Letters From Andy

When my farm has me stressed, and I want to leave it all behind, I throw the kids in the minivan and head down the coast highway to Big Sur. I call out every stream we cross on our way south like train stations. “ Salinas River, Carmel River, San Jose Creek, Maldonado Creek.” It never fails that when we pass over the Garrapata Creek bridge, a cry goes up from the back seat, “Tell us about the pancakes!”
“But that story has no redeeming social value,” I protest.
“Pancakes, pancakes, pancakes,” Graydon and Lena chant.
So I tell them again. When I was their age, a great friend of mine was an old cowboy named Jimmy Bell. Jimmy had a story about when he was a kid growing up on a little homestead up Garrapata Creek with his Uncle Harvey. This was back in the 1920’s, when life on the south coast meant growing all your own food and only going to town for essentials a couple of times a year. Uncle Harvey earned what little cash he had from selling a few head of cattle. Kerosene, bullets, baking powder, nails, wire, flour, and clothing all came from Monterey. Liquor came from local bootleggers, who traded it for dried beef. A lot of things we take for granted, Jimmy and his Uncle Harvey did without.
Uncle Harvey had a friend named Doolan, a hermit. He might have been a fugitive from the law. Doolan lived further down the coast, back in the wilderness, in a little cabin tucked away in a dark redwood canyon along a stream that fed into the Big Sur River. Locals called the remote spot “Doolan’s Hole.” Doolan hunted wild game and panned for the few flakes of gold hidden in the river gravel. But mostly he just laid low.
Every once in a while Uncle Harvey would saddle his horse, pack some supplies on his mule, and ride down the coast to visit Doolan and trade for gold. Jimmy would go along as part of the baggage on the mule.
Doolan’s Hole was dank and shady with ferns, moss, and mushrooms growing lush in the dim light. Sunbeams only penetrated the gloom for an hour or so a day during the height of summer. Doolan always had a cold, or maybe it was an allergy; anyway, he snorted like a pig.
A visit from Uncle Harvey with his mule load of supplies was like a visit from Santa Claus for feral old Doolan. Jimmy and Uncle Harvey would stay the night before starting out again for their homestead on Garrapata Creek. In the morning, Doolan would celebrate his guests by making his favorite treat: pancakes. While the little fire of manzanita burls burned down to coals, Doolan would get out the flour Uncle Harvey had brought him, and any chicken eggs that had survived the bone-rattling journey by mule from Harvey’s hen house. The skillet was pulled down from its nail on the wall of the shack, and greased with deer fat.
The jug of fresh milk Harvey had packed for the trip would be shaken by its mule ride, so the butterfat in it would already be churned into lumps. Jimmy would fetch the milk jug from the creek where it had been left to chill overnight, and fish the lumps of butter out with a spoon.
Once all the ingredients were gathered up, the batter could be ready in a jiffy, but you wouldn’t wan to pour it in the skillet too soon, or you won’t get a pancake that flips easy. To make sure his skillet was hot enough, Doolan had a method. He’d plug up one nostril with his right thumb and blow the contents of his runny nose into the pan. If the skillet sizzled, it was time to make the first golden brown pancake. If a cheery sizzle was missing, Doolan would stoke the coals in the fire pit and wait a bit before trying again with the other nostril.
“Oooh, gross!,” the kids cry out. “Tell it again!”
“No,” I answer. “Once is enough.”
We keep driving south, past the Little Sur River, past the huge rock that rises up like a small mountain from the surf and forms Point Sur. My great-grandfather, Marius Jorgensen, helped with the stonework in 1902, when they built the keepers quarters for the Big Sur Lighthouse that sits atop the rock. If the kids are bugging each other, or me, I’ll make them listen again as I tell them all I know about Marius.
I know that Marius came to Watsonville from Denmark in the 1890’s. Denmark is a small country and back then it was poor. When Marius was born, Denmark had just gotten even smaller and poorer because the Germans had invaded and seized the province of Schleswig-Holstein. For the youngest son in a farming family, the choice was to work on the farm for the oldest brother when he inherited the land, or go to sea. Marius emigrated to Germany and found work as a plasterer, a mason, and a painter. My uncle told me that when the Kaiser tried to draft Marius into the German Army, he too the money he’d saved, returned to Denmark to say goodby to his family, and sailed for America.
In the last century Danish immigrants had a reputation in America for being ignorant and stubborn peasants who were usually drunk. “Square-head” or “block-head” were two common derogatory epithets for Scandinavians. But Marius found that his skills as a plasterer, mason, and painter made him a marketable laborer. “Money is so easy to earn in America,” he wrote back to his family, “ that work is like stealing! Send me a wife!”
