A Real Place
Considerations from Sarah, Fall Equinox 2021
Hello dear ones, here we are.
I sent the last newsletter on summer solstice, when we were deep in weeds and fencing, the prospect of actual CSA members still a long way off. This week, as we pass the fall equinox and move toward the darker part of the year, we are already putting actual names and faces to what has until now been an imaginary group of people we might one day feed. This is also, conveniently, the week that we’ve started to bring in the bulk of our storage crops, so the food itself is becoming real as well. It’s all perfectly fitting and yet utterly wild.
As the crops come in and the CSA list grows, I’m imagining everyone coming to pick up their shares, how you all will interact with the space, how the parking will go, how you’ll roam through the garden. I can’t quite describe how overwhelming that prospect feels and how deeply soothing, like in this place there will really be something, as simple as food and as complicated as everything that has gone into this project, all the years of conversations and planning, the infrastructure and labor and money, our personal journeys to farming and stuttering learning curves, the mentors and friends who have guided and helped us, the ecological history of this piece of land and an entire history of generational wealth and land theft and climate collapse, of gender and labor and agronomics. All of that is here with me, a white woman setting Lower Salmon River winter squash out to cure in this barn that was once a chicken house, in this piece of valley oak savannah stewarded for millennia by Miwok, Wappo, and Pomo people and stolen into this system of land ownership, purchased with money that I did not earn nor could ever hope to earn from farming.
But, as simple as food. As simple as community. As simple as nine acres on the edge of the Laguna de Santa Rosa.
Some years ago I taught writing composition at the University of Montana in Missoula. We focused the curriculum on writing about place, and most of us assigned our classes a speech called "The Geography of Somewhere" by Scott Russell Sanders, in which he lays down some definitions of what makes a place “real” that have stuck with me, and surface for me now as this farm hovers between idea and reality. “A real place,” Sanders writes, “conveys a sense of temporal depth, a sense that people have been living and laboring here for a long time.” On this farm, in the hundred-year-old barn and in the fields and on the path through the Laguna that borders this property, I inarguably feel that depth of time, and yet I am also so new to this place. Though I grew up in Santa Rosa, I only moved back last year, and am still finding out what it means for me to live and labor here after a string of other places, other lives: on the Mendocino coast where I lived most recently, at Odiyan Retreat Center in the hills above Cazadero, in Montana and a long time ago in New York City. As Sanders wrote, “One cannot feel delight or pride in a place, a sense of belonging to a place, or a concern for the well-being of a place, if ‘there is no there there’” (he was using the famous Gertrude Stein quote about Oakland). My deepest craving, wherever I am and whomever I’m with, is for exactly that sense of “there there.” Sometimes I can find it in people no matter the place; occasionally I’ve found it in places distinct from the people. These places did, at different times, fulfill that need in me; whenever they stopped, I left.
This geographical trial and error of mine has made me believe that I need to be in rural places to be fully present in a place. It’s challenged me this year to learn a land that is no longer rural, though Anna debates me on what I mean by rural. She cites Merriam-Webster’s definition (“of or relating to the country, country people or life, or agriculture”), that because we are on agricultural land we are also still in some ways rural. I suppose I’m using the Oxford definition (“in, relating to, or characteristic of the countryside rather than the town”), and it’s the town part that scares me a bit, that feels more in danger of that “homogenizing of America [that] goes implacably on, street by street, real estate parcel by parcel, restaurant by office by store,” where “any sense of character or coherence [is] eroded by the forces of development.” It reminds me of being a child in the backseat of my mom’s station wagon while she ran errands, looking at the buildings passing by, strip mall after strip mall, and wondering how we made it all so complicated.
This trepidation hovers around me as I hear the cars on Highway 12 and see light from Santa Rosa at night. It made me impossibly sad when I first moved here, like I was no longer in a pure place, maybe no longer even in a real place. That sadness is what brought me back to that “Geography of Somewhere” essay, searching for definitions to put language to that unsettled feeling that can arise in me in Sebastopol, especially in the Barlow on a warm Sunday. You all know how that feels. There are aspects of this town that make me feel like I’m nowhere, like I’m in a generic version of bougie local handcrafted cuteness that is no more about this place than Whole Foods is. “A real place feels as though it belongs where it is,” writes Sanders, “as though it has grown there, shaped by weather and geography, rather than being imported from elsewhere and set down arbitrarily like a mail-order kit.” It has been a lot easier to feel exempt from mail-order bougieness by physically removing myself to communities that are small enough to create their own culture. I continue to love those communities. I even wonder if this farm could be one of them, wonder what are the components of community, what is the quorum to create culture.
But of course, I am not exempt from the forces of development; very few of us are. I am here, in and of this place. I’m part of its history now; we are growing into each other. When I am weary of the parts that feel like mail-order kits, I can always come back to the basics, to weather and geography. I can look more closely. It’s flat here, so open that I can see all the way to the ridges of the Mayacamas Mountains. It’s not like, flat flat, not eastern Montana flat, not Nebraska flat. But flat for me, after the hills around Sonoma County, the coastal prairie and ridges of Mendocino, the river valley of Missoula. I’ve always been held in a bit by hills or forests or, sometimes, buildings. I never thought much about grass. Now, I think about it every evening when I walk my dog, and every evening I get a little more familiar with flatness, with the Laguna, with the muted medley of colors that grass can be. This flatness isn’t just flatness, it’s valley oak savannah, which only means, I suppose, that it’s specific, that it’s this specific place. that there’s at least a frame for what’s going on out here. It’s oak savannah even with a highway running through it.
A farm by nature is “shaped by weather and geography,” and the effort to build a farm feels like the effort to build a real place out of what might have been any place. In this process, we are forced to be specific. Today I set squash on pallets to cure and winnowed our first dry beans, the gold tepary bean that we grew from seed from Tierra Vegetables. It’s a small, flat, almost lentil-like bean, cool and smooth as I ran my fingers through the batch, picking out the last bits of stems and pods. It was over ninety degrees but I got to be in the shade for this process, with the fan we use for winnowing, and in this case was glad for the heat so the beans were fully dry as they went into storage. The utter tangibility of this process soothed me, as do all the processes of farming. Like if these beans exist then I exist too. Perhaps it is not that a place must be rural to be real, but that farming in a place makes it real in the way that rural places are often real: particular, dependent on their physical conditions, specific to the ground they are on. Maybe the only thing it takes to make a place real is to be real in it.
I’ll leave you with this last line from Sanders’ piece: “What all of us long for, I suspect, is to love the places in which we live and to live in places worthy of love.”
Of course this place is worthy of love, as every place is, as every one of us is. And I will love this place; maybe I already do. This is, after all, where I am. And maybe the “there there” cannot come until it’s not just me but a whole community who loves and depends on this piece of land, and enters into relationship with it, and stays.
Here for the foreseeable future,
Sarah
Gold tepary beans, from Tierra Vegetables
