Cittaslow in Action on a Sebastopol Farm
October 3, 2014
©Copyright 2014: Richard von
Sternberg, All Rights Reserved
Fastest Food in
the West
I was a teenager when the golden arches of the McDonald’s empire
were first planted into everybody’s local landscape. Looking back, I am surprised by how drawn I
was to the idea of stepping up to a counter, asking for a this and a that,
paying an “Are you sure that’s all?” amount of money, watching the clerk make
some notes and turn around. In the time
it would take to draw out a handkerchief to cover your nose to sneeze, there
was your food, bagged up, hot, ready to go!
 |
I remember how sobering it was when that word "million" went up on
McDonald's signs everywhere. Now that seems like a thimble full |
Two years before that I had been employed at a place a block from
the beach that made burgers and malts.
Shakes were rarely asked for, but we made those too. The burgers I was taught to make were as real
as they could be at the time. They weren’t
putting chemicals, antibiotics, hormones and other sundry stimulants into the
beef part of the food chain then, but they were spraying DDT from crop dusters
up and down the valleys of our farms.
The burgers came with condiments, slices of tomato, lettuce and, for
whatever it was worth at the time, the beef patties came without gristle or
additives. In other words, at the place
where I worked, my boss had filtered out “cheap” and run-of-the-mill and opted
for quality. The milkshakes and malts
weighed a lot in your hand.
People who came in had one of
those ubiquitous round, twirling seats at the counter or a booth to sit and
socialize while they slowly consumed their pre-fast-food meal, spoke with the
owners, made their eating experience a quality one that, after a few years,
helped define their character by association. Mr. and Mrs. Bogert were
there practically every day, all day, put their heart into everything they did
and, as a result, a high quality experience was available in their
establishment for anyone who was looking for one. The Bogerts were not
“corporate” types, but your archetypical Mom and Pop. Without intending,
they ratcheted up quality expectations in everybody around them, while also,
without intending, preparing within me some kind of standard by which to judge
the quality of the soon-to-come invention of Richard and Maurice McDonald.
The day I went to McDonald’s the first time, it was mostly out of
curiosity. I was not in a hurry nor was I penny-pinching. One look around after stepping inside left me
with a feeling I was probably not mature enough to identify at the time, one
which today I would attribute to all activity on the premises NOT originating
in the heart. Heartfelt had been
replaced by routine, mechanical, repeatable behaviors. The people employed
there to do the job I did a couple of years earlier now looked and acted like
robotic, mainstreamed, uniformed individuals with scripted and very finite
numbers of sentences to parrot, trained in the corporate behaviors they were
required to ape. The only other place I
could think of that harbored employees with similar attributes was Disneyland. Like many people I suffered a cognitive
dissonance from the effect of the culture shock.
The sense of alienation prompted by my initial exposure to the sterile
environment subsided and was replaced by amazement by the speed with which my
order was handed to me. The cheeseburgers were 15 cents, and everything else
was equivalently priced, far enough below local norms to galvanize and jolt the
locals, most of whom seemed to be mesmerized by these “Pied Piper” tactics of
Ray Kroc, the partner of the two McDonald brothers who, bought them out and
radically transformed their business model into one based on the multiplier
effect and, therefore, “franchisable”.
Rumpelstiltskin Ronald McDonald
When I walked out to my car, I was holding a bag with burger and
fries in one hand, and a milkshake in the other. The milkshake felt too light for its mass to
this kid who had, only a couple of years before, made hundreds and hundreds of
milkshakes and malts using conventional ingredients and methods.
Frank Davidson, a boy my age I surfed with in Hermosa Beach, where
I experienced my first golden arches baptism, got a job at the McDonald’s. After a few weeks they promoted him, then
whisked him downtown for some programs where he was steeped in corporate
culture. One day when we had both
paddled our boards out from the lifeguard tower at Longfellow and were sitting,
waiting for a nice set of swells to come along I asked Frank if there were any
reason he could think of that the milkshake I drank felt so light. I asked him if it was the cup. I saw in his face that I had asked a question
that caused some strong reaction inside, his eyes rolled a little, and then he
burst out laughing.
