and talking about Harry Roberts, who was one of the primary teachers here in the early 1970s. And then we spent a day celebrating the life of Alan Chadwick by listening to stories from different people who knew Alan Chadwick, which was wonderful. Usually a couple of us do the history. So that's, I'm glad Peter's going to help me today. It's the one Mother's Day present I asked him for, even though I'm not his mother, never will be. I asked him to treat me lovingly and come and help me do the history, which is rough for him because he's very much involved in this land still. So you'll get a little bit of that roughness and I think humor too and a sense of how we worked, how we all worked together. Zen Center purchased, it seems amazing that we bought this piece of land in 1971. We came to Green Gulch. Suzuki Roshi always had a dream that there would be a place, that Zen Center's practice complexion would be enriched by having a place where students could come after practicing at Tassajara.

[01:08]

It would be a place that would be open to families, that would be open to a more diverse population, that would have some farming component, talked about that, kind of like a village or a temple, a temple village or village temple. I guess it's more appropriate. Tassajara, of course, being the monastery, Page Street being the city center, the place, the urban center. And then the fortuitous discovery of Green Gulch Farm as a possible rural site rounded out the picture. Suzuki Roshi had died by the time this place was discovered, was made available. But one thing that's good to know too about his dream, about Suzuki Roshi's dream is he also, and I think this is very significant, he also thought that there should be a place for people who weren't stable. And Rab is very strong about this. He remembers quite well. And for people for whom practice was a stretch, either they're, for whatever reason, they didn't function in a mainstream way in American society,

[02:11]

and yet they had a great offering to make because they've learned a lot from practice. And there ought to be a place where the schedule wasn't so rigorous that it would be impossible for them to participate. And there ought to be a place for their gifts to be offered, to be made available. So I think that's quite interesting. In the early years of Zen Center, we had a number of people living with us and practicing with us for whom practice was a real stretch, and for whom their love of Buddhism was undeniable. So it was very interesting. Zen Center was, to my opinion again, this is just my opinion, but in the many years that I've been at Zen Center, I remember that in the early 70s, the place had a little bit of a more raw edge. Dan Welch, who's one of the great teachers and friends and guides of Zen Center, came down to Tassajara riding on a motorcycle with hair as long as Rachel's and longer, down his back with his sweetheart behind him on the motorcycle, and they stayed for 30 years,

[03:14]

became some of Suzuki Roshi's primary students. They came in, they were interested, they were looking, he's an artist, and they ended up staying and practicing and being primary teachers at Zen Center. So the gates were a lot more open, there was more fluidity and more a kind of renegade quality to our life, was less structured, and Zen Center was a kind of haven for many people who couldn't find their place in American society in the 1960s and 70s. I came here with Peter in 1975. I think some of you probably were born after 1975. Is that true? A couple of you? How many? Bapu and Sanchara? Great, so I've lived here as long as you guys have been alive, and probably a little longer, which I think is incredible. I mean, I think it's in a way, it blows me away that I've lived half my life here at Green Gorge.

[04:17]

I'm 50, and I've lived here for 25 years. So that means that I came roughly at, those of you who were in the mid-20s, I came at your age. Oh, I should show you something. Prove it. I have a picture, here I am with Jesse, if you'd like to look at that. Oh, wow. Golden girl. How old are you in that picture? Let's see, I was 29. He came late. Well, that was considered a late birth in those years. So, that's 1977. Actually, I was 30. So, we were really excited to have this place. The story of the place is quite extraordinary. This valley, as you can see, is quite unique and rich. For many years, it's been cultivated as dairy land. And in fact, when a friend from California Academy of Sciences came to Green Gorge to help us look and create a landscape ecology plan, he stood on the deck and he said, it's all oak woodland.

[05:21]

It's gone to eucalyptus, he said, but it used to be gray. And it's been grazed. And now the eucalyptus have taken over, but it used to be old, sweeping oak woodland. And I think that's true. So, he could feel the actual history of the place. Not like in the Sacramento Valley, because it's never been that warm, but there used to be beautiful oaks on the hills going down to the beach. But because of the use of this valley for close to 100 years, it's been used as a place for cattle and for ranches. And it's part of the history of the place. Let's go back to, I want to get my dates right, because it's important that you learn this. Running the land, yeah. Get this right. Are these chapters of your book? Yes, these are sections, and I'll read to you from some of them today. Okay. Well, let's start with the real human ancestors of the place.

[06:24]

Of course, would be the Miwok native people who fashioned this stone obsidian knife and lived here for generations, generations and generations. Two huge shell mounds out at Muir Beach discovered, indicate a culture of people who regularly gathered on the beach and caught mussels and clams and ate them. So the mounds indicate inhabitation and presence. The fact that Peter behind Snip and Jerry turned up that arrowhead as he was plowing, working in a way that was close enough to the land, near enough to the land, so that he regularly turned up obsidian tools in our fields indicates that they probably hunted and traveled through our fields, that this was one of their home places. I'm sure it was a wonderful place to sit and to gather because of the extraordinary bounty of game and of the beautiful nature of the valley. And we know that the Esalen people lived at,

[07:26]

at least they used Tusajara as a medicinal place, as a medicine place. So we know that in two of the sites, and perhaps even in San Francisco, I don't know about the ancient history, the buried history of San Francisco Zen Center, but we do know that Native people inhabited this valley and did not cultivate crops, but drew from the extraordinary bounty of the land. And we could have a whole day talking about the practices of Native agriculture. Maybe it'll come up a little bit when we celebrate the BPF, when we do that ceremony on the 31st of May. But, you know, tremendous presence and integrity of the Native people. We know that they were complex hunters and gatherers. They knew a lot about the landscape. They cultivated the oaks for acorns. They knew how to live very lightly on the land. They left very little trace, but make no mistake, even though they didn't cultivate crops, really it's important to think of them as farmers because they did farm the land. And this is rather new and fresh and I think compelling research

[08:29]

that's coming out lately about the Native people actually managing crops. Harry Roberts, one of our teachers, always reminded us that Native people cultivated crops, that even though they were somewhat nomadic, that they had certain trees that they tended, certain wonderful acorn trees. And, in fact, those of you that know a bit about Native agriculture will know for sure that Native people would watch the oak trees and would notice the drop. The first drop of acorns is usually pretty wormy. And under trees where the acorn drop was heavy and rich and worm-infested, the Native people would gather, spread dry grass on the ground, rub sticks together in light of fire and burn out all the worm-infested acorns so that the next drop that fell, which was usually clean, fell on ground that was clear of the worm. So under the great trees there are old rings of fire around the base of the great trees, the great productive trees that belong to certain families within the Confederation of Peoples.

[09:31]

And we're talking about extraordinarily complex, richly cultured people. They were incredible basketers. They knew a great deal about Native medicine, got their own medicine and how to maintain health and vitality by using their own medicine. And they knew a lot about the landscape and how to draw food from it without leaving a trace of their presence, except occasional glint of obsidian knife. We wouldn't feel their presence here unless we were walking, unless you were walking on the hillsides on a foggy day in July and the movement in front of you, ahead on the trail, you might imagine was a Native woman beating into a woven basket with the seed heads of red maize and clarkia and tidy tips and all those wonderful plants that in late summer make a rich meal. A meal, a ground meal of flower seed was one of their staple crops.

[10:33]

So you might encounter her on the trail, and you still may. You don't know in the summer, you don't know when the shape shift and the land shifts and you drop into a time that's not your time. You may encounter her and learn something about this place. I think some of us have had experiences like that, being here and remembering how it was. Not out of nostalgia, but out of a sense of living tradition. There's a wonderful ranger at Point Reyes National Seashore, Lanny Pinola. He is Cosmiwok and Pomok. He's a great teacher, a great interpreter. And in the summer, there's a two-day festival up there at Kule Loko at the Native Village. Last summer, Lisa and I attended. It was wonderful, dances and Native food served and a sense of connection with the culture. So I'll be sure to check the date of that and put it on your schedule so that you can perhaps organize a trip and go up there if this interests you.

