After I graduated in 1976, I needed a way to break into the agriculture business as a first-generation farmer. In addition to traveling the country and visiting The Farm, I sought an agricultural apprenticeship. This was one approach to learning about the industry for non-landowners.
Dad sent many letters to his friends and colleagues, trying to help me get an apprenticeship. I don’t think I was aware of Dad’s letters at the time, but I recently discovered a large packet of them in my office. They always included my résumé. What strikes me about them is the sheer extent of Dad’s network and his willingness to use it. He reached out to some of the nation’s top agribusiness leaders, including Orville Freeman, who had served as secretary of agriculture when Dad was at Defense. From my childhood I remember evenings when Dad returned home with bruises up and down his legs from battles on the Pentagon squash court with Orville.
Although nothing came from these connections, reading those letters now reminds me that Dad was behind me. At least, he was behind my career. He didn’t have a clue how to address the turmoil he had caused me, but he was definitely willing to help my career.
Maybe I didn’t remember these letters, or my dad’s attempts to help me, for the same reason that a lot of our relationship is foggy: the shadow of him is just more powerful. It is mind-numbingly frustrating to know that he supported me—and to also know the extent to which he deprived me of understanding and of truth. I’ve sometimes worried that people will think I’ve ridden on his coattails. If they do feel that way, knowing the pain I felt from our underlying problems would probably do nothing to change their perception.
An early-morning swim with my father on South Beach, Martha’s Vineyard, circa 1974
My first venture after graduating from Davis was a truck-farming business. Julie and I rented a house in the hills above Winters, a hardworking agricultural community outside Sacramento with a colorful river flowing through its acres of shady orchards. I worked long hours planting, harvesting, and transporting a variety of crops on some rented farmland. These were long days that challenged our relationship and my own sanity. Truck-farming involves several yearly harvests and a lot of driving in order to deliver fresh produce to local markets. I was responsible for hiring numerous employees, managing multiple harvests, and running a roadside fruit stand. There was no guarantee after each season that the lease on my rented farmland would be renewed. This meant that I could be forced to move my business, myself, and my family at the end of each season. It soon became obvious that I couldn’t sustain this lifestyle while also having the life I wanted. Julie and I both knew that we wanted a family, and I knew that I wanted to be a present and loving father.
When I began looking for a permanent farm to buy, it was during a seller’s market. For over a year I drove down country roads in Yolo and Solano counties, looking for land for sale, without any luck. Driving the dusty lanes through almond and walnut orchards, I’d pull up to a farmer’s home or headquarters and knock on their door.
I went back to one orchard a handful of times. It was owned by a Spaniard named Jose, who loved to tell stories. Over homemade nocino—walnut liqueur—he’d tell me tales of his youth in Almería. Every time I asked him about the possibility of buying his land, he’d serve me another shot of that sweet nocino. His nose would wrinkle, and he’d start telling a new tale. At last I realized that Jose just enjoyed these afternoon visits. A farmer never sells until he’s broke, and Jose was far from broke.
Back when I was a student at UC Davis, I used to ride my bike along Putah Creek Road, which follows the creek from Davis to Winters. There was one piece of land that always caught my eye. Bordered by 40-foot-tall 120-year-old Mission olives, the chocolate-colored fields disappeared into the creek. The soil was rich and loamy, right in the heart of California’s Mediterranean climate. Just glorious, as Dad would say.
Soon, I entered into negotiations with the owner of a walnut farm that bordered that land. I was drawn to the beauty of the walnut orchards, and I approached the weeks-long negotiations with the same intensity that my father must have harnessed when he met Henry Ford II. I had all my statistics written out on a yellow legal pad: the number of trees per acre; soil data; income and expense spreadsheets, and start-up costs—everything organized in columns.
I had youth on my side and the rough hands of a farmer to prove that I was genuine and ready to work. The owner of the walnut farm drove a hard bargain. He had been a top auto mechanic and restorer of classic cars in Sacramento before becoming a farmer. A year of farming, with broken irrigation pipes and broken dreams, had led him to sell. But he wasn’t about to let his land go for a song. Channeling my father, I used my pencil and eraser to adjust my offer, inching it upward in large increments.
So close to achieving my dream, I could suddenly envision myself as a walnut farmer. Walnuts fit all my criteria: they were sustainable and healthy, and I loved eating them. Walnuts are harvested only once a year; this fact would alleviate the pressures of multiple harvests that I felt in truck-farming. The beauty of the orchards and the nearby creek reminded me of the love I first felt in the land near the Patagonian fjords. I didn’t consider the fact that I knew next to nothing about walnut agriculture.
During one of the pauses in our negotiations, I came home to Julie. I told her that I had fallen in love with the mechanic’s farm and its walnut trees. She became quiet and thoughtful for a moment, and then she asked, “Is the farmhouse cute inside?”
“I haven’t seen it,” I told her.
I hadn’t even asked to see the house. In my excitement to finally be bidding, I had never even considered how we would live. We were not married, but we were planning our future together. I had been thinking only of the land; I would have farmed and slept in a tent. Was this the sort of thing Dad might have done? He was always so focused on his career, and he didn’t always acknowledge the people who supported him. This was the autumn of 1980. I was thirty years old, and I was rushing headlong into the rest of my life. As it turned out, the clapboard farmhouse consisted of a mudroom, a kitchen, three small bedrooms, and one bathroom.
August came around, and the days became scorching hot. Every drop of irrigation water disappeared into the soil, happy to escape the sun. I thought often of the shade provided by bigger walnut trees. We were nearing the end of the tug-of-war over the asking price for the farm. The owner said that he wanted to keep the proceeds from that year’s harvest, coming up in October. More, he wanted to hold on to half of the mineral rights to the property. This meant he would have the right to extract oil and gas from beneath the surface of the soil should it ever be discovered. I had no intention of being a fossil fuel extractor, and this point of contention deeply frustrated me.