So they did. Marius met Petra for the first time at the train station. They married and had three daughters: my grandmother Anna, and her sisters Katherine, and Helga. Petra died young in 1905, shortly after the birth of her third daughter.
We pass over the bridge that crosses the Big Sur River and drive past the Forest Service Headquarters. I can remember back in the summer of 1967, when there was a line of hippies that extended from the Forest Service headquarters all the way up the grade to Post Ranch, hitch-hiking south to L.A. So many flower children tried to go back to nature that the Forest Service had to shut down some campgrounds because there was human feces in the river.
When I was a kid I asked someone why so many people wanted to come to Big Sur, and they said it was because Big Sur was a “power spot” where spiritual energy welled up out of the earth like a spring, and that a person could renew themselves by simply being there and soaking up the good vibes.
My father heard that and grinned. He was a scientist— empirical— and he said that what goes up must come down. If Big Sur was a fountain of energy, then Salinas must be the drain. Even now I wonder, because the Salinas Valley is a veritable salad bowl that feeds America, and yet despite all the wealth its land produces, not much seems to stay in Salinas. The money drains away.
The Post Ranch goes past the car window. Nowadays there are rooms for rent, and a very fancy restaurant. My grandparents, Anna and Graydon, stayed at the Post Ranch for their honeymoon in 1918. Post Ranch was a ranch at the end of the road back then, and only cattle trails stretched south along the coast. They took a romantic walk up the Big Sur gorge, and surprised some bootleggers who fired a shotgun at them. My friend Jimmy Bell would have been around the area at that time. In fact, he told me a curious story that I’ll tell my own children someday.
Jimmy said that one time he and his Uncle came south after visiting Doolan to see “the old Chinaman.”
This old gent lived in a cottage built of driftwood on a rock just above the surf some miles south of Post Ranch. He made his living gathering seaweed and abalone. He cut the abalone into strips, salt it with sea salt he collected, and laid the meat out to dry in the sun on a rock set back from the sea spray. He dried the seaweed he collected in the same way.
When the abalone and seaweed were properly cured, he would pack it in bags for storage. The next time someone like Uncle Harvey came along with a horse, he would pay them in dried abalone to haul the packages to Post Ranch, from where they would be sent by wagon to Monterey, and eventually to Chinatown in San Francisco— where a relative would sell them in his market. Sometimes the old man would carry his wares to Post Ranch on his back in a sack, but he didn’t like to visit civilization very often.
One day, as Jimmy and Uncle Harvey were passing by the Post Ranch heading south, they saw a strange sight. There was a long, black limousine parked at the end of the road, with a Chinese man in a formal black business suit brushing the dust from his black shoes. They called out “hello” to him, but he didn’t turn to greet them. He stepped into the back of the car, and it pulled away. Seeing a car that far south was odd enough. Jimmy told his Uncle Harvey that this was the first time he’d seen a Chinaman drive a car. Uncle Harvey reminded him that they hadn’t seen the Chinaman drive, only step into the back— and they hadn’t seen the driver at all.
Past Post Ranch the road got worse, and by Castro canyon it was no wider than a cow track. Jimmy and his Uncle counted the times they crossed streams, because the trail to the Old Chinaman’s shack was hard to find. When they did find the trail, they dismounted and led their horses on foot. The trail was steep and the brush closed in tight. To make matters worse, the old fellow was afraid of demons, so he had fashioned the trail as a maze, with false spurs and disorienting loops. In places there were little brass bells that tinkled to startle the evil spirits. It took someone with skill and patience— or better yet, prior experience with the Old Chinaman— to reach the rocky cove where the cottage stood.
When they got to clearing, they shouted out a hello, as is proper in the country when you drop in unannounced. They could see the abalone drying on the rock, and the strips of green-black seaweed, but there was no sign of the old gentleman. The driftwood door was open. They heard the buzz of flies before they entered. The old Chinaman was sprawled out his back dead, his body riddled with bullet holes. Maybe that was Death back there, getting into the limousine, Uncle Harvey said. Maybe the Devil is Chinese, or maybe he can look like anyone. He couldn’t say, not having really seen his face.
copyright 2007 Andy Griffin

“My salad days,” Cleopatra said, recalling her youthful tryst with Caesar, “When I was green in Judgement.” At least that’s how Shakespeare wrote the story. We’ve all got regrets about our salad days. In his book, Jeremiah Tower Cooks, celebrity chef Jeremiah Tower writes, “In the early 1970s at Chez Panisse, I smuggled in seeds from France and had them grown for us, little edible greens and wild greens to make a mix of various leaves….. The concept, now ubiquitous and misunderstood, is one of the major culinary sins that can be laid at my feet.”
