PUTAH CREEK COUNCIL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Directed by jesikah maria ross ([email protected])

A project of Dr. Eric Larsen’s Research Lab University of California Davis In collaboration with

AUDIO INTERVIEW WITH MANFRED KUSCH April 16, 2014  

PUTAH CREEK COUNCIL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Directed by jesikah maria ross ([email protected]) A project of Dr. Eric Larsen’s Research Lab, UC Davis In collaboration with the Putah Creek Council Audio Interview with Manfred Kusch Kusch/Madison Property ! April 16, 2014 Manfred Kusch 1 jesikah:

So to get started, can you tell me your name and how long you’ve lived here in Yolo County?

Manfred:

My name is Manfred Kusch and I have lived here in Solano County since Christmas of ’87.

jesikah:

I didn’t realize we were in Solano County.

Manfred:

We are barely in Solano County. That’s the county line right behind you. So the creek more or less is the county line, which since we talked about birding earlier, sometimes creates issues when I report about what kind of birds I’ve seen here on a listserv of Central Valley birds. People will say was it in Yolo County or Solano County? And I’ll say “Well, I was standing in Solano County but the bird was in Yolo County.” Yeah, our property line is also the county line.

jesikah:

So tell me where we are. Can you say where we are and maybe describe it a little bit?

Manfred:

We’re between Stevenson Bridge and Pedrick Road Bridge, about maybe threequarters of a mile below Stevenson Bridge. This whole area between the two bridges is almost entirely private. There’s a little piece down near Pedrick Road Bridge that belongs to the university, but otherwise both the Yolo side and the Solano side is pretty much inaccessible to the public except if you paddle a canoe down the creek. It has its advantages in the sense the place hasn’t been trashed up like further up where there’s fishing access. There’s always a lot of garbage and so on. And it’s a very secluded and protected wildlife habitat so there are all kinds of critters around here, bobcats and raccoons and skunks and opossums and river otters, beavers. Not as much anymore as there used to be, but there are lots of river otters and mink in the creek. Even mountain lions have come through here and even a bear has come through, not that I’ve seen them. I’ve heard the mountain lion, but I didn’t see it.

(2:45) Kusch

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So it’s a fairly wild place relatively close to Davis. In fact, most people in Davis wouldn’t know that a place like this exists so close to it unless they happen to come here. For that reason I often – well, I wouldn’t say often, but several times a year I give birding tours here to local Audubon chapters, the Yolo Audubon, the Napa-Solano Audubon, even people from Point Reyes, because otherwise they don’t have access to it. I write little blogs about it from time-to-time on Central Valley Birds, that’s a listserv, and they often want to know how do I get there? In fact, next weekend a group of friends is coming through here. The weekend afterwards, Yolo Audubon will come for their yearly tour, sometimes two of them. So that works out pretty well. Otherwise, what would you like to know? jesikah:

Well, let me start with what brought you to this area?

Manfred:

I don’t know if our time is long enough to describe what brought me to this area, because I used to live in Village Homes, my wife and I and our youngest son, Miles. We had just decided to remodel our house to make it a little bit larger when Jamie’s brother who had also just started building a house in Central Davis found this property out here which was 42 acres. A friend of his led him into it. He said “Let’s forget about remodeling houses. Why don’t you go in on that piece of property with us?” Because he couldn’t afford the whole 42 acres, although it would sound ridiculously cheap these days. Those 42 days cost less than a tiny postage stand plot in Davis. So I don’t know, somehow irrationally we decided to do it and moved out here. Initially the 42 acres could not be divided for very complex reasons I don’t have to go into, but ultimately we were able to divide it into two 21-acre parcels. So basically we came out here because we thought it would be a nice adventure. Also, to make it possible for Mike, my brother-in-law, Jamie’s brother, to have his place out here and do some agriculture. But it was a pretty daunting thing to build the house up there on a completely flat, empty field that had been fallow for several years, full of thistles, and not quite knowing what to plant around it. There was no border, no fence or anything. It sort of all merged into the creek.

