The Ranch Dance
This morning I walked out of my tiny house and the entry way and small wooden porch were already baked in sun. The rich smell of sun-on-wood is so different from the scent of the thick fog that rolled in a couple mornings ago.
When the fog is dense enough, it gathers on the pine tree above my roof, collects, and falls in heavy droplets on the corrugated metal. That morning, I woke early to wander down the trail to the beach. Still half asleep and scrambling down the rocky and slippery trail, rope in one hand and journal in the other, the ocean rolled in heavy crashing waves to the rocks, approaching from the obscured expanse of gray and bright marine layer. I imagined the fog rolling up the mountain and into the far reaches of redwood groves, tucked into their hidden canyons. The bottom half of my pants were soaked and dyed bright green from the moisture collected on the grass on the tromple down to shore.
After sunset that day, the evening sky clear and purpley, Worm (aka Lukas) said to me, “I saw you pause at the trailhead early this morning and then decide to walk down in the fog,” disappearing through nasturtium, lupine, and grass. He talked about how it's nice to see people having their moments alone to really take in the land, when our days are often full of being-togetherness.
I often find myself dancing along this balance between boisterous, joyful meals that fill our kitchen table each weeknight (pictured below is Ocean House banquet-style, before feasting on Hogan’s “gardener’s pie”, salad, and cornbread) or gathering together on the north point to have a bonfire, and the quieter, alone moments with the land.
In Vickisa’s blog post a few weeks ago, she tells of the early days of Slide as an environmental nonprofit in 1970 and her experience living here. She writes, “Life on the Ranch was communal and improvised.”
I smile reading this, because it still feels true in many ways. We have communal practices, like weekly market runs, daily cooknights, residence meetings and ranch chores that are deeply woven into the fabric of the ranch’s rhythms, that the people who live here embody together. And we are also constantly finding new and creative ways to do things and meet changes, challenges, and seasonal shifts. I find that in those quieter moments for reflection or noticing, clambering up a boulder by the ocean in the morning fog, or sitting down under an apple tree in the garden, that the energy and story of this place and the role we all play in it feels palpable.
Vickisa wrote of those “early days": “What stands out most, though, is the impact on the children who visited… Watching them encounter animals, soil, tidepools—it was transformative. That connection was the heart of what we were building.”
It's still at the heart, these moments of connection for any of us practicing guesthood in this place. Of the students who visit, finding themselves and each other in deep connection with the ecosystem, environment and place.
Today, the fog is gone and I stopped by the greenhouse to say hello to the nigella seeds Kate and I seeded yesterday and to see if they needed water. Someone had already watered them. I’ve opened the window above my desk in the office. There's some overgrown hemlock with its white lacey flowers, lichen hanging off the plum tree, just a few deeply purple plums, some bright and tall fennel, cypress, wild cucumber entangling the reaching branches of the plum, wild blackberry entangling the wild cucumber, and a little bit of mint poking through the grass. I’ve looked over to see Hogan carrying a bucket of veggie scraps from dinner last night to the chickens. There are voices of summer campers roaming the ranch with their instructors—they’re about to sift through the compost piles and encounter the countless tiny critters doing the magical work of decomposition that feeds our soils. And so, today, the Slide Ranch dance goes on, some parts rehearsed and repeated every day, some new and improvised.
Slide Ranch is doing a dive into moments of the land’s history. See Vickisa and Susie Washington Smyth’s post on the Ranch in the 1960s-1970s. Soon, we’re excited to share about a visit from the Leal Family, the Portuguese dairy farmers who stewarded the land in the 1940s-1950s. We’ll share more land history in the months to come. If you have a story to share that encapsulates a moment in time at the Ranch, please reach out to info@slideranch.org to be a guest blogger.
