1965, Scotts Valley, California

I was born in 1954 and lived in Scotts Valley, in the Santa Cruz mountains until 1973, when I moved to Albuquerque to go to the University of New Mexico.

When I was about 10 years old, I was scrambling around along creek near my elementary school. The creek was choked with brambles of blackberry bushes and nettles and not very accessible (but that didn't slow down a 10 year old). I came upon a large stone outcropping with a series of cylindrical holes on top. Some of these holes still held pestals that would have been used for grinding, presumably by earlier, indigenous people. My mother was the local librarian, so we did a little research and found out that acorns were a staple of the diet of the Ohlone people who inhabited that area many centuries ago. Acorns have bitter tannins, so can't be eaten raw. So the Ohlone people would dry them, grind them, then use fresh water to leach out the tannins. As a young child with a plan to escape into the woods and live off the land, this readily available food source interested me, so I set out to make acorn mush. I cut the acorns in half and left them in the sun to dry. Then I took them to the grinding stone I'd found by the creek and ground them into powder. I soaked, drained, boiled the acorns but, no matter what I did, they stayed too bitter to eat. I guess I didn't leach them right.Read more