The Slow Farewell Continues: The Garden

     My trusty landlord of forty years here at Happy Acres died last year at 92.  He was kind enough to rent me this canvas on which to paint.  Some things I chose to incorporate into my painting (the old dairy barn, for one) and some I hoped to eradicate (huge blackberry bushes--partial success--in the end, just as rust never sleeps; neither does blackberry).  

     Now my fate as "The Mayor of Happy Acres" lies in the hands of the prodigal son.  Appraisals have been made ($ 1.5M aprox.) and surveyors have combed the place from low to high and side to side.  The hand writing is on the wall.  Already a grandson and his wife have claimed the old butcher block that anchored our kitchen for so many years.  Truth be told it was a bit of a mill stone.  When we redid the kitchen I had my maintenance man, "The Colonel", who lives in an annex next to the old dairy barn, do the remodeling. 

     I instructed him to make all the counter tops and kitchen sink and even the stove to be ten inches above normal to better serve us bachelor chefs who are all over six feet in height.  Julia Child, who was also a plus-six-footer, did the same to her kitchen which now resides in the Smithsonian Museum.  My kitchen, alas, will most probably not make it to the Smithsonian unless perhaps as a showcase for "upscale Appalachian moon-shiner's kitchen cabin chic".  "If it's good enough for Julia Child, it's sure as hell way too good for me", I mused.

     I imagine the grandson and wife might well be dreaming of taking over this old homestead which is his birthright, after all.  His dad (my landlord) is my age, latter sixties, and is comfortably retired with his wife in a rustic little community on the edge of national parkland in Montana.  He's not likely to want to pull up stakes and deal with this Jackson Pollack of a painting that I have created.

     I can imagine a scene at the grandson's house.  It's late evening; the couple is cuddled up in bed; wife gently puts her leg over hubby and commences to stroke his leg:  "Honey, you know the old homestead?  The one you'll one day own?  What do you think of this idea.  We take the place over; kick out those old bums who've been living there for way too long; we take out a mortgage on the value of the property and use that money to knock down that old moonshiner's shack; bulldoze the place clean of all the mischief your granddad allowed to go one up there and build ourselves a beautiful trophy house where our kids could grow up in style and go to nifty Mill Valley schools?   Ya think yer dad would go for that.  Hmm, snooky?"

     With that scenario always lurking somewhere in my age-addled pea brain, I have started divorce proceedings from Happy Acres.  The first casualty of this disengagement has been my beloved fruit orchard and vegetable garden.  I officially concede defeat to the blackberry, bindweed, crabgrass and spearmint.  "So long fellas.  It was a tough match and I and my occasional teammates were able to  hold you at bay these forty some years but the time has come to admit defeat.  You won.  Enjoy all those year's of horse manure compost.  I know you'll make the best of it."  

     My brother was recently back in residence briefly for our annual bromance birthday get together.  

The "bros" hanging out in the old horse pasture with recording studio in the background.  A farewell selfy from the birthday weekend.

I set up the movie camera on a tripod in the back yard to film us as we drank our wine and beer and reminisced about this and that.  Timmy, took the occasion to write a little piece for his newspaper, "The Cedar Street Times" which serves his community of Pacific Grove, a stunningly beautiful town wedged between Pebble Beach, the Seventeen Mile Drive, (which is so exclusive, the hoi polloi have to pay for the privilege of driving on it) and on the other side; Monterey.  If you were to stand on a ladder on the roof of my brother's lovely Queen Ann mansion (he rents a portion) you would see otters and baby seals cavorting in tranquil kelp beds.  You'd see surfers and bikers; golfers and dog walkers and you would even see the great and famous Monterey Bay Aquarium which was built with some of the Hewlett-Packard fortune.

     When I am finally dragged, kicking and screaming, from my old homestead, Timmy's part of the country strongly appeals to me.  A modest cottage or garden apartment studio can be had for about a grand a month anywhere along California's beautiful central coast.  My days and nights of patronizing the charms of San Francisco are pretty much over, save for the occasional ferry ride from Sausalito to take in a baseball game or perhaps a "pedi-cab" ride to pier 39 to see (and smell...) the sea lions, as Timmy and I did last Sunday. 

     I also have a very dear friend who is retiring next year from the local constabulary of constables with full pension benefits.  She will be moving to the Pismo Beach area to take care of her aging mother.  I might just tag along with her, if she'll let me...  But I digress...  What I've been meaning to do with this preamble is to introduce my brother's latest newspaper article.  Enjoy.  I always do.  

     Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres

The garden as Google's all-seeing eye views it.  Green house in lower right.  Bee hives to the right of that.

