Half Way Mark

This year’s book in the series about the Mikkelsons, Pulled Into Nazareth, was slow getting started. I was doing more research for the book, as some of it is set in places I’ve never been. And also, things just seemed to get in the way of writing. In May I started worrying. The previous year I had been much further ahead. Would I finish half the book by the end of June? I began to put writing first, and yesterday I uploaded chapter 14 to the location where my first readers can find it, reaching the half way mark.

As I walked through San Rafael yesterday I noticed that the majestic old jacaranda which grows in a street park near the reconstructed Mission was blooming. The mysterious, spicey scent of the blue trumpet-flowers opened up in the hot, sunny afternoon, but the thick branches made a heavy shade and under the tree fallen blue flowers carpeted the grass.

I haven’t lived with many jacarandas, so each has been special. The first was in North Oakland, in a residential neighborhood which I passed through each day on my way to work. I struggled with the name jacaranda, which was pronounced with the ‘j’ sounding more like an ‘h.’ Its origins are lost in time, but is believed to be from a Guarani (an indigenous language of South America) word meaning ‘fragrant’. I especially enjoyed the few weeks in early summer when it bloomed.

Toward the end of those years, I talked to the owner of the tree. She threatened to cut it down as its roots were upending the concrete sidewalk. She was older and had no money to pay for insurance claims. So sad, I thought. Then I worked in Los Angeles for a few weeks in spring and found little ornamental forests of jacarandas on the plaza levels above the downtown streets.

Place is so important to all of us. Jacarandas don’t grow everywhere. Here the coastal morning fog cools us each night and clear, bright days are leaving us a very dry summer. But we are listening to the predictions of an El Niño which scientists perceive developing off the Pacific coast and hopeful that winter rains will alleviate our drought. I have long felt much more related to the rim of the Pacific than to Europe. Does this affect my writing, I ask myself.

When a Japanese-born friend tells me she is reading a lot of the Shishōsetsu, or I-novels written in Japanese, I research these and find that they are a particular genre in which writers used the events of their own lives for their subjects. Beginning in the early 20^th century, the writers wished to portray a realistic view of the world involving real experiences, often showing the darker side of society. Except for the realism involved, this did not sound like my work.

But then I found that Gish Jen, a contemporary American-born Chinese writer, has written a book entitled Tiger Writing, about the “profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.” She believes that the novel is essentially a Western form that values originality, authenticity and the truth of individual experience, while Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent.

I’ve had trouble thinking of the stories about the Mikkelson kids as a series of novels, though by some definitions, the novel is such a big envelope it can contain almost any kind of fiction. My work is certainly about “cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent.” It’s about family and how our personal and public lives interact, with emphasis on the private aspects. In the end, of course, I am not the one to say what the books become. I must just write them and hope that they eventually find their audience.

Alan Chadwick

Alan Chadwick

The University of California at Santa Cruz opened in 1965. It had a number of experimental ideas, including pass/fail grades, residential colleges, and the innovative cross-disciplinary history of consciousness program. For Paul Lee, however, the university’s first few years, before it hardened into a research institution, were crystallized by the presence of Alan Chadwick and the gardens he made there. Lee taught philosophy and religious studies at Crown College until he was denied tenure. Lee had the idea that a student garden on the beautiful, open campus would be a good addition to interdisciplinary study. Within weeks of a walk Lee organized to look for a possible garden site, Alan Chadwick turned up.

Alan Chadwick had been a British naval officer and a Shakespearean actor but it was as a master gardener for the many gardens he began up and down the coast of California that he made his mark. He used a French intensive biodynamic gardening system which has its roots in Rudolf Steiner and Goethe. When Lee asked whether Chadwick would make a garden for the university, Chadwick went out, bought a spade and started digging without any discussion of contracts, salary or where it should be done!

Chadwick hated industrial farming and gardening, the tractors which had compacted the soil and the profit motive that set them in motion. He preached biological diversity instead of mono-cropping and used companion planting and other techniques to guard against pests. His theme was working with nature, learning its rhythms and mysteries. He was as Paul Lee writes, “the Pied Piper of the reaffirmation of the integrity of organic nature and its carefree abundance, and the lifestyle that went with it.”

Photo copyright by Gregory Haynes

As a person, Chadwick was flamboyant and imperious. Students who became his apprentices never forgot him. Beth Benjamin writes: “He had flaming temper tantrums, told tales, gave us dinner parties, fed us with his own bread and ham and cheese, threw dirt clods at us and laughed as he hid behind the compost piles. He taught us the joy of work, the discipline to persevere in order to make a dream come true, even when we were hot and tired, and the deliciousness of resting and drinking tea after such monumental labors.”

The high point of Chadwick’s residence at Santa Cruz was a series of lectures he gave which had the quality of a revivalist meeting. Chadwick called people back to their own nature and the nature around them, which, he pointed out, was under radical attack. But after about five years of working on the gardens, Chadwick was finished at the university. Paul Lee was told by a colleague, “do you know that [Chadwick’s] garden has done more to ruin the cause of science on this campus than anything else?” Chadwick packed his bags and went on to Saratoga and Green Gulch.

This story and much more is told in Paul Lee’s rambling book, There Is a Garden in the Mind. His insistence that the California organic movement began at UC Santa Cruz with Alan Chadwick is further described on his website. Peter Jorris and Greg Haynes have put together a rich website including many video memories of his dynamic personality and teaching at Alan-Chadwick.org. Alan Chadwick also appears in Wendy Johnson’s book Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, in which she describes Chadwick’s contributions to the gardens at Green Gulch Zen Center just north of the Golden Gate. Chadwick died at Green Gulch in 1980.

For the purposes of my current novel, Pulled Into Nazareth, Chadwick impacts Line’s story when she and her husband move to Santa Cruz. Stephen is getting his doctorate in history and Line, though she has a small child in tow, works in the Chadwick garden before Chadwick leaves in 1972. Line is, of course, part of the choir. Alan has no need to preach to her! I first learned about Chadwick from my sister Solveig, a natural gardener who now does her gardening and birding in Yorkshire, England.