Ben Stallings

Missouri's Great River Road is marked as a bicycle route, and I wish I could recommend it, but when it's not tremendously hilly (as here, near Hannibal) it carries a lot of traffic and has no shoulder. I didn't feel safe, and I strongly suggest other cyclists find another route. I hear the Illinois side of the River Road is more suitable for bikes. Note my dorky red shoes, which I found at Wal*Mart for a dollar. They're very practical, I assure you.

Hannibal, Missouri is of course Mark Twain's hometown, and they're not about to let anyone forget it. This lighthouse sits atop a hill where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn allegedly played.

In addition to the individual houses, Dancing Rabbit also has a communal apartment building called Skyhouse (left) and a newly-completed common house (right) featuring a modern kitchen, hot showers, Internet access, etc. The solar panels on these buildings are all photovoltaic; unlike Abundance, Dancing Rabbit hasn't done much with solar water heating.

Also near Rutledge is Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Each "Rabbit" (villager) gets a "warren" (plot of land) on which to build a house. Every type of construction imaginable is in progress, from mud huts to old grain silos to fortified tents to timber frames. There's a lot of experimentation going on at Dancing Rabbit.

Here's Lonnie's second, more experimental strawbale house (10 years old), located at Abundance Ecovillage outside Fairfield. It reminds me of a Hobbit hole. It's plenty livable inside: Michael and his partner live there year round. It has solar electricity and hot water from the panels at left. The green barn at right houses Michael's collection of electric and biodiesel vehicles, plus the equipment for making biodiesel fuel out of used sesame oil he gets from ayurvedic spas in town.

This is a south view of the first new house completed at Abundance Ecovillage. It represents a compromise between the building code of Maharishi Sthãpatya Veda -- which says among other things that buildings must face east and have a north-south roofline -- and passive solar design, which favors south-facing windows and roof. Five people currently live in this house. The little shed houses batteries, chargers, and inverters for the photovoltaic panels at left. The houses will be built in clusters, sharing infrastructure such as electricity and water.