     Otter Views – Farewell to the garden

Tom Stevens for CST

My brother Mike’s birthday falls at the front end of September; mine at the back. We customarily meet at some calendar mid-point for a commemorative meal, some football viewing and a few laughs. 

I usually drive up to the place he rents near Mill Valley. It’s an old ranch homestead from the 1930s, probably the last one standing of that vintage. The homestead still has its three original acres, a hand-made wooden house with a stone fireplace, and several rickety outbuildings. Mike calls the place “Happy Acres.”

Ringed by “widow maker” eucalyptus trees as lofty as ship’s masts, the homestead slopes down a brushy ridge above Tennessee Valley. A cool Pacific wind blows through the trees at all hours, rattling the leaves like castanets. Snaking through bay trees and California oaks, Highway One switchbacks past on its way to Muir Beach.

One of the "widow makers" my brother refers to.  This one branch was about a hundred feet long and fell directly over the horse feeding area.  Luckily neither man nor beast was in attendance at the time.

Mike’s resourcefulness and the absentee owners’ fondness for the old homestead have enabled my brother to live there since 1974 on a handshake rental agreement. Having lived in 20 different places over that same period, I’m always amazed at how little Mike’s hillside world changes over time. It’s like a perpetual snow globe of eucalyptus leaves.

Before I drove up there last Saturday, though, he called and prepped me for one change. “I had to let the garden go,” he said. “In my dodgy physical condition, I just couldn’t keep up with it anymore.”

The news saddened me, but I wasn’t surprised. Heart problems have slowed Mike over the past couple of years, and the garden was a heavy workout even in the best of times. 

“I understand,” I said. “You need to look after your health. You can’t be bucking a tiller, weeding brassica beds, patching the greenhouse and shoveling horse pucky into wind rows all day.”

“True. But what golden memories I’ll have of all that.”

Housemate and chum, Johnny Surf, and I do a little later afternoon summer harvesting.  (pictures scroll to the right)

Indeed, if a garden can be a repository for memories, that one certainly was, or is. The garden’s still there, but it’s quickly losing definition as scotch broom and native grasses overrun the beds where produce, berries and flowers once dwelt.

In its glory, probably around year 15 of its run, the garden occupied 10,000 square feet of rich, soft, well-worked soil on a sunny flat near the bottom of the three-acre slope. Eight-foot high fencing and a rickety gate safeguarded it from deer unless someone forgot to latch the gate. Then the deer ate very well.

As soon as that pesky photographer leaves let's hit the garden.  I found a hole in the fence we can squeeze through.  Dibs on the lettuce!

The garden expanded incrementally over the decades, adding planting beds, crop rows, berry trellises and fruit trees as time and energy allowed. Mike did most of this by himself. But when renters or visiting brothers could be pressed into service, new features could be added.

Around year 20, during one of my stays at Happy Acres, the tomatoes and peppers got their own greenhouse. This was a big swaybacked structure framed from salvaged lumber and old sash windows. The roof was visqueen plastic as tough as elephant toenails. 

The greenhouse was funky-looking even when new, but it worked. On the coldest, grayest, stormiest winter days, the tomatoes and peppers basked in 70 degree humidity. It was Miami in Marin. One garden helper set up a lawn chair and a portable radio in there.

As of last weekend, the greenhouse still stood, but years of punishment by the elements had popped some seams. Several windows sagged out of true, and the visqueen flapped like a ghost ship’s sails. Tomatoes, peppers and lawn chair were gone, and gangster blackberries were busting through the walls. It looked like entropy in action.



Here's what greeted me when I got back from a three month trip abroad in '93.

 
   Armed with his trusty seed catalogues, soil amendments and garden tools, Mike long held entropy and blackberries at bay. On any summer evening of any given year, he could tote to his kitchen a wicker basket full of ripe apples, peaches, plums and pears; root crops, row crops and vine crops; herbs, berries,  and cut flowers. Once I counted nine potato varieties in the same harvest.  

When his health and bull-like strength declined, Mike recruited helpers to keep the venture going. The selling point was organic soil that had been worked, composted, mulched, tilled, sifted, worm-casted, fortified and pampered for three decades. The helpers divvied the plots into a sort of community garden, and the harvest continued.

But while Happy Acres maintained its snow globe status quo, those same decades saw the surrounding neighborhood gentrify as dot-com millionaires built showy hillside mansions. Trophy wives in glossy Land Rovers looked askance at the gardeners’ dusty jalopies. At length, the gardeners and the garden succumbed to entropy.

Perhaps out of respect, Mike and I didn’t speak much about this over the weekend. But before I left Monday, I said my own farewell to the garden. It had a long and beautiful run.