I’m not quoting the lamentations of Jeremiah because I believe that he’s “responsible” for either the ubiquity or the mediocrity of processed salad mixes—let’s call this statement  an example of  “Towering” hyperbole. But  I do find Mr. Tower’s assertion interesting, because out of all of the competing claims that I’ve heard over the year by individuals who claim to have “invented” baby salad greens, Mr. Tower is the only one I’ve found who regrets his role, and I find this stance refreshing and provocative.
Now that the largest organic farms are owned by the largest conventional food producers, and organic practices are embraced by farmers of all stripes because they are cost effective and practical, it’s a good time to think back to the “salad days” organic farming. Mesclun salad was a very important product in the development of the organic produce business. The first self-described organic farmers supplied the nascent natural food market with organic alternatives to conventionally grown crops, like organic potatoes, organic tomatoes, organic corn, etc. But once salads of mixed baby greens became available from organic producers everything changed. For several years there were practically no conventionally grown salads in the marketplace competing in the mesclun category at all, so the sudden popularity of baby lettuce salads gave the organic sector a credibility and a profitability earlier than would have otherwise been possible.
The early identification between “organic” and “baby mixed salad greens” was so complete, that now, years after conventionally produced mesclun salads entered the market, I still occasionally hear people talk as though all baby salad green are organic, just because they’re made of baby mixed greens For many consumers the convenience and flavor of baby mixed greens made the premixed salad the first organic crop they ever bought. It’s almost as if  mesclun, which was commonly mispronounced as “mescaline”, as if it were the psychotropic alkaloid derived from the peyote cactus, was the entry drug for square shoppers, and heavier crops, like organic meats, came later.
When I was a kid salad meant a wedge of iceberg with a slice of pink tomato and a blob of ranch dressing. I grew up in the hills to the south of Soledad on the Hastings Reserve, which is a biological field station managed by the Museum Of Vertebrate Zoology at the University Of California in Berkeley. Every once in a while my father’s boss, Dr. Frank Pitelka, would visit the reserve and stay at our home. Dr. Pitelka was an erudite and worldly gentleman (read snob) and when he was “at table” he liked to talk about food. It was the early seventies. Dr. Pitelka would sit down for dinner, look at the salad my mom had prepared, and begin to wax misty eyed about this “charming little place on upper Shattuck in Berkeley called Chez Panisse, where they serve the most delicious mesclun salads.”
I know now that the word mesclun comes from the Vulgar Latin verb misculare, meaning to mix thoroughly. Originally mesclun salads were made by farmers, and their seasonably variable composition perfectly reflected a peasant’s “waste not, want not” ethic. The baby lettuce leaves were the young leaves thinned from the rows of lettuces in the cottage garden that were destined to be grown to full size, and the lettuces were augmented with chicories and herbs and edible flowers, like arugula, borage, or cress, which were gathered from the fields beyond the garden gate, where they could be found growing wild in forest and pastures and boggy areas, or sprouting out of rock walls.
Dr. Pitelka didn’t tell me any of this. He said that mesclun salad was a perfectly balanced mix of tastes, textures, and colors. In Berkeley, within the confines of what journalists would one day come to call the “Gourmet Ghetto,” these perfect little salads were causing quite a stir. Salads of baby mixed greens, or the idea of a restaurant as a phenomenon remained abstract notions for me until I was in college myself, at the University Of California in Davis.  I got a summer job on a French Intensive Biodynamic farm on Garden Highway, north of Sacramento, owned by a fellow named John Hudspeth who worked at Chez Panisse restaurant.
It was 1979.  Jeremiah Tower, who’d once smuggled the exotic mesclun seeds into the U.S., had already left Chez Panisse, but the restaurant was still working to develop local sources for the best ingredients. When there were no local sources for a particular item, Chez Panisse took a leadership role in subsidizing the efforts of gardeners who were willing to try. The farm on Garden Highway was only one of a number of garden projects with a direct link to the restaurant  On John’s farm I learned first hand about a world of lettuces I’d never heard of before like Merveille de Quatre Saissons, Rouge d’Hiver and Lollo Rossa. We even grew a lettuce named La Reins de Glace, from the French for “Ice Queen”, which can fairly be described as an iceberg lettuce that speaks French.
Salad greens weren’t the only crops we grew at the farm on Garden Highway, but they were the most salable. We grew hundreds of kinds of crops from purple artichokes to valerian root, but much of what we grew was never harvested or sold. We weren’t peasants, the people who ate at Chez Panisse weren’t peasants, and certainly John Hudspeth, was no peasant; he was a rich party-boy. The first year I worked for John I was told that the farm lost twenty thousand dollars. The second year I was told it lost twenty six thousand dollars. It was clear that all the money the fields generated was being spent painting the fences white and garnishing John’s porno-Provencal lifestyle. It seemed to me that if a person approached organic farming with a production ethic it would be possible to make some real money.