(6:10) And I was attracted to it because it looked like a wonderful – an unexpected, really, natural environment. I’d never been down here to the creek. I’d always been further up when I went fishing, like Solano and above, but never below. The place where we are sitting now looked very different from what it looks now. In fact, the trail came on – in which we’re sitting on right now – I had to hack that with a machete and a chainsaw through a thicket of sandbar willows. The whole creek bottom was pretty much a dense thicket, because the Army Corps of Engineers used to come through and clear the stream channel. You may have heard about this. Kusch

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So initially, there were very few tall trees here. If you look around, that cottonwood tree there probably has survived from them, but most other trees never got to get big. They would be cut down before that. But then over time, valley oak and Modesto ash and box elders and black walnuts and so on colonized the channel after they stopped the practice of clearing it and shaded out the sandbar willows, and so now we have a much more open riparian woodland with lots of small valley oak which over time will also probably be shaded out by the ones that become the winners. Maybe 200 years from now there will be big oak trees down here, for that upstream. That interested me a lot because I could see right away this would be very rich bird habitat. So I cut trails through it, and all the trails you’ll see, I’ve walked many thousands of miles on it now. It has been really interesting to see this place slowly change. I only regret that I didn’t take pictures every year to sort of have a running description of how the environment changed. I didn’t do that about my garden either, and not even that much about my kids. In retrospect, I wish I had taken more pictures. It’s not an issue these days when people take pictures with their smart phone of every meal they eat. (9:00) jesikah:

Well, I can tell by your accent you’re not from Solano County, so maybe you can just tell me where you’re from and what brought you – I’m assuming it’s a job – to the Davis area.

Manfred:

My accent is a typical Colusa County accent. [Laughs] No, as you say, I’m not from Solano County. I obviously am originally from Germany. I came to the US in 1967, initially to Berkeley for a year. I was going to go back to Germany and do my PhD there at the university. I had an offer as an assistant. But then Berkeley in the late 60s was a pretty groovy place, so I decided to get my PhD here. So I got my PhD in French and comparative literature from Berkeley, and then I got hired by Davis, UC Davis. Couldn’t be any better. So I taught at Davis from 1971 to 2002, so 31 years.

jesikah:

And how did you get involved with the Putah Creek Council?

Manfred:

Well, that was another little accident which my life is made of, lots of accidents. Well, we had already sold our house in Village Homes which sold unexpectedly really quickly and moved hastily into an apartment in Village Homes which happened to be empty while waiting for this house to be built during the summer of ’87. Somebody told me, they said “You know, you’re moving out to Putah Creek out there. I hear there’s a meeting in the Village Homes Community Center of a group that wants to focus on Putah Creek.” I’d already been out here and seen the place and I thought well, that’s interesting. I should go and see what they’re up to. So I went to that first meeting and I was surprised how many people were there. Kusch

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Manfred Kusch 2 Manfred:

I just heard the hummingbird buzzing here that’s feeding the young up in there. Anyway, yes?

jesikah:

So you were just saying that you had told me the story about you had been told about this meeting and it was in Village Homes. So take me to so you went to the meeting.

Manfred:

Yeah, I went to the meeting and I was surprised how many people were there. Also by the fact that they must’ve already talked among each other about issues because I was totally new to it. There were hydrologists and restoration specialists and Fish and Game Department employees and a lot of people who knew something about the issue and also about the politics of it. So I was mostly an interested listener there. Then I think I remember correctly people were already talking about what they should call that new group. Susan Sanders and Steve Chainey were I guess the lead people already at that point and I don’t know if it was decided right at that first meeting to call it Putah Creek Council, but I’m pretty sure that name was mentioned. Then I’m a little bit vague about how the next meetings after that came about, because then there was already a smaller group that we would meet at various people’s houses, at Steve’s place and various small places over in North Davis then later at Robin and Bill’s house more often on Almond Lane. But before I knew it, I was sort of on the board. How exactly that was decided, I don’t know. There also was a guy, Paul Kaiser from Winters, who was a very fine cabinet maker who was interested in it because he lived at the conference of Putah Creek and Dry Creek in Winters. He and I sort of got together and early on we decided to build Wood Duck boxes and hang them up and get some press coverage about that to publicize the Putah Creek Council.

