A Canyon Trilogy: Life Before, During and After the Cedar Fire

By Chi Varnado

The October 2003 Southern California wildfires destroyed nearly eight hundred thousand acres, 3,657 homes, and killed twenty-two people. In San Diego County, the Cedar Fire ravaged vast areas becoming the largest fire on the record in state history. Out of this federal disaster Chi Varnado and her family escaped with their lives from their canyon nestled in San Diego's back country. She worked as owner-builder on a log cabin and was among the minority who managed to rebuild in a little over a year. She writes first-hand what life is like in a year of loss: first her mother and then their home in the canyon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 24, 2008
• ISBN: 9781467837187

Chi Varnado

Chi Varnado is a contributing writer for The San Diego Reader and the artistic director of the Dance Centre of Ramona. Her memoir, A CANYON TRILOGY: Life Before, During and After the Cedar Fire and The Tale of Broken Tail are available on www.amazon.com, as will be her soon to be released novel, The Old House in the Country. Her collection of essays, Quail Mutterings, appear in www.ramonapatch.com and www.ramonasentinel.com. Please visit www.chivarnado.com. Dorothy Mushet owns the Banner Queen Art Gallery in the hundred-year-old Trading Post near Julian, California where she specializes in painting wildlife, landscapes, farm animals and children. She works mostly in watercolors and oils.

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NEWS OF THE UNKNOWN

October 25th & 26th, 2003

I go outside to touch base with the night sky and feel the air before retiring to bed. Tonight feels different. A Santa Ana is brewing and I smell smoke. I come back inside through the creaky kitchen door, accidentally releasing the knob too soon, and the glass pane rattles as if it will break. My husband, Kent, says that a neighbor called saying they smell smoke.

Yeah, I do too, and there are hot and cold pockets in the air outside which means the east wind is on its way, I say. He grew up on the East Coast and is not as familiar with the natural omens of our area. A Santa Ana is a warm east wind that often turns an arsonist’s game into a brush-hungry wildfire.

Our 1920’s two-story cabin is nestled in a beautiful oak-studded box canyon, located about a mile due north of San Vicente Lake. There’s only one way out of this valley which cradles five houses belonging to the four generations of our family that have lived here: The three dwellings at the end of the canyon (Mom’s house, my sister’s vacant dome, and my old trailer with an add-on), my grandmother’s cabin (a quarter mile out the road), and our own paradise across the creek.

At 3:00 A.M. a ridge-sitting neighbor calls.

Chi… Do you know about the fire...? It’s going to get us… You may be all right, but we’re up on top. We’re going to get it. This is it.

I hear her words and feel the need to go where there’s a decent vantage point on this fire. Though I turn on an old flashlight, I can barely see the ground in front of me. After fumbling with the resistant car door handle, I drive out our dirt road and up a neighboring ridge. I park on an overlook and get out of the car. By now the warm wind has begun to carry the daunting smell of a forest fire. I lean back against the car and watch the fire-brightened sky in the distance. The first flames burn over the far ridge and the hairs rise on the back of my neck. The bright orange snake slithers along the mountainscape as it heads toward San Vicente Lake. I’d better go hook up the rig and load our livestock before my car gets blocked in on top of this mountain, as more vehicles have arrived.

I find Kent still in bed and convince him to get up and get moving. I’m amazed at the calm in my voice. Could you hurry and hook up the patio hose to the roof sprinkler? I’ll turn on the yard sprinklers and - oh crap… The flashlights are dead so I put new batteries in them. I call my sister. We’re starting to evacuate! Did you know there’s a fire? She doesn’t know. I call her again about moving her old horse from up the canyon.

Kent holds a flashlight and guides me as I back the truck to the horse trailer, and we crank the trailer tongue down over the ball. I fumble with the trailer emergency brake wire, weaving it through a clip dangling from under the truck, then cram the electrical plug into the receiver. We run up to the barn, yank open the door, and I stand there dumb-founded for a few seconds trying to figure out what tack to take. A wave of déjà vu crashes over me and I wonder if this will be a dry run, like all our other evacuations have been. I shove a saddle and a couple of bridles into Kent’s arms and scoop up another two saddles to load into the back of my old Toyota wagon. We carry more armloads out and throw them into the car until there’s no more room except for the two laundry baskets full of photo albums I snagged on my way out of the house. We hold off loading horses until daylight, if possible, to avoid any trailering problems.

