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Organic Kiwis and Sailboats.

| Lifestyle, US

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Last time we were in Live Oak CA.  The fires in California were intense, with approximately 1000 burning at any one time.  Few of the fires had been extinguished, some had been contained and many, many more were still burning out of control.  Our original plans were to work a few days at two organic farms in Clear Lake, CA and then see friends who were living in Cloverdale, CA, and had lived in Hawaii when we did.  After visiting with them, our plan was to go to Willits and Laytonville to work with other organic farmers and then go up the coast and on to Oregon to visit friends and relatives.  Everyone where we planned to go between Live Oak and Brookings, OR was on fire watch or warning.  Most of the roads between where we were and where we wanted to go were only sporadically open, and more often they were closed.  Celinda made a phone call to an organic kiwi orchard that was in our WWOOF organic farmers book. 

We’re volunteering through WWOOFusa.org and places to stay and work aren’t always available.  The people who own the kiwi orchard told Celinda they already had a volunteer but if we had a tent, we could camp out in their orchard.  When I was in London, UK, a cab driver who I was talking to likened me to Crocodile Dundee.  Maybe he was right, I’d rather sleep on the ground than sleep in a bed, so the invitation to camp out in a kiwi orchard was a new adventure and fine with me.  Celinda felt somewhat differently, but we had lots of sleeping bags for cushion and the people at the orchard gave her a roll up sleeping mat.  We were going to stay three days, but that wasn’t how it worked out.

When we arrived dinner was about to be served, we met the other worker, who was twenty-six, and the owners two Jack Russell terriers.  One of the terriers looked like Yoda (from Star Wars) with a long nose.  We all sat and talked over dinner and everything was very mellow.  We asked them what work they had and found there was a lot of weed whacking and the trees needed to be “suckered.”  Suckering is when you remove unwanted sprouts that come up from the ground around the tree or from the trunk.  We still weren’t sure how long we wanted to stay and decided to wait until the next day was over to decide. 

At dinner Wade, Wade and Bettie Ann are the owners, asked me if I knew anything about boats.  I briefly filled him in on my sailing experiences and he asked me if I wanted to help work on his boat that he planned to race in a couple of weeks.  I hadn’t sailed for twenty years and it had been at least that long since I’d worked on a boat. The boat was a Raven, it was an open, centerboard boat and all my sailing, with the exception of a few races in a Laser, were all on large, ocean type, keel boats.  But, it was another new adventure and it didn’t take much contemplation to come to a “yes” answer.

By 7:30 the next morning Trisha, the other volunteer, and I began sanding the cockpit seats so Wade could paint.  I installed some new fittings and removed some wooden slats, that held gear in place while under sail, so they could be varnished.  By that time, I was sure I wanted to stay at least three days and maybe longer.  Celinda had taken the morning off and gone with Bettie Ann to a T’ai Chi class, and they had hit it off well together.  We began e-mailing people and telling them we couldn’t get to the coast and would catch them next time around.

When I was done, it was time for breakfast and then off to the orchard to weed whack.  Before we left Palermo, the weed whacker and I became well acquainted.  I can’t say we became good friends, that would be stretching it too far, but we did establish a close working relationship.

About 10:30 I flushed a young rabbit out of the grass around a tree. It ran a couple of rows over and crouched down in the grass that I’d whacked previously.  It didn’t move, so I put Mr. Mantis, my name for the weed whacker, down and snuck over to where the rabbit was.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cat who had rabbit for brunch on its mind.  By keeping a tree between the rabbit and myself, I was able to get close enough to reach around the tree and grab the rabbit.  When I did, it squealed and the cat made a short charge in our direction but stopped twenty or so feet away.  I took the rabbit up to the barn and showed everyone and then down to where Celinda was working in the orchard trimming suckers from the trees.  We patted the rabbit for a while, but it was wild and wanted to be released.  I took it down to a blackberry patch and let it go with my blessings that it would be able to avoid the cats and live a long life.

