A Route Less Traveled

Those who know me find my plan to attend my fifty-year fifty-one-year high school reunion, out of character. After all, I am a guy who went 134 consecutive days without leaving this mountain at the start of the pandemic. The only reason I left then was to spend a Sunday afternoon on the Eel River.

Prior to this January, when I flew down to Orange County to visit Denise, my long-distance sweetheart, the last time I was in SoCal was in 2003 (California League of Middle Schools Conference), and before that, 1993. Accompanied by my family, I had stopped and visited with John and Brenda Hartnett, on our way back from a school district-funded workshop in New Mexico. 

The light is on in my home.

So why am I interested in a reunion of folks, only a dozen or so whom I have seen over the past fifty years? I want to attend because I have traveled a path that differs from most of my fellow graduates: In 1975 I bought twenty acres of undeveloped land in northernmost Mendocino County, five miles up a dirt road, off the grid. We relocated in May of 1982. I must travel an additional eleven miles on Highway 101, to the nearest place where I can buy a pound of coffee or some organic produce. 

Though I did not realize it at the time, I was part of the back-to-the-land movement.

I began my work career somewhat conventionally at age 14 with a six-year stint at Sunrize (sic) Market in Valinda, before going on to become a war monger (I was drafted), and then an auto parts clerk for eight years up in San Jose. During this period of time the price of poker went up dramatically, as my folks and three of my siblings got together and went land-hunting, settling on four twenty-acre parcels, three-and-a-half hours north of San Francisco.  

With my brothers, I built my house.

Up here I spent eight years working in construction, doing everything from framing homes, to concrete work, to interior finish work. I transitioned into education in 1989 and became a middle school teacher in the California public school system, in Laytonville, for sixteen years. Though I taught all three levels, my favorite by far were the eighth graders. I will take thirty-seven snarling eighth graders (the number I taught my last year in 2005) over twenty docile kindergartners, any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

I retired in 2005 and became a farmer here at HappyDayFarms for fifteen years before transmogrifying into a chef, cooking for the crew here on-farm.

In the office

While serving in the military, I spent sixteen months overseas in South Korea, where I earned an Army Commendation Medal for work within the 199th Personnel Service Company. Upon early discharge for returning from overseas with fewer than ninety days left, I did two last quarters at Cal Poly, Pomona, before moving up to San Jose in 1974. There I attended San Jose State University for the next eight years, first obtaining a BA in Humanities in 1979, and then working two years in a masters program in English.

Here on our property, solar power provides electricity, while two springs supply us with fresh water all year round. A two-and-a-half-million-gallon pond, put in ten years ago, supplies the ag water necessary to operate HappyDayFarms. Owned and operated by my three sons and a daughter-in-law, we grow a vast array of vegetables, herbs, and fruit all year round, participating weekly in two local farmers’ markets. Included in our repertoire is medicinal cannabis, a commodity grown on this property since 1977, five years before I ever moved up. 

As featured on Sixty Minutes, in a segment aired in October of 2019, HappyDayFarms is family-owned and operated, just as it was in July of 1985. At that point in time, a helicopter from CAMP (California Against Marijuana Planting) landed on the parcel adjacent to mine, seized my thirty-three cannabis plants, nine hundred dollars and left a notice on my destroyed front gate. The note stated that my home and twenty acres were now the property of the United States Government, signed by Attorney General Peter Robinson.

Seventeen thousand dollars and nine months to the day later, the land seizure went away, due to the work of local lawyer, Ron Sinnoway. Some of that loot was contributed to our legal defense by friends in the community, who simply figured that if it could happen to Mark and Annie, it could happen to anyone.

In an effort to repay those who had contributed, I took a position with the local school district, as a liaison between the school district and our little two-room school up here on the mountain. In doing so I committed to returning to Dominican College in Talmadge, to obtain my California Teaching Credential. 

Once I earned my Credential and the little mountain school was forced to close due to local politics, I took a position in the middle school in Laytonville. I taught language arts, reading, social studies and an elective, either Spanish or drama. Every year my students performed a full-length Shakespeare production in the language of the Renaissance. 

For ten years I team-taught with another teacher. Between the two of us, we had sixty sixth, seventh and eighth graders, grouped together as classmates, with me teaching language arts and social studies while Paul taught math and science. We took our students to Yosemite each year for a week. 

Our program not only combined sixth, seventh and eighth graders, we also taught a project-based, literature-based reading program, used hands-on methodologies and tried to get students out of the classroom as much as possible. I would still be teaching today were it not for standardized testing, which drove me out of the classroom in 2005 for good.

That worked out well because I shifted from education to farming, once my oldest son started up HappyDayFarms. Whereas I generally tended around thirty cannabis plants each summer, my particular area of interest was tomatoes. The last year I worked outside, 2019, I grew 300 tomato plants. Approximately one-third were Ace slicers, one-third were Heinz varietal for sauces and catsup, and the rest were a combination of cherry tomatoes, Romas and drying tomatoes. 

In my kitchen last summer I put up thirty-three gallons of after-market tomato products, including marinara sauce, catsup, cold-pack tomatoes, hot-pack tomatoes, jalapeño salsa, Jalapeño hot sauce, tomato paste and pizza sauce. HappyDayFarms sells these in our farm-stand up here on Bell Springs Road.

My wife Annie, who passed in the early days of 2020, and I raised our three sons up here on this mountain, and were rewarded when they all went off to college but returned eventually to this mountain to farm. I spend time daily with my only grandson, Ollie Mac. I cook for the farm crew, blog, paint with water colors, build, take photographs, garden, play bridge and connect with family and friends on social media. 

I did travel to Sacramento to participate
in the Women's March, January 21, 2017.

I do not travel much, so the excursion down to SoCal this October, is noteworthy. Having made the same journey as my fellow graduates, in terms of fifty-one years, I think I owe it to myself to be present at this gathering.

My path over these past five decades has transported me at times to the highest of pinnacles, and to the deepest of gorges.  I am no different from all the other graduates of 1970 in this regard; I recognize that clearly.

I just chose a route less traveled by most.

Ollie Mac and the author of Mark's Work