Spotlight by Default

HappyDay Farms will be at Area 101, eight miles north of Laytonville on The 101, all day this coming Saturday, celebrating Summer Market Day. We will be bringing an assortment of farm products, from freshly cut flowers, to preserves and fresh produce. We will also be featuring several strains of our medicinal cannabis.

Though I abhor the spotlight in every way, this setting can’t help but deflect a little of the glare from the bright lights in my direction. I am, after all, one reason why HeadSodBuster and BossLady are the proprietors of a burgeoning organic farm.

It’s one thing to have a dream to accomplish great endeavors; it’s another matter to have the land available to set the process in motion. Let’s just say that wanting to farm and not having any land, is like that Beatles song in which, “I’ve got no car and it’s breaking my heart, but I’ve got a driver and that’s a start…”

I share a small portion of that spotlight by default, simply because it was not an effort to “return to the land,” that brought Gluten-Free Mama and me up here in the first place, so much as an effort to “get out of Dodge.” We did not want to raise kids on the streets of San Jose, preferring the rolling hills of Mendo.

The original, sans windows...

Nestled in those hills was a 16-by-20-foot cabin, built by me and my brothers the previous summer, with no windows, no running water, no stove, no power, no shelves and no furniture. Into this tiny, dark box GF Mama and I moved, in May of 1982, with HeadSodBuster scheduled to make his debut in September. *

It took almost five months, sometime in October, before I got a hot water heater and a bathtub installed, and we could actually call ourselves civilized. For almost the first month of his life, HeadSodBuster was given baths with water heated up on the top of a stove.

Ah, pioneering! You have to love it.

So now, in a venue such as Area 101, I will sit behind the scenes in the back of our booth, helping out as needed, and bask in the shadow of what HeadSodBuster, BossLady and SmallBoy are accomplishing. 

Should the topic of “back to the land” arise, and it inevitably does, I will smile and accept the respect being directed at me, while knowing inside that it was more like the “Great Escape,” than “How the West Was Won.”

* It’s long and detailed: everything you wanted to know about pioneering… http://markyswrite.blogspot.com/2011/07/blue-rock-ridge.html

Who? Me?