(2:50) But somehow I got on the board and then there would be meetings, I don’t remember how often, and initially I think the council was concerned about cleanup to some extent, bringing attention to the creek, maybe some restoration because people felt the creek had a lot of potential that was not recognized by the stakeholders like the City of Davis, University, Winters, and so on. So I saw it mostly as a group that wanted to bring attention to what we have here, you know? That it could be enhanced and made a resource for the community. Then of course the drought hit and the creek started dropping, dropping, dropping. Then ultimately it dried up completely here. Kids were coming up on dirt bikes riding on the stream bed. There was no water in it; it was totally bone dry. Some Kusch

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of the pools, the fish were dying and of course raccoons and herons were having a good time eating, many of them. There was a small pool upstream near Stevenson Bridge that never dried up. It was fed by an aquifer, not by releases. So we got into this whole contentious debate with the Solano Irrigation District and other people who controlled the water. They were basically not willing to give up one drop. There was even talk about buying water. The university has a pipeline that brings some water down for irrigation and all that. That really didn’t go anywhere. They released once a small pulse. I remember it sort of came through here, then it was over again. It was so dry, you could walk along the river. I found these pestles that Indians used for crushing acorns that had been discarded that were lying at the bottom of the creek. You could see all the beaver lodges, the burrows that go into the bank. So it provided quite a different perspective. Anyway, since the people who had their hand on the faucet of the dam weren’t willing to release anything unless they were forced, the farmers obviously – and the urban users weren’t eager to give up any drop, although very little would’ve been required to keep flows. (5:55) Finally, we got to the lawsuit and I probably don’t have to talk much about that because you have talked to lawyers and Bill and others who were much more active and knowledgeable in that area. The only role I played in the lawsuit was that I testified at some point about the effects around here. jesikah:

Why did they have you testify? Why were you chosen?

Manfred:

I don’t know, I guess they wanted to have a landowner who also had been paying attention. I’d written letters to the editor, or one letter to the editor, and participated in meetings about the demise of the creek and the kind of damage that was being done. So I thought they just wanted to have somebody from along the stream who could just testify to what the creek looked like before and how it behaved during the drought and what the results were of the interruption of flow. So you probably heard all about the different – we had different lawyers because Morrison & Forrester had to recuse themselves. They got a conflict of interest. But we still got a good pro bono law firm, and I think this whole thing profited from the Mono Lake decision. You know, the public use doctrine or whatever it’s called that stipulates that fisheries below a dam have to be maintained in good condition which obviously wasn’t happening here.

jesikah:

Can you describe what it was like when you went down here? Because you’re saying this area was bone dry on your property. Kusch

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Manfred:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

jesikah:

So can you tell me what that looked like and what it felt like to see?

Manfred:

Well, the creek bed looked rather shocking because it was just all a lot of dry clay because basically the silt and mud dried up and cracked. In some places there was gravel where the water had been flowing more rapidly. But you could also tell that the vegetation that obviously was used to having its roots in the water and didn’t have to go very deep for it was beginning to show stress and lose leaves early. Yeah, it was shocking in a sense because you also always hear the sound of water, although the creek doesn’t rush exactly in normal times but there’s always some sound. And with the creek dried up, and especially with dead fish around, it was smelly. It was really a totally unnecessary environmental disaster for this area.

(9:10) I mean it recovered nicely because it didn’t last five or six years, otherwise obviously the trees would’ve died off. But still, with a little bit of flexibility, all of this could’ve been avoided. So fortunately we got a good judge – a federal judge – who had some sense about this. The result, well, you know about the results. The creek has been flowing at a pretty acceptable level ever since. jesikah:

Judge Park came out on a tour and spoke with lots of landowners. Did he come speak with you?

Manfred:

I don’t remember that. I don’t remember whether I was there. I don’t think I was there when the judge came out, but he was kind of a stern judge but obviously he attempted to be very fair. He definitely was not in the pocket of anybody.

jesikah:

So tell me about your experience testifying. What was it like being in the courtroom, and what kind of questions did they ask you?

Manfred:

I don’t quite remember the questions they asked me. I didn’t find it stressful at all because the testifying, it was not a criminal case and you were basically there to describe to the judge what the effects of the drought or of the fact was that they’d turned water flows off at Solano Diversion Dam. You know, describe the wildlife and the kind of values the creek has and along those lines. I always see the lawyers on our side ask me questions, but I don’t remember the particular questions. But I think I’m pretty sure they were questions along those lines of what kind of wildlife and what kind of value the creek had in general terms.

jesikah:

And what was your role with the Putah Creek Council throughout the prolonged struggle? You said you were a board member early on, probably in the late 80s?

