Memories of Happy Acres

Memories of Happy Acres by Mike Stevens

     When I first moved into happy acres (a 3.1 acre homestead off Highway 1 in Mill Valley, CA) it was the spring of 1974.  My landlord was the son of the man who had homesteaded it in 1935.  He had just run off the last tenants when he found out they had broken into the basement and sold a bunch of stuff that belonged to his late father.  The old homestead had been the only thing between Highway 1 and the Diaz, ranch that ran from the dirt road outside the house to Muir beach, where the Green Gulch Zen center is now.  It had no sewer hook-up, no water line and no electricity.  
     

     Tony Quadros  made do with a rain catch cistern made from a wine barrel from Sonoma that was about 12 feet high and 20 feet across.  The sewer was a 50-gallon drum buried about 2 feet underground with no discernable leach lines.  A huge blackberry bush (actually a whole cluster of them) about fifty feet in diameter and twelve feet high, had grown up around the septic tank, concealing it from view.  Even during the drought years of the seventies, when Marin County’s reservoirs were dry, this blackberry bush kept growing like wildfire. I hired a Vietnam vet who was down on his luck to help me hack the monster blackberry hedge down with machetes.  I wanted to clear the land so I could board horses there for a little extra money.  

     When we finally, with our trusty machetes,hacked our way to the heart of the beast, I found out why this thing had flourished for so long through thick and thin.  The septic tank was rusted through and all the ‘effluent’ from the house had been oozing across the ground feeding this bush.  We also found a cherry tomato plant growing right over the tank.  The tomatoes were quite delicious despite their questionable fertilizer.  It also gave me an idea that this place would be a pretty good place for a vegetable garden.  More on this later.  Electricity was provided by a donkey engine that turned a leather strap that turned an electric generator.  It could also be switched over to a flywheel made from an old train wheel that turned an Alaskan chain saw that was used to mill the wood that built the house and surrounding outbuildings.
  

Tony had milk cows, ducks, geese, chickens and goats.  Later when he was old and sort of the neighborhood curmudgeon he kept huge pigs.  When local kids would cut across his property he would come out on the back stairway landing with his shotgun, which was loaded with rock salt, and shoot above the kids' heads to chase them away.  One of them told me years later that his parents used to tell him if he wasn’t good they’d take him up to old man Quadros’ place and feed him to the pigs.

Tony, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Mussolini, was a big barrel chested immigrant from the Azore Islands off the coast of Portugal.  He was the police chief in Sausalito in the thirties and considered himself a tough guy.  He used to strut around his homestead all year in just an Italian undershirt and some old faded overalls.  He buried three wives while living on the property.  One shot herself while sitting in a pickup truck in front of the house.  He had feuded with his brothers in S.F. in the last years of his life to the point where they didn’t even know of his death till years later.  His son knew it was time to make other arrangements for the old man when he came by one day to check on him.  One of the side frames on his glasses had broken and Tony had dealt with the problem by attaching a piece of string to the front piece and tying a nail to the other end which he hung behind his ear.

Tony could never get old man Diaz, the neighboring ranch owner, to impregnate his cows with Diaz’s prize stud bull, so every year or so, Tony would break down the fence  between the two properties while his cow was in heat and the bull would come over and service the cow, whereupon, Tony would call up Diaz and blame his bull for breaking down the fence.
  

In his old age Tony got a little dotty and took to some strange ways.  He would go around the neighborhood with his old beat up pickup truck and collect any kind of junk that people wanted to get rid of:  cement wash basins, rusted out appliances like ringer washers, freezers, ice boxes and piles and piles of wood that sat there slowly rotting for years.  The cow/horse pasture resembled what lawyers call an attractive nuisance.  Wandering through the pasture checking out these old appliances, I half expected to find a little human skeleton locked into one of the old freezer units.  When I decided to clean up the place to use as a horse pasture it took me eight large grange boxes to haul all the stuff away.

