The Farmer’s Way

I had left my studies at San Jose State at the end of my third semester there. This was in 1967, a time when going to college could actually be quite an adventure, at least here in the San Francisco Bay Area. There were surfers on the coast, hippies in the woods and noisy, student radicals on campus and drunken fraternity boys hanging from the limbs of trees on 11th Street. Who could study with all that going on? I quit school and headed to the redwood covered mountains that were drained by the San Lorenzo River, emptying into the Pacific just south of Santa Cruz’s Beach and Boardwalk.

At first, I actually shared an apartment with some buddies taking classes only a block from San Jose State and I was like a hippy commuter, driving my Volkswagen over the mountains everyday to look for a new place to live. After several weeks of picking up hitch-hikers and asking them about the possibility of sharing housing, or whatever, with someone they might know. I would even park my bug and hitch-hike myself, doing the same with the drivers who were picking me up. In those days, if you were a long-haired hippy, any other hip person passing you would always pick you up, while almost no straight people would even look at you. In fact, if straight people did look at you, they might honk their horn and flip you off or even head their car you way, feigning running you over. They were lively days, those days.

After several mis-steps with housing attempts, I finally settled into a place at the junction of Zayante and Quail Hollow Roads up in the mountains, a place called “Olympia Station.” It was a rickety, old hunting lodge at the end of the rail line that came up from Santa Cruz, running along side the San Lorenzo River. I have a million stories about this place, fraught with hippies, drugs, mountain lore and railroad encounters, but for now, I’ll just elaborate on one of my favorite tales from the Zayante days.

When I was living in Zayante, the town of Felton had a population of around 1500. It was more of a village than a town. It had a Safeway store, but this Safeway serviced the entire San Lorenzo Valley, which was comprised of Felton, Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek. It was also the nearest super market to the residents of Empire Grade, Scotts Valley and the Zayante canyon. Felton was astride Highway 9 and before the redwoods closed in around the road at the south end of town, there was a huge meadow with a lone, rather large, red barn, that was unkempt, beat up and sometimes, it was actually, quite serviceable.

At one point, a very large, brassy voiced, brunette lady took possession of the place and turned it into a very eclectic antique/junk store. She called it simply, “The Red Barn.” For me, being like 18 or 19 years old, just off the farm, her lips were too red, her eye make-up was too black and her clothes, always a little too striking. But she was quick-witted, tastefully sarcastic, well schooled in the arts and culture and she had . . .

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