JOE LUNNY STARED at the five hundred heirloom dry root artichokes that filled the bed of his son’s white pickup. It was early summer, 2004, and change was in the air.
“What am I supposed to do with these?” he asked, skeptical. “I’m a cattle rancher.”
Joe was in his mid-seventies and had been running cattle his whole life. First he ran dairy cows and then, forty years ago, began transitioning to beef. His father, Joe Lunny Sr., had been the vice president and general manager of the steamship division of Pope and Talbot, Inc., a lumber company with offices in San Francisco. In 1947 he bought a dairy operation out in Point Reyes from a man named Frank Labrucherie, but not the land—that was owned by the Radio Corporation of America. The 1,500 gently rolling acres stretched to the Pacific Ocean on one end, and to the edges of Drakes Estero on the other, effectively cutting the peninsula in half at the tip of the estuary’s longest finger. Finding the business too demanding to manage remotely, Joe Sr. moved his family from their comfortable home in the city to a farmhouse on the Point. He experimented with the latest dairying techniques and worked to bring the milk back up to Grade A certification. From the time he was in high school, Joe Jr. worked the farm twice a day, rising in the middle of the night to milk the cows at 3 AM, and then milking them again at 3 PM, after school. When Joe Sr. died in 1959, the business passed to his son. The family remained tenants of the RCA until 1977, when the company sold the land to the federal government. Many of their neighbors—ranchers who had been there since the middle of the last century—had owned their parcels and received government buyouts in the millions, as well as leases to continue operating. For the Lunnys, however, it was merely a change in landlord, with no cash windfall to be had. Now owned by the people of the United States, their pastures were officially added to Point Reyes National Seashore the following year, and the family thus began a series of renewing five-year special use permits with the National Park Service. That year, 2004, Joe was due to sign the next one, though he hadn’t done so yet.
The artichokes were the latest brainchild of his son Kevin, a smart and energetic man in his mid-forties. Kevin had been helping run the ranch since reaching maturity. Really, he’d been helping out with the cows since he was old enough to walk. He lived in the ranch house now with his wife Nancy and their adopted triplets, Brigid, Patrick and Sean, now in their teens. His parents, Joe and Joan, lived next door in what had once been the bunkhouse for milkers. His older brother, Joe Lunny III, ran Lunny Grading & Paving out of nearby Nicasio, a speck of a town with a post office, a tiny nineteenth-century church and a restaurant all clustered around a baseball diamond, and not much else. Kevin wanted to find a way to make the family ranch desirable enough so that his own children would want to continue his legacy. Also, he would need to make it profitable.
“I want my kids to feel the same excitement and involvement in being an important, involved part of the ranch that I felt growing up here,” Kevin told Steve Quirt, a friend and agricultural advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension. The two men drove down to Davenport to pick up the artichokes together—an experience Steve wrote about for the Cooperative Extension newsletter.
Steve would write that the quest for the artichokes and the health of the family farm were inseparable, as Kevin embarked on an ambitious diversification plan set to rekindle the enthusiasm for farming he had felt as a child. Like other ranching families in the region, the Lunnys were realizing that organic farming was the logical next step for them, seeing as it was the fastest-growing section of American agriculture. Unable to keep up with the prices of larger cattle operations, they could nevertheless compete by offering a more niche product—beef that was organic, or at the very least grass-fed. In 2004, those efforts were just ramping up for the Lunnys. Being a part of a National Park and subject to special protections already, it was not difficult to get the pasture certified organic. In fact, some 1,400 acres were already certified, making it the largest organic pasture in the county. The next step was to work on the animals, reducing parasite loads through better management and rotational grazing, to wean the operation away from parasiticide and antibiotics.
That weekend, Joe got over what skepticism he may have had about his son’s artichokes, and the family all pitched in to plant them together—three generations working side by side as they set them out in eighteen manicured rows.
“We had a fantastic time of it,” Kevin said.
They hoped to sell the artichokes from a roadside stand to park visitors, adding berries and winter vegetables if they could get those to work in the soil, too. Kevin also hoped to start a composting business, maybe one that used green waste from the park. Then one day not long after, his closest neighbor paid him a visit with a favor to ask.
Tom Johnson, of Johnson Oyster Company, was in a bit of financial trouble. His family had farmed oysters in the estero that served as eastern border to the Lunnys’ property since the 1950s. But the oyster farm was plagued by environmental problems and had been locked in conflict with the county and the National Park Service for years over plastic debris that littered the beaches, and sewage that leaked into the bay. Tom had another eight years left on his lease with the park, but he didn’t feel he would make it. He was ready to retire now, and wanted to wash his hands of the farm. At first he only turned to Kevin to ask for help with bringing the facility up to code, to see if they could avail themselves of the service of Lunny Grading & Paving at a reduced, neighborly price. But then another idea occurred to him. He knew the lease was running out, but eight years was still a long time in which to farm oysters. The next day he went back to Kevin—did he maybe want to buy the balance of the lease for the farm?