When my girlfriend and I moved in we were just renting the house (monthly rent was $ 125/mo).  The pasture was occupied by the last remnants of a former ranch up in Oregon, a cow, a bull and two quarter horses.  One morning in the spring of ’74 I looked out the living room window to see the cow lying dead on the ground with a piece of plywood on top of it and the bull standing on the plywood looking down at the cow as if to say “Hey wake up!  What are you doing sleeping on the job!?”  Eventually the tallow truck showed up and the driver paid out about  300 feet of cable from the winch in front of the truck and hooked it up to some chain with which they had bound up the cow’s hooves.  As the winch started dragging that cow up the hill the bull went nuts and started running around and bellowing.  This caused the quarter horses to swing into action and they took turns shooing the bull away from the cow.  He would run around to the other side of the barn and then the other quarter horse would shoo him away.  I dare say these were the last cattle in Mill Valley.  I knew I had found a home.

The house itself was in pretty bad shape.  There was no insulation in it and the pine paneled walls let the breeze in between the planks.  The windows in the living room over looking the pasture were consumed with dry rot and you could stick your hand out through the rotted sill.  The wooden house frame sat on a set of small square stones that had sunk into the ground giving the house a bit of a lean.  Several of the floor joists were broken through and resting on the ground.  Of the four hippies who had been sharing it, one was living in the dining room with a small herd of puppies. They had been relieving themselves on the old threadbare Persian rug in the dining room and the upstairs reeked of puppy urine.  The guy living there had decided the air was too dry and had several open pans of water sitting on the heater to increase the humidity.  In one of the downstairs rooms I found several bags hanging in the closet which were filled with dehumidifying rocks.  So we had the upstairs humidifier versus the downstairs dehumidifier.  I later years when asked to describe where I lived, I would tell people to imagine an Appalachian moonshiner's cabin--but a nice one...

The local fauna would occasionally take up residence in the basement, which was now open to us tenants.  I once found the jawbone of a possum in there.  Occasionally you could hear the sound of fur brushing against the walls and if you put your ear to the dining room floor you could sometimes hear breathing below you.  Several times baby raccoons took up residence under the stairs on the side of the house and would wake us up with strange mewing noises in the morning, calling for their mother who had gone off to forage for food.  Once I pulled up the stairs to find 3 blind baby raccoons all clumped together crying for their mama.  I put them in a box and that night she came and got them and took them away.
  

Speaking of raccoons, once I went out to check the horses’ water trough only to find a drowned raccoon floating in the water.  I had to drag the carcass, dripping wet, weighing about 40 pounds, over to the side of Hwy 1 so the Cal Trans road kill crew could dispose of it.  The raccoons showed up again a few years later when I had eight chickens living in the old dairy barn.  I got up one morning and was heading down to the garden to feed the chickens when I saw about 20 big black turkey vultures roosting on the roof of their shed.  I had a sinking feeling in my stomach and sure enough when I got down there, there were my chickens ripped to pieces with their parts strewn all over the garden.  At least with the gray fox he was smart enough to take the eggs and leave the egg layers alone, as I found out one day as I saw him crossing the road, leaving behind a trail of broken chicken eggs.

I had been employed in the world of finance and accounting for years, with each job getting shorter than the last.  In 1991 I finally saw the handwriting on the wall and gracefully accepted an offer of disemployment from the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco and set about to make myself self sufficient on my little Happy Acres homestead.  Helped by my beloved brother who was bivouacking here at the time, we built a 24 x 36 ft. rental unit on the property, artfully situated so that no one else could see it.

     Armed with the rent from that unit and from the house, studio and horse pasture I was independent of the corporate world.  This allowed me to expand my vegetable garden.  A friend of mine (who lived on the property in a felt yurt kit he had purchased and cobbled together) and I had started a small garden in 1980 or so.  I decided to expand on that original garden and fenced off roughly 20,000 square feet on a fairly flat and sunny portion of the horse pasture overlooking highway 1.

     For the next year I threw myself into expanding on the original garden.  I put in a small fruit orchard and a thousand square foot greenhouse.  In the main garden area I laid out a series of raised beds about seventy feet long and five feet wide.  I spent the winter of 1991/92 digging out the rocks and double digging all the beds laying in tons of compost most of which I obtained from the four horses I had boarded on the property.  The rest I got from the Muir beach stables.  Every year for as long as I had the horses I would collect all the manure by flat shovel and garden cart and deposit it in a large pile directly below the garden.  It averaged, when finished for the year, 80 feet long, 15 feet wide and 3 feet high.

