Guerrillas in the mist, no more.
Remaining hidden helps neither i, those in the care of i, nor others
Aside from my formative years as a young man where I explored and played with great freedom in the high desert of Northern Nevada, my life has been largely shaped by food and the unlearning and simultaneous relearning of everything I had been taught by the public school system and our mediated culture. The food aspect had always been of great interest to me. I was naturally curious and was cooking and experimenting early on, making all kinds of concoctions while my folks were at work, and grilling up lunches out in the hills on a rock slab over a wood fire. When it came time to choose a direction after high school the culinary path was most appealing. So at the age of 17 I moved from a smallish mining town on the high steppes of the Great Basin to downtown Seattle (Belltown) to attend the culinary arts program at the Art Institute of Seattle. A culture shock ensued. I am a fast learner, luckily and became street smart rather quickly with the tutelage of wise street sages such as Bubble Eye and the “no bananas today” crier along with a host of other riffraff that tested me daily on my walks to school and through the city.
My two years in culinary school were great. I had some fantastic chefs that executed a curriculum that at the time was top notch in the culinary world. I also had some really great classmates that made it a great deal of fun. My time in school went by fast and was mostly uneventful save for almost being kicked out for underaged drinking at the Taste of the Nation event that the school had a booth at. We were doing demos of pan seared garlic shrimp and there were enough of us tending the booth that, two at a time, we could walk around to taste and drink what there was to be had. As it turns out at an event like that a chef’s jacket doubles as an I.D. and every booth serving beer, wine or liquor served me with no hesitation. I had a meeting with the dean and a few apology letters later and everything was smoothed over. I never did get invited to anymore events but I graduated with the rest of my class.
After Seattle, I moved to Maui to begin my cooking career. My first kitchen job was at Stella Blues Cafe in Kihei, one of my coworkers saw my devotion and work ethic and gave me a recommendation to go work at The Seawatch restaurant in Wailea. I had a great experience there and learned a lot from Chef Todd who was a great guy and made work fun even in a high volume, somewhat stressful environment. When I wasn’t working, I was playing. I was in the ocean every day swimming, body surfing, free diving, and spearfishing. I hiked the jungles, jumped the freshwater pools, partook of the finest paca lolo to be had and gleaned SO MUCH FRUIT! One of my favorite memories was when I would dive the reefs during humpback season, I would swim down and hold onto a rock about 20 feet down and listen to them sing, occasionally it was so enchanting i’d almost forget to come up for a breath.
One day I was walking through a bookstore at the Queen Kaʻahumanu mall and a faced out book caught my eye, I picked it up and looked at it but put it back and went about my day. Not long after that a friend of a friend gave me two burned DVDs with a pyramid and the word “Info” crudely written with a black sharpie marker. I watched them and they contained a compilation of Alex Jones screaming about all kinds of shit, horrific footage of obvious war crimes from the first Iraq war and David Icke talking about the shape-shifting elite. It was a little jarring and somewhat unbelievable but it flipped a little switch in my consciousness. The next time I walked through that bookstore I went over to where I had seen the book that had caught my eye a couple months previous and found it again. I hadn’t taken notice of who had authored the book at first but now the name was familiar, David Icke. “The Biggest Secret” is a pretty thick book, but I devoured it in a matter of days and was blown away by the claims and information contained within. From there I was able to confirm enough of what was claimed in the book and came to realize that the world was not as I had been told. A year later Mr. Icke came to Maui on a speaking tour and I attended his eight hour long lecture deconstructing the global managerial class and how they’ve turned people into livestock for a variety of ends.
While still pursuing my passion for food in the restaurant industry, I dove deep into the way the world really works, why and who had set it up that way. Around the same time I had what one could call a metaphysical awakening that in hind site was much more powerful than the info bombs that had consumed my attention thus far. I received an aqua-cranial massage while floating in the beautiful blue Hawaiian waters, the movements were subtle but when Dan had finished I stood up and slowly walked ashore. My entire body was on fire, like I was a conduit bridging the gap between mother earth and father sky. I’m still not sure what exactly happened but that experience broke something loose or more likely reconnected something in me that brought a deeper connection with my spirit and the animating forces of the world around me.