He talked for a long time before any good waves came along and I remember
only a few details, probably the details that were the most astonishing at the
time. First he told me about the machine
they had that was adjustable, the one they made the shakes with. What they adjusted was the amount of air the
machine added to the milkshake ingredients.
The more air they added, the lighter it was. By adding air they were able to double the
profit on every milkshake sold at every location and garner unthinkable amounts
of profitability.
I was much more jolted by this news in a negative way than
anything I felt that was positive about the extremely low pricing and the
rocket ship speed of the service. This way
of thinking was the intangible counterpart of the robotic environment that,
together, spelled the doom of the simpler, more honest approach to business
made possible by the Mr. and Mrs. Bogert’s of the world.
Next he explained how they could not make any money on the burgers
except as a draw to their add-ons. In
order to keep the accountants in the firm happy, they found it necessary to “extend”
the meat with oatmeal and other ingredients.
There were many other items on his list of things to tell me, but the
only other salient fact I recall was about the French fries. He referred to these as the absolute profit
center of the business. They were able
to purchase entire potato productions of major Idaho farmers and get them so
cheaply, that by the time they cut them and fried them up, the cost of goods
relative to cost to the consumer yielded an obscene profit margin and propelled
the company to stardom.
There have been many Ph.D. theses written about the long-term
effects of Ray Kroc’s masterminding of what ultimately came to be known as the “Fast
Food” movement that seems to know no boundaries.
I remember seeing signs in
Germany as long ago as the 1970’s that said “Schnellimbiss”, a term that came
to stand for a category of eateries we call Fast Food restaurants. In
German the word means “Quick Snack”. What I find even more interesting,
however, is what is just now being written about its opposite: The Slow
Food Movement.
Big Slow Down on the Fast Food Highway
When I think about any of the small towns I have spent time in
while traveling in Europe, especially the restaurants in those villages and
towns, most of my memories are about sitting at a table surrounded by people
laughing heartily, touting the ideas of a local politician with highly animated
gestures, involved with each other, people taking their time, enmeshed in the
richness of their culinary refresh time.
From their perspective, I can only guess how bizarre our Fast Food
Movement must seem.
A couple of decades ago mayors of several small towns in Italy
held a meeting to discuss this very subject from the perspective of
enlightened, cultured people viewing the Fast Food Movement as a menacing
tornado, spinning out of control. The
mayors were from towns in a part of the world known for cuisine, where
restaurants have been passed down through 20 generations of secret recipes and
a reverence for excellence, shrouded in a mystique so pervasive that the art of
haut cuisine has been elevated to a
status occupied by legendary musicians, painters, sculptors, artists of all
kinds. During the meeting attended by
these sons and daughters of the spirit of small town Italy, the term Slow Food
was coined.
It was a reaction to all that Fast Food had become: artificial,
unhealthy, loveless, practical, dehumanizing.
The mayors knew the results for both people and the culture they are
part of were unhealthy and were hoping to start a dialog that might get
citizens to wake up before it was too late.
This movement has come to stand for the maintenance of quality living,
for the consumption of real, unadulterated foods that promote health, the
return to values that find the fast food mentality a social wrong turn.
After a reception that must have surprised those lofty-thinking
mayors, hundreds of thousands of people world-wide began to jump on the
bandwagon of those who would draw the line to stop the progression of our
foodstuffs into further chemical experimentation and question the value of
packaged culture in general. Evidently
feeling successful from their prior dabbling into the elevation of the significance
of our daily consumption of what, for many, has come to be an interconnected
web of unhealthy eating and lifestyle habits, those mayors, when they
reconvened in the late 1990’s, amplified their agenda to the level of
community. They discussed ways of
applying all the beneficent principles of the Slow Food Movement to urban
planning and, in the process, coined yet another new term: Cittaslow.
