We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Loleta is a little dairy town nestled in the hills about a dozen miles from Eureka, which, in comparison to tiny Loleta, seemed as rough and trash-talking as a stevedore on payday.
The ranch was perched on a steep bluff above the gray Pacific, and its namesake, an old lighthouse, towered over an ambitious garden of red-veined Swiss chard, stringy rhubarb, mottled pumpkins, and revved-up zucchini. A plot of land at the edge of the world, a garden where seeds took root and flourished in a coma of fog and rain — this was my home.
Clouds over the ocean. Wind in the twisted cypress. If I closed my eyes, I could hear mold growing. The ground was a humid sponge that never dried out but kept decomposing underfoot. The windowpanes by my bed sprouted hairline fractures of dark green. Even clean cotton sheets fresh from the dryer quickly assumed the sweet-sour fragrance of curdled milk. Just turned nineteen, I was in a tight cocoon, bound by worship and work. Time was ticking by, cycling through season after season.
Meanwhile, I drifted in a fugue of isolation; no newspapers or radios alerted me to the world outside. I might as well have been living on an atoll in the Pacific.
I had come to the ranch by accident. A directionless teenager, I was thumbing my way down the California coast when a ranch resident picked me up and invited me to dinner. After a meal of chard-and-barley soup, I sat with Sister Carole on the bluff and listened as she told me how much Jesus loved me. The Jesus Movement was big in the early seventies, spawning en masse baptisms in the Pacific and altar calls in football stadiums. But Sister Carole gave the familiar sin-and-salvation story a new twist.