Life continued on, and I came back to the mainland relocating to Portland, Oregon and moving in with my lifelong friend Jake. I found work easily even with my short, but not insignificant resume, and landed a sauté position at a very popular bistro downtown called the Saucebox. It was another great experience, and I gained a solid foundation in Thai fusion and sushi. I rode my bike to work every day, 14 miles round trip, had pau hana with my friends and coworkers, attended the occasional burlesque show and went camping and fishing on the weekends. I enjoyed my time there immensely. The biggest influence that weird city imparted onto me was a new found love of beer, real beer. There were so many breweries there and many were top notch. My favorite spot was the Lucky Lab brewery on SE Hawthorn, nothin fancy but the beer was fantastic, one could even get a fresh cask ale which was one of my favorites no matter the brew. The Hair of the Dog was my other go-to. He didn’t have a pub at that time but I went to the brewery for a private tour with my brother and got to see the true Willy Wonka of craft beer. His beer was second to none, and I am sure it is missed by those who were in the know.
After a few years in Stumptown I moved back to the desert, this time landing in Reno, Nevada. My culinary career stumbled a bit in the biggest little city. I came to find out that there was not a thriving restaurant scene, and it was a little disheartening to come from three locales that were cutting edge in that respect to what felt like a dirty roadside cafe. My pride took a hit when I accepted a job at P.F. Changs for significantly less than I had been making at my previous jobs. I stuck it out for a few months but it cost me a bit of passion for my chosen profession. I had run into an old friend from high school that was working in traffic control and he offered to get me a job. Since it was paying triple what I was currently making, I jumped at it and in no time I was a certified T.C.S. (traffic control supervisor) in charge of major road closures on I-80 and Pyramid Highway. Graveyard shifts and a few near misses with death, and I decided to go back to what I loved doing and find a way to make it work. I was hired at a job fair for the opening of the new Butcher Boy by a salty dog of a chef named Randy. We quickly became friends, and I was his number one in the kitchen. We catered event after event all the while keeping the storefront stocked with fresh dishes, and we drank. I adopted one of his philosophies on life and the restaurant: “criticism is accepted but not encouraged”. Randy left “the Boy” suddenly after months of tension with the owners son, and I lasted about 3 hours longer than that when I became the new whipping boy. Led Zeppelin’s Ramble On came on the radio in the kitchen, and I took that as my cue. I walked out and never came back. The next couple years saw me in a variety of kitchens from Mt. Rose and the Chalet at Alpine Meadows, a short but enjoyable stint at Lulou’s in Reno and a bit of private catering.
The kitchen had become boring and sterile for me with the ubiquitous bag-in-a-box around every corner. Creativity had given way to mechanistic institutional cookery, and I realized that every restaurant was buying the same industrial crap “food” from the same behemoth distributors and repackaging it (barely) for their own menus and themes. What had once been inspiring and fulfilling was now hollow. Around the same time I had started to learn a lot about organic farming, nutrient density and ethical animal husbandry to which I was attracted like flies on shit. I had found the food counter culture, and it felt right, though at the time I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went, and really I’m still digging.
While in Reno my love of beer was still very much intact and fermentation became a new yet parallel fascination. I started making home brew, and I was a regular at the original Great Basin Brewing Co. in Sparks where I met a smiling no nonsense waitress with a bounce in her step that I talked into going on a date with me, after a couple of attempts. It wasn’t long after that she moved in with me, and a couple years later, Dre became my wife.
We mostly ate organically and found a local food Co-Op in a tiny building near downtown Reno, not far from our first home, that had amazing meat and produce from local producers. We shopped there weekly and got to know the two sisters that were spearheading the endeavor, and when they learned about my culinary background, recruited me to be the chef and head of the prepared foods department in their new much larger location. Given my passion for real, healthy, local food, I jumped at the chance. It was a great experience, and I was given carte blanche to design and build out the kitchen and the menu. I had the privilege to work with some really solid people at the Great Basin Community Food Co-Op over the course of a few years, co-workers and local farmers alike. Once a month, on my days off we would host a coursed out pop up dinner in our living room. We called them Guerrilla Dinners. It was a little tight in our small house but all who came left full and happy while my need for creativity was satisfied.
At the same time my food paradigm was changing I was still ingesting a steady stream of fear media and reading books like “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”, “The Creature from Jekyll Island”, “Tragedy & Hope” and “Propaganda” to name a few, and the angst of our seemingly collapsing world was rising to a crescendo but all I felt I could do was stockpile food and bullets…..and beer.