Citta means City in Italian. In
honor of the concept of Fast Food having originated in an English-speaking
country, the SLOW part of the new word appears in English. In honor of the fact that the mayors were the
originators of the movement, Citta, in Italian, was combined with Slow, in
English, to form Cittaslow.
The Slow City Movement, in other words
The existence of an international organization referred to as
Cittaslow that consists of almost 200 small towns (populations of 50 thousand
or less) spread all over the world shows how deep a nerve the Italian mayors
touched when they made an issue of the fallout we are experiencing globally as
a result of letting villages established as centers of local agricultural
enterprise where local culture flourished be transformed into urban centers so
densely populated and so vast in size, that the combined activity of the
millions of participants in the daily social exchange creates a spinning dynamo
of energy sending pressure from the inside outward to all the citizens who feel
in a hurry, a need to conform, to be here now, there later, on time everywhere,
constantly made aware by the mere presence of millions of people that any sense of uniqueness is an
illusion.
For a town to be
designated Cittaslow, it is required that it have a local chapter that is connected
to the city it is in with representatives from the city council participating,
the city, therefore, showing its support for the general provisions of all
Cittaslow towns in the world. There are
6 main points – priorities -- in the philosophy of Cittaslow, of which
Sebastopol, California is a member, one of three towns currently in the
American branch of Cittalsow:
Sebastopol, Sonoma and Fairfax.
In our
literature, the Sebastopol branch espouses:
1. Support locally made products and agriculture;
2. Celebrate our culture and history;
3. Welcome visitors and embrace neighbors;
4. Use technology wisely;
5. Promote the health of the environment;
6. Develop community-friendly infrastructure (e.g.,
parks, open space, bike paths and pedestrian connections).
The organization,
Cittaslow, has made the snail its symbol for self-explanatory reasons. It has demonstrated around the world that it
is possible for a community to prioritize the heart over depersonalization and
turn the clock back to the oldest, most prized values of community while, at
the same time, embracing any wise technology that offers only benefit, that does
not marginalize or extinguish the value of our humanity.
Towns that are
designated Cittaslow revere the relationships that exist between the town and its
local artists and farmers. Perhaps due
to the fact that our area already has two prominent programs that connect the
public with artists and farmers – ArtTrails and FarmTrails – it was a natural
act to the founders of our local chapter of Cittaslow to assimilate the values
of the organization at large.
Here is a link to
Cittaslow Sebastopol’s web site:
www.cittaslowsebastopol.org
Out my rural
Sebastopol living room window I see corporate farming and small family farming
coexisting side-by-side, literally. I
see one of them operating from the heart and one operating from a balance sheet. One of the farms is an agricultural
counterpart of an urban factory that is dedicated to excellence in quality,
providing an organic product, operating on a very large scale, employing
hundreds of people, connected to “Corporate” as a “Division”. The other farm is a gem-quality specimen of
the heart of the Cittaslow philosophy. In other words: a working example to
point to and elucidate the very concept of the Slow City Movement.
I am a member of
the steering committee of Cittaslow Sebastopol and carry around within me, in
my daily life, the previously mentioned espoused priorities. I left a large urban area to come to
Sebastopol almost half a century ago as I watched what I thought of as a
meltdown of the fabric of the slow and kind way of life around me. I tend to light up inside like a Canadian
sunset whenever I come across somebody whose nature has led them to live a
lifestyle that jibes with the whole “Slow” way of life. That other farm, the non-corporate one, is
owned by an extraordinary family of people who came to own it from Fairfax,
California, one of the other two Cittaslow towns, and stepped into a way of
life that had been deeded into the future of the farm by somebody whose vision
was so far-seeing, that it included Citttaslow-like priorities long before the
Slow City or Slow Food movements were conceived.
One of my blog
posts was written about this far-seeing farmer.
Here is a link to it:
The Vallejo’s and the Carrillo’s
The large
corporate farm I have referred to is the first organic Pinot Noir planting of
the Kendall-Jackson wine empire. Before
Jess Jackson passed away, his company purchased a square mile of land that was
once part of the much larger holdings of the family that was brought here when
General Mariano Vallejo helped his mother in law, Maria Ygnacia Lopez de Carrillo,
settle into the local landscape and bear 13 children.