The history of farming oysters in Drakes Estero began in the 1930s with a man named Pat Quail. A bit of an eccentric, Pat was an artist and biologist who liked to sign his name by drawing a picture of the bird it represented. In 1932 he obtained a lease from the state of California, set up house along the inlet of the estero known as Creamery Bay, and proceeded to try farming oysters. When all of the oyster beds in the San Francisco Bay were killed off at the turn of the century due to pollution, the imported oysters would no longer thrive there, and the Morgan Oyster Company went out of business. But there was still a desire for oysters in California, and so the Department of Fish and Game sent prospectors around the state to try and find sites that were suitable for conversion to mariculture, so they could start issuing leases. Operations were already thriving up in Humboldt Bay, and Tomales Bay was considered a prime location as well, as was Drakes Estero, if only one could get around the problem of the soft mud bottom.
At first, the cattlemen at neighboring F Ranch didn’t take too kindly to Pat’s presence. When Pat went out to plant his oysters, he was fired upon with a shotgun. Besides that, he contended with some unusual oyster pirates too, namely raccoons who would come and steal the oysters at low tide, as well as an unknown man who would drop down in a light aircraft in the nearby field, gather up as many oysters as he wanted, and fly off. Though Quail soon decided he’d had enough of the local hostility, an oyster company did spring out of his efforts there. He handed off the business to a local, Larry Jensen, who called the operation Drakes Bay Oyster Company. He was helped by a biologist from the Department of Fish and Game named Paul Bonnot, who instructed Larry in the hanging string technique, so that the oysters would not be lost in the mud of the soft-bottomed estero.
They tried farming eastern oysters, brought out via train from New York, just as John Morgan had done, but they didn’t do well. Then they planted oysters native to Japan, which came to them via Puget Sound. These oysters were eventually named “Pacific” oysters—perhaps to distance associations from their country of origin, which was about to become politically complicated. The Pacific Ocean was also what linked the two regions—Japan and America’s West Coast—and saying that an oyster from California was a Pacific didn’t sound too foreign.
The original Drakes Bay Oyster Company did well, selling its Pacific oysters to the San Francisco market until the start of the 1940s, when hostilities with Japan during World War II cut off the oyster supply. The oysters would not reproduce in the California waters of their own accord, and Drakes Bay Oyster Company went out of business once the shipments stopped. Larry had tried and tried to propagate the oysters on his own, but couldn’t: the conditions just weren’t right.
Charlie Johnson didn’t start out in oysters. A wheat farmer from Oklahoma, he was driven west by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Determined to get as far as he could from his failed Midwestern farm, he later said that he used a ruler to determine the farthest away he could get from his former home while still being in the contiguous United States—which landed him in Washington State. He went into the oyster business in 1940, running an oyster company with a partner. He took his three young sons with him. They managed to stay in business despite the war, and he sold out in 1948. He used the profits to briefly try a dairy farm back in Kansas, but when that went broke he returned to Washington oystering again. He worked as a buyer for Coast Oyster Company, making regular trips to Japan. He traveled there so often that he kept a house in Sendai, in Miyagi prefecture. Known as the City of Trees, it was—and still is—notable for its autumn colors and summertime Tanabata celebration, a star festival. The old way of writing Sendai meant “a thousand generations,” after a temple that once stood there with a thousand Buddha statues. Johnson was likely getting his oysters from the area near Sendai most famous for it, Matsushima Bay, meaning “pine islands,” a haven from the Pacific Ocean dotted with some 260 tiny islands, some no larger than a Range Rover and bearing just a single gnarled pine tree. Their pale rocks arch out of the water, forming sculptural shapes and bridges.
It was during one of these trips that Charlie met the woman who would become his second wife, Makiko. He took her back to the States to live with him, and in 1957 they bought the oyster farm in Drakes Estero from Larry Jensen. With the help of Makiko’s oyster expertise from Japan, they got the operation on its feet again.
