There is a town upriver that my friend Mychele wants to take over and turn into an ecovillage. It’s pretty much a ghost town. Boarded up businesses and a dwindling population, no school, no bank or grocery store, a dollar store on the periphery to suck up any lingering commerce.

We could all buy houses there, she says. They’re going for a song.

We could have a farm and grow our own food. Have a wood shop. Turn the pole barn into a community dance hall.

Better to dream than despair. The unsettling of America that Wendell Berry wrote of a half-century ago is manifesting its destiny in all these dying Midwest towns, each of them eyeing the horizon, waiting for a miracle.

Or a Mychele.