(11:50) Kusch

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Manfred:

Yeah, I was on the board for quite some time because we met many times. I remember licking envelopes and drinking tea and always concerned about raising funds. I think once the lawsuit was settled and then especially after SID decided not to appeal after the salmon showed up here, that’s when Putah Creek Council became more formalized in the sense that they got an executive director and they got money from grants, restoration funds, and so on. So those kinds of small footwork efforts that we made, licking envelopes and cookie sales so to speak raising a little bit of money, wasn’t really appropriate anymore or necessary. It never occurred to us at the time there would be an executive director who would run the show and would get paid and have an office and all that. When I was active in the council, there was no office. The office was always the living room of somebody. And that was fine. It was kind of fun to be in on it at the beginning, trying to figure out the name, trying to figure out the logo, the posters, the t-shirts, and so on. Yan Nasimbene made the poster with the wood ducks that we tried to popularize. So it was extremely gratifying to see how something so, well, I wouldn’t say innocuous but so modest as some people getting together and saying “You know, Putah Creek is really a wonderful place most people don’t know about. They just dump garbage into it. Maybe we should bring some attention to it.” How that then sort of snowballed into a bigger movement and actually got traction and accomplished something that we never thought we could accomplish with the resources we didn’t have. We could never have hired lawyers or anything like that. In fact, we were scrounging for the money for the lawyers who were doing this work pro bono, but they needed to have some money for photocopying documents and so on. I forget exactly how that all came together. So those were the concerns that we had dealing with small amounts of money like that.

jesikah: (15:00)

How did you go about fundraising? Do you remember?

Manfred:

I think we tried to . . . again, members, you know, people paid their dues. T-shirt sales, it was fairly modest.

jesikah:

Bumper stickers?

Manfred:

I don’t know if there were bumper stickers. Maybe. But you know, it’s one of those efforts. And now I think most stakeholders are acutely aware of what Putah Creek is. If you look at the restoration project up in Winters Park, the realignment of the stream and the big-time restoration project that cost millions, taking out the eucalyptus at my neighbor’s, Harvey Oland upstream from here, has created a wonderful environment there. Before there was just a solid wall of fairly Kusch

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substantial eucalyptus right at the edge of the water, and taking those out created room for valley oak and others and grassland there. It’s a great place for birding. jesikah:

Did you participate in any of those early creek cleanups?

Manfred:

Yeah, we did . . .

jesikah:

I haven’t heard any stories. I wondered if you had been on a cleanup and could tell me kind of a story about where you all went and what kind of stuff you pulled out.

Manfred:

Oh, I participated only in one early cleanup here at Stevenson Bridge. You could pull out whole engine blocks and sofas. It was quite amazing. And over the years, how much stuff they have hauled out of their . . . Well, the creek is always a tempting place to dump stuff. It goes downhill. If you live in the flatlands, there’s no downhill except down into a river. And the farmers who lived along here like Jack Phillips who owned this ranch before he sold out, this was his garbage area right here. If you go and dig in the slope, you’ll find not only thousands of bones of expired animals – he raised sheep too – but horse skulls, cow skulls, innumerable sheep skulls. Then if you go a little bit further towards Mike’s, there are all kinds of stoves and machinery. It was all dumped over the edge and it’s slowly sort of sinking underground now. But that was the practice of the earlier days. This was the remote corner of Jack Phillips’ ranch, which goes there, so they just hauled it to the most remote spot and dumped it.

(18:05) jesikah:

So what do you think made Putah Creek Council, as an early member and board member, and somebody who has been with the council to this day, what do you think has made the Putah Creek Council so successful?

Manfred:

I think in . . . well, some luck, I think, historical luck that they came at the right time. But I think also in large part because the people who were involved in leading roles knew a lot about this environment in terms of restoration, water issues, hydrologists, engineers. They were connected to Fish and Game, now Fish and Wildlife. So they knew a lot, also, about the legal issue and the political issues, especially people like Bill who was very active in Democratic politics and knew a lot of people in politics: the local politicians, the assembly members, senators and up. So that was very helpful for the council to know where to aim, so to speak. If you were just a bunch of naïve people like myself who didn’t know much about the political situation, who just had a swollen heart for the nature here, that probably wouldn’t have gone very far because you have to have some skills and you have to know where to compromise and who the people are that actually have Kusch

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the wherewithal to bring about change. I think Bill and Robin were very good at that, and Steve Chainey was pretty good in that respect also. And they knew other people who were involved. And ultimately people like Joe Krovoza was obviously also in politics – more and more so now – became involved. So I think that helped. Being the university town where there’s so much expertise concentrated, it was not that hard to bring the right people together. So I think that’s probably one of the main reasons why the council succeeded in addition to the fact that we just happened to come upon the scene when it was useful, just before the drought. (21:05) jesikah:

Having gone through the whole experience, what lessons kind of do you draw from how Putah Creek Council conducted itself that would be useful for other communities.

