Eat Pie!

   While pickling and canning at Happy Girl Kitchen I had the chance to meet alot of the local farmers as they stopped by with loads of precariously loaded produce in dust coated trucks. Or in the case of David, a neat little hatchback. David was the cook/ reluctant educator at Pie Ranch who lived in sunny Bonny Doon and worked in a big beautiful outdoor kitchen, I thought to myself "that guy has a sweet job" and the thought stuck with me. So when it was nearing the end of our one year lease in PG I decided to sign up for the internship offered at the ranch. A few months later I found myself fingers locked around the teets of a moody goat milking away.
   The summer interns stayed in a little cleared out patch beneath a walnut tree in what ever shelters we brought. The first night it drizzled a bit and a stocky, hardy chap by the name of Coal hadn't brought anything but a Mexican blanket. he just rolled up in it and passed out near the trunk of the tree, sleeping better than anyone else. He was half Native American and half country badass, wearing a thick cross made of stone on a necklace and a cowboy hat that shaded his dusty face, wide grin and squinty knowing eyes. He had a way with the animals, they skipped and pranced when he came to the pasture. He also devised a way to corral the unruly adolescent chickens into the coup for the night rather than grabbing them by the legs and tossing them in which had been the practice. The other summer intern was Li, a lovely intelligent woman who had graduated from UC Berkeley and decided to play in the dirt instead. Li was from Monterey, a town I had, for one reason or another, come to know very well. She played the cello and sung folk songs on a steel string. Looking back we all seemed pretty country, down to Earth kind of kids. At first there was a clear division between us and the apprentices. Some amount of camaraderie is innate just from sleeping outdoors together rather than in the ancient farm house with the year round apprentices. There was a certain amount of disenchantment within the year round group, maybe too much work, too little time. The second year apprentices were frustrated with the plaintive nature of the group and were hoping for the golden times that must have been a big part of last years crew. As the summer progressed we started to meld together and as we bonded through the hard labor of  harvest, riding on the back of jostling trucks packed over full of radish, tomato, kale, carrots and everything you could ever want to eat.
   The animals were a whole new layer of life that I hadn't experienced at all before. Zelda our stubborn lady goat, the only one who had survived repeated cougar attacks on the herd, was a real chore. Hard to get into the stanchion and moody once in place, she would often kick the bucket while you milked, tossing the whole thing to the ground or flinging a flake of poop into the perfect frothy white. She was also a diligent escape artist. backing up and kicking at the ground before leaping over the four foot fence. She wanted to be with the cows and would run baaing over to where they were grazing and munch defiantly on the stubble. Dulce, by name and manner was the sweetest of the cows, the only true jersey, her offspring and granddaughter were a hot headed mix of beef cow and jersey, an error from the AI guy. Dulce was easy to milk and only kicked the bucket when she wanted a little more alfalfa in her feed. Her milk was prolific and fatty, golden in color and rich with flavor. She let you come up and pat her large horned head as she glanced at you somewhat suspiciously but with resignation. Soon it became apparent that she was pregnant. How this was a surprise to the farmers is a mystery to me. You think that you would have remembered something like impregnating your star cow. When she gave birth she was already taking care of her daughter Ginger's calf who was neglected by her angry mother. So now Dulce was mothering two calves and we couldn't milk her anymore. Naturally this left us to milk moody Ginger who had to have her legs tied tight so that she wouldnt kick your hand with full cow fury, but nothing was stopping her shit covered tail from wipping you in the eyes while you tried to suction her teets to the machine. Yes, no hand milking for this one, she wouldn't allow it. She would get so crazy that she would break free from the rope and kick the skin off your hand or take a shit on your legs or break from free from the stanchion and go bucking around in angry circles. Needless to say, when it was your turn to milk her your early morning was a solemn march to the barn because you knew you were in for a beating.

"This Is An Uprising" the most important book to read right now.

This book is dense but at the very end in a chapter titled "Conclusion" the key points of successful non-violent resistance are summarized as such:

"Momentum driven organizing uses tools of civil resistance to consciously spark, amplify, and harness mass protest. It highlights the importance of hybrid organizations... which can build decentralized networks to sustain protest mobilizations through multiple waves of activity. It goes beyond transactional goals by also advancing a transformational agenda, and it wins by swaying public opinion and pulling the pillars of support. It is attentive to the symbolic properties of campaigns, showing how these can sometimes be just as important as instrumental demands, if not more so. It uses disruption, sacrifice, and escalation to build tension and bring overlooked issues into the public spotlight. It aspires, at its peak, to create moments of the whirlwind, when outbreaks of decentralized action extend far outside the institutional limits of any one organization. It is willing to polarize public opinion and risk controversy with bold protest, but it maintains non-violent discipline to ensure that it does not undermine broad-based support for its cause. And it is conscious of the need to work with other organizing traditions in order to institutionalize gains and foster alternative communities that can sustain resistance over the long term."

Got that? Good, now lets bring down Big Oil!

