Last week, in my small town of Three Rivers, we watched with pride as our Lady Cats basketball team fought its way to the state championship in Lansing. They lost, but not for want of vocal support. Nearly 2,000 purple-clad fans drove two hours to see the game -- about 25 percent of our population. When the team bus arrived home at 11 p.m. it was faithfully met by a fire truck, police cars and even an RV that led them on a victory lap of downtown.
Even if you don't care much for sports, you've got to appreciate such a generous display of community spirit. I was sad to see it end, and wished the excitement and camaraderie would've lasted a few weeks more. But alas, to everything there's a season.
Or is there? As I thought of other ways that communities can build unity through shared experience, another event came to mind. This one took place in Munising, an unpretentious Upper Peninsula town on the shores of Lake Superior.
It was early afternoon and we'd stopped for a picnic lunch at a lakeside park. While the kids played on the beach, I saw a guy -- let's call him Ray -- loading split chunks of maple into what looked like a wood-fired pizza oven. Except that it was outside.
"So what do you call this thing?" I asked.
"Oh, dis is da community oven," Ray said, with a classic Yooper accent. "I'm firin' it up for my girlfriend so they can bake in it tonight. Gotta keep 'em happy, eh?"
When we came back that night, it wasn't just Ray's girlfriend that he'd made happy. Hundreds of townsfolks had gathered for a free outdoor concert. It was a kaleideocope audience: young parents with kids on blankets, old folks in lawn chairs and walkers, kids on bikes and bikers with beards and black leather jackets. The musician, an acoustic minstrel who'd slept in his van the night before, played enough Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash to keep his eclectic fans happy.
But the singer was no more a hit than the oven was. There it sat, a sturdy beehive of brick as humble and lovable as a plump grandma in her kitchen. From its mouth came forth a procession of blueberry muffins, biscuits, cheesy bread and some incredible little hand-tossed pizzas. Volunteers manned the oven with long-handled paddles and as each batch hit the table it sold out immediately to a swarm of customers. A seductive, fresh-baked fragance hung over the entire evening like a benediction.
The oven was low-tech and low-maintenance -- no electricity, no mess to clean-up. The bakers showed up, rolled out their dough and once it was gone so were they. All proceeds went to charity.
It all reminded me that a community's like a tribe of sorts. Yes, we gather to cheer our young warriors, resplendent in their local colors and totems, as they fight rival tribes on the fields of athletic conquest. It's a healthy outlet for our competitive human bloodlust.
Yet tribes also have an inborn need to celebrate and feast around a common hearth. That's how it was in the Middle Ages when villages often had a shared oven where people could bake bread and rehash gossip in equal measure.
Community ovens have caught on nationwide and I hope we build one in my town. There's a perfect spot by the fire station on a grassy bank that overlooks the river. The firefighters could savor the smell of blueberry muffins as they laid another coat of polish on their big red trucks. And when the baking's done, maybe an escort of Lady Cats could bring them over a plateful.
Tom: The smells of wood smoke and bread baking are sharp reminders of home. If I'm walking and smell woodsmoke, I usually stop in mid-stride to let the smell--and the memories evoked by smell-- billow around me. Autumn gives me the feeling other people get from Christmas because it's time to light the fire pit and bake in the oven (without getting heat stroke, as in summer).
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