I was born and raised alongside the best patch of wild strawberries in Gustavus. We think it must be a hybrid of a wild and cultivated variety introduced by the first white people to settle the newborn glacial outwash where our town sits. Regardless of their origin, the cabin-sized patch of low growing berries produces the sweetest and reddest berries in town, sometimes 20 gallons in a season. 
     The summer between my junior and senior year of college I squatted in this patch with two other friends, fingers sticky and pink from the sun-warmed berries. We were, as twenty-year-olds so often do, talking about the future in a half-assed-eating-strawberries-between-sentences sort of way.
     “I’ve had this idea since I was eight, but it would be so cool to live here for a year and try to do one hundred percent local food.” I said. This was true, I’d had the idea for a while as an elusive what-if day dream. Then Liam responded. 
     “Name a year, anytime in my twenties I’m in!” 
     The idea slipped from elusive to possible. 
     Our conversation trailed from the berry patch back to the kitchen. How many people would it take? How many could we feed? When would we learn the skills? Really, one hundred percent? Would you use spices? We put the berries in the freezer and made dinner. Conversation was still circulating that night with neighbors around a fire. What about coffee? Alcohol? Could we ferment things without sugar? The next day our friend Tanner walked over with soap berries and a book of interviews with Tlingit elders on traditional harvests to loan me. “This thing really is a mind worm.” he chuckled, handing me the book. We talked for another hour standing on the porch. 
     That week I put off work on my senior thesis to write up a proposal for the local foods project and sent it to ten other people who I knew were also thinking about what to do when they grew up. Awkward unstructured zoom meetings with a rotating semblance of the email list followed. I sat on my too-humid, burr-oak-shaded porch back at school in Minnesota, blabbing at the zoom screen, bouncing around with excitement, at an utter loss for what form this would take or how it would happen. 
     As the burr oak dropped its leaves, the meetings dwindled down to four of us, each wanting to dedicate a whole year to the project. Our idea in the literal sense was easy to outline. To spend a winter only eating calories (spices and vinegar were allowed) that had grown, swam, or walked in Southeast Alaska. From when the sandhill cranes migrated south in the fall until their return North in the spring. We’d spend the summer harvesting and preserving all aforementioned food and eat away at our stores in the winter. 
     The task was daunting. Although we all had varying degrees of experience with subsistence living and Southeast Alaska, our learning curve on boat driving, chainsaw running, garden tending etc. to pull this off was ridiculously steep. We would likely fail. We had to do it with education as our benchmark for success. To learn all the skills our college education did not teach. 
     As we, the core four, became more serious, and were repeatedly faced with the why are you doing this? question from the curious, caring and concerned people in our lives, it became clear there was a whole other layer of knowledge we were hungry for underneath the technical skills. We wanted to learn how to be in community. Not the tight-knit hive mind of 18-22 year old communities we were leaving at schools but the one of grubby kindergarteners and grandparents and gardens and glacial fjords. To see what happened if living in place became our full time job rather than just a consequence of being alive. 
     And so our experiment began.