Connections: A Gaviota Story

Now I know why people worship, carry around magic emblems, wake up talking dreams they teach to their children: the world speaks. The world speaks everything to us.
William Stafford

Both Lori and Michael have deep connections to this land, and they came to our house one summer evening bearing Gaviota gifts: handmade popsicles from the fruits of their garden in flavors like mulberry and plum, a glass jar of cold water fragranced with fresh cucumber, and several magenta-colored dragon fruits. The dragon fruit in particular dazzled me––it seemed so sumptuous and exotic.

“You have some growing on the deck,” said Michael, “Didn’t you notice? On the pitaya cactus in the pot right outside your front door there are two blooms getting ready to open up.”

If anyone were to notice that, it would certainly be Michael. Dragon fruit is one of the crops he cultivates on his family property at the top of Nojoqui grade, and his dedication is touching. The pitaya blooms nocturnally, preferring not to open in the heat of the day, and Michael actually goes out in the nights from June to December to pollinate its fragrant blossoms, lovingly transferring pollen from stamen to stigma with the touch of a Q-tip. He also grows blueberries, mulberries, figs, and a varying list of seasonal crops, experimenting in search of a consistent year-round production, enjoying the puzzle of it.

The Nojoqui land has been in his family for four generations. Michael’s great-grandfather, Natale Giorgi, established a dairy farm there in 1896, shipping cheese and butter from the Gaviota wharf to clients north and south along the coast. Over time, the family shifted its focus to cattle ranching and farming of beans, peppers, and tomatoes. (The original dairy barn still stands, serving as an old-fashioned farm stand for the sale of organic produce grown by Helmut Klauer on land he has leased for the purpose.)

Michael remembers his early childhood on the Giorgi property as paradise for a young boy, a time of unsupervised wanderings and exploration during which he developed a profound awareness of the natural world.

“Nature offers portals,” he said. “Even looking at an oak tree, I might begin to sense its different relationship to the world, as though the oak tree is telling me a story. Nature speaks, and it is always sensing us in its life field and responding. I believe that everything in nature has its own consciousness.”

Lori, meanwhile, was growing up a couple of miles to the south in the mountains at Las Cruces, in the house her great-grandparents had lived in. A descendent of Miguel Cordero, to whom the Las Cruces Rancho had been originally granted in 1836, Lori’s roots in the area are deep and real. Her grandmother, Caroline Henning, was a schoolteacher at Vista del Mar, and Lori grew up hearing her stories and living with history.

“Grandpa’s barn, Grandpa’s garage,” she told us, “it was like a museum by then, but not to them. To them, it was just their junk, and this is the place they always were. So I grew up with the stories of this land, listening to people tell stories. I didn’t realize how rare this was until I went away.”

Although members of their families had known each other going way back, Lori and Michael were unaware of one another, and each set out on their separate quests, but each returned, and they finally met. They both happened to be at Fairview Gardens in Goleta one day, and in Michael’s words, there was some kind of resonance: “We were supposed to be together.”

He still wonders how many people there are with whom you might have such a fundamental affinity, a pull so obvious that you would recognize it immediately––but you never find out because you never have the luck of meeting. Fortunately, Lori and Michael were in the same place at the same moment. At this point their parallel stories intersected.

At the time of their meeting, Lori had finished school in Maine, was entertaining ideas about moving someplace different, and saw her return to Gaviota as a temporary stay. Now, because of Michael, there was a compelling new reason to think about remaining here, but it was complicated.

“I am still trying to understand it,” she told us. “My story and Michael’s are similar, but also very different. I was shaped by the land. Definitely. And I was shaped by my family and their connection to this land…and yes, of course it’s a beautiful thing, and it’s sort of amazing…I might go outside and I’m working in the garden, and I think, my great-grandmother was working here in this very same place…but it’s something I struggle with too.”

“Because there are other connections and associations about the place and my family that I don’t necessarily want to hold onto, but it's hard to let go if you’re still right here. There is an old and a new that have to come together somehow, and I need to work with that…because the world shapes you a lot, but you’ve got to redefine it too.”

The two now live at Nojoqui and have patched together a livelihood that requires hard work but has its rewards. Lori teaches, but of course she also helps with farm chores, is a talented photographer, makes, among other things, great jam and beautiful earrings, and with her ongoing interest in oral history, she is a true story-catcher.

As for Michael, when he isn’t working on the farm or doing landscaping jobs, he is a guard at the Hollister Ranch gate, which is how I got to know him, and one should never underestimate a gate guard. Michael is very philosophical about his role at the Ranch gate, taking it to a whole new level of insight.

“Everyone passes through there at some point," he explained, "and I try to find some way of connecting. It’s like being in the cockpit of the Ranch airplane. Even the untouchable ones who are over-scheduled and just flying through for some kind of concentrated separateness, I can help guide them into the kind of experience that they will have. I think back to these moments of connection…I was standing there watching a snake once who was hunting a lizard in the succulents, and someone came through who is usually in a big rush, and I pointed, and he suddenly stopped, and suddenly he was noticing. And standing there, sharing that moment, barriers began to break down. So you become the momentary guide, and you begin to see there is a whole community here, an underground community. It’s about giving them something to refer to, and it is why they are here, even if they didn’t know it.”

I think of Michael and Lori as children of Gaviota, intelligent and interesting young people who had the luck of starting out here and the courage and curiosity to go out into the world, and now face the shared adventure of living here again. They have returned to a place that is still relatively unchanged since their childhoods and a century before, and that’s highly unusual in the modern world.

But in addition to personal challenges of adjustment, there are large-scale shifts in the air, ongoing issues of preservation and economics. When it comes to the land, there is always pressure to sell and subdivide, and it's becoming more expensive to remain here. There are hold-outs who have used whatever resources they have to hang on, land-rich only, and there are others who have sold, making way for a new wave of influences and different perspectives about the place.

“I think about it every day on many levels,” Michael said.

“We’re all still working out different dynamics in terms of how to keep the land intact, and fortunately in my family there’s a lot more cohesion, but there are still full-time efforts going towards that…In the meantime, you figure out a niche, figure out how to integrate into that new wave. Maybe you sell parcels or a conservation easement, or you grow exotic vegetables and fruits…”

I had the feeling that Michael and Lori will find a way to live simply and peaceably wherever they are. “I do know,” reflected Michael, “that the less judgmental I am, and the fewer assumptions I have, the more opportunities unfold.”

We drank red wine and sipped cucumber water, had homemade ice cream with our dragon fruit, and talked into the night. Then we said good-bye as the moon rose, almost full and waxing. Michael had to get back and pollinate the blossoms.

Connections: A Gaviota Story

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