General Vallejo
was among the most important personages in the history of this area as he was
sent here by a government as its chief military representative with the
authority to do whatever was required to domesticate it. He was given tens of thousands of acres of
land. When he was in power here, it took
weeks to survey his holdings. If you
were to drive a mile a minute in a car today from one end of the original
Vallejo and Carrillo holdings to the other end, you would be behind the wheel
for hours. People connected to or
descending from the Vallejo and Carrillo families have or touch blood lines
that date back to the time before gold was discovered and caused a population
rush, before America’s Civil War, back to when the first struggles and
bloodshed of the movement to civilize this area flared up.
When I purchased
the property overlooking the Kendall-Jackson vineyard, it was not a
vineyard. Instead, it was something of a
cattle ranch and a sheep and cattle dog training school on one square mile
owned by the grandson of one of the Carrillo’s mentioned earlier, part of the
California land grant act, still owned and operated by a descendant of the
original owner. There was a dwelling I
could see out my window far off in the distance, far from the main road with a
long, dirt road connecting it to the main road. I used to imagine what it must
have been like to live on a whole square mile that you owned back in a time
when there was no electricity, no power tools, no paving tractors or steam
rollers. The house was set so far back
from the main road, that it would have probably cost a million dollars to pave
it back when I built my house in the late 70’s.
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The road from Bloomfield Road to the main house runs quite a distance back from the entrance to the property, once
part of the Carrillo holdings, now part of an organic Pinot Noir vineyard the size of my home town:
1 square mile |
It never was
paved. Likely only horses and carts
traversed it in the beginning and people whose holdings included hundreds of
acres generated enough income from their land to be able to employ many people
to maintain roads and everything else that needed maintaining. But as the years passed and we switched to
fuel-driven vehicles, the world changed pretty fast and those who did not keep
up were left behind. I could tell from
the condition of the road at Carrillo’s property that he must have fallen
behind somehow because his pick-up banged and clanged along the deep ruts in
his neglected road and kicked up an entire countryside of dust as he suffered
the jaw-jarring impacts of the frame of his truck along the rut bottoms. There did not appear to be enough
enterprising going on to generate enough income to maintain that road or to
restore it by paving it even with blue shale and gravel. I used to wonder how they kept it going on
that big historical stead I looked at in my view, glad they did, very much
appreciating that nobody brought Los Angeles style wanton development to
transform it away from pastoral and calming.
Jess Jackson was
in the news a lot once he got on the list of the world’s richest people and
began to invest in racehorses. He
shopped locally and purchased jewelry from a jewelry store that carried the
brand of diamond I was cutting at the time in my cutting factory in Santa
Rosa. The store was one of the prestige
ateliers of this area with a good reputation. Our diamonds carried that same reputation in
our trade and it made my head spin with glee one day to hear the owner tell me
that Mr. Jackson appreciated our cutting and our local flavor so much, he
bought some for his family.
He also bought
the old ranch with the gritty road dating back to the beginning of California
history and brought his deep pockets to pour millions of dollars into vines,
excavating, an enormous holding pond to be used by firefighters in helicopters
to hover over, siphon water and fly away to drop on local brush fires. One day my view was of the “Old California”
and the next day I woke up in Wine Country.
It is a spectacular sight to behold, but trucks much larger than Mr.
Carrillo’s old pick up truck make far more attention-getting screeches and
booms as they come to haul away the ultra premium grapes on a road that seems
destined to resemble something in an old Western movie.
At harvest time
you can witness agribusiness in motion 24/7.