     After the initial plume of decomposition had died down I would go out in the Winter with my hoe and a hose and turn the whole thing over and the second plume of decomposition would commence.  As I worked my way, six inches at a time, through this pile I would be enveloped in a cloud of steam from the heat of the pile.  By Spring I had all the composted horse manure the garden needed.  I would layer each bed with a thick dressing of the stuff and spade it over by hand before roto-tilling each bed.  I ended up having so much produce I used to sell it to the neighbors.  I had about twenty local families in the neighborhood that I would deliver a bag of groceries to once a week.  At its peak, the garden had over a hundred different varieties of fruits, herbs and vegetables growing.  When I had my serum cholesterol tested my doctor said I had the highest levels of HDL’s (the good kind) of anyone he’d ever heard of.  The employees at my local grocery store couldn’t believe how I survived all those years, as all I bought from them was booze, meat and tobacco.
    

Deer have also been prime occupants of the land.  Late one night in '74 we were awakened by the sound of sirens.  The house below the pasture, which was owned by Vince Guaraldi the jazz pianist, had caught fire and it and the surrounding Eucalyptus trees were going up like Roman candles.  Meanwhile a whole herd of deer came running across the highway onto the horse pasture right past us.  Over the years the deer have had moderate success getting into the garden.  One of them got his head caught in the garden fence and I had to pick him up and unhook his head from the fence.  He showed his appreciation by pooping all over my pants.  I had to carry him out of the garden with him bleating plaintively the whole time.

Then there was the time the two dogs living on the property chased a deer across the pasture down to the highway where it leaped out onto the road and was struck by a passing car.  I got down there just in time to see it expire on the neighbor’s driveway.  One morning I saw the motion sensing garden light come on which I knew meant some intruder was in there.  Sure enough about five deer had snuck in and were chowing down on my strawberries.  As I went to chase them out, as they ran by me one of them stepped on my ankle with his pointed little hoof.  I still have the scar.  Earlier this year coming back from a friend’s house, I found a baby deer standing in the middle of the road.  Its mother was nowhere to be found so I picked it up and took it home.  I got a baby bottle and fed it some formula.  Not knowing what else to do with it at that hour of the night I took it to bed with me.  Early the next morning it started crying plaintively, convulsed a few times and died in my arms.  I don’t recommend this approach to saving baby deer as it is very sad and there are the fleas they leave behind in your bed.

     Some years back, in the fall, I heard a strange sound coming from the pasture like the sound of giant knitting needles.  When I went out back I discovered two adult male deer jousting.  The females ran up out of the pasture, past me in the back yard and disappeared into the forest.  One of the males locked his legs and the other pushed him back, skidding about three feet.  After the loser ran off below into the woods, the victor put his head down and followed his nose up the scent trail of the retreating does.  As I stood stock still he kept coming, following the scent, and trotted right past me, his eight point antlers missing my thigh by about two inches.  For awhile I fed them rolled oats out in the back yard like we used to feed the horses.  They got so tame that if I sat very still next to the feeding trays they would actually come up and sniff my shoes.

Then there was the time I heard a knock on the door one morning.  It was a woman who said she was driving up from Muir beach and found the four horses that were boarding here grazing on Hwy 1 near the beach.  Being a horse owner herself she didn’t panic.  Instead she herded them back up here in her car.  One of the owners, it turned out, had accidentally left the horse gate open the night before and the horses had gotten out and sauntered the five or six miles down to Muir beach.  Another time someone left the gate open and one of the horses got out and started cantering down highway 1.;  a very lonely and distressing sound for me to hear.  Luckily the horse realized, eventually, that there was no place like home.

