Calfornia Farmin'

The Classic Organic barn

I felt like a 16-year-old kid with a new driver’s license as I picked up the keys to my rental car and drove from Santa Barbara down the California coast to Los Angeles. Hertz gave me a new Jetta—wow, a rental car I actually like! I cranked KTYD on the stereo, and sang along—nay, hollered along—to the same playlist of classic 60s and 70s rock that KTYD had been playing when I was a student at UC Santa Barbara twenty years ago (when this stuff was already classic rock.)

The Pacific Ocean stretched out on my right, sparkling in the morning sun, as Jimi Hendrix kissed the sky and I rocked it with driver’s seat head bobbing and steering wheel drum solos. It had been almost a year since I’d driven a car outside of the 5-kilometers or so of residential compound where I live in Saudi Arabia—and that long since I had enjoyed properly engineered roads and reasonably skilled drivers. Americans can say what they want about crazy drivers, but at least in the U.S., you have to take a test to get your driver’s license. Also, you will eventually get pulled over if you always completely ignore all lane markings and speed limits à la the typical Saudi driver.

So I was blissing out, driving south on the 101 after spending a bucolic week in Buellton, a small town in northern Santa Barbara County that is right in the middle of the Central Coast wine country. (If you’ve seen the movie Sideways, you know where I mean.) I spent most of my week volunteering at Classic Organic, a farm that grows vegetables, herbs, and berries for its own little farm shop as well as several local restaurants. This was a larger farm than the one where I volunteered in France earlier this summer—about 10 acres.

At La Collardiere, the farm where I worked in Normandy, I weeded each row slowly, painstakingly, teasing out every last shred of weed roots and carting them off to the compost pile in big pails. In Buellton, I used a utility knife to scratch weeds up and out of many more and much longer rows. Quick! Get them out and toss them into the middle of the aisle between the rows where they’ll shrivel in the sun. In France, I gently pinched off perfect salad leaves and delicate edible flowers, one careful specimen at a time. In California, I picked quart after quart of perfect strawberries, leaving as many good ones behind as I took, and also eating plenty.

La Collardiere was small, jewel-like, sparkling in the cool grey Normandy August. Classic Organic generously spread its bounty across the flat valley lands under a wide, California blue sky. Both were spectacular.

Farmer Helmut Klauer of Classic Organic Farm

In 1969, the owner of Buellton’s Classic Organic Farm drove a VW bus across the country from Long Island to Venice Beach. Why? “California Dreamin’,” he said. He learned to farm a couple of years later, after he camped out in the Oregon wilderness. He realized that he would always have to hike back to civilization every couple of weeks for food, unless he learned how to grow his own. Most young guys with VW buses and groovy dreams of peace moved on to the duties of adult life and the go-go priorities of later eras—but Helmut Klauer learned about organic farming and has stuck to it for 40 years.

Eliberto, a farm worker who has been with Helmut for a dozen years, vacuums bugs off of the crop rows with what is essentially a leaf-blower that blows in reverse. Weeding is all done manually. Fields are fertilized with compost from the horse stables up the road, along with vegetable matter from the Classic Organic Farm itself. It is basic, physically demanding, never-ending work.

Eliberto and Alex, weeding seedlings

It was really satisfying to lend a hand at Classic Organic, and interesting to see the differences between it and La Collardiere. There were more similarities than differences, though. Both farms are completely at the mercy of the weather, of whatever sun and rain, whatever drought or pest or other natural occurrence blows through. Life at both is governed by the passage of the sun across the sky and the month and week of the season, rather than by the clock. Neither uses any man-made chemicals to tinker with the natural realities out in their fields, and both accept the loss of some crops and the constant, never-ending schedule of manual labor as the cost of producing unadulterated food. Both farmers are highly educated; engaged in and committed to their local communities; and socially progressive. If Classic Organic’s Helmut Klauer and La Collardiere’s Mike Hewitt were invited to a dinner party, it would be a great evening of conversation. (It would also be a great meal, presuming the food on the table came from their farms.)

As I drove south after my farm week in Buellton for a week of visiting in Los Angeles, I thought about the fact that this trip, unlike all of my other travels, does not feel like an exotic vacation. It feels like a homecoming—which it is. My husband has family in the Santa Barbara area, and I have quite a few old friends scattered across southern California.

In my ongoing search for the definition of home, I have learned a few new things. First, I do not have any longing for the farm life. That was never particularly a goal, but I had the same idyllic notion that I imagine many people do, of having a small piece of land, maybe doing a little bit of farming. After my two volunteering experiences, I get it. No way: that work is hard! Instead, I am more firmly committed to the notion of living in an area like California’s central coast, where the food I want to eat (and the wine that I want to drink) is grown and produced. And I want to support those farmers and vintners by putting their food on my table and their wine in my glass.

Raspberries in the pick-your-own field

The next stop on my whistle-stop world tour is Maryland. I will be returning to my hometown after nearly a year of expat life. I wonder, will it feel like home?