Manfred:

Well, I think a lot could be learned from Putah Creek Council in the sense that A) it can give you a hope that even if you start at a very low grassroots level, if you do it intelligently and if you bring enough expertise to it, it’s actually a pretty good sense that something relatively big could come out of something quite small. For example, Putah Creek Council didn’t just end with an agreement about stream flows and the efforts. It didn’t end with that. They continue obviously with public outreach and so on. But members of Putah Creek Council also got involved in the issue of developing a wildlife corridor from the coastal mountains down into the bypass, because Putah Creek is one of the very few waterways that reaches all the way from the coastal mountains uninterrupted more or less, at least from Solano Irrigation, down to the Delta. So people always say “We’re interested in bringing salmon back and making that connection,” so that’s making progress with the fish down there. But also, they were – people started talking about converting the bypass into a wildlife refuge, the Yolo Bypass, the Vic Fazio Wildlife Area, because Vic was the congressman at the time and Bill knew him and all that. I remember going on a couple of trips with members of Putah Creek Council with all kinds of other stakeholders like Ducks Unlimited, a federal wildlife service. There must’ve been I don’t know how many groups. I think the emblem’s actually on their billboard that says Vic Fazio.

(23:40) So there was a group of I estimate 30 to 50 people. We’d walk the levees and talked about how Putah Creek could be spliced in. It could be actually a vital link between the bypass and the coastal hills so that in fact mountain lions can move up and down. This whole idea of wildlife corridors has gained quite a bit of traction lately, not only here but also in South America and places where they Kusch

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want to maintain movement of jaguars or Florida for the Florida panther. There needs to be an uninterrupted string of preserves that make that movement possible. So Putah Creek Council wasn’t the central player in the Yolo Bypass, the creation of the wildlife area down there, which turned out to be the largest restoration project in the country. It’s several thousand acres. Bill Clinton came to inaugurate it for that reason. Bill and Robin's daughter gave a speech. So we can see all the connections there. So these things – things can snowball. I don’t know whether it is true that that never would’ve come about without Putah Creek Council, but Putah Creek Council certainly helped because it provided this link that made the bypass even more interesting. There are still efforts underway to bring the Delta through Putah Creek up into the coastal mountains which is a wonderful idea. So for me, being a member of Putah Creek Council and being sort of a witness of what happened, sometimes more actively than at other times, has been really quite encouraging, because it does make you realize with some luck but also with some effort and expertise you can bring about change. Sometimes people just need to be woken up to get on the bandwagon. They may not really be opposed. So I think that’s what happened here. jesikah:

And has your property become the unofficial property headquarters for Putah Creek Council? Because it seems like when I ask people to recall what it’s like to be here, they mention some party or another that you hosted.

Manfred:

Well, I wouldn’t say this place is a party headquarters but it’s true that because it’s located more or less in a central part of Putah Creek, and since I served on the board and people are looking for a place where maybe 50 or 100 people could meet, that’s hard to do in a suburban garden. They said “Oh, Manfred, you have this big place out there. You have a big lawn. People can go down to the creek. How about it?”

(27:10) So yes, I don’t mind. I think that’s something I enjoy doing if it doesn’t become too much because I have people doing bird surveys here; I have hummingbird bands coming every two weeks, not this year, but the past three years, all of which I enjoy it. But there’s always something going on. We have had weddings of friends here. My niece will get married here next summer and we have had Putah Creek Council meetings and parties here. People always remember that, the celebration of the lawsuit when it came out in our favor. We had a party here with the lawyers and members and stakeholders from various agencies. And I remember walking down towards the creek with John Kempur who was the dean emeritus of engineering, an avid birder, he actually wrote a book about Kusch

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birding in Yolo County or Northern California, I forget. A very wonderful man. He was already retired at the time. And we happened to look up and there was this big kettle of Swainsons Hawks circling overhead and staying and staying as if they were watching our party. People all felt that’s a good sign. You know, I sometimes remind people that in French, the word for happiness is boneur and boneur comes from a Latin origin, bonum agurium, which means it’s a good sign and it’s a good sign as divined by the flight of birds. Priests would watch birds and see how birds behaved in the sky to predict something like an oracle. So boneur originally meant a good sign as expressed by bird flight. So I say that’s the kind of happiness we had here. We could tell those Swanson hawks definitely signaled something positive, so that was nice. jesikah: (29:50)

What future do you see for the Putah Creek Council?