 

Filed under: Lifestyle, US
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About Larry Miller

I was born in Los Angeles in 1940. My father was a fighter pilot instructor during WWll and we moved from coast to coast, maybe that’s where I got the nomad in my blood. After graduating from high school in 1958 I joined the Marines. That lifestyle wasn’t for me and upon my discharge I went on with my life, and have never looked back. I worked briefly for a Caterpillar dealer in Riverside, CA before moving back to N. California where I was a welder and truck driver for a chemical company. Truck driving wasn’t my calling anymore than being in the Marines, and I went back to work for another Caterpillar dealer steam cleaning dirty tractor parts and welding. They sent me to schools, lots and lots of schools. I spent as much time going to trade schools as I did at work. I went from cleaning parts to apprentice field mechanic, to mechanic to the parts department to satellite store manager in less than two years. They wanted me to move to Sacramento and be a salesman: I moved to Oregon to learn to commune with nature. I went to work for another heavy equipment dealer and was later contacted by the World’s largest Lorraine Crane dealer and offered the position of purchasing agent and general parts manager. In 1967 I was offered a line of automotive parts and supplies and went into business for myself. My business revolved around eleven race cars that we maintained for others, driving race cars professionally and maintaining high end sports cars. I was a championship and regional champion driver. My business was the largest import parts and service, non dealer, in the state until I sold it in 1979. We went sailing in 79, first to Mexico and then Hawaii. I was an award winning Trans-Pacific sailor and sailor of the year, Hawaii, Island of Kauai. An opportunity presented itself in Hawaii during 1981 and I was back in business, importing Japanese auto body and hard parts. I also felt the pull to write and began freelancing for magazines and newspapers in 1982. My main focus in my articles is, and always has been, health, wellness and fitness. Most of us have heard the saying, “Time is all we have.” I disagree. Our health is all we have, because without our health, we have no time. I was a US Olympic team hopeful in racewalking and held all the records for the state of Hawaii. As a sponsored athlete in my forties, I finished first in nine marathons in a row in my division, qualified for the Ironman® and was the state USCF cycling champion five times in Hawaii and Oregon. Celinda and I were married in 1988 after a three year engagement. We sold our businesses and organic farm and sailed back to Oregon. After our sailboat boat was sold, we moved to Joseph, Oregon, two miles from the trailhead into the Eagle Cap Wilderness. We were caregivers for my mother the last ten years she was alive. We moved to New Mexico in 1995 because it was too cold for my mom in Oregon during the winters. Celinda designed, and I engineered and built our strawbale house. I began writing the weekly health column for a local newspaper in 1996, and still do. In 2000, I took the summer off to do a four month, 4000 mile, hike, bike and kayak odyssey. I’d been writing health, fitness and sports articles since 1982 and the journey produced a full-length, nonfiction, first person adventure book, Yol Bolsun, May There Be A Road, which can be bought from Amazon.com and others over the Internet. The summer of 2001 was spent hiking. kayaking, fishing and exploring the southwest. In 2002 Celinda and I spent the summer in Canada learning the hospitality business at a resort in preparation for doing promotion for the resort in the US. Most of 2003 was spent reestablishing the trees and landscape that had died during the stay in Canada. We had a house sitter and the house sitter had an ex-husband, and that’s a long story. In July of 2004 I did a solo kayak trip on the Snake River, taking pictures, writing articles and pencil sketching the journey. I hope to do another kayak adventure on the Snake River during the summer of 2008, on the section I missed in 2000 and 2004. In 2005, I returned to Canada to the resort where we’d spent 2002. I was supposed to be there for the month of June. I’d contacted people I’d met in 2002 and they came back to Canada to fish, hike and spend time at the resort, Echo Valley Ranch and Spa, while I was there. My one month became five and then it was off to Spain to do the El Camino de Santiago as a travel companion with one of the guests who’d returned to Canada in June. During the summer of 2006 a friend from Ireland, who I’d met in Spain the year before, came to visit in NM and we fished, hiked and explored the White Mountains of AZ. He’d never slept out in the wild in a tent before, and it was quite an experience, for both of us. My newspaper articles were put on the Internet beginning in 2002. I was asked to give public speaking engagements, photo and video presentations, on various subjects for the library in Deming, NM and continue to do so. In 2006 I videoed and produced a DVD for the Smithsonian Institute’s travel exhibit “Between Fences.” NMFILMS had a conference by invitation only, which I attended. While attending the conference, I realized that film making wasn’t what I wanted to do but I still wanted to use my sixteen years of experience and enjoyment of videoing and photography. During the winter of 2005, I discovered that no one on record had ever run from the Arizona border to the Texas border, a distance of 165 miles. During the spring and summer of 2006 I trained for the run and the run was completed in October, 2006. In late 2005, I began building and maintaining websites incorporating all the things I enjoyed about video, photography, travel and the out of doors. 2007 has been a summer of upgrading the home and property which resulted in a downgrading of my enthusiasm for being located in one place. If we don’t like what’s happening in our life, we need to change what we’re doing. Celinda and I are ready to pull up roots and move on. I guess I’ve come full circle. I’m ready to revert back to my childhood, and a nomadic lifestyle.

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