We used to sneak through the Gregg’s Forest Farm Summer Camp on our donkeys because that was the only shortcut to get to Tamal Road from the Barbano's Lagunitas Summer Camp. We'd ride a wide loop back up into the hills where Forest Farm Camp winter-pastured their horses and then we'd traverse the final ridges homeward in darkness.
Forest Farms Camp is the same place where Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead died. But by that point, the summer camp had transformed into a rehab place with a different name: Serenity Knolls Chemical Dependency Center.
Jerry Garcia was personally responsible for record sales of Ben & Jerry's ice cream at the Forest Knolls store. But heroin didn't kill Jerry. Despite his daily walk down the hill to the store, his heart just gave out. I'm sure the ice cream didn't help the diabetes any either. The Godfather of acid rock was dead at 53.
Seems Forest Farm Camp was always a troubled place. Janis Joplin lived on Arroyo Road at Barbano's Lagunitas Summer Camp with Big Brother and the Holding Company—but that's another story to tell....
In the 40s and 50s and into the early 60s (before the economic crash happened), Forest Farm Summer Camp was a pretty radical co-ed summer camp for inner city kids who were pretty much like Martians to us.
We thought it was a weird, if interesting concept for kids to go to Forest Farm Summer Camp. So did the FBI. (In those days, most summer camps were not co-ed, nor were they such a strange admixture of kids from all walks of life—sort of a mini-United Nations).
Anyway, varying shades of McCarthyism colored a rosy hue over our little valley so the FBI was interested in several families.
We locals were definitely not welcome at Forest Farm Camp at any time which upped the ante during the summer months when we'd sneak through camp on our slow-dreaming donkeys and have staredowns with the camp kids from New York—it was as if we were in a bad spaghetti western with a thin plot. They were big, bad and ugly.
But Brenda Fullick who leased her Icelandic pony, Helgar from the Greggs after summer camp was over, liked to sneak in a visit to see Helgar who hated the city slickers on his back. He was a one-girl pony. And Brenda was his girl. Whenever he saw her, he'd buck off his rider and come over to wicker a hello.
We had a strange notion that we were invisible on our long-eared mounts, lost in the resulting meleé, because everybody else was on horseback too. The Gregg girls never finked on us or told us to leave. Only Old Man Gregg would chase us off like vermin.
I remember Old Man Gregg, I thought he was the most dour man alive. He'd just as soon bite your head off rather than give you the time of day.
Ironic in that they'd taken refuge in Forest Knolls, far from the claws of McCarthyism, like many Valley folk. Then they too shunned everyone.
Mrs. Gregg was kinder, she was a local, who grew up in Petaluma, but the Anglo Saxon Presbyterians kept themselves separate from us Catholics. The Troubles of Northern Ireland were so deeply ingrained, the distance lent itself to generations. You were marked at the church door.
When Jack and Claire Felson took over Forest Farms Camp from 1966-1976, it became a kinder, gentler, more inclusive place that invited participation from Valley folks. But by that time I was long gone, chasing the wind over some distant horizon.