I smile now when I think of the conventional vegetable growers and County Agricultural Agents that I met in the 1970’s who were so dismissive and hostile to the idea of organic farming that they prompted me, and lots of my peers, to keep on trying to make it past our failures just so we could stick our thumbs in their eyes. It soon became apparent that the baby lettuces we were growing for the mesclun salads were perfectly adapted for the sort of small, profitable farms we were trying to create.
Baby lettuces were a quick crop to produce, so the first payoff came quickly for undercapitalized, start-up farmers, and there were many potential crops per season. The oddball import french lettuces that “hippies” like me were growing could be harvested at a young stage, so the tip burn damage that’s always threatens the heart of a of mature lettuce during summer hot spells wasn’t a problem, and the harvest of baby lettuces could be easily cooled for local sales in a horse trough full of clean, cool water. Pest insects didn’t have as long to find the baby lettuce crop and destroy it before harvest the way they did with the full-sized lettuces. Baby lettuces were tolerant of a wide range of environmental conditions, suffered only a minimal amount of disease pressure, and above all, they commanded a premium price from sophisticated customers who were proud to pay.
By contrast, iceberg lettuce needs  along the narrow to be grown along the coastal fringe of California where the foggy weather and marine influence provides the iceberg lettuce plant with the cool conditions it needs to achieve it best, most commercial, quality. Because arable land along the coast is limited, land and rent costs are high. And to handle iceberg lettuce successfully after harvest meant you needed to be linked with the huge forced air coolers necessary for chilling the lettuce down to its core for maximum shelf life. Because iceberg lettuce was already an industrial commodity, successfully selling iceberg lettuce meant  having established relationships with the large shippers. No hippies allowed!
The fact that conventional lettuce growers didn’t follow sustainable farming practices meant that after years of mono-culture production they had ferocious soil born disease issues to contend with like sclerotinia. When commercial growers said that it wasn’t possible to grow lettuce organically, what they really meant was that THEY couldn’t grow iceberg lettuce organically. The Titans of the fresh produce business didn’t mingle with the chefs who were jaded on iceberg either, so that they had no idea about how to market specialty lettuces. For the big boys in Salinas, iceberg WAS lettuce, and the  full sized heads of red leaf -greenleaf-butter-romaine- lettuces passed for specialty lettuces. The heirloom varieties of lettuces that restaurants like Chez Panisse were at best considered a novelty, and at worst a joke, and the people who paid high prices for them were fruitcakes or chumps.
The first customers for baby greens were restauranteurs who were passionate about a return to seasonal values and they made their salads to order. But the market for mesclun salads soon grew beyond the needs of a handful of restaurants and began customers among the restaurant patrons who wanted to make these salads on their own at home. For the convenience of the public, so that a rabbity mesclun consumer wouldn’t have to buy separate heads of half a dozen different baby lettuces, plus a head of chicory, a bunch of arugula etc. the farmers began washing and mixing the salads on the farm and selling the blended greens to the public for a high price.
Consumers swarmed the farmers markets to get the salads they couldn’t find in supermarkets. For the small farms the mesclun boom was a bonanza. But because the salad fad had sprouted in alleys of Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto it was also politically suspect. Mesclun, the one time peasant salad inspired by thrift had become upscale fodder for foodies. “Yuppie chow,” sniffed puritan minded, sourpuss lefties. Real proletarians didn’t eat babies. On the right, the old guard of Salinas scowled at the specter of dirty longhairs selling foreign weeds. I was in the middle, and having finally begun making a modest living as an organic salad grower after years in the fields, those were funny times.
As the numbers of farms making salad green increased growers sought to distinguish them selves from each other by increasing the number of ingredients. Isn’t more always better? Customers who weren’t confined to a Mediterranean palate began asking for something different in their salad mixes, hence the introduction of tat-soi, mizuna, and Japanese red mustard. The charm of the tat-soi was a deep green, spatulate leaf that contrasted nicely with the lighter green of the lettuce. Mizuna’s spiky, serrated leaves stood out in sharp contrast to the other salad green, and the Japanese red mustard had leaves that were purple on one side and green on the other. Because we were farmers producing for consumers, not peasants plucking greens from our gardens for subsistence, visual effects that would increase the eye appeal for consumers inevitably took precedence over any notions of a balance of flavors.