I check on the roof sprinkler only to find that it needs manual assistance to get it to oscillate. After removing the screen from an upstairs window I climb out onto the roof. Standing on tip toes, slipping on the loose, mossy cedar shingles, I reach up to turn the head a few times to remind it of its proper function and get soaked in the process. Finally the dang thing decides to work on its own and I climb back in through the window.

Kent, our ten-year-old son, Chance, and I hurry out to catch the horses when it begins to get light. My sister drives past to get her old horse, and my teenage daughter, Kali, goes to help her. We lead our nervously snorting horses down to the rig and stroke their necks saying, It’s O.K. now. I load the two horses first because I know the donkey will be trickier. We tug, heave, and even try lifting her feet into the trailer – all standard donkey-loading procedures – to no avail. By this time the smoke is billowing over the mountains and I yell, Bailey, you either need to get in now or you’re gonna have to stay here. Fortunately, she decides to be a smart ass and within a minute she’s in the trailer and we close the door!

Can we hurry up and go? It looks like the fire is coming! Chance’s quivering voice conveys more than his words and we pull out of there, leaving Kent to load the goats and dogs. We are taking the horses ten miles across town to my sister, Bo’s, house.

About a half mile down the road a woman is waving for me to stop. Do you have room for my horse?

No, I say. I’m full.

What do I do? she begs.

You wait until you absolutely have to leave, then turn him loose!

An hour later, flames leap down the canyon walls and smoke is thick and black as Kali and I barrel in the dirt road. As I turn the rig around, she jumps out of the truck and disappears through the smoke to rescue my uncle’s cat from the garage behind Grandmother’s house.

I yell, Just open the door and come right back!

No, I’m going to get her! she screams.

I run up towards the field, seeing unfamiliar faces, one in a gas mask, helping Kent load goats into the camper. The strangers yell, We gotta get out of here. Now! I scramble to open the chicken pen and the goat gate, because the two younger non-milk goats are too scared to let us catch them and they have to be able to get free.

Meanwhile, Kali is crawling along the floor in the smoke-filled garage, frantically trying to find the cat. I’m worried, but I have to drive the empty rig out since it’s blocking the road. I yell to Kent, Don’t leave without her! and a neighbor jumps in my truck. In the cloud of dust behind me, Kali’s tearful face portrays her breaking point to Kent as she clutches the cat in her arms and trembles.

I drop off my passenger in a neighbor’s yard and am relieved to see the camper following behind. Kent had already brought out Kali’s truck, and his van crammed full with four of our dogs. There should’ve been five, but no one noticed. Kali lifts the cat into her truck and drives over to my sister’s house.

We now begin our relay race out of there with only two drivers, but three vehicles. We manage though -- Kent’s a runner. We both gag and cough from the putrid smoke burning our throats. Flames, shooting a hundred feet high, blaze down the mountainside toward the Fernbrook houses as we leave our canyon.

We arrive at Bo’s house and she drives Kent back for the van while I move the goats from the camper to the horse trailer and give them water. I continue to glance toward the east, monitoring the proximity of the smoke, and hope that we’ll be safe here. By now, it’s all I can do to just plod along making sure the animals are okay (cats, cockatiel, guinea pig, and horses). I can feel a migraine coming on.

I down some Advil and join the others in Bo’s living room, to watch the non-stop TV coverage of the fire. Around 9:30 A.M. my stomach turns and my brain feels foggy. I numbly grab a blue ice bag from the freezer, settle into a chair and press the ice against the back of my neck. While staring at the screen, observing the fire already moving into Lakeside, we hear that the fire has burned from Cedar Falls, which is north-east of Ramona, through Country Estates, down the bottom of Mussey Grade, and through Wildcat canyon and the Barona Indian Reservation. They tell us, This fire is moving twice as fast as a man can run!

San Diego County, except for the south-west coastal area, has very mountainous, brushy terrain, with canyons and mesas highlighting the landscape. Every fall there are huge fires somewhere in the County casting a dark cloud over the rest of us. The average rainfall is less than twenty inches, and by September the back-country vegetation is parched and ripe for incineration.

I snap back into reality realizing that I should call Jessie, my oldest, to see how she is and tell her not to come home. After tracking her down through one of her friends, my phone call wakes her to the disturbing news of possibly, no probably, not having a house anymore.

