Failure

It is funny to write about this for only our second post, but one of the things that has been so challenging about the Crooked House Ranch project over this first year is how much we have failed. And really failed, in multiple ways, repeatedly. We failed at gardening… we planted 200 fava beans and not one came up. Then we planted a second cover crop…nada. We just planted a third one a couple weeks ago. Not a single sprout. All of our squash died, the insurance company wouldn’t insure us for months. Our septic tank failed. Our steer project failed. Our hopeful friendship with the neighbors failed. We have had flies, spiders, scorpions, bats and worms…in the house.

Through all of this, we have deeply questioned our intentions and talked ourselves around again to where we started multiple times. We are here because no other place would have us. This place is as ornery as we are in our fundamentalist belief in making it work. But it is certainly a trial by fire. And literally by fire, as of this writing, the Mill Fire and Mountain Fire burn around us and we are inundated with smoke. We are daily questioning our reasons for being here, doing this, keeping going.

In a way, Covid probably helped us all become better acquainted with failure too. Missed opportunities, cancelled plans, loss, death. So, by now, we should probably be used to the familiar experience of things not going our way. But where does the dogged optimism that keeps us trying again come from? How long do we worry at a knot until we declare it too difficult to untangle? In this time where many folks are championing naps and the value of rest, is this just some protestant work ethic gone awry?

And in the face of repeated loss and adversity is it crazy to keep trying. (Who said that thing about insanity being when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result….?) Maybe this whole project is an experiment in insanity. Or resiliency. Perhaps it’s just about re-framing, shifting our perspective and trying to orient to this new place with different eyes. When we look at it through the eyes of our Bay Area selves, it really does appear a failure. Nothing growing, brutal weather, lonely ranches and trump signs. But the starkness is also quite beautiful, the solitude is an immense teacher, and the trumpers have forced us to reconsider what it means to be in community with folks who you don’t agree with and maybe don’t even like. In many ways, we have spent much of this first year just re-calibrating ourselves to this new place.

Just this morning, I took several bowls of rotten peaches, brought home from the gleaner bins at the co-op, and dehydrated them to make dried fruit snacks. My continual failure to plant a cover crop has led me to read up on regenerative soil practices, to research the history of this land we are on and learn that the particular makeup of volcanic clay soil is actually well suited to grazing, and that without significant regenerative practices will not likely yield much of a garden. The chickens are now working our garden soil and soon it will get a strong layer of hay/poop mulch before the winter frost and snow. If I hadn’t failed with the cover crops, I’d probably have kept depleting the already compacted soil, but now, with each successive year’s work on this land, we hope to make it stronger.

Some of the things that have keep us going this year have been the visions of what is to come. What will this land look like when we have stewarded it for 5, 10, 20 years? What will this place become when we are gone and we pass it to our kid or the next person to inherit it? What will it mean to share this place with other artists and friends? How will the work we do now and tomorrow impact the place going forward?

But more importantly, how will the place impact us? As our planet warms and our society collapses, how will this dry landscape hold and shape us? Is there a way that the work and challenge of this place will temper us into more compassionate, more patient, more resilient humans? Will it ask us to pay more attention to the things that grow easily here so that we may better care for them? What will the dry wind and starry skies teach us about sound and space and silence. Perhaps the hardness of the surrounding mountains will remind us to stay soft in their presence.

It is still too early to tell. For today, we will keep going.