At Riverside Farms, where I worked as a managing partner in charge of the salad harvest, we employed over two hundred full time cutters, with twenty more employees mixing salads in the refrigerated packing sheds. Sales climbed from 300 pounds a day to over 30,000 pounds a day. The gourmet ghetto couldn’t consume that much mesclun. We shipped the stuff to New York, Chicago, Boston, Miami and Dallas by the jet load, and so did our competitors. As the sales of pre-washed baby salads took a bite out of iceberg’s market share the large farming corporations from Salinas jumped into the salad game, and they brought their economies of scale with them. The price for salad greens began to go down as the supply increased. Isn’t bigger always better?
A different aesthetic went blending the salads compared to the early days—call it a “production aesthetic”. Mizuna picks quickly so a lot of mizuna found its way into mesclun. Chicory frisee can be harvested in advance, hydro-cooled, and then torn into the mix as needed, so it became an essential ingredient. Bitter radicchio had always been a potential ingredient in seasonal mesclun, but since its brilliant purple leaves help a salad mix sparkle in a plastic bag, and since radicchio is heavy and can be held in cold storage for a long time after harvest, consumers began to find more and more of it in their salads.
Food service giants like Sysco, and Markon, Ready Pac began to compete for the institutional market. The big buyers demanded year around supply, so farms started up winter mesclun production in the low desert valleys and in Mexico. If one salesmen promised the corporate customer “14 different ingredients year round” the competing sales manager offered “16 different kinds of leaves in every bag,” so the lawyers began writing ingredients like baby Red Russian kale into the supply contracts the industrial salad packers made with their growers. Isn’t more always merrier? The constraints of shipping meant that salads needed to last up to twenty days in refrigeration, so a lot of chlorine went into the chilled wash water to eliminate bacteria. The complex chemistry behind successfully embalming baby mixed greens in sealed plastic bags created new restrictions for the recipe of mesclun which put a premium on tough little leaves that could take a lot of handling.
“You buy mesclun and it has bloody kale leaves in it,” thundered Jeremiah Tower in a New York Times interview of April 18, 2001. “What is the most disgusting thing you can eat? It’s a baby kale leaf. Even the cows hate it.” Jeremiah’s right, of course, and I say that as a person that went from picking salad greens in a garden by hand with a few other long-hairs for Chez Panisse back in 1979 to managing hundreds Mexican farm workers on an industrial plantation in 1995 . Yes, at times we made salads with too much mizuna, too much radicchio, and too much baby red Russian kale. But our salads tasted like success and we shipped thousands of cartons of them every day to wholesale buyers all over the America.  Thanks to the efforts of a lot of people the simple salad of mixed baby greens that took its cue from the seasons and the native thrift of the Provencal peasantry had been warped into a standardized U.S. commodity.
There’s a tang of irony to Jeremiah Tower’s chagrin over his salad days because in his book California Dish, Mr. Tower also takes credit for the invention of the concept of “California cuisine”  The mass produced salads Jeremiah abhors are no longer European, even if the seeds for the lettuces are still imported from France. Whether you enjoy them or not, the bagged salads of mixed baby greens with lettuces, arugula, mizuna, tatsoi and radicchio, are Californian in the purest sense. They are mass produced by huge farms, and California has always been the land of the large scale enterprise. The mixed salads are produced year around without respect for the seasons, and California has been at the forefront of the effort to convince people that we can have an endless summer. The typical industry name for mesclun became “spring mix,” because California worships the freshness of youth. Salad mix is mechanically harvested now to reduce labor costs, and then triple washed  in stainless steel factories, before being merchandised nationally using gauzy images of nature and flowers and little farm girls. Pure Hollywood, California uber alles.
In 1996 my partners and I sold the farming corporation that I worked for to one of the biggest Salinas vegetable producers. There was a non-competition clause in the sales contract, and I was pleased to sign it. I had no wish to compete with Salinas any longer. In the space of sixteen years I’d gone from being a farm worker to being a field manager, and finally to being an owner and corporate vice president sitting behind a desk. And I’d grown to dread my job. The non-compete clause would prompt me to start out small again, and the money from the sale would allow me to start a new farm so that I could do things my way, whatever that would be.
As I sat with my partners and the lawyers and signed page after page of documents I thought back to the days when I was just starting out on my organic adventure, fresh with enthusiasm and green of judgement. I was still working at the farm on Garden Highway when I visited my parents one day.  Dr. Pitelka was “at table” at their house. Mom had cantaloupe wedges for desert. When Frank went off again about “this perfect little French restaurant where the Charentais melon paired with prosciutto was so divine.” I  cut him off.
“They don’t get the very best Charentais melons,” I said.
“Have you ever eaten at Chez Pannise, young man?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t,” I replied, “but I work on a garden that supplies them, and when I see the very best melon, a melon that is beyond compare, in the beauty of its form and the succulence and scent of its flesh, since I’m only a farm worker and I know I can’t afford to eat at Chez, I cut that Charentais open and pop the slices in my mouth until the juice runs down my chin.”