[11:36]

It's a very important part of life here that I wish we emphasized more. And some of us know a good bit about it. In fact, every child in the Mill Valley school system who's gone through third grade has to learn about it. Lisa's been studying it for five months, studying Native culture, and it's been great to participate with her. So prior to the presence of the Native people, are you ready? Okay. There were other beings who walked this land and made it their own. They called it their home. This relic we keep on the altar, it's really a testimony to mindfulness, I think. It's Zen student Rob Weinberg. While walking in mindfulness many years ago on the one day off that we had a week, we worked like wild dogs here, cultivating and culturing this place when we first came, trying to tame it and being driven down into it by the genius of the place. Anyway, he was taking a day off.

[12:37]

And walking in the creek above the Sunday parking lot, noticed this rock poking out of the ground, bent down, dug it out. It was actually in a sandy spit, picked it up, incredibly heavy stone, took it to Harry Roberts, whom you're going to hear about a lot today, showed it to him. Others had looked at it and puzzled over it. It's incredibly heavy. It feels like iron almost. Harry said, oh, it's a mastodon's tooth. We thought, Harry is a very wild character. We thought... He said, thank you very much. We went and asked other people and they had lots of different theories. But Rob was a kind of scientifically based fellow and got arranged to go over to Berkeley, took it to UC Berkeley, paleontology. They said not only was it a mastodon's tooth, it's the top third of a mastodon's tooth or tusk. So hold that in your hand and imagine the scale of the being that pooped and fertilized and drew from this valley thousands of years ago.

[13:39]

When it was a warm place, warm inland sea, and the horsetails that we now find poking up in the green in the glasshouse, all along the edge of the glasshouse, to me they are the most extraordinary, vigorous harbingers or reminders of an era gone by. They used to be 100... These are the most ancient plants in our ecosystem. They used to be, during Cretaceous times, during the time of the dinosaurs, they used to be 150 foot high trees that grew in an inland swamp, warm tropical sea, and actually shaded and protected this valley. So, hi. Yeah, you didn't know. This is fine. We searched. Welcome. You haven't missed much. I'm talking about the horsetail. The herculean weed in the glasshouse, I mean the two paths,

[14:41]

that one that you asked me about. They used to be 150 feet tall. Yeah, they used to be 150 foot tall trees. They're incredible things. Yes, yeah, they did. You know, you can see some wonderful renditions. National Geographic has some great renditions of how it looked around here. I wish I had one of those at hand. I don't. Very primitive looking plants, and if you look at them carefully, you'll see that they have their spore producing. They propagate by spore rather than by seed. So, they're very ancient plants. I like them coming up in the greenhouse because we went to great efforts to have no plants come up through the floor of the greenhouses, and I think it's far out that the horsetail ferns, ta-da, poke through the ground cloth and have found those edges that carpenters can't even, you know, you can't make a seamless world, really, if it's not made of the world. If it's the stuff of the world and not the earth itself, it's hard to make a seamless monument. Anyway, the horsetails have found that crack between their world and ours

[15:44]

and are pushing up through the floor of the greenhouse. They're wonderful. They're one of the highest sources of silica in the plant kingdom. Wonderful plant to have. Interesting that they're so high in silica, impervious to rot, and yet they grow in a bog. They're a magical plant, I think. Anyway, they predate this mastodon, the era of the mastodon, which I don't know when it was, obviously colder times, at being to walk around here. It's like an elephant, like a small... Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It's actually a little smaller than a mammoth. Cal Academy has a great display, which I should obviously have studied better before coming to you, to differentiate between the mastodon and the mammoth. Is this curl? Yeah, the tusks come up, and this is part of the tusk. I think so. I don't know. Something like that, I don't know. It's part of it. Who knows? He said the top third. Then obviously the creature went down into the creek to drink

[16:51]

and probably wallowed in the creek and died there. So that means... No? Mm-mm. We've not excavated, though. No, it's closer. It's right by the road. He found it right by the road. Those of you who've been here through the winter know the creek changes quite a lot in there. It turns into a large bog. So this is part of the dream, to remember, to realize, the dire wolves, the saber-toothed tiger, were all the creatures of this valley, this area. Maybe not the Green Gulch Canyon in particular, but in our midst, in our landscape. They wandered millennia ago. And at that time, too, the coastline was like... 30 miles out. That's correct. The Farallon Islands was the western edge of this continent. Next week, you'll close your eyes and we'll do a spell.

[17:57]

I'll spell you into that. It was hotter then. There's been a whole series of heating and cooling. So wouldn't there have been more water? Wouldn't there have been less coast? There's been both. It's been dry and flooded. The waters have subdued. I don't remember. I'll have to go through it. I have it all written in my notes. But this is one of the most unstable or most dramatic of geologies. It's much more dramatic in Alaska, but the coast of California is incredible. Geological zone. Wonderful place of study. So... So all of this is just by way of introduction to the place. And what does it mean to us? In 1838, an Englishman named William Richardson

[19:04]

received a Mexican land grant of almost 20,000... Yeah, Wichita Bay. Received a Mexican land grant of almost 20,000 acres for this coastal region. A Mexican? No, he wasn't. He was English. But he received a Mexican land grant. I don't know how that worked. But anyway, apparently he wanted to farm or to run cattle in this area. So he was given a land grant of 20,000 acres. What year was that? 1838. Could it have been because of the Mexican-American War? Yeah. People who fought... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd be good to know more about it. I don't. I'm just giving you the most... But I think that's right. So anyway, he received this grant and established Rancho Sausalito, which is the town of Sausalito. And he hired Portuguese ranchers from the Azore Islands to work this land because George always mentioned that the coast of the Gringotts Coast

[20:06]

and this whole area is very similar to the Azore Islands. Where is it? Off the coast of Portugal. It's a strip of small islands out in the Atlantic off the coast. Portuguese ranchers are extraordinary ranchers, very well schooled in cattle raising, and also they're great fishermen, fisherwomen. They know a lot about the ocean because they're island dwellers. So Portuguese came over here from the Azores and began to settle. And Richardson was a broad-minded person. He sold the ranches to the Portuguese people when they raised enough money, and he made it possible for them to have land stakes. And there began to be a chain of five interlocking dairies. Now, I'm hoping that we'll have a date with Yvonne when she's around that we'll be able to go down to her house and meet with her and have tea, not on one of our Sunday afternoons, but maybe on a weekday or some other time. For those of you that are interested in learning more about the history, every time I meet with her I learn quite a bit because she's certainly senior to me. She was involved in the original purchase

[21:08]

and entitlement of this place. So wonderful, wonderful teacher. So these Portuguese farmers and dairy people began to set up distinct ranches, and our area is known as the section of five ranches. That would be the Golden Gate Dairy, which is where the present, where we go down to gather manure, where the horses are, right opposite the Pelican Inn. That's the Golden Gate Dairy or what we called Tinker's for many years. And then there's Green Gulch Dairy because we were one of the dairies. Let me get them all right. Slide Ranch. Frank Valley Dairy is right near Muir Woods. Next time we go up there I can point it out to you. And then on the other, above the woods, there's going over to Homestead Valley. What's the name of that dairy? Yeah, the Homestead Region or the Diaz Dairy on the upper flanks of Mount Tamalpais.

[22:09]

So there were five dairy operations that were interlocking and created a kind of culture owned and run by different Portuguese families. But the strongest and most prominent landholder was a man named Constantino Belo. And in fact, he was able to purchase all of the available dairy land in Muir Beach and connect the dairies between family members and Muir Beach used to be called Belo Beach in honor of him. Until when? Until the early 1900s when Muir Woods was purchased by William Kent and gifted to the federal government and the beach was also named after the naturalist and conservationist John Muir. So John Muir Beach and Muir Woods. But before that it was Belo Beach and a rough and tumble place it was too during Prohibition. It was one of the primary places for unloading contraband liquor. And in fact, I think there was a big still out there on the beach.

