cemetery impacts the use of that property for a very long time, so the county has to sign off on the conversion before we can start interring human remains there.

As part of that amendment process, the county wants us to upgrade the private road that runs west from the paved county road for more than a half mile into the depths of the Herland Forest. The first phase of that improvement involved extending the culvert that serves the seasonal creek and then widening the surface width of the road bed to twenty feet.

Where the driveway crosses the seasonal creek that runs along the eastern edge of our property, the roadbed is a good dozen feet high and about thirty feet wide at the base. That involved hauling in a lot of heavy fill—another reason why road work can get quite spendy very quickly.

With the first 800′ of work done, the roughest and steepest part of our entrance is now so broad and smooth that some of our neighbors have teased us about creating what looks like an onramp to the interstate.

There’s another 2,400′ still needing improvement, but that will come in time. Now that we have our 501(c)(13) status, we can reach out to various foundations for infrastructure grants to help with the cost. So far, we’ve raised some $55k but there’s probably some $200k more funds that will be needed in order to complete the road work.

I’m noticing that the road improvement has resulted in a lifting of our spirits all around. Getting in and out is now easy and quick, which is a good thing, but it’s also emotionally upsetting in an odd way. Habit is a powerful thing, and while part of the heart embraces change, another part draws back. I’ve observed a notable reclusive nature to the people who’ve settled in here, and making our home more accessible to the outside road runs counter to that desire to distance ourselves from the outside world. Now that the initial part of our driveway is “normalized”, the outside world feels a lot closer.

The last five years have been challenging—here at Windward and everywhere else—but we’re still here, still moving forward, and still keeping faith with the belief that viable alternatives to the status quo are possible and worth striving for. If you’ve had enough of the stress of modern life, so have we. Perhaps you would benefit by learning a new way of living with the land and each other. Just saying…