Manfred:

What future for the Putah Creek Council? I don’t know. I mean it’s a good question, because once you . . . you get a more formal structure with an executive director and an office and so on, sometimes that can probably take a little bit of the fervor away because somebody is in charge. But I think they have handled it quite well so far, as far as I can tell. We’ll continue, and if it continues to be funded by the Lower Putah Creek Coordinating Council I guess must be providing the money, I don’t see why it wouldn’t go on for quite some time. And if it ever ceases to exist, some other agency would take over. I mean I can’t quite imagine that once the creek has been restored as much as it will have been restored, that it will be abandoned again. If anything, people will become more conscious of shrinking natural environments. And there are lots of good signs that agriculture and conservation agencies for conservation groups are working more and more together. If you look at what’s done in the rice fields, with hedge rows, rearing salmon in flooded rice fields, I know John Brenan who is involved in that. All that shows that people are definitely willing to make the environment more wildlife-friendly and move away from total clean farming where there’s nothing left but row crops and no weeds and no cover. So I think that’s probably what’s going to happen. I’m fairly optimistic.

jesikah:

And how are you still involved with the council these days?

Manfred:

Ah, very tangentially because whenever they have cleanups, I’m doing my cleanup down here because I take care not only of this stretch but of Harvey’s stretch. I take care of about half a mile here. Harvey is pushing 80 and you know, he still works around his garden and so on but he doesn’t go down to the creek very much, so I mow a trail down there and I keep the tamarisk and re-sprouting eucalyptus under control and so on. Otherwise, I just pay my dues, you know, and get the newsletter and find out what’s going on. Kusch

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jesikah:

And allow people to do lots of interviews on your property.

(32:50) Manfred:

Well, yeah, or to come here for birding trips. Yeah, then we had another party I think, now that I remember right, when Putah Creek Council turned some age. Maybe Libby was already here and they catered something. I forget how long ago that was. What kind of anniversary would that have been?

jesikah:

20th.

Manfred:

Was it 20th?

jesikah:

Because I think they just had their 25th, and she’s been here five years.

Manfred:

Okay, so must’ve been the 20th. So that’s my story.

jesikah:

Is there anything else about Putah Creek or the council or your experience with the water conflict that you’d like to talk about that I haven’t asked you about?

Manfred:

I can’t really think of anything concerning the flows in the creek because ever since they reached that agreement long after the lawsuit about minimum flows and so on, things have been pretty great. You don’t have a rushing mountain stream here, but you have pretty good flows, certainly adequate for all the fish, and they have been sticking to the schedule where they have a pulse of high water coming through I think in March or whatever to induce fish spawning. That lasts for several days. The creek gets fairly low late in the year, but adequately so. It’s plenty of water for the fish. It actually exposes gravel island upstream where I can put my photo blind and photograph migrating warblers. I always appreciate when the creek comes down that far. [Laughs] But no, otherwise I can’t think of any particular issues that I have been ruminating on.

jesikah:

Okay.

Manfred:

I’m quite happy here. For me, this has been totally unplanned. I mean I never planned moving out to Putah Creek and Solano County. Our youngest son was five years old and I thought my God, he’s going to be pretty isolated out here. Village Homes was crawling with kids. But Jamie said ah, let’s just do it. Okay. But it turned out to be a lot of work, but it’s all work that I enjoy doing. And now that I’m retired, living out here is the best gift. Even as a kid I was never bored. If this didn’t exist for me, I always had more things to do than I had time for.

(36:10) Kusch

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That is true here too. I mean I practically don’t watch any television or anything. I’m practically outside all the time, either working in the garden or walking Chico out along the creek every day, putting in a mile or two. And it’s such a wonderful environment that sometimes I have to kind of pinch myself and think what would this place look like to somebody who comes here for the first time? Because to me, I know every tree here so to speak. It’s easy just to walk through and it floats by, whereas from time-to-time it’s good to stop and really take a look at what is here and be aware how ridiculously special it is to live in a place like this, so close to urban centers. So for that, I’m very thankful if I only knew who to be thankful to. It sort of fell in my lap. And it was also the kind of person who was able to make it happen. In other words, I enjoy gardening. I’ve always been out in nature ever since I was a little kid. I grew up in a little village of 300 people after the second World War. My buddy and I would do our homework as quickly as we could then we’d go outside. No helicopter parents there. You just had to be home before dark. jesikah:

Sounds so good. All right, well let me go ahead and pause this.

Kusch

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