Oh no! she sobs. The news hits her hard as she tries to wake up from this nightmare, agreeing to come to Bo’s this afternoon – where we’re staying. She had gone down to the city to visit friends for the weekend. She will need to take the long way up to Ramona because the fire is closing many main roads.

I hang up thinking that I should also call my dad to let him know that we’re okay. He wakes up to answer the phone with my disturbing news, but he doesn’t even know there is a fire – heading his way to Lakeside! But his house isn’t in any danger though.

I’m glad you’re alright, Dad says, but I can tell the news bothers him.

I try to put his mind at ease and say, It doesn’t do any good to worry about it. At least we’re okay.

He says he isn’t going to worry and, I’ll just go have a cup of coffee at the donut shop. But I know he’ll work himself up anyway. I worry about him – eighty-two years old with a bad heart. My head is pounding when I hang up the phone so I put the ice back on my neck and collapse on the sofa again to watch the fire coverage on TV.

Kent storms in the front door, I forgot Patch! I’ve got to go back! (Patch is our old blind dog.)

You can’t go back! Bo and I both shout. You’ll be burned up!

He’s beside himself. I unconvincingly try to explain, Even if you did manage to get her, she’d bite you when you try to lift her up into the car, and all the dogs here would pick on her so badly she might not survive… She’s a dog of routine and without it she’d have a rough time.

I plead with him not to go, since my analysis didn’t work, and I have him promise not to go all the way home because, You could be trapped in that box canyon without realizing it in time to get out, as well as die of smoke inhalation! Somehow he feels he can’t be here right now. He can’t just wait it out. He needs to go where he can feel like he’s doing something, even if he can’t get into the canyon.

Kent is gone for the next few hours as we watch ‘The Cedar Fire’ blaze into the ritzy community of Scripps Ranch. At this point Ramona is forgotten. Our Mussey Grade Road is completely ignored, as not one fire truck, borate bomber, or forest service person shows up. Without our Fernbrook community of friends and neighbors calling each other (before the phone lines burn) and helping out, we would have all burned up. At least we were there for each other.

Later that afternoon Kent returns. The fire’s crossed the road down at Foster Truck Trail. Some guy pulling a trailer whipped in one of the dirt roads down there. He was screamin’. He must only have had time to go in and turn around and it was burnin’ back up in there. He came flyin’ out of there like a bat out of hell! Then I saw this couple come down in a car. She was cryin’ and the guy was clutching the steering wheel with this vacant look in his eyes. They must have just seen that they’d lost everything.

We force some cheese and crackers down our throats and the two of us leave to go stand around the top of Mussey Grade Road with many of our neighbors. By now there is a police car blocking the entrance, not allowing vehicles down the grade. We can all see flames, some as close as a hundred yards, and are engulfed in smoke as we trade escape stories. Dump Truck Dave defies police and rides his motorcycle down through a ring of fire to get back to his place. His wife is frantic, but she knows him – he has to go.

Later, we head across town to our friends, Tim and Heidi, to see how they are faring. Heidi is methodically packing little figurines in a box, not knowing what to take, while Tim stands outside with a garden hose wetting the ground. We offer to take their kids, but one is already at a friend’s house and the other one opts to wait with them. The flames are jumping down the back mountainside quickly and getting uncomfortably close. It doesn’t look good. As we are leaving, a borate bomber (fire plane) dumps a load of the fluorescent pink fire retardant onto the burning hill behind the house, which saves them. Five minutes later would have been too late.

Towards evening, Kent says, Let’s go to K-Mart and get socks and underwear. I look at him dumbfounded and whine, Huh? K-Mart’s the last place I want to go now. I don’t care, I’ll just keep wearing the same socks and panties! We had escaped with no packed clothes so Kent finally convinces me that we ought to go, At least for the kids’ sake. The parking lot here is full of evacuees. Later, relying on Bo and Dan’s hospitality, we spend the first night looking out the camper window at the orange glow in the distance, wondering if our home has survived.

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Home sweet home

A SENSE OF PLACE  

The ecosystem of our canyon is unique to the general area of Ramona. During the hot summer months the canyon walls, the hundreds of hundred-year-old oak trees, and the gentle breeze provide a bit of a respite from the blazing sun, and during the winter it is slightly warmer than the surrounding territory. Sometimes deer, foxes, bobcats, and an occasional mountain lion pass through along with the bounty of songbirds, squirrels, rabbits, gophers, quail, doves, hawks, crows, and ravens. Often, the last wildlife music I hear at night, while lying in bed, is the song of the Poorwill. Its three and one-half syllable call is one of my favorite sounds, especially when I hear a beckoning response from another direction.