What would Pitelka say about the state of mesclun salad if he were alive today? Yuppie chow no more, baby mixed salad greens can be found at McDonalds. If there’s anything original left about the salads of today that we can trace back to Provence it’s that once again small, fresh lettuce and chicory leaves are being eaten by working class people. There’s no shame in that. But bigger isn’t better. Big is big, small is small, and the best is the best, where ever you find it

A real jackass is a monument of asinine masculinity, and a testament to will, virility, and intelligence. A jenny is a female donkey. A stallion plus a jenny equals a mule. A jackass plus a mare equals a hinny. There are more mules in the world than there are hinnies because it’s easier to get a jack to breed a mare than it is to mate a stallion with a jenny. Why this should be so is a matter of conjecture. I figure that the inequality in numbers stems from performance anxiety on the part of the male horses, who, in the presence of equine ladies with such lovely long ears, such dulcet voices, such soulful eyes and such independent manners, simply feel inadequate. Hinny foals and mule foals come out the womb equal though, with 63 chromosomes apiece, and they’re all valued by their owners for the unique hybrid mix they have of a donkey’s good looks and endurance and a horse’s gullible nature and athletic temperament. I’m a donkey fancier, but over the Memorial Day weekend I went to the Bishop Mule Days Celebration on the eastern side of the Sierras to see what the fuss was all about.
The Mule Days Celebration is a week long event dedicated to the premise that anything a horse can do a mule can do better. As a kid I worked on a horse ranch mucking out stalls and feeding the horses. I got jaded by the self-important manner that some horse owners pass on to their steeds. I hoped that Mule Days might be a corrective experience, and I was right. For me, the visit started with a mule race. Five mules lined up on the starting line with their jockeys all dressed in silks of different colors. The mule with the jockey in yellow jumped the gun and had to reined back. Then she jumped the gun again. At a horse race a spirited animal like this would be disqualified for its enthusiasm but the judge at Mule Days had a donkey’s patience in his soul; he simply asked the jockey in yellow to turn his mule around so that the animal’s ass, not its nose, was on the starting line. Bang went the starting gun, and the mules shot off like bullets. The mule with the yellow silks had to spin around on her haunches before she could start the race, but she wanted victory so badly that she laid her big ears back and flew. When she won by a length everybody in the stands cheered.
Then there was a donkey race. It was invigorating to see the philosophic nature of the ass on display. The racing donkeys seemed all too aware that enjoyment of the journey of life comes from the trip, not from the finish line. Three of the five donkeys set off at the starting gun and scampered down the track with alacrity, but they didn’t obsess on the event the way a mule or horse would. A fourth donkey loped along casually and looked at the crowds of spectators with curiosity. And it is curious how thousands of donkeys never gather to watch five humans run in circles. Left to their own devices donkeys are happy to just savor mouthfuls of grass and feel the warm sun on their backs. The last donkey was the most thoughtful of all. She halted halfway down the track before turning and strolling back towards the starting line. Everybody smiled. What a generous donkey she was to make such an ass of her jockey. If the gambling industry wanted to inject an element of suspense into parimutuel racing they’ll open the racetracks to donkeys. It’ll never happen, though, because when it comes to a donkey race “all bets are off.”
I enjoyed the “donkey in hand” obstacle course too. This event was open to donkeys of all breeds and sizes, from the miniature Sicilian donkeys that stand no taller than dogs all the way up to Mammoth Donkeys whose ears can shade an average horse from the sun. Here the goal of every contestant was to lead their donkey over, through, into, and around a series of obstacles that challenged the animal to demonstrate its training and its faith in its owner. I appreciate the donkey obstacle course because I can see the time and energy that the donkey trainers have dedicated to their animals. I’m humbled when I compare the compliant behavior of the show animals with the saucy attitude that my donkeys display
when I try to make them do something that they didn’t think of. “Donkey in hand” obstacle shows will never make for good tv, because patience, trust and discipline are on display, not speed, flash, and violence. There was one made-for-tv moment though. A miniature donkey grew bored with the “keyhole” obstacle and left the arena suddenly to give a nuzzle kiss to another donkey on the other side of the corral fence, forcing the judge to announce over the public address system that “contestant 312 has lost her ass.”