There's No Place Like Home

Returning to Saudi Arabia after seven weeks in India was surreal. We flew out of the steamy and decrepit Kolkata International Airport, smelling slightly of mold and sweat, and changed planes in Dubai. During our layover, we did some window shopping in the airport and saw a 24-karat gold cell phone on sale for $30,000. The Dubai airport was immaculate, echoey, modern and freezing cold. I probably wouldn't have even noticed except that, well, I just came from Calcutta.

While I was away in India, our shipment of household goods had arrived in Saudi Arabia. So when Michael and I walked in the front door, I was greeted with all of our familiar things: a house full of the objects we have collected and lived with during our sixteen years of marriage. There was the threadbare red velvet sofa (with some dog hairs still stuck to the front of it. Oh, I miss my dog! He's back in the States living with his best doggie friend.) There was the Art Nouveau china cabinet and the Danish modern dining room set--both second-hand finds from years ago. My ergonomic office chair! And our bed, oh yes. The most comfortable bed I have ever slept on in my whole life, yes, there it was, made up with the blue cotton sheets that are soft from many washings.

It was great to come back to all of this, and air conditioning, and my own kitchen, and the stereo, and the shower with the great water pressure and all the hot water I want. Oh, heaven! Even all these weeks later, I am still grateful for such luxury. Also, I'm still aware that I can live well without it.

Back in this comfortably feathered nest, I can sit and consider my biggest question: what is home?

I am sheltered here. All my stuff is here, and (more importantly) my husband is here. Is this home? Oh no. We live in a comfortable little bubble here, but we will never be able to call Saudi Arabia home. The cultural disconnect is too vast.

So, home does not equal "where your house is." There is a cultural component to it.

What about my hometown of Greenbelt? Most of my family and friends live there. The farmers market I helped to start still thrives on Sunday mornings, and the yoga studio I built still holds classes there. My sister lives there, in our childhood home, down the street from some of my favorite friends. My in-laws live there, too. This friendly, tightly knit safety net awaits me. This is where my roots are. Is this home? It was. It may well be again. But right now we don't have a house there. We don't have a place that belongs to us, so I don't think of it as home.

So, maybe home is where your house is plus where you feel culturally connected. This has possibilities. 

Then there's Santa Barbara. I have been yearning for California's central coast for quite a while now. Maybe home is Santa Barbara, where my husband has family, where I went to college. The city got its hook in me, and I remain hooked. Some places have a pull of their own. They feel like home even even before the real estate has been purchased, before the roots are down.

So what is home? Is home where your house is, plus where you feel culturally connected, plus where you feel some kind of magnetic attraction to the geographical place itself? Hmm....

As I spin out this Sesame Street-style exercise (to the tune of "One of these things is not like the other"), I wonder what I even mean by "home." What am I looking for? This is not such a random exercise in navel-gazing if you consider this: If you know what you mean by "home," then maybe you can create it. Wherever you go. What if "home" is something you can take with you? Yeah, yeah, "home is where the heart is." Or as the Temptations said, "Papa was a rolling stone. Wherever he laid his hat was his home." But what if that is true? 

And here we are, crashing back into yoga again. One of my yoga teachers often said that during a difficult posture, "you can always come back to your breath. Just come back to your breath." This is also good advice during challenging moments of life generally. When I'm angry: come back to my breath. When I'm afraid, or about to say something I shouldn't: come back to my breath. (I need to keep practicing that one!) Just stop whatever it is I'm about to do, and breathe. Actually feel the air filling my lungs, the breath coming and going from my body. Whether I am aware of it or not, my breath keeps cycling through me. My heart keeps beating too, of course, but my breath is something over which I have some control. I can work with it. I can let it work on me. I always carry it with me. My body is the home of my breath. What if my body is my home? Is that enough?

I am a nester. I love fussing with the furniture, choosing paint colors, hanging pictures, finding new pieces to bring into our house that are reminders of places I've been or have shapes or textures that I find beautiful. So it's hard to reconcile the fact that I take such pleasure in feathering the nest, with the notion that home can be as portable as I am.

I also love cooking at home. The smell of good food being prepared in the kitchen is another big signpost pointing the way towards home. Almost every day, I use my grandmother's iron skillet to fry onions, or scramble eggs, or make a batch of cornbread. Three generations of women in my family have used that skillet in their kitchens. That kind of continuity is a deep, important anchor to home.

Next week, I am traveling to Spain to visit a new friend from my yoga teacher training. She should have some insights on this question of home. She is an American from Kansas, who met her Irish husband while teaching English in Korea. They are now living in a village north of Madrid. Where is their home?

I want to find "home" and settle there. And I am becoming ever more aware that in order to do that, I need to push a little more on the boundaries of what's comfortable for me, what's physically and emotionally possible. To figure out how to get back home, I need to keep venturing away from it. The road towards home continues to twist off into the trees. It's a beautiful day for a drive.