[23:11]

Muir Beach has always been known as a rough and tumble place with a kind of edge, slightly dangerous, kind of wild people, not unlike Bolinas. So our history is strong history that way. There was a tavern out at Muir Beach called the Muir Beach Tavern or the Belo Tavern, Belo Beach Tavern. And it was pretty nip and tuck. Illegal liquor would be brought into Muir Beach and then kind of infiltrate, it would infiltrate from Muir Beach into the other communities, nearby communities where it wasn't so easy to infiltrate. So during the war, during the Second World War, bunkers were established on the hills above Muir Beach and in fact enlisted men were housed in the Muir Beach community, which was always a kind of individualistic, iconoclastic community of pretty intrepid,

[24:12]

single-minded people living out there on the cliffs, in the buffeting of the winds. And they opened up their houses and let the soldiers in. San Francisco Bay was guarded by North American military for all the war years. If you've not visited those bunkers, treat yourself to a walk up to the Muir Beach Overlook and go into the bunkers and stay there for a bit, bring a book, see what it feels like to overlook the ocean from that vantage point. Imagine how it would be for our country to be worried about having to protect and have a warning system to protect the Bay Area. All along the coast there are bunkers built into the hills. It kind of indicates a little bit about how we're put together. I think it's just interesting to know how the place was. So this place, it was a dairy ranch for many years, many, many years. Cattle ran through here, and that's why the landscape's been so altered and changed and it's been somewhat eroded. But the real altering of the landscape

[25:15]

really happened with the person who sold us Green Gulch, and that's George Wheelwright who came here in 1945 with his second wife and the love of his life, Hope Wheelwright. They had just gotten married, and they were looking for a place to settle in the Bay Area. George is, because he's still very much alive, quite an extraordinary human being. Mr. Wheelwright, we called him. We call him. Here he is with his prize bull notability. Hope and George were driving along the road and along the coast highway, which was in itself somewhat of a feat during those times, and they noticed this extraordinary place below, and Hope said, Why, George, I want to move there.

[26:16]

And he said, Well, fat chance we'll be able to move there. But she said, I really want to. So they came down, and lo and behold, they met Mr. S. E. Button, Ray Button, who was the person who sold and made his living running gated horses, raising gated horses. The war years had taken quite a toll on his business. People were not so interested in drinking mint tulips and looking at gated horses. They'd lost their loved ones, and the country's heart had been ripped open by war. And he wanted out of here. He sold the place to George on the spot. George bought 650 acres of land. Guess how much he paid for each acre? Sixty-six dollars. This was rough land. It wasn't a yuppie chow like it is now. It was rough land. It was, you know, it was rough. I mean, the beach was rough. There was a reputation of it being a very tough place. There were brawls, fights, punch in your face, get the out of here kind of stuff going on at that

[27:16]

beach. It was not easy, and it was also a sub-community of Portuguese people for many years. The main language was Portuguese. This fall, we will treat you to an unbelievable treat. We will have what we call the Geezer's Evening, and we'll invite Amadeo Banducci, third-generation Italian farmer, and Joe Ponte, who was Portuguese farmer in his 70s, and Turo Richardson, George's stepson, George Wheelwright's stepson, to tell you stories of how it was, and I am really looking forward to it because I will be as young as you are to me when I hear these old farts line up, and apparently it's awesome. It should be a very awesome event, so we'll have some living oral history. Oh, I wonder how that's going to happen. They're saying, well, are we coming over there? Hmm, I want to go over there. So I don't know what we're going to expect. They're not very tame people. They're somewhat, well, they're from a different world. And when you get them

[28:17]

started, I don't know. I don't know if it's possible to jump-start them without a little red wine, but maybe we'll disguise that in goblets and get them going, or prime them first and bring them here. I don't know how we're going to do it exactly, but I trust that they will get going and we'll be their audience. Wendy, how much would an acre of land be here? Oh, I can't imagine, Matthew. Well, of course, it's not for sale because it's in the Federal Park right now. Oh, it's some of the highest real estate in the country. Would a censor pay for it? Well, that's a different story, so stay with me, and I'll tell you. How did George get his money? He's from a wealthy family. He's kind of an old money family in Boston, a family of wheelwrights. They made wheels. They had a mill, a wonderful, successful mill. He was groomed to take over the mill. He was a renegade, a complete renegade, wouldn't hear of it. One of the most charming books to read, and I hope that we'll get a copy of it because I'm not about

[29:18]

to let my copy out, even to you guys, is a book that George wrote called Dead Reckoning, which is really the story of his life. It's very inflated and very rich in tales and stories. Basically, he makes fun of himself to let everyone know that he's the smartest thing on two legs. Actually, it's not untrue. Quite an incredible person. He didn't choose to continue in the family mill. Instead, he went to Harvard at quite a young age and ended up teaching physics at Harvard. In one of his later classes, there was a 17-year-old in the class, a young student who had early entry to Harvard. George said he realized that after the first quarter of semester that the young man knew far more than he would ever know about physics. Pulled him aside and said, I can see you're bored. I'm bored, too, and I should be learning from you instead of you learning from me. Would you like to start a lab together? Edwin Land said, yes, I would. 17 years old? He was 17

[30:18]

years old. I think he was a little older by the time they actually got the lab going, but Polaroid Land and the camera came out of that lab. They discovered the polarization of light. The camera happened to be an incidental. Land was a brilliant, brilliant physicist. And they were working on the polarization of light for war use, too. So they were doing a lot of really interesting research. Their fortune was made. Their lives were made. And so George was able to retire at the rather early age of, let's see, 1945, so 50 years ago when he was in his 40s. He met hope. At the time of his retirement he was a pilot for the United States Air Force. He developed a system of navigation that was based on shooting off of taking bearings or dead reckoning off of the position of stars. So he knew how to fly, but it was far before radar. So he figured out a system of navigation that allowed him to cross the Atlantic and to be very involved in

[31:20]

pretty high secret stuff during the war. Brilliant man. So he was a great navigator. And he knew how to make these instruments and how to follow them and read them. So the story, the book is just a charming read. It's about 100 pages. Of course not published, so it's a loose leaf binder. Try to get a copy so you can have a look. It's a great, great thing. So he came with enough money in his pocket to buy Green Gulch and to settle here with the love of his life, Hope Wheelwright. She had been married before and I think her marriage ended because of her affair with George. He was not mild in any way and certainly not mild in that way. He had a number of passionate problematic affairs. But after he met Hope it all cooled down and she had a couple of children. Turo Richardson, Arthur Richardson, is the person who built Hope's cottage. He built it for his mother so that when they

[32:20]

were living here in the ranch she'd have a place to go. Because quite early in her life, and she's a beautiful, beautiful woman, quite early in her life she developed lung cancer. She was a strong smoker, outspoken dame. Ended up teaching English to all the Portuguese kids in the neighborhood. Kind of a saint actually. They still talk with her. They can hardly talk about her to this day. She must have been something because this family is not mild. She was a great lady apparently. And very loved in the neighborhood. George drove her nuts because he talked so much. He had so many ideas. He probably never should have left Harvard, but he did. He would have been happier if he kept talking and teaching. Because he did it to everybody else, no matter what. He loved this place. They lived here quite dynamically. He influenced the land extraordinarily. Here's some pictures to give you a sense of how he cleared and tamed the land. He was a very interesting mix of conservationist and developer. He straightened the creek. Green Gulch Creek ran in a

[33:21]

sinuous pathway. There's an old picture in one of the lower rooms. That's a name you might remember, Nora might know. Taking care of the rooms. Of the creek winding through the floor of the valley like a snake out to the Pacific Ocean. He wanted to farm those lower fields and to raise cattle. Prized cattle. He straightened the creek into a concrete sluiceway and planned to irrigate the fields off of that creek. That also included going up on the hills and burning the brush. He sprayed to defoliate the hills so that they could be used as pasture land for the cattle. He did aerial spraying, recommended by the University of California and the Extension Service. He did aerial spraying of 2,4-D. He went in the helicopters to do it. Sometimes I think that our primary purpose here, besides saving all sentient beings or as part of saving all sentient beings, is to clean up the environmental degradation that George Wheelwright wrought upon this beautiful place. When he sprayed 2,4-D on the

