Origins, part 1: Teenage angst and the value of dark times.

Kicking off a series about how I got to where I am.

I will forever be grateful that when I was 14 years old I started skateboarding and listening to punk.  Who knows where I could have ended up, if I hadn’t felt the instinctive call to turn away from the prospects of a standard issue future in a society whose trajectory appears to be that of a car driven as fast as possible towards a cliff. Something intuitively felt out-of-place, and I was desperate to find out what was missing.  Because we are not made to spend our lives hiding in toxic boxes and going to jobs that we hate.  The realization would slowly dawn on me that humans can be so many things, and at the core we are dignity, compassion, and love.  But before all that, I was pissed off.

Growing up in Southworth, where the ferry departs for Vashon and West Seattle, we were fortunate to have a few good skate spots.

I latched onto the spirit of rebellion, and was fueled by the sense that I wasn’t the only one who wanted nothing to do with the soulless pursuit of mediocrity that masquerade as career opportunities in the land of the lost.  I couldn’t articulate what I was rebelling against, or what was missing from my life.  Like a spiritual phantom limb, there was an existential itch I couldn’t scratch.   Discovering punk was like finding out that other people also felt the itch too, that it was not crazy to want to push out past the boundaries, question the norms of society, and carve your own alternative.  I don’t think I ever left this sentiment behind.  I just grew from this base into what I am now, a work in progress. 

I still skate from time to time.

Every now and then I even pogo.

The day I graduated high school in Washington State, I received two books that changed my life, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, and The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell.  They spurred my interest in mythology and looking at the long history of the human species, to the vast chunk of time before we lived in so-called civilization. The books you need on a deep level will somehow appear in your life. But you have to go into bookstores, and be a lover of words. You have to pick up many books, to find the right one.

I was probably 17 here with my friend Jesse White, an artist and musician my mom let live in our basement for a few months.

When I was 19, taking community college anthropology courses, I had a great professor who turned me on to radical left activism and anarchism, which really resonated with me.  The sickness I saw wasn’t limited to America, to one form of government or economic system.  It seemed to me that we needed to question not only capitalism, but the nation-state itself, and the total-war-agriculture at the roots of civilization.  I romanticized hunter-gatherer groups, envisioned a communal life on an organic farm, and thought about alternative ways that societies could be structured.   I resisted finding a job, because all the available ones sounded horrible.  I knew the life of an employee paying rent and going into debt was not for me.   So, I scrounged, working quick jobs for cash, and relying on friends to get by.  I read the works of Kerouac, Hunter S Thompson, and Edward Abbey.  These three had a big impact on my writing, and I still feel their presence now, in my words and approach to writing.  I feel it is important to be inspired by and mimic the voices of those whose creations echo warmly in our hearts, and not be afraid to build our style by borrowing from the greats. 

Backpacking to California with my friend Calvin at 21 years old.

At 21 I was bursting with big ideas and a positive desire to travel and see new things, explore beautiful places, and see how people lived.  I spent that summer hitchhiking down to California and back to the Puget Sound, meeting all sorts of fringe characters and discovering that life seemed to work out wonderfully when I let go of planning and caution, and threw myself into the river, trusting the journey.  Returning home, going into winter, I somehow lost that vision and allowed darkness and my radical, unmet expectations to suck me down into an eddy.  I would spend 5 years slowly going into a funk, with periodic bursts of light the came when I traveled, to work in Alaska or go on long hitchhiking trips.  Through my early 20s I read a lot, studying philosophy, spirituality, and politics, fixating on the forces I saw as holding me back.  I was hungry for a movement to join, but there was none to be found that didn’t feel contrived.  I’ve never been much for joining groups that have doctrines.   So, I started a revolution of one, built on studying what was “wrong with the world”.  I lived in my dad’s basement, moved away from social life, and isolated myself into a world of ideas and philosophy.  Those were important years that shaped the foundation of my thinking.  All this cheese stuff, travel, and the creation of my own path stems from then, from sitting in that basement writing papers and devouring books, searching for ways to free and spiritually fulfilled.

A box full of old journals is one of my prized possessions. Full of short stories, poems, and the story of my unfolding.

At 26 I was lost and had watched the extreme optimism of my early 20s wither into pessimism and apathy.  I bottomed out in depression in the fall of 2008 and remember watching the spontaneous celebrations of Obama’s election on television, thinking how naive everyone was to believe anything would change.  Melancholy and condescending superiority went hand in hand.  I was living with my girlfriend that winter when I hit bottom, feeling hopeless and feeding little except my depression.  I fantasized about going to live in the woods as a homeless hermit.  I got a job at a pizzeria, broke up with the kind woman who I was mistreating, and moved into a horrible flophouse full of students who couldn’t find anything better near the UW campus.  I loved to cook, and became fascinated with sourdough, and stretching mozzarella.  But this was just a seed of my cheese path, that wouldn’t sprout yet. 

