Sweetwater

It is unclear when to begin writing about a grand adventure. Time spent writing might take away from the moment, but after the moment passes one cannot readily piece together the patchwork of flavors, textures, and colors that characterize an experience. So perhaps one should take time – preferably after the sun has set – to leave scraps of thoughts, fragments of ideas that can be developed later on. Maybe the experience will just roll into the next, in which case one should begin writing right away. 

My current time and space trajectory began at the intersection of intuition and logistics. My Colorado vehicle tabs were about to expire, I had finished the majority of the summer’s freezer items and leftovers, and I found myself far from my southern California HMO health coverage. And it was time to go. I had enjoyed an excellent summer in Saint Paul, MN living with my folks, who are truly great housemates and even better friends. But from the perspective of establishing and maintaining adult relationships, a looming departure is not really much fun. 

I undoubtedly shock my folks when I decide one Wednesday to leave that Friday. After spending over a month remotely seeking housing in San Diego without success, I was pushed by friends Will and Greta to show up in town and find the right spot in person. This is a scary prospect that most of me resists – although I have “left home” countless times in the past, I had never done so without a solid plan for housing. But when I find an ad for a live-in chef at a ranch in the mountains outside of San Diego, my intuition lights up. I had remarked to friend Dave how much I wanted to work food into my San Diego journey. After hauling around large quantities of food-that-would-otherwise-be-wasted, I have realized that the role I want even more is “chef.” When it comes to meal creation, I am not really interested in reading a recipe, picking up the ingredients at the grocery store, and then assembling them in the kitchen. To me, food creation is an art of limitations, of working under constraints: I love to be handed a bumper crop of some vegetable that will soon go bad and tasked with making something interesting for a large group of people. Anyway, I am stoked. I plan to leave Friday morning, show up at Sweetwater Ranch Saturday night to camp, and talk to the owner Bernie on Sunday morning. I throw together a backup plan involving a hostel and a storage unit in case the ranch plan falls through. The real worry is that I won’t get to a quiet place with internet by 8am on Monday morning when I have to return to virtual work. 

I work my way uphill through South Dakota and into the Black Hills, where many of the rock formations characteristic of the Colorado Front Range have been exposed: the Fountain Formation (Flatirons), the Morrison Formation (Red Rocks), and Lyons Sandstone (hogback ridges). I snake southwest on state highways through eastern Wyoming and then hook due west near Rawlins. Wyoming is a wild place – high, dry, and almost treeless aside from a couple mountain islands in the northern part of the state. In southern Wyoming, the North Platte has etched a path through the high desert plateau, leaving a storybook floodplain where covered wagons and bands of horses would not have been out of place. I am West, deep in great wide gone America. I race toward the Great Salt Lake at sunset, hoping to catch a view of the city before dark. I don’t quite make it and find myself winding through the steep canyons of the Wasatch mountains in the blackness. I had picked out a free campsite on BLM land outside of Cedar City, Utah, just a couple more hours down the road from Provo on the edge of the Great Basin at the intersection of mountainous northeast Utah with desert southern Utah. By the time I arrive I am exhausted and hop in my tent for a dreamless five-hour sleep. In the morning I feel incredible! I drink two large cups of coffee at Starbucks before continuing south. I stop at Sand Hollow Reservoir near the town of Hurricane in order to wash and enjoy myself a bit. 100% worth it! I then descend a few thousand feet into the Nevada desert. Las Vegas tends to make me physically ill so I cruise through without thinking of filling up my tank. I pay for this mistake in the town of Baker, California with five gallons of gas that cost $4 each (I find later on that ~$3.10 is the current cost of a gallon of gas in California). I watch the Joshua Trees fly by before hitting traffic near Los Angeles and turning south toward San Diego. I arrive at Sweetwater Ranch around 6pm just as the setting sun is beginning to cast an orange glow on the landscape. I am surprised to hear electronic dance music echoing through the valley… 