There are brightly lighted vehicles scurrying around the vineyard in the
middle of the night and scores of workers shouting to each other starting just
before the sun comes up. It can be hot
or cold and rainy, those workers will invariably be out there carefully piling
up tons and tons of grapes to make sure the news from the company chemists
about their ideal sugar content and a window of opportunity of just so many
days is taken seriously. All the
scurrying and hurrying are important in order to achieve the goal of producing
healthy, premium grapes, but, being a corporate venture, the profit on the
books is the priority that all participants in the organization must defer
to. The heart is pretty much left on the
perimeter of the business activity that leads to profit, albeit it likely was
present in the original idea to broaden the company’s horizons with organic
Pinot.
The Caretakers of Blucher Valley
Just to the east
of the organic Pinot Noir planting, however, lies a type of family farm that
resonates in harmonious sync with the principles of the new Slow movements, 80
acres that are part flat pasture land and part hillock, that occupy quite a bit
of the valley known as Blucher Valley south and east of the town of Sebastopol.
 |
| Top of the Canfield hill looking down into Blucher Valley |
On a cold night a
few years ago a man was traveling on a 2-wheeled vehicle, headed home, taking a
short cut through Blucher Valley. At the
top of the hill on Canfield Road where the 80-acre farm begins, this man began
to pick up speed as he headed toward the valley floor and, in the middle of his
momentum-building, he broadsided a deer and skidded and scraped his way all the
way down to where the occupants of the farm could hear something horrific was
taking place. Lorri Duckworth, who with
her husband, Oscar, and her children, make up the family that owns the farm,
ran to the scene of the collision to see if she could help. I confirmed with the man who hit the deer
that Lorri saved his life by following her heart. She noticed a wedding ring on this bloody
mess of a man on the road and imagined being part of his family not knowing
what was happening, not knowing the man of the family was dickering with death
on the pavement. The possibility of the
extinction of the life of this family man burned in Lorri’s soul and prompted
her to tell him over and over to speak to her, that she could see he had a
family and to stay alive for them. And
he lived.
There, now, is a
tiny glimpse into the nature of the family that bought into the idea that it is
wiser in the long run to conserve family farming rather than to seek mere profitability
for one generation of the family that disgorges the sentiments of the great
grandparents who began the farm and sells to developers with plans to pave over
the little dairy operation, the truck farm, the hay field and plant 3 bedroom,
2 bathroom Xerox copies of each other in their place.
These
neighborhoods of 3/2 houses, mind you, are extremely important to the social
and economic vitality of any urban or suburban area. The matter at hand is not whether tract
neighborhoods are good or bad, but where they are located. Strategically situated, safe neighborhoods
access arterial travel and commute routes, can have great schools, shopping
areas, entertainment centers, can be great places to raise a family. Neighborhoods that are built over family farms
in which a time-tempered symbiosis between land and caring human is filled in,
paved over, leaving no actual trace of any farming, only graphic mementos that
appear as street sign names of family members of the farm that used to be, are
starting to be perceived as regrettable acts that bulldoze away a sacred
connection to the land we can never retrieve.
Many foundations and government agencies now exist to preserve the
condition of the most vital pieces of ground whence our spirit as a community
of people sprang.
October, 1931 to March, 2004, the era of “Bud”
Bernard Nahmens,
known locally as “Bud”, was born in Blucher Valley in October of 1931. See the blog
post I wrote about this man here: http://sebastopolrichard.blogspot.com/2012/05/west-county-valley-that-cannot-change.html During Bud’s lifetime, the world began to
change faster than at any time in history up to then. He lived through the Great Depression, the
Second World War, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War. He could hike up to the highest place on his
property and see down into the Santa Rosa Plain from Cotati to Windsor. When he was a teenager, looking down from
that ridge top in the Spring on what is now Rohnert Park, what was there to see
were miles of the Ferry Morse flower-seed farms where they had acres and acres
of flowers every color of the rainbow in full bloom.
In 1959 he surely
noticed the 101 Freeway stretch north and replace the main streets of towns
from Novato northward and, in short order, people saw an opportunity to trade
their seed-farming kinds of activities, hay farming and ranching and the like,
for amounts of money that the grandparents of these agrarians never could have
contemplated – in their heydays -- without laughing. Bud worried about the future and must have
had unthinkable visions of army ants of Caterpillar tractors ripping up the
fields where his parents’ dairy cattle would spend their lives on scores of
peaceful acres of quiet, snail-pace pastures, lost in his vision of himself as
a caretaker of his little corner of the world.
