Two months ago, I moved into a casita on the property of my daughter Muriel Gardner’s Wild Oak Farm in Sonoita. How does a girl, born and bred in New York City, end up running with goats and chickens and tending a lavender patch in Arizona? After all, New Yorkers may remember a familiar poster, where past the Hudson River to the west of Manhattan there is absolutely nothing…
But when years later I got a job offer in Tucson, our lives opened to new horizons. Muriel was 18 years old by then, looked around at the desert flora and asked me point blank: you call this “green”? She was obviously used to different nature environments: with my late husband Richard, we did take Muriel and her brother camping up and down the East Coast.
So now she adjusted, and started her studies at the University of Arizona. And after testing out the options, she decided to major in Wild Life Management. As a practical training she worked for a program that dealt with “at risk” teenagers from South Tucson. The idea was to take them into challenging nature situations to create a sense of group loyalty known to develop in street gangs. So, she would tell me about her whitewater rafting and mountain climbing… When she talked about repelling, I asked her whether she was repelling mosquitoes… “Oh mom, rApelling,” i.e. hanging on ropes from cliffs…
Her dream of running with wolfs took an unexpected turn, however. Instead of choosing from the twenty thousand student male population to hook up with a future doctor or lawyer, she fell for a wolf with long wavy hair who played the guitar and planned to become a rock star. But love won out, Rob settled down, became a good family man and a devoted father. Muriel adjusted once again, and scaled down her wilderness ambitions to starting a dog daycare business. This is how my granddaughters Chloe and Astrid grew up to be animal lovers.
As people who move to Arizona are warned, we have the beach, but we don’t have the sea. But thanks to student spring breaks in Rocky Point, Muriel had discovered the Sea of Cortes. But how safe was it to cross the border? Back in New York my friend Jane and I had been taking our kids to the Jersey shore. That one time the kids refused to jump into the waves. What gives? Well, they had been watching Jaws…
So, who knows what dangers lurk behind sunny horizons? I was so happy to discover the local connection with Philip Caputo in the last Patagonia Regional Times. I had read his book on border issues, and found myself reassured by the argument of one who clearly knew the score. The Sinaloa narco, he claimed, was a smart one: why kill the goose with the golden eggs, i.e., discourage all the gringos from coming to Rocky Point to spend their money? So, he made sure that Rocky Point was safe, and that’s how we felt for many years despite occasional dire warnings in the Tucson papers. We even bought a house there and enjoyed it very much until my husband Rick passed away in 2015.
But when all is said and done, city life, if you can call Tucson a city, apparently never really resonated with Muriel’s inner self. It all seems to go back to the fact that in the midst of New York City’s offerings, she was absorbed by a very different life model: for years she had been a faithful watcher of Little House on the Prairie. And when she discovered the prairie lands around Sonoita – and, believe it or not – found that it was the very space where Little House on the Prairie was filmed, it felt like kismet.
The big decision was made: Muriel and Rob bought the property with the towering wild oak, and moved to Sonoita. They worked on a business plan to develop the property and Muriel sold her dog daycare business in order to begin much needed improvements. Rob would continue to work at Ratheon for a few years and then take early retirement. They would then be ready to both put all their energies into sharing this beautiful natural environment by turning it into agrotourism.
But life and dreams don’t always work in sink. Rob seemed fully on board, but then something in him changed. He became nostalgic of his youthful days of music and boundless free play. Family and business commitments began to feel like a burden. Their proverbial mid-life crisis did not resolve itself, and ended in divorce. This left Muriel with a deep loss. She now had to face hard decisions: personal, financial, and practical.
But she defied well-intentioned advice, and resolved to carry on. She spared me the endless difficulties – financial and legal – which she had to struggle with. On my occasional visits to the farm, especially the wonderful lavender festivals, I did not really understand the exhausting work and relentless purpose which kept this place going. Only now, when I too decided after a long and complicated life (I grew up on four continents) to join Muriel on her farm, have I come to realize the real measure of her achievement.
I am grateful to her companion John the Scotsman, who is not afraid of hard work and knows the way of the land. And now that I too have become a country girl, I am looking forward to becoming a member of the community which my indomitable daughter has found here and which has been so supportive of her life and work.