While oystering in Drakes Estero had tapered off due to World War II, oyster mariculture in nearby Tomales Bay was starting to pick up. Larry Jensen also had holdings in Tomales Bay, but the largest operation there at the time was Tomales Bay Oyster Company, to this day the longest continually operating oyster company in the Bay Area. In the 1940s it was run by Oscar Johansson, a Swede who’d been farming oysters in the area since 1925. His partner, an old-timer named Frank Erickson, had worked on the Morgan Oyster Company beds when they still dominated South San Francisco Bay. At Tomales Bay Oyster in the 1950s there were crates stacked high that were stamped OCCUPIED JAPAN, and heaps of gunnysacks with shipping tags from New York. As with Drakes Estero and San Francisco, the oysters wouldn’t spawn in Tomales Bay, so they shipped the Pacifics in as seed, or as oyster spat already adhered to scallop shells. The eastern oysters came in fully grown, to be kept in wet storage in the bay for a time before they could be sent to market. They were sent out fully grown from New York and the Chesapeake Bay by the carload. They had not figured out Morgan’s secret, that the easterns could be shipped out as young oysters too; larger than newborn spat, but small enough to make the enterprise more profitable. The pre-affixed oyster spats were called “sets.” Even then, the kinds of oystering techniques used varied widely even within the same bay. Sometimes it was best to set the oysters on the bay bottom in mesh bags. Other times, the oysters were hung from wires. By 1966, Charlie and Makiko had built a network of redwood platforms in the estuary, each beam sunk ten feet down into the mud, for their new “hanging cultch” method that was practiced in Makiko’s home area of Japan.
The Johnson Oyster Company was going strong by the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, when the ranches on all sides of the estero were sold to the National Park Service. Charlie Johnson did not really own Drakes Estero, but possessed leases from the state to farm his oysters there. The 2.6 acres that he did have on land, and what tidelands were his, he sold to the National Park Service in 1972 for $79,200, and received a forty-year Reservation of Use and Occupancy. This was different from the short-term, renewing leases of five or ten years that the cattle ranches were given. Like the cattle leases, however, this 1972 document also had a clause stipulating the possibility of renewal. It wasn’t guaranteed, but it was possible.
The Johnson Oyster Company continued to prosper economically into the 1980s, though tensions emerged when locals began complaining that plastic debris from the operation had started washing up on beaches. Still, all of the oyster farms in West Marin were becoming more popular than ever, as people began to see them as tourist destinations: places to go and experience an authentic form of food production. As the environmental movement gained popularity, and more people began to question the compartmentalized way of life that shut them off from the natural world, so too did people long to return to a time when food production was more accessible. The processed foods of mid-century America were going out of vogue, and people wanted an “authentic” connection to what they ate or drank. They wanted to experience their food, to pick their own apples or walk through lines of Napa grapevines and see the grapes crushed in vats. The authenticity movement wasn’t as prevalent as it would be by the 2010s. Hip young people were still more likely to wear plastic and safety pins than outfits last seen on a lumberjack. Nevertheless, the impulse towards localism and authenticity was growing.
The oyster farms of West Marin were no longer just suppliers, but destinations in and of themselves. In the summer in the 1980s, the Johnson Oyster Company sold 80 percent of their oysters in-shell and on-site to visitors. In the winter, they sold more jars of shucked oysters than those in-shell. A local woman organized tours of the oyster farms in connection with the restaurant at the old Olema Inn, called “Gourmet Wilderness.” Guests would go see the oystermen at work on the farms, and then settle in for a fancy dinner.
The farms were not without their problems though. Oyster farms have nearly always occupied a somewhat nebulous space between public and private, at least in parts of the country where they once grew wild. Were oysters a natural resource, like wild blackberries, to be gathered by whomever? Did they fall under fishing rights? Oysters were big business, and taken more seriously than mussels or clams, which were farmed, certainly, but also usually available to any member of the public with a bucket and the will to find them.
At Johnson Oyster Company, the biggest problem so far had been litter, but in the 1990s another headache was added to the mix: leaking sewage. Members of the Johnson family and farm employees were living on the property and the superintendent of the park, John Sansing, had allowed Charlie to keep adding residences in the form of trailers and mobile homes, without acquiring the proper permits. It was more than the property’s septic system could handle, and raw sewage ended up leaking into Drakes Estero.
Similarly, there were sewage problems that plagued the oyster farms in Tomales Bay as well. Like many homes in the area, a fair share of the houses built along picturesque Tomales Bay were not up to proper code. Some had septic systems that sat in the water—a practice that was not allowed. There were incidences of contamination at the oyster farms, and one summer all of the farms in the bay were shut down for over a month. It was suspected that the contamination was caused by leaking sewage. Still, the farms managed to stay in business while the county cleaned up the area as best it could.