In a eulogy posted on line I found: "Bud's goal was to preserve the
land. He always felt farmers were the best stewards of the land in Sonoma
County," said his wife, Janet Nahmens.
His parents came to America from one of those
ubiquitous European villages I
alluded to earlier in this writing leaving behind memories of family and
centuries of ties to the earth, where families, as Bud’s wife put it, either
“caretook” the land or were unable to reap the harvests that kept them and
their local centers of gentility and culture fed. Bud, therefore, was his
parents’ Americanized recipient of the personal history that a great writer of
the same ancestry as Bud (German), a writer named Thomas Mann described and
capsulized in his novel, the Magic Mountain, in a scene in which Hans,
the main character, is handed a silver goblet by his grandfather as he
says: “This belonged to your great, great, great, great, great, great,
great grandfather.” Bud Nahmens was given the orientation of a caretaker
of the land through all the lore, tales and whisperings of a thousand years of
smart, aware, farmers and felt he had to act.
His personal observations of history unfolding from dirt roads
to freeways and his fear of spinoffs like Silicon Valley in this county made
him decide to preserve his land by selling his development rights to the Sonoma
County Agriculture Preservation and Open Space District. He did this before there was any Slow Food
movement, but he was born with the same outlook on life as those small town
mayors whose simple proposal became a world movement.
Bud’s heart was a Cittaslow kind of heart. I say this because, if you read over the 6
priorities of our organization, you can see how Bud was a “natural”:
1. Support locally made products and agriculture;
2. Celebrate our culture and history;
3. Welcome visitors and embrace neighbors;
4. Use technology wisely;
5. Promote the health of the environment;
6. Develop community-friendly infrastructure (e.g.,
parks, open space, bike paths and pedestrian connections).
When he decided
to sell his dairy herd and retire, it was only a matter of time, I thought,
before I would see a FOR SALE sign along Canfield Road and, sure enough, up one
went. 80 acres for sale with two houses,
barns, fences, outbuildings and land with a proven history. There could be no more houses, but any
agricultural endeavor could be pursued.
Handing the Torch of Goodness to the Duckworth’s
I used to go
running, now only fast walking, along Canfield Road, have for decades. The pace of change along that road has been
so minimal, that it seems to be playing out exactly according to the hopes of
hero Bud. The buyers who came along to
grasp the torch Bud handed down were the couple mentioned before: Lorri and
Oscar Duckworth. I can bear witness to
the fact that Lorri and Oscar have kept their covenant to be righteous stewards
of the 80 acres.
 |
| The sun about to rise over yet another idyllic day in Blucher Valley |
These two people
from Fairfax, owners of a concrete business in which Oscar has risen steadily
into the upper levels of knowledge-bearers of his technology: shotcrete, the
nozzling of liquefied concrete, speaking at conferences on the subject, came to
the 80 acres in need of a great deal of on-the-job-training as farmers. Lorri told me once they could feel the
farming instinct within.
Together they dug
right in. Instead of throwing them a
welcoming party, Mother Nature tested the family’s will to deurbanize with a
wild, wild storm. Lorri told it to me
this way:
“Bud was the nicest, most kind man I ever met. True
story: A few months after we bought the ranch, there was a terrible wind storm
in the evening, it got worse, much worse after dark; we were living in the
camper by the horse barn, Oscar, myself and our two girls, I have never heard
wind howl like it did that night. Oscar looked at the large hay barn and
realized something was wrong, it was lifting. The camper was rocking so
violently we thought it might take flight.