My favorite event at Mule Days was the Pack Scramble. With the snowy crags of the Sierras crashing down to the desert floor to the west and the high peaks of the Whites looming over the Owens Valley from the east, Bishop is a natural spot for wilderness pack stations to show off the mules that can match the mountains. For the scramble contest wranglers from each Pack Station lead strings of fully loaded mules into the arena. Each animal is unloaded, and all the tack and gear removed. When every mule is nude a cannon is shot off, and for a minute the arena is a swirl of dust as sixty or seventy mules run around in chaos. Then the wranglers get busy. The first team to pack their mules and lead the train around the quarter mile racetrack without losing so much as a frying pan wins. My favorite packers were the Powder Puff Girls, an all-girl crew from the McGee Creek Pack Station, who dolled their mules up with packs and tack that sizzled in Breast Cancer Awareness Month Pink.
As I sat in the bleachers in the sun on Memorial Day, watching the beautiful mules and donkeys, the Civil War came to mind. When General Sherman marched through Georgia he promised the newly emancipated slaves forty acres of confiscated Confederate land apiece along with a government surplus mule. A mule used to be considered the optimum “horsepower” for farmwork. Forty acres was thought to be land enough for a hard working man to wrest a living from nature. The Federal Government soon reneged on its offer of reparations for slavery and returned the farmlands to
the plantation owners, so “forty acres and a mule” came to be understood as shorthand for broken promises. I thought about this longeared 19th century formula for emancipation and took measure of my own dependence on diesel fuel. Yes, I’m a self-employed farmer, but like almost everyone in America I live in thrall to Big Oil.
When I was seventeen I worked on a farm in Oregon with teams of Percheron horses. You better eat your Wheaties before you spend a day working with a draft team. Even the leather harness is hard work to put on the horses’ backs, and then there’s the strain of holding up the reins all day long and convincing the horses to pull. Now, at age forty eight years I’m developing a curiosity about the path I didn’t pursue. Do I have the stuff it takes to farm the way my grandfather did? Am I too old to learn? So I read and I seek out the company of people who can drive a team or lead a pack train. My farm buys me the freedom to take a day off now and then so next weekend I’ll attend the Coastal Oaks Miniature Donkey Show in King City. But at home I’ve got two tractors, four trucks, and two cars to fill with fuel. I’m ad-d-d-d-d-d-d-dicted to oil. I’d love to be freed from this karmic burden. Is emancipation possible? Who knows? But I’ve taken a half step I already own twenty acres and a donkey.
Copyright 2007 Andy Griffin
Photos of Mule Days that Andy and Lena took

My son, Graydon, was about three and a half when he came running half naked through the kitchen one morning while I was cleaning up. “I’m hungry Papa, so make me lunch!” he shouted. “Make it quick, and make it crunchy!” I told him to eat a carrot.

Children can be wiggy about what they eat, so the carrot, with its inherent versatility, is an almost perfect food. For kids that need to everything be “theirs,” eating a whole baby carrot can be a satisfying experience; when a larger carrot split into pieces is absent there’s the chance of being served a smaller piece, or fewer pieces, than a rival sibling. Orange seems to be a comforting color for food, too, whereas all kinds of suspicious, sickening things are green.
Of course, with baby carrots the young diner always faces the potential trauma of being confronted with a flawed or crooked root. Food corporations handle this existential issue well by taking larger carrots and mechanically lathing them into perfectly rounded facsimiles of baby carrots, thus achieving a level of uniformity that many children find comforting.

And then there’s the whole issue of carrot flavor to consider. For centuries the carrot’s natural sweetness was enough to make it an attractive vegetable to people and beasts. My donkey comes to the fence every time she sees me, because she hopes to get a carrot. If you want to see an “Oscar level” expression of disgust, just look into my indignant ass’s face when she expects a carrot and I offer her a handful of cabbage leaves instead.

Flavor is still an important component of the carrot eating experience, though these days it is customary for many cooks to focus more on the flavor of the dip they serve with the carrot than the natural flavor of the root. Many consumers only eat the pre-bagged, pre-peeled “baby” carrots. These “value added” carrots are treated with an antiseptic solution for “long life” in refrigerator storage and they often smell like a high school swimming pool, so it helps if the dip is flavored strongly enough to over-ride any lingering chlorine essence.

My favorite “baby carrot” is a variety called “Minicor.”. They have been developed to be harvested young so they plump up fast. They are small, but they’re not really babies, as in “infantile”—more like adolescents. Sometimes the so-called baby carrots don’t always have the depth of flavor that comes with mature, deeply rooted winter carrots, but they have their own charms. When I was a kid I didn’t like to eat cooked carrots—actually, I didn’t think there was anything nastier on earth than a cooked carrot, but I now that I’m old and grey and most of my taste buds have died, I like to cook baby carrots. Here’s my favorite recipe:

Put the carrots in a pan (washed, not peeled) with a pat of butter, a pinch of salt, and a splash of white wine, and steam them till they’re halfway cooked. Then remove the carrots from the flame, garnish them with minced fresh parsley and tumble it all around. The heat of the carrots will wilt the minced herbs, the melted butter helps the savory herbs cling to the roots, and a delicious aroma rises up. I like to apply a final twist of black pepper, and serve the carrots warm.