[34:22]

hills, straightened the creek, burned the brush, created this house, colonized the place, created the pond systems, this interlocking ponds that are here. Created an underground dam below the third field where the reefer is. There's an underground dam. Peter will tell you about that. Ask him when he comes in if I forget. When he dug, there's an underground reservoir below those fields. One reason it stays wet down there. And the ponds are all indications of them. He was put together to discover how to store water. So he created these reservoirs so that he could irrigate the fields so that there could be cattle here. Then he imported grasses from New Zealand, again on the advice of the California Extension Service, and planted the lower fields to really exotic grasses, marvelous grasses. In fact, when our dairy cow was unloaded from the truck years after George left, her name was Daisy. She had a better name than that. Daisy Moss Rose. Steve Stuckey unloaded her, backed off the truck

[35:22]

and Daisy surged, nearly pulled his arm out of the socket, surged toward the New Zealand grasses and fell on them. Yes! George watched with delight. She pooped and ate and pooped and ate. We could not get her off these grasses. They're really incredible grasses for cattle. He studied, a brilliant man. He studied and he was a navigator. He never wanted to stay still. So he got himself in an airplane and went to New Zealand, went to Israel. He followed the parallel, he went along the 36th parallel to see what climates would produce grasses that would do well here. So he introduced a number of very exotic grasses. Planted a lot of the trees around here. Followed the advice of the extension service which included the advice that he spray with 2,4-D. Asked him if he intended to have children. He said he did. They said you'd better get started because he had really done some genetic damage to himself. Not genetic, but some

[36:24]

damage to himself because of spraying. He did a lot of the spraying. He observed the spraying. He watched while they sprayed the hills. He was, you know, he drank in a lot of that. I'm sure it didn't help Hope. They knew that. Did he continue to spray? No, it was years after he'd done it. He wasn't feeling well. He went in to be. In fact, he and Hope never had children together. He has two sons by his first wife who live on the east coast. I love George Rurine. He was a really important person to me. He lived here. He adored this place. It was really the most incredible time of his life to live here. When Hope died in 1968, 67, it became a very lonely place for him, kind of a haunted place. They were far out people. They had decided before her death and they knew she was ill, they had decided to give this land because they always felt

[37:26]

that this place was too special to be in the private domain. They ran it as a place where many people could come. They donated the land to Synanon. Do you know Synanon? Synanon was doing some very radical research during the 60s with drug addiction. As an alternative program for addicts. The Synanon Center was up in Marshall about 20 miles north of here, 25 miles north of here. George liked the work they did. It was encounter therapy, direct one-on-one contact with the addicts. Trusting them, expecting them to come together, get their life together. It was kind of the prototype of encounter therapy or direct psychological work. They liked the work. They believed in it. They let them do some trainings here and decided to deed the place to them and in fact did that. When George

[38:27]

found out that Synanon was planning to sell off the Green Gulch parcel in order to pay for additional land purchasing, he rescinded his offer and changed hope's will and made it impossible for Synanon to come here. After her death, he tried to give the place away to a consortium of Native Americans. On the way to the signing, they got into a horrific fight about how the land would be managed and never showed up. Finally, his lawyer, who was a great friend of Zen Center and a great friend of George Willwright said to him, I think you'd do better to try to sell the place to people that are going to care enough to buy it for a low bit of money and take care of it well. Huey Johnson, then the founder of the Nature Conservancy and the member of the Nature Conservancy and the founder of Trust for Public Land, Secretary of Natural Resources in the Jerry Brown Administration said, what about Zen Center? They have a good track record of Tassajara. That means that we were able to purchase

[39:29]

a wilderness tract of land and take care of it in a non-developmental way. We didn't develop it. George was interested. He met Richard Baker, Santassi Richard Baker, Abbot of Zen Center, Yvonne Rand. His lawyer, Dick Sanders, was a Dutchman. One of the people in the Baker household was a wonderful Dutch woman named Rene de Tombe. They began to speak in Dutch. Sanders said to George, I think you should go with them. They're good. They're good people. I think a lot of the way, a lot of the success and Yvonne pointed this out last time we met, a lot of the connection, kind of radical and direct connection between Zen Center and George Willwright and the then burgeoning Park Service, which was gathering around, came from one on one connection between the people. A dynamic sense of a shared vision. A sense that this place could not belong

[40:29]

in the hands of one private family. It was too important a place in the jewel of this area and that it belonged in the public domain in some way. By then, George owned about a thousand acres. He sold off that acreage. It was developed as you're driving into Greenwich, that last development on the left hand side as you're coming up the crest of the hill. Those of you that know the road well, that was land that George Willwright owned. He sold it to developers and they developed it rather nicely for that period of time. Oh, what's it called? I can't remember. I should know. I want to say Mirror Meadows. That's one of the common names for it. It has some other name. I'm sorry, I don't remember. Laurel. I think it's Laurel Heights. I don't remember. Anyway, it's right as you're driving into Green Gulch. It's on the left hand side of the road. It's a huge development in there. He basically sold off most of the acreage to developers. Made a lot of money and I think that Green Gulch was his heart place and he wanted to keep it in the public domain.

[41:30]

Felt that it shouldn't be sold off. What was the acreage that was purchased? Thousands of acres. I mean, here? 108 acres. No, 115 acres. I don't know how much it was for. Not much. Where is the original 650 that he bought? It includes the hillsides, the headlands, a lot of headland land. All of which has been is now in the hands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. So in the early 1970s, Huey Johnson introduced Baker Oshie to George. They liked each other. People in the neighborhood thought he had lost his mind. He was already considered quite an eccentric coot, but now he sold this extraordinary property to the Zen Center. God. At the same time, and this shows extraordinary thoughtfulness on George's part, at the same time the place had been this whole

[42:32]

area, thousands of acres, were being considered as purchased as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Zen Center happened to slip in right underneath the wire and purchased this place so that we are quite unusual. A private landholding, this is really important that you understand this, a private landholding within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. In this area, one thing that's significant because on Wednesday the third meeting of the Watershed Council of all the different shareholders or stakeholders within the watershed will happen in this room. In this area, there are two agencies that have water rights, Green Gulch Farm and the Marin County Municipal Water District. That means Muir Woods, the community of Muir Beach, and any slide ranch. None of the other agencies in this area have water rights. That means they're all owned by the federal government. Which tells you a little bit about why water politics are so hot here. Tells you a little bit too about the unique and problematic place that Zen Center holds within

[43:33]

the paradigm. So, George was very smart. He agreed when he lived here, he signed up for a tax exempt status under what's called the Williamson Act, which means promising to maintain this land for agricultural use, not develop it, in exchange for tax exemption, and in exchange for perpetual ownership within the, you know, when the park took over. So, there's famous photographs of George going to Washington and signing the Williamson Act, or signing this property over to the Williamson Act, which just means exactly what I told you in 1965. There's pictures of him in the archives of Marin County. He was, again, a very interesting person. He was both a developer and a conservationist. Look at the check going down the stairs. You see the mock-up of what it would have looked like if Highway 1 had been widened and created into a major two-lane,

[44:34]

four-lane highway, which is what they were considering. He was an ardent campaigner against that. He pulled up the stakes. He pulled up the surveyor's stakes. He helped finance that drawing, which so freaked people out that it was nipped in the bud and it never happened. We nearly had a huge highway through here. People wanted to develop it, to open the coast. So, anyway, it was a very interesting, very interesting time. So, he sold the land at End Center for a small amount of money, a modest amount of money, felt that we would do a good job, and then moved to Tiburon, in Belvidere, where he lived with his third wife, Helen, whom he regularly, daily, referred to as Hope. And she was a tough, briny old bird, and upper class dame was having none of this. She was not at all wounded by this, just annoyed by George's nostalgia. Couldn't bear to live here. This was George and Hope's place, not she and George's place. She was hoping, he was a cultured person, was hoping to get him away from here.

