a week at salmon creek

& the seven letters i wrote there

For the week ending in December’s full moon in Gemini, I did a residency at

Salmon Creek Farm

. Or at least, that’s what I'll put on my artist resume. In truth, I know the culinary director of the place, chef and heartthrob ~ Gerardo Gonzalez ~ from our New York ratbag days, and he invited me to come spend some time there in exchange for helping in the kitchen. Baby’s first nepo :)

I had been following SCF for years before though, ever since my ex DM’d me a photo carousel of the cabins saying “omg let’s go here one day”. And honestly, I have returned to those photos many, many times since then because the workmanship is like pornography to me. The individually named and colour-coded cabins each with their wonky parts and histories, the age-less, knotted slabs of wood, the arched windows framing a horizon hidden by misty heavens. The, in my opinion, very chic compost toilets, where I saw the SCF mascot, a real life banana slug, for the first time. “Yeah they eat shit” Gerardo confirmed. Someone’s gotta do it!

salmon_creek_farm

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And so it was my immense pleasure and joy to wake up my first morning there in time for a tour of the cabins (inside too!) and the land. The land! The coastal redwood forests of Northern California, of Central Pomo land. I had never seen a redwood tree. I had only been to the West Coast of North America once before in 2017 (though I have since learned that the UK also has a flourishing Redwood population??) and it was then that I first heard about “the redwoods” and then I started noticing them in films and wondering what it might feel like to stand at their feet mottled in sunshine and to be honest I still do not know because it was shady and also winter but it was still really cool. 

I won’t go into all the history because you can read it on their website and I can’t really remember it, but essentially, this land was bought by some white homesteady off-grid types in the 70s who lived there, in their commune, together, until they sold the land in 2014. Some of them still live a few minutes away <3 And like, white people buying land aside, i’m sure they had their ups and downs, but that’s maybe the longest I’ve ever heard of a commune lasting? And so I asked myself, is it because they aren’t gay? Anyway in 2014, artist and architect Fritz Haeg bought it, queered it, stewarded the land and buildings with friends, and birthed it into this new crunchy art hoe era.

So many of us talk about this kind of thing, the commune, the queer apocalypse bunker, the village we make, the alone but together. We have done for so long now, yearned for it, and for so many reasons it feels impossible and maybe even undesirable or unrealistic or idealistic or unsafe. Or maybe capitalism is the most comfortable discomfort we can handle. Or maybe those of us with resources were never actually gonna share them share them. Or maybe we’re really attached to flushing toilets and $50 candle sticks. All of the above? I don’t know. But what I do know is that when the fires broke out in LA a few days after I left, I kept thinking about this damp farm a few hours North, with a huge dining table and an edible garden.

This opportunity arose during a time that I was sort of chasing my own tail with anguish and loss and an acute sense of homelessness. I still am, but have some pretty excellent temporary life rafts in place. Always a raft, always temporary. I’ve been feeling the need to relent to my desire to build a stable nest for myself, after more than a decade of flitting around in a cloud of hustle and glitter. I would love to live “in nature” as they say. Feel ready to, even. But I’m scared to do it in England and I’m scared to do it alone.

At SCF, I got to stay, with my beloved friend Mara, in the yellow-edged Dawn Cabin. The main cabin with the big kitchen where communal dinner is served every night. The chef’s cabin that was originally built by Dawn, one of the OG homesteaders who still lives nearby. It is so stunning, designed and maintained with so much love, it radiates, and there was always something new to notice. Gerardo rustled up a seasonal plant-based lunch and dinner for all guests on the farm every day but this guy is so fucking smooth I’m pretty sure I never actually saw him do it? And not just that. He’s kind. Kind enough to invite me to be his sous-chef despite having no skill in that area, so that I could have a nice time with trees. 

I cannot cook for myself which is 1 (one) person, and so watching Gerardo conjure feast after feast out of thin air, while I sort of hopped around the kitchen like a doggy with an anxiety disorder waiting for extremely basic instructions which I would then not know how to fulfil, for me lived somewhere between curious and devastating. And duetting to Kate Bush while washing tiny slugs off of lettuce from the garden was probably my favourite memory of the trip. Beet horseradish salad with dill, black chickpeas, potato and cucumber with parsley vinaigrette (would never have guessed that’s spelled like that!), sweet potato pudding with coconut yoghurt and goji berries… It was one of the best food weeks of my life. And not in terms of taste which was obviously great, and texture which was inspired, but in terms of how that shit felt in my body. I left a new man. Before quickly reverting to whatever type of man I was before. 

One morning I bumped into one of the guests staying in Rainbow (fave) (cabin and guests) and she was like, “do you have the Country Woman in your cabin?” and assuming she was referring to a local ghost, I replied, “I certainly hope not.” But after some mutual confusion it was established that she was talking about a journal that ran from 1972-79 which was produced by women in the Albion area including many original SCF communards and that yes, there was actually a large collection of them at Dawn Cabin that in my general dissociated haze I had not noticed! Cue one of my favourite afternoons on the farm, spent devouring these publications, split into subject-led issues like Working the Land, Ageing, Mental and Physical Health and so on. In particular, I loved flipping to the call-outs section, which were moving, gross (“we are casting for a minstrel show” and hilarious in equal measure. 

Many of the same questions we grapple with now were being asked in these pages. How can we support each other in a world that won’t support us? How can we work together without fokin killing each other? How can we be closer to the land? How do we make peace with the decisions we fumble through in the act of living a life? And while I shudder to think what was happening racially in these movements, I am so glad these publications exist, and that I got to spend time with them.

Last time I was on the West Coast I was also going through a breakup so tbh I’ve never really been able to give it a fair chance, because the slower pace tends to lean towards an emotional hellscape for me. But it is for sure Really Pretty.

Between the grief and the dish-washing, I did not have energy to do any of the work I intended on doing, and in that way it was a proper residency. Though I did co-facilitate an online misery grief session on my last morning, gazing out, beyond the screen, onto ever-reaching redwoods and I thought, oh, this is how grief work should be done. Still, I wrote some. I wrote letters - a letter a day. Letters that were never sent. And it’s parts of those (in which I reveal that in fact I cannot spell), as well as some photos I made on me trusty film camera, that I share with you here.