Carrots are members of the Umbellifer family, along with cilantro, chervil, fennel, parsley, and celery. Many members of the Umbelliferae make excellent garnishes for carrots. If you buy your carrots fresh by the bunch, and not embalmed in a bag, then the greens, minced finely, might make a pretty good garnish themselves. Stir the garnish into the baby carrots just as you remove them from the heat, so the garnish wilts and releases it’s aroma without cooking down into sludge.

If you have any kids in the house who turn up their noses at any flecks of green garnish contaminating the purity of the orange carrots, or if you cook for a partner who is close to “the child within,” remind them how lucky they are to be alive in the modern era. In the infancy of humanity, when all of us wandered naked through the forests, it was the carrot’s greens that we ate, since the carrot plant’s roots had not yet been improved by agriculturalists into a sweet, quick, crunchy snack crop.

And dip? Well, The first dips that humanity discovered was probably yogurt made from donkey, horse, yak, sheep, cow, or camel milk, with some crushed herbs and salt mixed in. That still sounds pretty good, even if it requires a little work. Back in the stone age, the quick-fix, emotionally satisfying, commercial, salty, pre-made dips that come in plastic tubs or packets were still far off in humanity’s adult future, along with tax deadlines, hydrogen bombs, and this laptop computer I’m writing to you on. Convenience took a long coming.

copyright 2007 Andy Griffin
salad dressings

Film reviews aren’t part of my routine, but in the case of the recent release “Miss Potter”, starring Rene Zellweger, I’ll make an exception. Thumbs up! Five stars. Saw it twice!
The story is based on the life of Beatrix Potter, the authoress of classic children’s books like The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but this isn’t a children’s movie. Instead, “Miss Potter” is a story of how a young woman had the inner strength to overcome the stifling social mores of the Victorian era. After I saw the film with my wife I took my ten year old daughter, Lena. Like young Beatrix, my daughter loves to paint. I thought it would be instructive for Lena to see how women’s roles in society have changed over the years, by seeing the struggles of a woman with whom she could sympathize.
I loved the farm-life angle to the film’s storyline too. Beatrix Potter painted scenes from the English countryside around her. Her illustrations are so well observed that I can name the breed of animal or the variety of flower or vegetable pictured. In an illustration for The Tale Of Jemima Puddle-Duck it’s clearly a rhubarb plant that Jemima has chosen to hide her eggs under. “She tried to hide her eggs;” Beatrix Potter writes, “but they were always found and carried off.” The farm boy in the picture looks at the silly duck hen confronting him with a reproach, and Jemima looks concerned. Beatrix writes that Jemima was “quite desperate.” The authoress was probably aware that rhubarb is synonymous with words of dispute, like ruckus, quarrel, controversy, debate, disagreement, bickering, fuss, and flap. The picture has a homey tartness that can appeal to the parent reading the story, as much as the sweeter elements appeal to the child being read to.
When foxy gentleman’s house is pictured, later in the same story, there’s a Digitalis purpurea plant in full bloom at the edge of the frame. Digitalis grows well in dank, moist, shady areas, and the most common name for Digitalis is foxglove—another name is “dead man’s bells.” Is Beatrix insinuating that Jemima is a dead duck? Most illustrations for contemporary children’s books feature generic images of nature that are pretty, but iconic and lacking detail. I like all kinds of art, from the religious psychedelia like The Garden Of Earthly Delights by Bosch, to Klimpt’s line drawings of women to Magritte’’ surrealistic businessmen with their faces obscured by large green apples. But I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for super-realistic images of bunnies in britches too, especially when there are shadowy innuendoes drawn in to give the pictures more depth.
The movie “Miss Potter” captures the rustic beauty of the Lake Country,but it doesn’t take us down a saccharin garden path. Beatrix Potter looked deeply into the world around her, and her familiarity with nature bred love. She overcame societal obstacles and personal inhibitions to become a millionairess, and then she invested her money in land to save working farms from destruction. We can still enjoy England’s Lake country because of her. Beatrix Potter was WAY ahead of her time, and her curious, amusing Victorian morality tales are only part of her legacy.
Oceans are rising, the ice-caps are melting, the apocalypse is nigh, and there’s always so much doomed news to dwell on. The fact that Hollywood moguls saw a market for a movie about Beatrix Potter, and then made a movie where love for the natural environment is as important a theme as the search for romantic love—well, it me think that those of us working towards a sustainable, nature based agriculture can hope for a happy ending too! This farmer says “Go Beatrix!”