[45:36]

His heart was here, though. After he sold the place, he lived with us. He basically was here every day. He had a lot to say about everything. He lived through... a racer. He taught skiing in the Austrian Alps. He was, he continued to fly. Very vital person. Naughty, naughty mind, great raconteur, great storyteller. We loved him. He was here all the time. We'd get a call in the middle of the night, I think the terrain means that you should be out there now, I hope you're lifting the fan boards. Yes, we are. Thank you, Mr. Warwick. He was our donor, our benefactor, and our teacher. And how extraordinary for him to have this able-bodied community of people who were interested in what he had to say. Here's a picture of him. I really think of him more like this. Moving down the path. He had two standard poodles. Sorry, the picture fell off and broke. You can get a new glass part. He had two

[46:38]

standard poodles called Ptolemy and Cleopatra that moved through the valley. They were the only dogs we let in the field. They regularly ran across the beds. Tolly would lift his leg and Pia, marking his territory here, and Cleo would squat on the compost pile, interestingly enough. She'd jump up on the compost pile and mark her territory. And he had this penetrating whistle. You know, a kind of mechanical whistle. He would blow to call them, and he was going quite deaf by that time. We were going quite deaf by his whistle. So we would know. We'd hear the whistle. We'd go, Oh my God! Here comes Mr. Wheelwright! Oh my God! Hide! And we'd often do, Ah! He'd tell us what to do. In the mid-80s, he wore Helen down. She wanted to move to a retirement home. She was sick of the rough life. We really took care of George. Our maintenance crew cut wood and brought it over to him. We stocked their fireplace. We fed him whenever he was here. We listened to his stories. We featured him in all of our events.

[47:38]

It was a primary part of his life, the last decade. You know, his really cogent life. He was very much involved with us. Did he practice a lot? No. He practiced. Wheelwright. But he went to all the Dharma talks. He thought some of them were quite stupid. He would just sit there in the front. He was going quite deaf, and he would sit there and he'd nod. And every now and then he'd go, Ah! He'd nod. But he was sharp. Really smart. Really smart. And funny. Quite funny. And naughty. He had a very naughty mind. Anyway, in the early, mid-80s, he came back and lived with us. He lived in room D. She left. She went to Carmel Valley. She said, I've had enough of you. I'm getting out of here. Fine, he said. By then he had a little dog about the size of Rozzy who kept him company. His other poodles had died off. He was almost blind. He was losing his sight, which was a great source of sadness to him because he loved to read. Quite a character.

[48:41]

So he lived in the Wheelwright Center. Actually, it was the later 80s because Elisa was born into the 90s. He stayed with us for two years. Jerry Fuller took care of him. It was great because he had a roving population of people that went through and took care of him and listened to his stories, which was nice for us. Okay, so that gives you a sense of that part. He's not dead. He's 97 years old. He lives in... He's Charlotte's age. He's alive in Tiburon, an old age home. How did he and Charlotte relate over the years? They loved each other. He had... Yeah, we had... Nakamura Sensei, whom you know, died last year on the winter solstice. Nakamura Sensei, George Wheelwright, and Charlotte Silver to me and my grandmother. They're all the same age, 1903. Peppery old salts. Peppery old beings, extraordinary beings. And

[49:42]

they got along great. Did you ever go see him? I haven't been to see George. He's deep under the well of Alzheimer's. Deep, deep, deep. But he has a body that won't stop. A very athletic person. He always wore a tweed coat and these little leather boots. And he's wearing... Oh, those are his rubber ones. He had rubber or leather boots. And he'd wear that cap. That's the hunting cap that he's wearing. And he'd walk with a cane. He loved chard. He'd go out in the field and pick chard. When he would go home, he'd know he'd spent the day at the ring all day and he had to go see Helen. So he'd say, I'll take her a little chard. He'd go out in the field. I remember he went out once and it was so muddy that he got stuck in the field. He was leaning on his cane and he had his foot pulled out of his boot. And his foot was like this. Chard in his hand. I wet my pants. I was laughing so hard. Let me compose myself. And I said, Mister, where I am coming?

[50:43]

Somebody help me. Somebody help me. I'd forgotten that. Anyway. I pulled myself together. I was screaming with laughter. I thought I'll never make it out there. And it was hard making it. I thought the mud was going to pull me down. But I kept moving. Pulled his boot out and put it on his foot. Oh, he said that was terrible. Stomped off with the chard. Oh, God. He tied the dog. He was totally stuck. Was this the little boy who was here? That's his great-grandson. George's great-grandson. The way it goes is Turo, George's stepson, who built Hope's Cottage, had four children. Anyway.

[51:45]

Those children are my age. And then their children are actually a little younger than I am. Their children are peers of Elisa's. So their children are George Willwright's great-grandchildren. And they're in Tam Valley School together. So the family's been around for a couple of generations. They were Hope's children? They were on Hope's side. Yeah. They were not really George's blood. Their matriarch is Hope Willwright. So, yeah. You mentioned last week that Zendo was a barn. That wasn't a barn that he built? It was a barn that was here beforehand. But George kept it as a hay barn and underneath, in the lower barn where you all are, where there are cow stalls, hay shoots would open up and hay would drop down to the cattle underneath. Yeah, when we came, it was a very rough hay barn and we repaired it. And you'll have to ask Peter more about that. He can tell you more about the actual...

[52:47]

What was it like upstairs? They were old stalls and it was full of harness and just unbelievable amount of junk. Window panes. We built the first greenhouse out of old window panes that we found. It was a kind of wonderful structure, kind of ramshackle old thing that you've never seen that we took down in the early 90s. Just a sec. It was just from all the found stuff that we discovered here when we first came. Yeah, Laura? I was just going to ask Peter. So we did that and we always loved doing it. When we first came, Zen Center was, I think, a group of us... The group that came here was very rough and tumble, very much back to the land, feeling of wanting to meditate hard. It was the height of the Vietnam War. There were a number of people. There were 75 people who were living here when I moved here, which was quite unusual. But there were no guests. There were no guest facilities. This building wasn't built. The guest house wasn't built. The tea house wasn't built. We all lived in the meditation hall

[53:48]

in the Gaitan. It was very rough and tumble then. There was no... We didn't make any money. I think we made $25 a month, each of us, something like that. We worked really hard. We all slept in the Zen Do. If you were... I mean the single people slept in the Zen Do and the newer people slept in the Zen Do. Michael Sawyer slept in the Zen Do for five years, five or six years. That was his place. The older people got to sleep in rooms, in the stalls, basically that were converted into rooms. That's what the cloud hall rooms are. There's a lot of memory around that, how it was. There were no facilities in the lower barn. We experimented. We had, I think, a marvelous person who was our teacher at that time, a student of Suzuki Roshi's, Richard Baker,

[54:48]

very bold thinker, problematic person, rich, imaginative, creative, iconoclastic thinker himself. George Wheelwright and he respected each other. They saw each other as kind of peers. Maybe because they both went to Harvard, I don't know. They kind of sniffed each other out and knew there was something there for them. Richard Baker was very interested in learning how to take care of this place and developing it according to the real political and environmental standards of the times. You know, Earth Day, it just started. It's a time of upheaval and change. Back to the land movement was strong. A lot of homesteading going on in California. A lot of pulling away from mainstream society, really questioning. The Zen Center is set in that time, in those years. We did a lot of

[55:51]

pilot projects for the Office of Alternative Energy. We had a windmill. We experimented with wind power. We experimented with composting toilets. We experimented with a number of alternative technologies to see if they would work. What happens in this? Well, I'm hoping that when Peter comes, we'll talk. You'll ask him then. Ask him a little bit more about that. Because I want to talk to you more about the people. If you can bear it. You can bear more of that from me. We, as I told you, we cultivated with horses. We kept chickens. We kept cows. The idea was that we would be self-sufficient. We would not join the mainstream. You know, from the very beginning, this is in honor of the people who are hoping to listen to this tape, from the very beginning we kept our finger on the covenant of this place, which is to keep the doors open to the public and to meet the public and to take care of the public. So we were hell-bent on having a really good

[56:51]

meditation place and also having a working organic farm, because that was part of the covenant. Part of our outreach was to create and grow beautiful food for ourselves and for others. This was before Green's Restaurant, before the bakery, before a lot of the businesses that Sun Center is now famous for. In the early 70s, we wanted to have this farm. And I think a number of people came here to kind of escape from modern society and to have a kind of homesteading alternative. Primarily urban people. I've often thought that the way the population sits down at Sun Center is very much like the national population, with about 2-5%, Mimi and I were talking about this the other day, right? About 2-5% of the people actually understanding how to farm and understanding something about agriculture. That's about what the percentage has been at Sun Center. Some very strong people have gone through. Peter and I worked with a man named Steve Stuckey, who's a priest at Sun Center and continues to be. Now makes his life as a landscape contractor. Was raised as a Mennonite, by a Mennonite family, very strong Mennonite family.