Unfortunately, Johnson Oyster Company was having greater difficulty. Charlie Johnson died in 1992, leaving the business to his son Tom. Tom’s attitude at the time was, as he told local newspaper the Marin Independent Journal, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Unfortunately, the seams of the business were quickly unraveling. Three years after Charlie’s death, in 1995, the county sued Johnson Oyster for not addressing the overloaded septic system that, the suit claimed, posed a significant health and safety risk to the public. The county claimed that Tom promised to replace the septic system, but then did nothing. Tom tried trucking septic waste off of the property, but that cost $4,500 per month and wasn’t viable. They were starting to bleed money. Part of the problem was that they needed more room than was currently provided to build a septic system that could accommodate all of the residences on the property—but the park would not (or could not) give up part of the public national park land to the Johnsons so that they could build a new system.
“Defendants have demonstrated absolutely no willingness to reach a solution,” the suit alleged. A newspaper article about the suit said that Tom Johnson and his attorney did not return phone calls. He’d agreed to remove mobile homes from the property within six months, but eighteen months later the homes were still there and occupied. In response, the county sought to prohibit anyone from living on the property and to ban on-site retail sales until a new septic system was built—one that accommodated whatever residences remained—and permits obtained for the mobile homes, a well, and the store. The suit noted that Johnson’s lease would expire in 2012, and that in the interim he was required to comply with all local zoning, health, safety and building codes.
Still, Johnson managed to hang on through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. In late 2003, aware that the Johnsons might not manage to stay in business until the end of their lease, the new superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore, Don Neubacher, a tall man with sandy hair and a graying mustache, sought a government solicitor’s opinion regarding the future of the land.
A field solicitor from the National Park Service’s San Francisco office named Ralph Mihan surveyed the situation. In his letter of February 26, 2004, to Neubacher, he acknowledged that the opinion could inform treatment of the oyster lease, which “might be terminated sooner for cause or other processes.” His opinion was guided by the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Point Reyes Wilderness Act of 1976 with regards to how, at the national level, the Point Reyes National Seashore was required to implement “wilderness” within its borders.
Because of the 1976 Point Reyes Wilderness Act—which was in fact part of a bundle of wilderness legislature being passed at the time—the majority of Drakes Estero had been designated as “potential wilderness.” This is a distinction I will explore later. Mihan referred to language in the House Report (94-1680) accompanying the bill, in which it was said there should be an effort to “steadily continue to remove all obstacles to the eventual conversion of these lands and waters to wilderness status.” He also referred to the park service’s own management policies on wilderness from 2001, in which it was stated that “in the process of determining suitability [for wilderness], lands will not be excluded solely because of existing rights or privileges (e.g. mineral exploration and development, commercial operations, etc.).”
“The Park Service is to manage potential wilderness as wilderness to the extent that existing non-conforming conditions allow,” Mihan wrote to Neubacher. He said that the park service was also required to actively seek to remove from potential wilderness the temporary, nonconforming conditions that preclude wilderness designation. “Hence,” he continued, “the Park Service is mandated by the Wilderness Act, the Point Reyes Wilderness Act and its Management Policies to convert potential wilderness, i.e. the Johnson Oyster Company tract and the adjoining Estero, to wilderness status as soon as the non-conforming use can be eliminated.”
When Tom Johnson asked Kevin Lunny if he wanted to buy Johnson Oyster Company from him, Lunny wasn’t in the dark about the troubles that the farm was in. After all, he’d grown up just next door, and used to cross the fields as a boy to stand at the water’s edge and watch the oystermen work. He wanted to help out a friend and neighbor, but there was something more to it than that: He’d heard the call of the sea, of days spent not just next to the water, but on it.
“I fell in love with this oyster farm,” Kevin would tell Marin magazine a few years later. “It’s this unsung hero of sustainable farming.”
He knew that Tom had a good heart, but the writing was on the wall, and the walls were caving in on him. Tom’s attempts to meet the regulations were driving him to financial ruin.
“Frankly, we knew the oyster farm was Don’s biggest headache before we purchased the balance of the RUO,” Kevin later said, meaning the Reservation of Use and Occupancy. He told his brothers and his wife Nancy that if Don Neubacher wasn’t on board with him buying it, then it would never work and he wouldn’t do it. When he spoke to the superintendent, however, he was supportive.
“But he told me he didn’t plan to extend the RUO,” Kevin told reporter P.J. Bremier in 2008. However, he also said that by then he had “done enough homework to be reasonably sure” that they would be able to get the lease extended anyway, even though Don explicitly told him that the park had no intention of doing so.
“I thought if we proved we could solve all the environmental problems the park would issue a special permit to allow oyster farming beyond 2012,” Kevin said.
And with that optimistic intention in mind, he managed to borrow $1 million from the bank, and set out to clean up the farm.