Summer of 2012

I had returned to California after the long trip across country and was feeling, well, a bit randy. It was a hot summer and Big Sur was charged as ever with energy that drew me in. Celebrating my 27th birthday aboard the Raindancer with my Dad, brother Forrest and great friend Sam. We smoked and joked on the calm seas as we cut along, three sails in the wind. Later Sam and I found ourselves buzzed to our boots in the dark wood of a Big Sur bar. I was smoking my lungs off, laughing, drinking, cackling, birthday stuff. The next weekend found us dancing and drumming beneath the full blue moon wild and free. We were on our way to Oakland to play a show with our new outfit 'Nature Fortress', a name we came to in the hulk of a large driftwood shelter on the soft sand out at the Cove. We woke in the morning feeling fresh, having slept a little by the river and using its cold water to splash the sleep from our faces. The venue in the city was small, attended by the local activist crowd. We played our short set of technical chanty melodies and never missed a beet. At least one guy was really impressed. That night we drove all the way back to Big Sur and hurled ourselves into a crowd who gathered electrified, jostling at the foot of some space-time traveling band from Tokyo. I worked my way to the front with my double sided wolf sweatshirt and danced like a lunatic. I had a charge going that drew in the eyes of the curious and before long I was sitting by a lovely lady getting a little touchy feely. Out of the blur and on to the road we went, south to Esalen. Miraculously the gate guard just let us in, no charge no questions. We went straight for the pools and it being three in the morning found ourselves alone, bonded at the lips, really enjoying the night. We made our way back to the valley in the pale dawn and slept maybe an hour tangled on the car seat. I found Sam sleeping in his Honda in the morning and I closed the door as I sat down beside him feeling like I had just stepped off of a carnival ride of carnal bliss.

Low Tom Strap On

Booyakatran!

Woodland Camouflage

When passing through the forest you may find peace of mind through silence and care of motion. If you sit in stillness for some time you may notice that other animals are unaware of your existence. However, your scent on the wind is enough to alarm most mammals, and off colors can easily be seen by the birds. It is best then to mask your scent with dry pitch or plant material. Clay can be used to break up your skin-tone and obscure the transitions from one feature to the next; the sharpness of your bodies shape can alert any watchful creature. This practice allows for deeper observations of nature and the means to merge with your surroundings. 

Wild Blackberry Elixir

Yes my friends, the summer fruit is ripe. My fingers and lips are stained by the abundant blackberries that grow dark and sweet on the trail side.  A little while ago I was up the coast at a bar in Gualala, the owner was a slick old bachelor who appeared to be generously sampling his own stock. He strolled over and after flipping a glass high in the air Vegas-style, poured me a shot of cranberry infused vodka, I was impressed by it's simple but rich flavor.  It gave me the idea to do the same with wild blackberries. The process is simple enough; pick a jar full of berries and steep them in vodka, but this elixir has a special ingredient. While tearing the highly invasive Cape Ivy from a rose bush outside my Mom's house I stopped to smell the small pink flowers. The scent reminded me of the taste of a perfectly ripe blackberry. So i picked some, added it to the jar and gave it another day to fully absorb the flavors.

The berries were picked on the first quarter of a late July moon. A spiraling pressure system off the coast cast bands of negative ions through the wooded valley.

                                                                    A connoisseur 

 

The look of a ripe berry. 

                                                                  A jar full of berries

 

Bounty!

 

Rinse and strain

                                       Fill jar until berries are covered with vodka (I used Tito's)

 

After two days of infusion I picked rose petals to add.

                                         A handful at the top and another day of infusion.

                                                                     Pour and filter

                                                                      Ruby Elixir

                                                                    The first taste

                                                                           Cheers

Sammy and I agreed that it was the finest spirits we had ever tasted. That being said, I believe another batch is in the works.

In the Pines

In the Pines

I sat reading at a coffee shop in Savannah Georgia. Shaking slightly from my second cup of green tea, I finished the last chapter, shut the cover and gave it to a friend. I walked outside for some air and ended up in a conversation with someone. I mentioned that I was looking for a new book, they told me to come to their house to find one. After a good walk across town I was in their living room in front of a bookshelf. From the collection of titles one stood out, "The Vision" by Tom Brown Jr. I carried it over to a man with a hollowed-out tree for a digeridoo and asked if I could take it, he consented enthusiastically.  I was immediately engrossed in the stories, reading whenever I had the chance. When I finished it in Charleston, I went straight to a computer and signed up for a class at the school the author had created. A month later I was there in the Pine Barrens at the very spot where Tom had camped with his friend Rick, learning from an old Apache scout who they called Grandfather. From what I had read, Grandfather's knowledge seemed as endless and powerful as all the wild places of the Earth. He existed in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual and was able to sense what was happening anywhere in the forest. The path he took to reach this heightened level of awareness was imparted to Tom. Now this knowledge was being passed on through a series of courses to whomever attended the Tracker School. The shear volume of information that the instructors presented was staggering. We would wake up early and receive instruction on a wide variety of subjects well into the night. Fire, shelter, water, food, every detail of living off the land, even down to the way your eyes should perceive. "Wide-angle vision" as it is called, was one of the most emphasized skills of awareness. By taking your focus away from one central point and diffusing it out to the edges of your periphery, you can pick up the subtlest of movements. If you combine this with the silent, deliberate gait that they call the "fox-walk" you can pass through nature without disturbing it. The students slept amidst the pines wherever they pitched their tents, bathed in a beautiful amber stream lined by cedars and moss, and drank from a hand pumped well. The one thing that bothered me was my constant concern of tics, it seemed like everyone was talking about lyme disease. I had to check my whole body several times a day, often in the company of others doing the same. Fortunately the beauty of the pines and the freshness of the air kept my spirits high. As the week progressed I noticed a change in the level of my vibration. By the last night, I had reached such a high frequency that it was hard to stay still. In the golden glow of the setting sun, I danced around a large pile of embers, the birds and the trees my only witnesses.

Bow drill demonstration

My fire board

Trap making

Surprise

Well blended

Tree man

Debris hut

My figure four trap

Heat ripples

Professor chicken

Cooking with clay

The Pine Barrens

Wild herbs

Amber water

Take a dip

the group

Acro yoga