[57:52]

Knew a lot about farming. Was the primary farm person at Green Gulch. He was responsible, he was a student who came here, became responsible for training us and introducing us to farming. Very good man. His father disowned him when he ordained. It was a very big, you know, his father always hoped he'd be a Mennonite preacher. Or that he would be involved in the Mennonite religion. Wouldn't speak to him. They've since regained or restored relations, but it was a very heavy time. A lot of people were quite unhappy with us, that we were living here, not going to college. A number of students dropped out. The joke was that if you went to read, you'd drop out in the last quarter of the last semester, which is what Layla and Jim Bockhorst did and many other people who came through here. Some of the best students at Zen Center came from Reed College in the last hours of their you know, arduous travel through that institution. It was like the joke. They would come in the last semester and never go back. They'd end up being at Zen Center. People were being drafted. These were dangerous times.

[58:53]

Many of us wondered if we could live in this culture. I guess the sheikh's just thinking about it. For me, it was a big question. Does Zen practice stay connected with the world? The teacher, I think one reason that I stayed at Zen Center in those years was because of the teacher. Richard Baker really did make an effort. He was involved in international relations in Russia, going over and trying to work as a peacemaker and a bridge person between Americans and Russians. Was very active in nuclear politics and trying to protect. He was a worldly person, very worldly person, which was one of the faults that got in his way, I think. For some people, a meditation life couldn't be that expansive. But in fact, Zen Center has always had extraordinary properties that we've taken care of and complex properties that demand a rich mosaic of talent. And we drew from an incredible pool. I want you to understand in the early 70s, we had a carpentry crew. Fifteen people who were incredible carpenters.

[59:55]

They built this place. They lived here. They were Zen students. They trained under Master Carpenter Paul Disko, who was a student of Suzuki Roshi's. Practiced temple carpentry in Japan for five years. Michael Sawyer was one of the carpenters. Ken Sawyer, his brother, who will do the student housing. Marvelous, marvelous human being. Sawyer brothers are incredible. They're sons of a carpenter, a great carpenter in British Columbia. Before Michael had his Parkinson's diagnosis, he worked as a brilliant carpenter, really good in Japanese joinery. He studied Japanese joinery and made this building. So there were about ten carpenters, and they weren't all men. They were mostly men. There were two women who worked in the crew. Hard on them, but they did it. And they were journeymen carpenters, or journey men and women carpenters. They went around to the different parts of Zen Center. They helped build Tassahara. They helped build this place. They helped build the city center. They built Green's Restaurant. They did the flooring. They did a lot of that work. We knew how to do a lot of work in the first year. And we drew people who were heavy workers. A lot of physical skills.

[60:56]

We dug ditches. We packed a lot of manure from here to there. Our complexion has changed as a community in the last years. In the last decade, we used to be much more physically minded in those first years. We worked hard, and everybody practiced. We were young. Our children hadn't been born yet. It was pretty much the people that are now 25 years your senior in their 50s. Many of us lived at Zen Center in those early years and helped create the dream and stayed on. There have been a lot of people who've gone through since. To have a place where the public would be welcome, where meditation would always be central, and it still is. I would never say anything other. And to have that place include a working organic farm where we grew our food and offered that food to hungry people and offered it to a restaurant and offered what we know about farming and meditation to the public was always a dream of the place. And to do the work

[61:58]

ourselves, and to train other people to do the work, and to live lightly on the land. All those great values that for some aging hippies are still primary ones. They still fire us up when we think about it. What do you think the shift has been to? I think the shift has been to more urban population, more intellectual. People have had to...we're not drawing such skilled physical workers. They've gone on to start their own businesses. Peter van der Schuur, they have their own carpentry businesses. Frank Kilmers and Ted Howell are plumbers. They trained at Zen Center. The people who are really involved in physical work have gone out and are now doing it in the world. Steve Stuckey, great landscape architect. He's out there making gardens. A lot of the farmers and gardeners who've been through here are out starting projects. I've got the shakes just bringing this up. This is really my tribe. It's interesting. We were not... There weren't so many people working

[62:59]

in offices. There were no computers. There were no computers anyway. Everybody did communal work. Every morning we went out in the fields from May until every day. Not just every day. We went out from 5.30 in the morning until breakfast. That's wrong. We got up earlier. We meditated from 3.40 until 5.30. Then we'd go into the cloud hall. We'd have a snack out there in cloud hall. We'd have hot zucchini bread. I am made of zucchini bread. Living testimony. More zucchini bread. When I could smell the steam coming from the vents, I'd know it's zucchini bread, I can tell. Or biscuits. We'd have hot biscuits and tea. Stand around stamping in our dirty muddy boots. It was a shoes on kind of place. It got a lot slicker. It used to be funky. We were up in the upper barn stamping our feet, drinking our tea. The bell would ring. We'd all go down to the fields. We worked for an hour and a half.

[63:59]

Sometimes we'd bring in five yard trucks of manure a day. We worked really hard. We built this place. Then in the 80s when the whole shakedown happened with Baker Oshie, we retreated, I think. This is just my take, probably. I don't like to have it on record. Oh, never mind. It's just my take. It's okay. I won't censor myself. I won't censor. It's just we worked really hard and in the mid 80s we suffered because the place was restructured, was reorganized. Baker Oshie had gotten way too big. His vision was huge and his empire was huge. It depended on a lot of us working really hard to support it. When it fell apart, it was rough. A lot of people left. We began to search our souls and really ask ourselves, what are we doing? What's the primary purpose of what we're doing? Zen Center was built by then.

[65:01]

Certainly Greenwich was built. The infrastructure was here. We have not built anything since then. Think of that. It's wild. We were building all the time. I think it's extremely significant that we're building. We can't even cover the deck. They would have covered that deck over the pool in two weeks. That's nothing. We're building this building. We've kind of put a moratorium on developing and we've turned a lot inward. We've created the guest program which was built during those years. We developed the guest program really well, but in fact, we've not innovated. We've not upgraded. We've not taken care of the place. That's changing. It's been changing for the last five years, I think. It was a real... I think of it sometimes like Sleeping Beauty. The briars grew over the place and we turned in. We didn't go to sleep, but we turned in.

[66:02]

That's another story. I'm very happy to tell you my impressions if you're interested. He... I will always be a student of Richard Baker's. I learned a tremendous amount from him. I was treated very well by him, with a great deal of respect. I'm very grateful to what I learned with him. I think it's very significant that I learned so much from an American teacher. It meant a lot to me, that he was smart and deep and kind of nutty, too. My impressions of him are very strong, but he made possible for me a very rich environment. We would create Lindisfarne Hall so that these scholars and thinkers, great scholars and thinkers of the 20th century, could meet together, could have a place to meet. It was very important. And who are the Lindisfarne Fellows? Do you want to know who they are? You probably know. Some of you may know. You can help me calling out their names. In the early 1980s, this hall, the Wheelwright Center,

[67:05]

dedicated to George Wheelwright and Hope Wheelwright, was built, largely financed by Charlotte Silver, her generosity to help have a place where sensory awareness could be practiced and where people could meet. We deliberately made the hall small so that groups of 25 to 50 would be the maximum numbers. We never wanted to exceed the carrying capacity of this valley. At the same time, there were a group of scholars meeting and thinking, and they said, we're going to need to think boldly about what's ahead for our culture. Included among them, Sin Van Der In, Richard Baker, Brother David Stendal Ross, William Irwin Thompson, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Keith Critchlow. Help me, those of you who know. I wish Peter were here. Kathleen Raine, the National Poet of England. Incredible people. Hazel Henderson, Paul Hawken. And they met in this room to think together. And they designed Lindisfarne Hall so there'd be a place where they could think about our culture.