“It felt like a
hurricane, we decided to load the kids in the truck and head out. After we
loaded the girls and the dog in the truck I went into the horse barn, (against
Oscar’s wishes) to check on the horses one more time, I heard Oscar screaming
at me to "get under the truck, now!” I barely had time to drop to the
ground under the back of the truck when I heard the hay barn lift up and
collapse. Parts of the barn flew past us, it felt like over 80 miles per hour,
and landed across Canfield to the field beyond. No sooner did we crawl out from
under the truck to check on the girls when we saw headlights coming toward us,
It was Bud and Jan. Bud heard the wind, and thought the girls and I were alone
during the storm, he told Jan he was coming to check on us and bring us to
their house if necessary. We followed them home, slept on their floor (we were
too scared to sleep apart in a room) and then came back every night for 4
nights and slept on their floor because I was so rattled. Bud told everyone
that he didn’t know when he sold the ranch it would come with a new family. He
was so gracious.”
Over the years, as I have
walked or run along the eastern perimeter of Lorri and Oscar’s farm, I have run
into both of them and chatted with them and watched their many organic farm
projects develop through my time-lapse views.
The Duckworth’s spent one summer driving all
over America’s farm belt studying the architecture of farm houses, then came
back home and remodeled their little gem of a mid-century farm house. Lorri told me they had the deeded right to
have two houses on the property and one of them could be a modern-day dream
home if they chose, but, instead, they elected to revivify the lines of the
original house, clean up the inside, and stick to the original specifications
as much as possible.
Land Stewardship Memorialized
In this
article, as in talking to Lorri about this subject, it is easy to see that Bud
lives on through the Duckworth family: “Lorri and Oscar Duckworth bought Nahman’s Dairy, an
eighty-acre ranch on Canfield Rd. in southwest Sebastopol, in 2002. The
property, now called Duckworth Farm, is part of the Sonoma County Open Space
District, which ensures that it will never be subdivided. Additional housing is
prohibited, as well, but there are no restrictions on agricultural endeavors.”
In
another article, the Duckworth’s stewardship is honored as exactly that:
From Landpaths
---- June-11-2011
“Where can you
find organic hay fields, berries by the bushel, free range chickens, river
otters (occasionally), and relic black oak forest - all within a stone throw of
Sebastopol? Part of the Nahmens conservation easement from your County
Agricultural Preservation & Open Space District, Duckworth Ranch produces
local food AND stewards the land.”
“When
the Duckworths first acquired the property, they began growing hay. Soon they
added strawberries, which I tasted several years ago. The berries were
delicious despite the fact that the soil is not perfectly suited to them.
“Three
years ago, they switched over to three organic acres of blueberries. The late
Bud Nahman helped Lorri Duckworth research blueberries before he passed away;
it turns out the land is ideally suited to these berries. A single bite reveals
this wisdom.
“In addition to
blueberries, the farm also has chickens, ducks, geese, goats, sheep, cows and
horses, along with a multitude of pets.”
On my walks, when I
get to the top of the hill above their property I usually stop to rest from the
physical activity that got me there and look down upon two things: the house where Bud was born and the adjacent
parcel of land that Lorri and Oscar tend with a caretaker’s touch. “This is it, I remind myself; this is what
the Italian mayors had in mind.”
Lorri and Oscar have a piece
of reality, an exemplary model of what the inventors of Cittaslow configured in
their idealized version of the organic symbiosis of town and land stewards, of
town and artists, of Mom and Pop merchants who keep the part of the world that
matters to all of them and its inhabitants most, humming and business-as-usual
downtown. Here then, on Canfield Road,
Sebastopol is one shining example of what is possible.
to listen to music. Live
music has not changed, only the way to record and reproduce it. By comparison to today’s electronic
evolution, the first recorded music was muffled, scratchy and severely
restricted by the crude methods used to capture the sinusoidal vibrations
emanating from the voices and musical instruments being recorded. As much of a titanic breakthrough as it may
have been to convert sound vibrations to a hard surface that could be recovered
by a vibrating needle transmitting those vibrations to a sound horn, the actual
fidelity of the emitted sound was 100 times less than a cheap car radio of
today, something more along the lines of a real bad phone connection. (Fidelity
in sound refers to accuracy in the reproduction of the original sound.)
