I don’t know if you’ll be able to relate to this but my story of growing up white in Marin County as a baby boomer set the stage for, as I now know, a bazaar set of circumstances. During the 60s, while I was in high school, it was the height of the hippy movement; civil rights, anti war, free love, renaissance in the arts and music. While walking the back streets in Fairfax you could hear Janis Joplin and her band Big Brother and the holding company rehearsing in their living room. The Grateful Dead was a local band that would play at your high school dances. The ballrooms in San Francisco were in full swing. Any given weekend you could see Jimi Hendrix or the Cream for $3. The first outdoor music festival was held on Mount Tam. Magic Mountain Fantasy Fair, featuring the Doors and the Byrds. The beginnings of the Renaissance Faire started at China Camp outside of San Rafael. So as a naive 17 teen year old, I bought into it heavy. After Woodstock, I became apart of the back to the earth movement. I became a vegetarian, artist, rock musician, peace-loving hippie trying to find his way back to the garden. At that same time the state of California decided to break up these huge land holdings/ranches, of many, many thousands of acres held in perpetuity. Families who paid little to nothing in property taxes owned these huge ranches. All they had to do is throw a few cattle on this acreage and they could write off the tax as an agricultural deduction. This same land was holding millions and millions of dollars in timber and it was all locked away and not available to anyone except these rich landowners. Sorta like today and the rich billionaires that lock up all their money offshore and don’t contribute to the American economy. So when the tax assessors reevaluated these ranches and the wealth of the timber holdings, rather than pay their fair amount in taxes, these ranchers subdivided their huge estates and allowed the hippies to come in and homestead bare land for pennies on the dollar. That’s when at 19 years old, I found myself the owner of 20 acres on top of a mountain with an ocean view. But then came the problem, how do you live off the land? As I sat in my tepee and played my guitar, I tried to think of something I could do to earn a living off the land. Many of my neighbors turned to agriculture, growing pot. I didn’t want to do that. I was too inspired. What I did learn was that there was an abundance of wood lying around out in the forest and that redwood was a commodity in northern California. People came from all over the world to see the redwood trees and maybe take home a little souvenir. The interesting thing about redwood is that it doesn’t rot and the bugs won’t eat it. But the most interesting thing is, most of the downed and dry redwood you find out in the forest is thousands of years old, It doesn’t rot, and the logs are huge. So in 1970 a 19 year old hippie puts $250. down on 20 acres in Mendocino, takes his guitar and lives in a tepee and learns to carve wood to sell to the tourists. That was the beginning of the journey of stepping into an idealistic fantasy world. I’m living the Beatle song “Fool on the hill”.