There is a meadow on top of the south mountain sprouting exotic grasses usually found only in low wetland areas. The large flat boulders to the southeast of this meadow boast awesome views of Cuyamaca and Iron Mountain, Kimball Valley, San Vicente Lake and the bluish ridges in the distance. This is our traditional destination on Christmas afternoons and on hikes with friends. On my 19th birthday I carried my little boom box, with a tape of my favorite songs, and let my soul soar while dancing the afternoon away in the meadow. Sometimes I hiked up there to study during my college years.

To the east swells our lowest mountain, which forms the back of the canyon. This ‘Saddle’ connects both the north and south ranges. All this is relative because the canyon doesn’t exactly lie east-west. After the last fire, which burned about a third of our properties up on top of the ridges, we discovered hundreds of pottery shards. Mom had found a clay pit back in the 1960’s and taken a sample. She worked the clay by sifting the coarse granules through a wire mesh and then added sand. The animal figurines and bowls she sculpted took on an earthy, organic appearance, unlike the shiny, molded look of the gift store variety. She fired them at ‘cone 10’ which is stoneware. When Bo and I were in elementary school, Mom’s morning walks would sometimes lead to new discoveries like this. In the 1970’s I came across a cave nearby where the Indians had stored some of this clay. Many of the boulders have indentations where the Diegueños ground their acorns.

The mountain to the north towers over all the others, leading up to a 2,200 foot peak to the northeast. This is the toughest one to traverse because of its steepness, dense brush, and huge boulders. Dozens of caves dot this slope, including ones we’ve named the Tree Cave, the Bat Cave and the String of Seven Caves. The native chaparral consisting of buckwheat, chamise, sumac, poison oak, sage, scrub oak, lilac, and manzanita cover the landscape, between the hundreds of massive boulders.

The semi-arid climate gracefully yields to the seasons which the canyon manifests in its own special ways. The annual rainfall is usually less than twenty inches, mostly coming between November and April. The seasonal creek runs when we’ve had an abundantly wet year and the water echoes throughout the canyon. Flowers pop up in wild succession from poppies, Indian paint brushes, sun cups and brodea to penstemon, mustard, owl’s clover, Chinese houses and nightshade. The yellows, reds and purples pick me up on even the darkest gray days. I often take a walk up the hillside to pick a sage leaf for my tea to sip on all afternoon while teaching my dance classes. The horehound plant provides relief from occasional respiratory ailments, although it is extremely bitter.

Fall brings the Santa Anas - hot dry winds from the east. Fortunately, they don’t come as often or as bad here, as in the greater Ramona valley, but when they do everything is edgy. With all that static electricity in the air the horses are flightier and spook more easily and people get more irritable. The threat of fire is constant as the brush is crackly dry and brittle by then. Mom always stayed home, at the back end of the canyon, on these days in case a fire came. In fact, she hardly ever wanted to leave our beloved sanctuary. She often used her geriatric horses as an excuse to ‘not be able to go away on vacation.’

There are three houses and many out-buildings at the end of the canyon, which is about a third of a mile up the dirt road past our place. Besides my sister’s dome, there’s my old house which we lived in before buying this place, and Mom’s house where my sister and I were raised. Dad’s shop and photo lab, a hay barn, several sheds, and piles and piles of used lumber and miscellaneous potential-construction-material heaps decorate the forty-five acre compound up there. Across the creek from our house is my grandma’s old house that’s rented out. A garage and large shed are sitting on that fifty-five acres.

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When I was a kid this old two-story cabin, which was down the dirt road from where we lived then, enraptured me. An artist had built the cabin during the 1920’s, and the place oozed charm. No two rooms were constructed on the same level and rockwork in the patio led the way to a cistern on top of a boulder behind the house. My grandparents, Bamoo and Papoo, purchased their hundred acres from the artist in 1955. Their house happened to be what the artist had built for his studio. However, our cedar-shingled cabin was now on a separate twenty-acre parcel.

I remember if I was having a particularly tough day I would venture down here with my dog and guitar and enjoy this peaceful setting. No one lived here during that time as it belonged to several families who retreated to the place only a few times a year. Huge live oak trees shaded the house and front yard gracing the cottage nestled into the hillside.