The Eucalyptus trees on the property have furnished a certain amount of entertainment also as several have, over the years, come crashing to the ground or had huge limbs come down.  A couple moved in across the street in the late seventies and the wife was very concerned that a huge tree limb that hung over the road and part of her yard was going to blow down in one of our Winter wind storms and wipe out her new fence and her prized rose bushes.  She kept badgering and threatening my landlord until finally we decided to have the limb cut down to get her off our backs.  I hired a friend of mine who sidelined in tree trimming.  He climbed about 80 feet up the offending tree and attached a long rope to the limb.  Five of us stood in the next door driveway pulling on the rope while my friend cut down the limb.  Which promptly fell on her new fence, wiping out her prized rose bushes.

 One limb almost hit a fellow who was driving a backhoe on the property at the time.  It came so close to him it sheered off the hydraulic hoses that powered the backhoe’s digging arm six inches from his head.   After I had to get rid of the horses for insurance purposes a huge limb came crashing down right where their feeding troughs had been.   I and/ or the horses would have bought the farm if the timing was right as I was the guy who fed the horses.  It took all day with a chain saw and a log splitter to render that tree limb into firewood.  I’m still burning the wood today two years later.  The dead fall from the trees surrounding this place have provided me with firewood for over thirty years.  For over twenty years the big hand-built fireplace in the living room was its only source of heat and I’ve never had to buy a stick of firewood.

After I had finished playing music for a living, to keep my hand in the business, two friends and I started a recording studio in the garage.  The landlord was accommodating but a bit overwhelmed at what to do with all the stuff his dad had accumulated over the years as a homesteader.  Throwing open the garage door was like opening a Pandora’s box from the past.  Trays of copper locksets and latches, horsehair stuffed sofas and chairs, huge circular saw blades, rusted piles of chain and barbed wire etc.

     My landlord and his long-suffering wife were overwhelmed at the task of separating this stuff and deciding what to do with it.  Eager to get to work on our new studio, I suggested that we separate everything into three piles.  A keep pile (furniture and such) a throw away pile (rusty barbed wire) and a pile to decide what to do with later (everything else).  Norm was still overwhelmed at the prospect of going through his departed dad’s stuff.  I decided to start things off to prime the pump, as it were, and I grabbed the funkiest dirty rusted out pile of chain I could find and told Norm, “It’s just a matter of starting with the worst and working our way through it.  Here’s a prime candidate for the throw away pile”, and I put the pile of rusty chain down outside.  Norm said, “I might want to keep that…”.

     We eventually got the job done and my partners  and I got to work on building our little recording studio.   We had a lot of fun recording ourselves and others including Michael Bloomfield, Commander Cody and his lost planet airmen and a mother daughter combo that wanted to be back-up singers.  They went on to become Naomi and Wynona Judd, the popular country duo.  I was the mom's boyfriend for about a year and even made it into her autobiography.  The sheriffs used to show up some nights when things would get a little loud and rowdy.  Eventually the neighbors across the street complained to the county and we were forced to vacate the premises.  Later I turned the place into an in-law unit and rented it out to a series of musicians.  Beautiful music is still being made there today only now it’s recorded on a computer.

In addition to the duplex rental unit I had built, I had decided to expand my little legally dubious empire by putting up a yurt and some out buildings down in the garden.   Unfortunately the County Planning Commission took notice and wrote me up for multiple zoning code violations.  (The memo said I was guilty of operating an illegal dumpsite, among other sins…)  I had to evict everybody and remove several kitchens and bathrooms and worst of all, my beautiful yurt, which was all fixed up but no one ever had a chance to live in.  A month later the insurance company said there was a liability exposure for the landlord if the horses were to hurt somebody and, sadly I had to evict them too.

That, at the time (2001), was pretty much the end of Happy Acres as it had become.  It was as if there had been a death in the family.  When I told my brother, a journalist, about it, he wrote a little memorial story (the first entry in this blog) about the place so many of us had come to know and love. (I've had over 50 tenants in my 36 years here).  It was a beautiful elegy for an old homestead that had become an anachronism in modern Mill Valley.  Fortunately the coda to this story is a happy one.  After several years the county lost interest in my ‘rehabilitation’ and I was eventually able to resurrect my rental units.  Now all that is missing is the sound of my beloved horses, gently nickering in the afternoon breeze.