[68:07]

And they would come and meet. And you know what the original idea was of Lindisfarne Hall? Lindisfarne Hall is the guest house. Lindisfarne is an island off of the coast of Scotland which was a monastic community where scholars and monastics got together and dreamed of, you know, culture. Dreamed and planned culture. Is it part of Ventura? No, it's an old monastic culture, Lindisfarne. L-I-N-D-I-S-F-A-R-N-E. Lindisfarne. Their idea was to meet here for one month out of the year, probably in June. And they would come and they would live in that hall. And when they weren't living here, the hall was originally designed as a place for people to come and be guests, but also for student housing. Students would live over there when guests weren't. Students would live for a period of time and guests would also live there. It was just a way to increase the vision. It became clear that we needed to build a good financial base

[69:08]

and that Greenwich was a great place for people to come. And because of the success of Tassajara, by the early 80s, in the beginning of the 80s, we converted it to a place for guests. Tassajara was already ten years old? Yeah, Tassajara was something. I understand most of the income right now comes from the guest house. We say that, but you have to remember that the reason the guest house is successful is because of the whole place, because of the meditation and the farm, because of the whole life. So it may be, but I sometimes feel that that's extracted from the wealth and beauty of the whole place. What's the state of Greenwich in terms of income? We were terrific. We were 100% unsustainable under Richard Baker's tenure. He was an entrepreneur, a risk-taker, a very bold thinker. He was kind of wild. He did crazy things, like welcoming Harry Roberts, a Yurok Indian, a shaman, to live here and teach us, calling and beseeching Alan Chadwick to come home and help us,

[70:09]

to help to convalesce here in the last years of his life, last year of his life, and making the whole suite of rooms underneath this room be available for Alan Chadwick so that he could die here. He had a great vision, and it took a lot of people working hard, a team of Oompa Loompas working hard to keep the fire going so that this vision could keep out, could keep there. He had a vision of creating a restaurant where people from all over the world could meet and they'd be fed vegetarian cuisine. We may think that's pretty ordinary, but it was not ordinary in the 70s. And to be awarded the contract from Fort Mason to be the restaurant of Fort Mason and have it be a vegetarian restaurant? People from all over the world want to come there, they can't get a hamburger? Are you kidding? Zen Center was really trusted and known for quality. I think it's remarkable. And you think now, how many vegetarian restaurants are there in the city? There's a lot of little ones. But on that scale,

[71:10]

on that order and magnitude, and the dream was always to have the farm fit and produce the food, and to have the restaurant be a model place with model bathrooms. I mean, jokingly, Richard Baker would say, well, she's doing this and he's doing that, and he's thinking about this part of it, and I'm responsible for the bathrooms. But he was modeling. We had six different kinds of composting toilets or low flush toilets in that restaurant when it first opened in the mid-70s. To show different ways. One of them included a very amazing toilet where you would flush and the water would come up from a stick and you'd wash your hands before it went down to flush. That one we got rid of right away as soon as Baker got out of there. Because people thought, I'm washing my hands in toilet water. They didn't get the principle, even though we had descriptions. We looked at it as an opportunity to teach. To give you a better sense of why some of us have stayed at Sun Center. It's really modernized now. Isn't it wild, Sunshine? There's still some weird stuff in the bathroom. Are we going to go there?

[72:11]

To Green's? I don't know, maybe so. I think so. They serve a good salad. Yeah, it's great. It's a great restaurant. Think of it. Our carpentry crew built that place. Did the work. We had an incredible place. The guest house was... Linda's Farn Hall was designed by the Linda's Farn Fellows. They made that design and they collaborated on its execution. Then the Sun Center carpenters built the house. Do you mind if I ask a question? Sure. Why did such a potent ecological consciousness not... Wane? Why did it wane? I don't know. I don't know except that I think it's partially the commitment behind that, the drive behind that. We were one of the only licensed facilities in the state of California that was licensed. We were licensed to do experiments

[73:12]

with composting privies. It was in the 70s. They were miserable experiments. We'd be under the table screaming with laughter if I told you some of those things. The urine brigade. We did all kinds of incredible things with composting toilets and with the horses and with alternative energy, with wind energy. It took a lot to power that and eventually people got sick of it. It was so much work and I think there was a reaction, kind of a lash, to that kind of... I don't want to say global because it isn't global but that kind of expanded consciousness and people started saying, Hey, we're really here to study Zen, not to do all of this other stuff. So we reacted and came in a lot closer I think, a lot tighter than we ever meant to be. And now I think there's some willingness to filter out and a lot of it is led by those of us who practiced in the 1970s and remember how it was and are still committed to that vision. The vision that includes

[74:13]

a broad-based ecological presence and awareness. Yeah? How does the new building and new development fit in with the whatever that was that was selling that there would be that this value would be developed? I think what you have to realize and I heard Pat explain this really beautifully the other day and that is that no new housing is being created. Old housing is going to be taken down. So we're not increasing, we're replacing. We're replacing the funky trailers that we pulled in here and we got a little funky in here during the 70s and 80s so that we could sustain the population of people who wanted to work and build the place and so that we could also take care of our children because babies started being born. People were popping around with babies inside of them and you know I mean within the period of

[75:15]

within a two year period the abbot of Zen Center, Richard Baker and actually his child came later, Lisa right around her time No, that's wrong I'm spacing Anyway, during the 70s late 70s Reb and Russa had a child, we and we all lived here, Reb and Russa Peter and I, Richard Baker and Jenny Baker Norman and Kathy you know, that's the abbot of Zen Center in the Tonto, Reb was Tonto then and you know, people that were working on the farm people that were working Norman did everything, he did all different kinds of stuff he was working on the farm too Susie Clymer, just students who practiced and lived together for so many years began to have children together too and so that upped the ante and changed the housing situation significantly it also represented a kind of

[76:16]

you know, grounding in the community, a lot of questions coming up about well, are we a land-based community or are we a meditation practice place so that's another topic but I tell you, they have been challenging, rich, provocative years, we've learned a lot from that experience and always the assumption was, we are not a community we're a practice place this is not a home, this is not your home Richard Baker was one of the strongest people to say that, and yet there was also a kind of groundedness that came from being at home in the place although that was always considered attachment something you didn't want to do so I still feel like a guest here, no doubt about it and it's interesting, I mean we all practiced in a very similar way even when we had children, we were expected to go to every period of meditation one person went around and looked in on the babies in the morning

[77:18]

while we meditated it was a terrible time for me, I was exhausted from being up all night nursing it felt really strange to leave my child, I knew perfectly well how to sit, I could have sat you know, I loved to sit, I could have sat like a rock at home would have been much better for me I felt like I was going against my nature and I could hear my kids scream Child Watch was, there were a lot of kids here so Child Watch would go down and look in on Jesse, we lived in the trailer where Jordan lives, look in at Jesse and always the Child Watch would trip on the porch and wake him up you know, the flashlight shining in the cradle meanwhile they'd be walking in walking meditation style up to the bullpens where Arlene and Dagon lived, and I'd look in at Stephen, Leah's baby Hannah and then they would go down to look in they didn't have to look in at Taya because Rusa was at home, but you know, that was a long time in between, and then what happens if the baby's crying anyway, they're going to come get you but we never missed a period of time and now and then we

[78:20]

took our turn, doing Child Watch so, it was intense, children were always somewhat a second class citizen here you know, it's one of the evidences of attachment you know, although people loved them most people here didn't really want to have kids so it was kind of interesting this is just my take you ask somebody else and you'd hear a whole different story but it was, you know they were intense years, we were building this place and trying to learn more about each other I want to tell you a little bit about the teachers and then about the outreach and we had two primary teachers in our years when Zen Center started in 1971, Richard Baker was very good friends with Professor Paul Lee Professor of Philosophy and History at the University of Santa Cruz University of California at Santa Cruz great teacher, he spoke here last summer remember, Laura? he had everybody falling on their backs wonderful, wonderful teacher

