Being an intern at Dancing Rabbit is a great opportunity to spend time at Dancing Rabbit while working side by side with residents and other interns. As expected, people drawn to a place like Dancing Rabbit are truly one-of-a-kind and dedicated to living lightly within the environment; these qualities create a valuable and unforgettable experience for visitors. Erika here, describing my experience last summer and fall as a DR intern.

The interns at Dancing Rabbit work in pairs, and some of the work we do is one-on-one with a resident. Some of the projects I worked on included helping someone with a move, harvesting delicious grapes to make wine, dehydrating fresh fruit for mid-winter treats, and mulching baby pecan trees to protect them from the summer’s direct and unrelenting sun. As an intern at Dancing Rabbit, my sense was that people were pretty busy during the summer months, and so these smaller, more intimate projects gave me a glimpse into the daily and seasonal life of residents at Dancing Rabbit.

There is also work that is not part of the day-to-day, and involves a much larger team effort. I had done habitat restoration volunteer work on weekends, supporting the habitat of various endangered species for about 15 years prior to my internship at Dancing Rabbit. But working in a severe wildfire hazard zone in Southern California, we were never able to burn invasive plant species for removal, as is done in other parts of the country. We only had our two hands, some basic tools, and an excessive sense that we were doing good work that propelled us through back-breaking work on acres upon acres of invasive plants. 

But at Dancing Rabbit, I got my chance to help with a burn; the fire mimicking natural forces that had gone on for millennia prior to the prairie being settled. And it was the whole experience: from watching the weather forecasts in choosing a burn day, site preparation, permit review, discussion of safety protocols, notifications, debrief and fire watch, not to mention the main event itself! It was a pretty incredible process. There were about 10 of us that worked together as a team, surrounding the area to be burned, burning the downwind area first to extend the firebreak, and then working the larger area to remove an invasive plant species prior to it flowering and reproducing. The native annual species had already finished their lifecycle, and the burnt material added nutrients to the soil for its ongoing health. We marked one down for Dancing Rabbit’s contributions to the larger efforts of Northeast Missouri to maintain tallgrass prairie biodiversity in the region.

There were also ongoing natural building projects at Dancing Rabbit that I had a chance to pitch in with, two of which have been featured in previous DR newsletters: SubHub and the new Critters’ kitchen. We were a part of different phases of natural building, each one using different materials and methods. 

The Critters’ kitchen was being framed, which needed teams of people to choose the right trees, clean them of branches, debark them, and hoist the trunks into place. All of this took planning, vision, coordination, and a strong drive to see it all through to completion. 

At the same time, and at the opposite end of Dancing Rabbit, SubHub was extending its main structure to add auxiliary rooms for food storage and water tanks. This structural addition was in the foundational stages, where we were putting in trenches and drains. Having a civil engineering background myself, it brought me great joy to see these types of necessary, but usually invisible, concepts in action. I think the best part of being an intern was being able to better live my values: not consuming as much, contributing to something larger than myself, being conscious of, and minimizing, fossil fuel use, and prioritizing the use of renewable resources. Dancing Rabbit is a living example of these types of values. And if Dancing Rabbit can do it, so can the rest of us!

 

Erika Wilder lived at DR several times last year as a visitor and then as an intern. Among many other projects, she was instrumental in clearing brush to prepare for an excavation project for the natural building project called SubHub. She saved the day, just when our schedule for the excavation got postponed and most of the regular crew were not available to help with the preparations. She then moved right into helping fill trenches, helping to pour a cement floor, and mortaring a foundation for SubHub’s addition. Thank you so much for your help, Erika! You were an awesome intern!