In the early 1990s, Kent and I decided we really wanted our own place. The house that I’d built on Mom’s property, which originally had been part of my grandparents’ land, wasn’t truly our own. I felt very connected and at home here and Kent was beginning to feel that way as well, so it would be awfully difficult to leave. I knew I couldn’t live amongst pavement, traffic and sirens, and my heart really was rooted here. Even while going to college and staying in the city a couple of nights a week with relatives, I felt antsy to get back to the canyon. We decided to try to buy the cabin down the road, even though it wasn’t for sale. After months of bargaining with the owner of this house, we bought our paradise in the spring of 1992. It’s funny how things come around sometimes. I had always felt like it was my house somehow, and now it really was! But even better than that was the kind of heaven it became when my husband fell in love with it too.

Unfortunately, the place had changed hands a few times over the past couple of decades and subsequent renters trashed it. To say that there was a lot of work to do on this fixer-upper would be a gross understatement; a ‘Condemned Notice’ was posted on the kitchen door. Before we bought the place, during the rainy season the underground cesspool filled up and drained into the road, creating an even muddier route to get home to our end of the canyon. Now we needed to put in a real septic tank and leach field, bringing in outside help. The toilet had been ripped out of the bathroom leaving a gaping hole in the floor. The concrete bathtub was unsightly and cooled water and buns quickly. I scoured it with muriatic acid and painted the tub navy blue with epoxy paint. Daylight could be seen through the large cracks in the wall so we added plywood inside and painted the whole room antique white with blue trim.

All the windows were caulked shut with dirty cloth remnants stapled over them. Previous tenants had evidently felt paranoid, even living out here. A huge pile of clothes, bicycles and various belongings littered the field out back along with an old truck that sat decomposing into the landscape. One prior tenant called with a sob story about her husband being in jail…so we let her come out with a friend to tow the truck away with some of the other junk as well. Late one night, about a month later, a stranger drove into the yard. A pudgy, unkempt woman staggered up the falling down living room steps, wanting to ‘score’ something. I helped her back to her car and Kent and I thought a gate might be a good idea.

The back patio sloped directly into the living room through the rotting French doors. The Douglas fir floor was decayed and sagging so this area needed new wood, and we beefed up the living room floor with foundation supports. The house sat precariously on a thin rock-and-mortar stem wall – classic Craftsman style. We dug ditches and laid pipe. We painted until our arms ached. We made innumerable trips to the dump. Mom drove her tractor down and readied a site for a rental trailer to help make our mortgage payments a little easier. Anyone else would have torn the place down and started over. But even if we had more money we still would have worked with what was here. Simplicity and making do with less has always fit us.

Former owners had painted over old cowboy paintings on the dining room walls. I knew about them from my childhood escapades down to this house. My long-time artist friend, Helen, whom I have known since high school, helped me apply a special solvent with which you can remove one layer of paint at a time. We tipped the can of solution onto wadded-up rags and rubbed the edges of the pictures, working our way inward. Through several layers of paint we began to uncover cowboys flying off bucking broncos onto cactus plants. Not that these three paintings that the artist’s wife stroked onto the walls during the Depression were anything extraordinary, but they were rugged, free-form illustrations that had become part of the house. They belonged here. It is said that the local San Diego landscape painters would come up the mountain to paint at this house.

In the months following our purchase of this land I remember getting up at 4:30 A.M., as Kent was leaving for work at the juice company. I’d exercise and then walk the third of a mile down to get a few hours of work done on the place before going back home and getting the girls’ breakfast ready. The three of us would then head down to perform a few more hours of physical labor. Often, at night, I’d go back to get ‘just a little more done.’

Dad helped us immensely. He knows how to do just about anything. Chi, he’d say, Can you pull on that end of the wire and loop it through the hole in the 2 x 4 there?

Okay, like this? and I’d tug the 12 gauge wire where he wanted it to go so the girls would have safer electricity in their bedroom. With his endless volunteer hours we were able to rewire some of the old electrical pathways, install paneling over the open insulation-filled framework of the upstairs bedroom, and open up the breezeway-style porch to let more light in. Dad even built us an outhouse because, Sometimes a family might need more than one toilet! Several friends thankfully pitched in with scraping, painting and cementing.

Kent and I were engaged. We decided to put our limited funds into fixing up the place instead of having a traditional wedding. Wouldn’t a lawn be beautiful here? I asked Kent.