[79:21]

anyway, Paul Lee was a very strong fan and devoted supporter of Alan Chadwick who helped establish the UCSC gardens, the Farm and Garden Project and Alan Chadwick eventually wore out the University of California he was booted out of the University of California and made his way slowly and irrevocably up the coast of California and Paul Lee directed him to Richard Baker, directed him to here so he came here in 1971 and helped set up the original gardens I think it was 73 Suzuki Yoshi was dead by the time Green Gulch was purchased he died in 1971 he never saw Green Gulch he died in the winter, December 4th as you know, and Green Gulch was purchased in the next spring, 1972 so Alan Chadwick came here and he proceeded to create extraordinary gardens in the upper spring valley, never would build a garden on the flatland, wouldn't hear

[80:21]

of gardening where we're gardening now only wanted to build them on hillside, as you'll see when we go to UCSC he set up the gardens here and had a strong core of apprentices who worked with him was a pretty amazing gardening teacher and stayed for until about 1973 at which point I think it became clear to him that he wasn't going to make it here because it was the vision was just too different and he chose by his own, with common accord and good understanding, he decided to move on and did move on worked his way up the coast of California continuing to establish to found and establish the Round Valley Garden Project, one of his greatest projects actually up in Cobalo, not a sign of it left, beautiful extraordinary, amazing garden we went up to visit it I've never seen a garden like that he had about 50 apprentices working there with him, he was by then a legendary

[81:23]

figure, marvelous teacher I'll give you a peek of him British I'll tell you about him I'm really a student of Alan so I owe you I'm going to torture you with my writing about Alan, not right now you need to understand the way the routing went, he was here to teach us gardening but he taught much more than gardening, he was a great theatrical person Shakespearean actor and a person who had a sense of the regeneration of culture happening through young people working the ground because it's what he believed in he had a strong effect on this community very fundamental effect the other person who had a very strong effect was Harry Roberts Harry Roberts was a Yurok

[82:23]

shaman, he was a good friend of Yvonne Rands, he was introduced to Zen Center by Yvonne and began to live with us he moved here in 1975 and he lived in the TV room part Yurok shaman, part Irishman helped to pretty much single handedly establish the Native Plant section of the University of California Berkeley, knew a tremendous amount about Native plants and Native culture, having been raised by Robert Spott who was Kroeber's main informant those of you that know a little bit about anthropology great anthropologist Alfred Kroeber had one primary informant Robert Spott who was a Yurok shaman great medicine man and teacher in the Northwest Coast Robert Spott was Harry's adopted uncle or his mentor so Harry knew a lot about Native practices, in the group of people

[83:24]

that were living here a group of Zen students people studied with Harry very closely he was like a shaman within the ranks and I think both Harry and Alan taught Zen in their particular distinct way and they were affected by our life here, even though they weren't Zen practitioners they were respectful and interested and the Zen students that worked with them were some of the finest Zen students at Zen Center during that time the young men that worked with Harry were pretty amazing and Yvonne Rand Harry would take Yvonne Rand and her family into the mountains around the Smith River for what he called a camping trip for a month out of every summer where they had just lived in the woods and they learned about the plants and the animals in the river and we were blessed with the opportunity to study with him. So I'm the product of both of these teachers. They unloaded on me a lot and I did a lot of work for them, particularly Harry, whom I was really close to but I think of myself as a primary student of Alan Chadwick's because it was really

[84:25]

his philosophy and his vision of the garden that affected me the most strongly although I think my interest in the natural world and in the garden evolving out of the natural world in connection with the natural world really does belong to my connection with this medicine man. He was wild. Harry Roberts was wild He loved to make trouble. He was very naughty. Both of them were naughty. Alan was grandly naughty and disrespectful and irreverent. They were both irreverent and reverent at the same time. An interesting combination So you've seen I have Harry too No, they're both dead When did he die? 1981 The year after Alan So they've been dead 15 years I can just read to you a little bit I appreciate it. It might be a relief This is called Gardening for 500 Years So I've had two great gardening teachers in

[85:26]

my life, Harry Roberts and Alan Chadwick Both of them raw and ragged They were great prophets, both of them now dead. I say they're dead but sometimes I wonder, even though I helped bury the ashes of both of my teachers are they really dead? In January when I'm thinning the crowded spurs of the espelier apples alone in the orchard I still hear Alan hiss over my right shoulder Not that spur! Sausage! Take the wizziki one growing into the tree Obey the apples Often it seems to me that my teachers are more alive than ever I'm not the kind of person who seeks a teacher to complete myself or to learn a craft or to deepen my knowledge quite the opposite. I run away from teachers the more they know, the faster I sprint I smell them from a mile off catch their seductive whiff especially when they pour out their unctuous syrup of distilled truth to lure hungry people to the table Harry and Alan never taught me anything they never gave me anything they were not prospecting for students and yet they each showed me unabashedly

[86:28]

and distinctly a fierce love and uncompromised passion for the natural world in spite of myself and with a full fuel box of questions I followed them in through the garden gate Is this okay? I first met Harry Roberts in 1976 when Peter and I had just come to Green Gulch came in 1975 the place was five years old then the original hand-worked garden up in Spring Valley had been begun by Alan in 1972 Alan was a restless renegade and he had moved on by that time a wild-eyed maverick Alan Chadwick was burning his way up the coast of Northern California leaving a trail of extraordinary biodynamic gardens in the live ash of his path in the early years of Zen Center the place pulled in a rough harvest of eccentric artists and thinkers blah blah blah blah I forget that I met Harry Roberts early on in my life at Green Gulch he was a craggy beast of a man

[87:29]

walking on aluminum crutches he had fallen forty feet from a eucalyptus tree and broken his back when he was a young man he was also dealing with bursalosis that he claimed he caught from digging barehanded in earth laced with live pig manure parasites from the pig manure claimed his health permanently inflaming the joints of his hip and causing him to walk on crutches actually he worked at Cal with a number of people who handled this pig manure and a number of them died from this disease he made it through but he was permanently disabled from the pig manure bursalosis nasty disease he was this kind of rough blah blah blah stuff it in the ground and if other people got rough with plants he'd go how dare you plant that plant like that pick it up with reverence so he was completely unpredictable he played off of the students if you were too reverent just stuff it in the ground

[88:29]

if you were too cavalier you had to toe the line he was precise he insisted that gardeners were in for it because he nearly died from bursalosis Harry was a good friend of Yvonne Rand, a student of Suzuki Roshi, and one of the main teachers at Green Gulch. Oh, this is great. In the late... Can you say that again? That was really fast. I didn't hear it. He was a good friend of Yvonne Rand. Yes. Yeah. She was a student of Suzuki Roshi's and one of the primary teachers, and she brought him here, thought that we would benefit from... we'd learn from him. We sure did. In the late 1920s, Harry had run cattle for the ranchers of West Marin. When we started to work together, Harry told me that when he first saw the Green Gulch Valley in 1927, with the unchanneled creek meandering in slow serpentine loops along the valley floor, he thought that Green Gulch was one of the most beautiful places he'd ever seen in his life. And he was a wilderness man, so it made an incredible impression on him. He never forgot it. Harry was raised at the mouth of the Klamath River in the tiny village of Wreckaw.

[89:34]

He was part Native American, part Irishman. Harry's mother was a legend in Del Norte County. As a young woman, she met and married Harry's father, who ran a fish cannery at the mouth of the river. Harry worked with his father, learning the fishing trade, but early in his life was adopted by Robert Spot, a high medicine man of Yurok culture who became Harry's uncle or main teacher. So Harry's primary lineage line ran with the old blood of the Yurok nation. So here's a little bit about him. Harry was a hardworking man with a passion for the plants and animals of Northern California. He was well trained in the Yurok tradition and in the lineage of hard, honest labor. He knew how to work, and he worked hard. He was a master fisherman in Lumberjack, a trained horticulturalist, and a nursery man who helped establish the native plant section of the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley. Harry was a welder and a machinist, a rum runner and a turquoise trader, and a person with an equal passion for cooking and for embroidering fine tea towels. He was also a cowboy and an inventor.

[90:36]

During World War II, Harry collected spider webs to be used in the creation of precision instruments and gun sights. He was also once Ginger Rogers' dancing partner. He loved women, ooh, all types. Oh, he's a renegade. Harry's main role at Green Gulch was to help us slow down enough to see the land that we owned. Harry's main role at Green Gulch was to help us slow down enough to see the land that we

[90:59]

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