Upon arriving, I meet a handful of DJs, a tall tan man with a long white beard who looked out of place without a staff and stone tablets, a chain-smoking gentleman speaking “the Queen’s English” and making TikTok videos, and a young guitar player from Portland. Turns out Sweetwater Ranch is also a festival venue! In the morning I meet Bernie, an interesting mix of southern gentleman, aging exercise trainer, and Trump supporter, something like a cross between Joe Exotic and Ben Stiller’s character in Dodgeball. After chatting with him for a while, I decide to give the chef gig a go and we strike up a deal. Most folks I know would probably have turned and run at the sight of the MAGA hat (not the red kind, a dusty green-gray variety that by the looks of it could stand for Make America Agrarian Again). But I’ve grown tired of political boundaries. I have a feeling that getting out of this current mess is going to involve becoming a whole lot less political. In short, the chef arrangement involves cooking breakfast and/or dinner on weekdays, for a total of about two hours each day or ten hours per week. The kitchen is partially outdoors – covered with a roof but open on one side – and my first self-assigned task is cleaning a thin layer of dust off of every surface. 

The days pass quickly, as most of my time is pre-allocated: chef 7-7:30am, work 8am-5pm, chef 5-6:30pm. I can usually finish up dinner just in time to scramble up to a west-facing rock to watch the sunset. A Sweetwater sunset is of a special kind – on the western end of the Lyons valley coastal mountains frame bands of hazy orange light. On Wednesday, I whip through my dinner duties so I can hike a little farther with two of the dogs. We climb up through Manzanita magic, between juniper thickets, along boulder outcrops. These mountains receive around a half meter of rain annually – comparable to Colorado – dry shrublands but not quite desert. There isn’t much of a top to the mountain, more of a rolling series of outcrops; the dogs and I find some nice ones and watch the sun dip below the western horizon. This experience is a strange mash-up of some of my other short-term stops: the landscape and climate is reminiscent of the walnut farm in central Chile near San Fernando where I spent a week during my final days in Chile; the work arrangement is not unlike my WWOOFing experience at the luxury fly fishing resort at Lago Yelcho. As these experiences begin to take on a similar pattern, I wonder how many more of them I have up my sleeve. In each instance, the experience begins with a large amount of uncertainty, which transforms into a brief period of order and balance before collapsing back into the void, a veritable “tree pose” of existence. 

Wednesday night the ranch is buzzing with activity – this weekend Bernie is hosting a music and camping festival at the ranch from Thursday night through Sunday morning!   From the look of the festival organizers, it should be a good time. On Thursday night  the food truck that was slated to provide meals for the festival-goers bails, leaving the organizers scrambling to throw together some alternative food options. When they start talking about setting up a soup-kitchen-style arrangement using Bernie’s outdoor kitchen, I mention that I have a stash of beans and flour and can throw together some vegan meals in a pinch. After a bit of back and forth, I am designated as the chef for the weekend – I plan meals for Friday dinner (curry + rice), Saturday breakfast (breakfast burritos) and dinner (pasta with homemade red sauce), and Sunday breakfast (sourdough blueberry pancakes), and then a couple others go to Costco to pick up supplies based on my grocery list. 

My friend Drew, who I met in college in Minnesota and now lives in San Diego, comes up for the festival on Friday night and helps me in the kitchen. At one point I had to kick a well-intentioned festival goer out of the kitchen, who insisted on randomly adding salt and spices to dishes I was preparing – I couldn’t imagine anything that would be less helpful. I am a bit flustered when, after I had finished cooking dinner, the bartenders begin barking orders, “e.g. two burgers and fries” – I explain that I am definitely not an on-call chef and go enjoy the music. The bands are okay, pretty jam-band-y, but it’s hard not to have a good time with live music, especially in the time of COVID. In the morning I get up around 7am to prep breakfast burrito ingredients and set up an espresso station. This weekend I am getting reacquainted with the aspects of food and beverage service that I really enjoy. In addition to prepping food at my own pace according to my own plan, I love the role of barista. A musician asks me for an espresso, we share a positive interaction, I make the espresso, and then he sends me a couple dollars on Venmo. Great. But when the bartenders start barking orders for espressos, the fun immediately slips away – once that positive interaction is gone and I am simply being ordered around, I’m out! All in all, the festival is a good time. A few of the sound guys are pretty good dudes and we’ll hopefully jam soon. I make $150 over the weekend – not too bad for a labor of love. 