Yeah, maybe so. It’s kinda hard for me to visualize it, but I trust your instincts, he responded. So I planted a lawn and landscaped as much as I had time for. This special place harbors many distinct beautiful spaces, which can be enjoyed separately, almost like different rooms in a house.

Somehow I was beginning to feel even more connected to our new property in the canyon than the back end where I had grown up. Behind the house, up by the garden area, stand gigantic flat-faced boulders rising up as high as seventy feet vertically. I’ve sometimes wondered if an artesian well might be possible here. Because of this majestic south rim our living space is sheltered from the early direct sun and the nestledness this creates feels magical. The sunsets cast a wonderful yellowish light if the season is autumn; and if there are clouds lingering from a storm the color turns crimson.

One particular boulder back there sits above an old peaceful-looking oak tree. By situating myself in one of the butt-shaped indentations, I am recharged by the warm, invigorating energy which envelopes me there. Hiking up just a little bit higher, I’ve witnessed some spectacular sunsets over those distant hazy blue ranges while my being feels protected by these jagged rock outcroppings that house my soul.

Being a dancer and choreographer, I couldn’t just have a regular wedding ceremony. I needed something uniquely our own. We were married in a circle on our front lawn. Jessie and Kali were flower girls of a non-traditional type. They handed a pink carnation to each person in the circle, which they in turn held during the ceremony. Two of our good friends sang a special song for us with guitar accompaniment. I wasn’t going to wear a traditional wedding dress, but when I found one in a thrift store window that fit perfectly, I couldn’t resist. My best women, Helen and Marguerite, helped with the last-minute details that morning as we were still cleaning up the place. Mom even wore a skirt and nice blouse, stepping out of her typical jeans and suspenders that day. The usual entourage of dogs accompanied her and joined in our festivities. Kent’s attire consisted of rented old-fashioned trousers, suspenders, a frontier-style white shirt, and a long black coat with tails, which blended nicely into that rural country gathering on August 8th, 1992.

We had found the cheapest preacher possible through the yellow pages and had him perform the verbal stuff. Kent and I thought we had made clear to him what we wanted, but his senility reared its head, if only to us, when he said, till death do you part and the obey thing. I glared at him, bit my tongue, and decided to respond ‘appropriately’ so as not to make a scene. When it came time for him to leave he got his car stuck and Dad had to help him out. He’s not the brightest dude, he said later.

When our circle ceremony was over everyone put their carnations in the vases decorating the tables in our dirt driveway. We had laid down cedar chips to cut down on the dust and also provide a wonderful aroma. I was able to get our carnations wholesale through an acquaintance with my dance studio business. Along with these and some Naked Ladies that Helen’s father grew, we only spent $60 on flowers. I got a kick out of this since it was the flowers that everyone seemed to remember about our wedding. Most of our money went into sprucing up the place, which it needed anyway. That satisfied our frugal nature nicely.

The house was quite sparsely furnished at that time because we hadn’t moved in yet. The potluck buffet was presented on make-shift tables (plywood resting on saw horses) in the living room, so the dogs couldn’t get at it. A neighbor, along with her cohort, provided her vocal skills for a modest fee, so that we could all dance on the old carpet out in the side yard. Jessie also played her violin.

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We spent that next year busily trying to get the cabin livable. Before moving in we walked through the house carrying a dish of burning sage, smudging each room with the aromatic cleansing smoke. In spite of all the bad tenants the cabin felt good after all the improvements we’d made and the friendly gatherings that took place here. We moved our beds down to the house the day before school started which meant, of course, that none of us got to bed at that ‘all-important early hour’ that night. Jessie was going into 5th grade for the first regular school experience of her life. The kids have been home-schooled for most of their educational years. Kali would be attending two days a week with the local home-school program. We’ve home-schooled, hoping to keep the love of learning alive and to prevent school from squelching it. My two teaching credentials would come in handy if anyone were to question us. But I also think it’s important to provide a mix of different environments for the kids to learn flexibility and be able to succeed in different surroundings.

Over the next few years we added livestock and gardening to our lives. Jessie wanted milk goats and I made cheese with the extra milk. Kali got interested in riding so corrals and horses moved into our field. The garden provided fresh vegetables for our extended family dinners as my parents would often be around at that hour. The house became quite comfortable; we used a passive solar system by opening and closing the windows to make optimal use of the sunlight and warmth coming in through the