I would write dark poems on the walls of abandoned buildings. I still do this, but they are less dark now.

What had dependably felt right, real, and enriching in my life was traveling down the coast to California with just a backpack, so I did a trip in 2009 to go live with my high school sweetheart.  When that quickly fell apart, I took a job at a ski resort in Colorado for the winter, and it was there that I started putting myself back together.  I worked the lone night shift in a large mid-mountain lodge, unloading all the food and supplies that came in each night.  I played in the snow all day and took a stab at writing an autobiography.  In doing this I realized “the story of me is unfolding as I write.  I want my life to be an adventure worth writing about.  I am blessed to be in this space of openness, my depression was a gift and now I know that I fed it, became comfortable in it, created it.  Now I’ll move forward, reclaiming some of the vibrant hope of my youth while rebuilding it in a more expansive way.”  Tempered optimism, not quite so naive, made stronger by having its foundations tested. 

Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where I started making cheese.

I was full of good vibes, and a state I now refer to as “all aspects of my being in alignment”.  It’s the unstoppable feeling of good things coming.  Optimism, zest for life, run out and see all the beauty, the fruit is ripe on the tree.  I had my first road trip through the Southwest with a childhood friend, exploring the same country I now sit in 13 years later, writing these words in the shade of some cottonwoods along an arroyo.  I felt pulled back to Seattle, to move back into the large house where some friends still lived.  I applied for many jobs, and on the same day got two offers: one for a pizzeria, and one to make cheese at Beecher’s in Pike Place Market, downtown Seattle.  I took both and for a few weeks would make cheese from 430 am to 230 pm, then ride my bike to work the dinner shift.  It was too much, I had to quit one.  I can’t recall now why I choose to stick with the cheese job, it was a stressful, demanding work environment, and restaurant work was what I was comfortable doing.  I chose to keep the cheese job, a move that altered my life.  Perhaps I couldn’t have chosen otherwise.  That drive back to Washington, searching for work, then getting that first cheese job was the beginning of a time of great serendipity, that in hindsight appears pre-ordained, like everything unfolded perfectly, all the doors opened up and helpers appeared.  But the doors only opened because I knocked.

The only blurry images I have from my first cheese job, making cheddar in twin vats.

What was it about working at Beecher’s that encouraged me to make cheese my path?  I didn’t particularly enjoy working there, but it seemed like a good job, and I moved downtown to be close to it, living in a studio apartment in Belltown.  The wheel got rolling when Dan Utano came out from the east coast, an aspiring cheesemaker already well on his path.  One afternoon, while we drank beer at a dingy bar full of pinball machines on 2^nd avenue, he shared with me how cool raw milk cheese is.  Dan explained how when cows eat plants and sleep in fields and barns, the microbes from their environment go into the cheese, allowing it to be a unique expression of a place, potentially the product of a landscape.  A lightbulb lit up in my brain. The thoughts bolted out, like penned up calves running towards mom. “Cheese is the ultimate food.  It could be a vessel for healing the divide between humans and the wild.  This is perhaps what I’ve been looking for, my place to make a stand.”  This single conversation triggered something, and looking back appears as a foreshadow.  I became obsessed with learning the science, and envisioned living on a dairy farm.  I read books, took notes, tasted as much as I could, while doing the daily work of making cheese.  Farmstead cheese - which is made on the same site that the animals are milked -  raw milk, and small scale became my vision.  The opposite of what Beecher’s was, where I never saw the cows whose milk we were pasteurizing, in the middle of a large city.  To ferment the milk, we mixed little packages of cultures, a practice I never questioned.  Now I wanted to be on a farm, craving a connection I had never even experienced. It was just an ideal that drew me in, seemingly with a will of its own.  It was as though I began my path with the exact model I am now opposed to and working against.  I got to see the nearly industrial scale, and what I feel is wrong with milk and cheese in America. 

Being angry and knowing what you are opposed to is an ok place to start, but it doesn’t get you far.  It’s not the most fertile soil for creation.  Studying the problems, and critiquing large systems can be beneficial, or it can weigh us down.  The more we fixate on our defeat by tyrannical forces, the more they master us.  I’m glad I spent time studying the problems, and that I started my journey with cheese where I did.  I’m glad that punk rock chose me, lifted me up and spat me out onto some unknown path involving moldy cheese, shepherds, mountain pastures, and walking with a crusty backpack. 

This is my bliss, and I shall continue to follow it,

not sure where it’s leading, but trusting the journey.