By the end of the weekend, I know it’s about time to leave Sweetwater Ranch – something about spending time with a bunch of young folks makes me remember why I’m here. In addition, Bernie is not someone I want to be around for much longer: he has a habit of switching into a whiny voice to describe just about anyone who disagrees with him (e.g. Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, Democrats, ex-wife, business partners…), suggesting an immature approach to conflict. He is quick to launch into a tirade about how Democrats are the reason that all his business plans have failed. While we continue to have positive interactions and our agreement is established in writing, I would not want to be involved in any sort of conflict with such a person. Thankfully I had just toured a couple spots in Ocean Beach and am ready to execute. The paperwork is processed early the next week and by Wednesday, I have signed a lease! Friday night the dogs and I head uphill for one last Sweetwater sunset and on Saturday morning, after a cup of coffee and a couple eggs, I throw my tent in the truck and make moves to Ocean Beach. 

I’ve been here for a few days, mainly running around chasing a free desk and office chair and dresser and trombone and groceries and auto insurance and renter’s insurance… But on Monday afternoon (federal holiday), I take Schizandra over to Pacific Beach to pick up a rollerblade tool at Play it Again sports. On the way there, I wind along the palm trees on the edge of Mission Bay and then take the beach path on the way home, briefly stopping to jump in the waves. A couple blocks from me are the “Sunset Cliffs” with a handful of secluded low-tide beaches at the base of the cliffs; Ocean Beach’s main beach is a 5-minute bike ride away. People who only knew me during the snowy mountain phase seemed generally surprised at this move. But in a long term sense, I’m a bit of a climate tourist – fundamentally I seek to understand how topographic factors (latitude, elevation, proximity to coastline), by controlling solar radiation and air temperature, influence vegetation (forest, shrubs, grasses) and thus, the aesthetic character of the landscape. In addition, I pursue movement that allows me to enjoy those landscapes with minimal wear and tear on the body, typically involving bikes, skis, and perhaps soon, surfboards. Beginning more or less the day I flew to Los Angeles on short notice to pick up my Chile visa and spent the afternoon at Santa Monica beach, I became fascinated with the Pacific Ocean. This fascination only escalated as I spent time in southern Chile, traveled around the fjords on ferries, and experienced the marine influence through daily frontal precipitation events. To be honest, I expected that my move to the West Coast would land me somewhere much farther north along the rainy coastlines of Oregon and Washington, and I have no doubt that life will inevitably lead me there. But every Minnesota kid loves sunshine and palm trees. California is a wonderful place where the uglier parts of humanity (e.g. diesel exhaust, cigarette smoke, sprawling development) have been smashed up against the most beautiful aspects of nature. I have read about the state’s major social and ecological problems (e.g. air pollution, traffic, wildfire, homelessness) for a while now, so I knew exactly what to expect, but so far Ocean Beach and San Diego have been very pleasant! I’m a total sucker for the southern California coast – the combination of hot sun, light breeze, salty air, and surging waves is magic.

Returning to our initial question regarding the appropriate frequency with which to document experiences: if you are interested in following this journey more regularly, I would encourage you to consider following me on Instagram. I tend to update my “Story” on a pretty regular basis, and the content is typically appropriate for all audiences. As I’m going to be working a more regular schedule for the indefinite future, my adventures will be sprinkled throughout evenings, weekends, and days off, rather than some of the extended grand adventures I’ve undertaken in the past. Anyway, here is my account: @oldmanmichelob