Andrea had given birth to our first son and Reno was starting to feel like not so great a place to raise children. It felt dirty all of a sudden. People and situations we brushed off and laughed at before, now became a serious threat and we knew it was time to go. We decided to go back to my hometown with big aspirations of starting a brewery/gastro pub. Once we settled into our new, old surroundings and had our second son it was decided that we should start a little slower with a food truck instead.
The atmosphere seemed just right, there was only one food truck in town at the time, a taco truck. The restaurant options were pretty meek and there were thousands of people making really good money at the gold mines. We seemed a shoe in for success. Guerrilla Craft Eats opened in the summer of 2015 with the goal of providing the community with expertly crafted organic food from local producers whenever possible. It was a hit, at first. We attracted a cult following with regulars that came back every week, some every day, with people traveling I-80 stopping to try our eats but in the end most people scoffed at a $14 composed burger and were not willing to pay for quality, opting for lesser food at a smaller price point. I took a series of mechanical failures two years after we had opened as a sign that it was time to quit. Feeling very defeated, we sold the truck.
I had no idea what to do next and needed a moment to breath so we hooked up our small camp trailer and headed north making a loop up to the top of Idaho and back down through Montana. We were feeling like another move was in order but didn’t know where or even how. In the meantime, I was recruited to be the chef at the Ruby 360 Heli Ski lodge in the Ruby Mountains south of town. The Owner had frequented the food truck and thought I would be a good fit for their seasonal operation. It was a fun job at an unbelievable location, and I spent two seasons there cooking nightly dinners for heli ski tours.
In the off season, I was gardening and tractoring quail in our suburban yard trying to provide at least some of our own food and doing work trade with a local producer, butchering chickens while my wife started a small but successful sourdough bread business out of our home. It was also the time when I discovered permaculture and it hit me like a ton of cobb. I decided to go for an immersive two week long permaculture design course at Wheaton Labs in Montana. Alan Booker was the instructor for the course and over those two weeks my worldview was shattered. I felt like I had learned what it really meant to be a man on this earth, to be able to coexist with nature and co-create with her to the benefit of all. I earned my permaculture design certification and returned home to my family changed forever.
Soon after my return, my third son was born, and I knew then that we needed land and the search for it had begun. We looked around the area and there was plenty of cheap land, but no water, anything that did have water carried a price tag that reflected as much. So we loaded up the trailer and again went north, this time up through Montana and back down through Idaho with the goal of finding an area we could call home. We stopped for a couple nights at the Sam Owen campground on lake Pend Oreille in north Idaho, and my two oldest boys, who had been grumbling to go home since we left, came alive playing in the water on the rocky shore. That was the moment we knew that this is where we wanted to be.
We returned home and started spit shining the house to put it on the market and packing up what we didn’t need at the time. The house went up for sale right as the great toilet paper panic of 2020 begun, and we were sure that no one would buy our house in those conditions. But the Californians did not disappoint, and the house sold rather quickly. So, we hooked up to our new travel trailer and headed for Sandpoint. We rented a parking spot for a month and started looking, and while most others were still frozen waiting to see if there would be a release from the countries strategic toilet paper reserves we found our new home, water and all.
We spent the next nine months living in the trailer while I built out one side of the existing pole barn to be our home, and in the cold of February we moved out of the trailer and into the very unfinished house, but it was glorious, subfloor and all. It has been five years now since we stepped onto this property and the transformation has been dramatic for us and the land. Our fourth son was born here, in the barn, and we have been welcomed into the community with open arms. We started regenerating the small pasture with a chicken tractor at first then introduced a small flock of sheep that we rotationally grazed to great affect. I planted a large food forest, a nut wood and terraced(ing) a hillside for our production garden. I built a ridiculous chicken coop with integrated brooder so that we could hatch our own chickens. We now farrow American Guinea Hogs, butcher our own sheep, chickens and pigs. Every morning I have the pleasure of tandem milking our family cow with my wife. We have a rotating bank of bioreactor compost cages to supply the garden and a humanure system to close the poop loop and feed our trees and bushes. I am making biochar and integrating it into all of our fertility management systems. We have had and are still in the midst of a spiritual awakening where we touch nature and she touches us, as the fears of the world are composted and transmuted into exuberant optimism about what really is and what could be in the future.
Thanks for reading my very abridged autobiography. I thought it may be important for me to give insight on where I’ve been and some of the events that have led me to where I am now. I will probably never write something to this extent on this platform again but what I will talk about is what I am passionate about and the things that I am doing to co-create a better existence where my bare feet touch the ground.