———- Forwarded message ———
From: Louise Blight <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 9:46?PM
Subject: Message for Steven Marx
To: <[email protected]>

Dear City Farm SLO,

Would you mind passing this on to Steven Marx?

Thanks very much.

Dear Steven,

I recently came across your Flickr photoset about Lund and The End of the Road, and was immediately transported back to the 1970s and the Lund Farm Day Camp. I attended for two years in a row, an experience that was – unsurprisingly – unlike anything I had done before, and a transformative time for me as a nerdy and introverted kid. It was a great thing you did there, probably for everyone who attended. So after all this time I wanted to say thanks to you and Jan for running it.

It appears that the two of you continue to do great things with your community in California, so thank you for that also.

Louise

Louise Blight, PhD

Adjunct Associate Professor,

UVic School of Environmental Studies

and Principal, Procellaria Research & Consulting

Salt Spring Island, BC

[email protected]

Dear Louise

As you can imagine, it was a great treat to receive your email with its blast from the past.  Another example of the internet’s annihilation of space and time, it came to me and Jan while on a river cruise on the Danube in Austria the week after we concluded a difficult process of selling the property we’ve owned in Lund to our ten-year tenants, Tai Uhlmann and Theo Angel, the couple who we worked with to organize the Lund Reunion memorialized in the Flickr photoset you found, which itself was the climax of the great film they made about the place: “The End of the Road.”  (available here https://www.amazon.com/End-Road-Ronnie-Uhlmann/dp/B07WP6TKY6)

Another connection your message awakened was an article written by one of your fellow campers, Anna Gustafson, published in the Lund Barnacle p.32

Your note strengthens the collective memory of that mythic place and era.  I do remember you as a quiet and serious but very curious kid, and it’s wonderful to learn that you grew up to become a professor and entrepeneurial scientist. I’d love to learn more about your activities than what I gleaned from a google search.

Jan and I returned from Lund to California in 1979, where I finally completed my abandoned PhD dissertation and she became an attorney and elected official (among other roles). In 2012 I retired from teaching English and Environmental Studies at Cal Poly University and returned to an endeavor much like Lund Farm Day Camp, CityFarmSLO.org.

We continued to spend time in Lund every year with our two kids and 4 grandkids until 2023, when we all felt the need to move on.  But your message reignites the old flame, and I feel deeply grateful for it.

Yours,

Steven

Hello Steven,

Thank you for your warm reply. The rivers of the past seem to be converging on the present. I was just in Lund last month, for the first time in about 35 years. I was there doing fieldwork with a couple of colleagues, censusing the gull and cormorant colonies of the Salish Sea: we started our field season in Desolation Sound, and launched our boat at the Lund ramp. It stirred up lots of memories for me; after I finished high school I moved to Lund (in 1981 I think) for about a year and was the baker at the restaurant for much of that time. I lived with my then-boyfriend in the first house on the boardwalk past the parking lot, long since torn down and replaced by Nancy’s Bakery. (After that I followed my dad to Victoria and started university.)

Then the other day I actually saw Gerry Kariaganis, who is married to an old friend from undergrad days that I have just reconnected with after about 20 years. I remembered him from Powell River days as my parents also knew him; this week he told me a story about going home to his cabin on your farm one day and finding the door open and a sheep in his bed.

And of course we drove past your old farm last month too. I had no idea that you two had continued to own it for so long.

You asked about my activities. I mostly study birds – mainly marine birds over the years, but various species these days – and work in conservation. One of my main roles these days is co-chairing the birds specialist group of COSEWIC, the scientific body that assesses threatened species in Canada. https://cosewic.ca/index.php/en/about-us/cosewic-members.html

One of the places I’ve worked a lot in my career is Antarctica, and I’m just finishing a book manuscript about that. A couple of years ago my partner Iain and I moved to Salt Spring Island, so we’re settling into the community and our garden here. I’m so impressed that you’ve created Lund Farm Day Camp writ large in San Luis Obispo.

Jan, good luck on your reelection. If we lived in California I’d volunteer for your campaign.

Louise

A year ago we had to cancel “Romantic Danube,” the Viking Tour Company’s River Cruise because we came down with Covid a month before departure.  With the travel insurance money, we went on our own to England, Holland, France and Germany, our journey chronicled here.

That experience motivated us to try again to squeeze a trip into the two-week interval between Jan’s City Council meetings.  An injury to her “good” knee  during a December workout at Gymnazo required her to walk with a cane, which made the prospect of a cruise especially appealing.  But we agreed to spend a week following the river trip on our own in Salzburg and Munich.  Before departure we reserved lodging and concert tickets and read in books about the river and its cities, including Carl Shorske’s Fin de Siecle Vienna, Politics and Culture, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, The Danube, A Cultural History, by Andrew Beattie, Mozart, A Life by Paul Johnson.  And we watched films set in central Europe, including The Third Man and Museum Hours

The weeks before departure concluded several open-ended involvements: the sale of Knoll House–our Canadian property since 1995–to Tai and Theo, our ten year tenants and lifelong friends,  our grandson Ian’s passing his qualifying exams as Airline Technician, our grandson Lucas’ acceptance in the five-month  Grizzly Academy boot camp, our daughter Claire’s promotion to full-time employee at the Cal Poly Food Service, Jan’s organization of. her campaign committee after a long-pondered decision to run for re-election, and completion of my Prefumo Creek Restoration and Enhancement Project.

Sheep and Schubert

Lambs born Mother’s Day 2014.  Franz Schubert born 1797

I was looking forward to the regular Sunday Creek Freak work party at the Restoration and Enhancement project.  In addition to the four steady College Corps Fellows–including Kennedy, whom I’d seen in a fine performance of a bizarre play at the Spanos theatre the night before, plus grandson Lucas–two new volunteers had signed up.

Late in the previous week the unfinished tasks of moving tree trunks into position together with Josh and his Skid Steer and starting the contracted maintenance program of weeding the plantings, along with testing the irrigation system, were completed.

Earlier in the week the first field trip along the creek project led by Creek Lands Conservation took place, involving 60 fifth graders bussed in for three hours.

I’d been anxiously working toward these outcomes for months.

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Our intention this morning was to stray from the cliche tourism of the Bateau Mouche and ride a City bus at the quai to the end of the line and back as we’d done in London.  We walked a new way toward the river and came upon a tiny corner sculpture park centered on a travertine marble box behind which a large red circle was painted on the blank wall of a building.

A sign indicated that the box was used as a base for temporary art installations, this one entitled “Pandora’s Box.” A young woman walked up to the pedestal and pressed  a button causing the plastic assemblage to revolve and look like a discharge of steam. (more…)

We began the day with the practical task of doing laundry, which, not surprisingly, turned into a memorable adventure.  Morning sunshine reflected from the recently cleaned old buildings turned routine urban activities into paintings.

Ancient architectural monuments  adorned the way to  the laundromat up the block.

Apartment buildings appeared as architectural marvels. (more…)

On a walk around the neighborhood, before our scheduled train departure for Paris, we happened upon a building fronting a large square where booths, stages and grandstands left from previous days’ Pride celebrations were being dismantled.  It  was the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, originally built as a City Hall in 1655, later converted to a Royal Palace by the conqueror Napoleon’s brother Louis Napoleon in 1806 and eventually appropriated by the Dutch Royal Family who retain control of it today.

We arrived at the grandiose Paris Gare du Nord in the early afternoon (more…)