My cards were on the table. The edge of power and ego that Dad might have exerted in the same situation eluded me. In those days, I wished that I had the hardball stamina that he possessed. The owner sensed that I had nothing more to bargain with, and I caved to his demands. Years later, I’m glad I did. Had the mineral rights been a deal breaker, I wouldn’t have gotten to farm this amazing piece of land.
Since we bought the place at the beginning of September, the pressure was on right away. In the art of walnut cultivation, the learning curve was vertical. I had about a month to plan for the harvest, facing the most difficult part of the business at the very beginning. One of my early adventures involved getting to know the land from the seat of my tractor, glimpsing my farm neighbors on their own vehicles in the low light of early mornings. As I drove the tractor, hawks exploded from the furrows in sudden flight. I remember, on one of the first days, stopping twice to lift an injured owl that I’d hit with the tractor, having tried so hard to miss him. I was quickly becoming obsessed with the beauty and sorrow of working that land.
The harvest lasted the full month of October, and the workdays were very long. As a beginning orchardist, I depended on the ideas and examples of my neighboring farmers. I wonder if they thought I was a bit of a pest. I was always asking them for advice. I often asked to rent or borrow equipment that I didn’t yet own.
After hulling and drying the crop, I loaded the nuts into trailers and drove them into Winters for shelling and processing. This was a short trip, but it was scary as hell. After crossing the one-lane bridge over the creek, I had to swing the trailer, brimming with walnuts, hard to the left. There was a slight drop in the pavement right at the turn, which always caused the trailer to tilt precariously. I’d witnessed other walnut rigs tip over, spilling a million walnuts onto the pavement. I’d seen workers reloading the nuts with forklifts, shovels, and many hands. Carefully navigating the roads of my new community, I worried about what would happen if I lost money and time from an accident. I’d come a long way from the happy recklessness of climbing seaside cliffs on Rapa Nui.
That first season was a taste of the years to come. My dirty hands became more heavily calloused and my work boots quickly wore out. I was more exhausted than I had ever been, and I was happy.
That Thanksgiving, Julie and I had our first family celebration on the farm. Suffering from mesothelioma, wheelchair-bound and in enormous pain but with assistance from caretakers, my mom flew from DC to join us. She needed help at the gate, and when I first saw her in the chair, my eyes went to the ground for a moment. We all knew that she was going to die. Doctors had given her eleven months. I was mostly thinking about the pain she must be in.
At the farm, Mom rode the tractor with me through the orchards. It must have taken a huge amount of willpower for her to allow me to hoist her up onto the metal seat. With a huff and a puff and a waft of diesel, the engine turned over, we lurched forward, and we were off and running together, one last time. Having lost all her hair, she wore a wig. The synthetic hair blew only slightly in the breeze as we rode, while the wind coaxed the walnut leaves from their limbs. We took a picture that captured her smile, miraculous in those days of sickness. Her determination to enjoy the visit was greater than her pain, greater than the fatigue caused by her many medications.
That evening, we had a small Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends. I don’t remember any talk about my father. Why wasn’t he there? I have no idea. The holiday was a time of celebration with my mother—of the farm, of the future life Julie and I would have. Mom and Dad would never be in Winters with us, together. Maybe it was denial of her sickness that kept him away. I know that he was immensely frustrated by the fact that she couldn’t be cured. I ought to have insisted that he accompany her.
At the time, these questions needed no answers. We were focused on Mom, and on spending those days with her well. Julie and I were planning to get married and have a family. We knew Mom would never meet our children, and the emotions we felt must have filled in the big space left by Dad. He wasn’t there with us, but the pattern felt normal.
I tried to make the most of Mom’s last few months. I flew home for Christmas that year. I returned again to DC on January 16, 1981, to join Mom as she received the Medal of Freedom from President Carter at the White House. The President’s remarks honored her work in literacy education.
It wasn’t Dad who had pushed for Mom to receive the medal. My brother-in-law Bob Pastor had advocated for her, leveraging his position as a national security adviser. Dad already had his medal, from 1968. We attended the ceremony with her, and she remained in a wheelchair. I knew she didn’t have long.
During the last weeks of her life, I dreamed of her often, and the dreams left me crying. We’d be meeting in the concourse of an airport. We were saying goodbye. She seemed aloof, which was so unlike her.
When the end seemed imminent, I returned to DC to say goodbye to her. She spent the last week of her life in our house on Tracy Place, in a hospital bed in the middle room of the second floor. Hospice workers attended to her, going in and out all day. I stayed in my old bedroom, the place where she’d comforted me as I sobbed over Fs on my homework assignments. From the second floor, now a thirty-one-year-old man, I overheard conversations Dad was having on the phone downstairs, calling all his friends in the medical field.
“Any possibility? Anything that might help Marg?”
Dad held out hope that a cure for Mom’s disease would be discovered in time to save her. He spent a lot of time looking for that miracle and, I think, left her too much on her own. To hope is natural but to spend precious final days in a quixotic pursuit seems tragic to me now.
With Dad on the phone, I sat by Mom, next to her deathbed. I had thought her final gift to me was visiting the farm and seeing the beginning of my new life, leaving her impression in the soil even though she would never see what grew. That felt unbearably sad, but it wasn’t the last gift after all. As she lay in her bed, she turned to me. Looking at me with her faded Pacific-blue eyes, she said, “Don’t do as I have done. Don’t give everything to others, so you have nothing left over for yourself.”
Those words were shattering. Throughout my life, I had always tried to model my existence after her role as the giver. She had just received the nation’s highest civilian honor for her service.
She told me again, “Just remember to give to yourself.”
I realized then how hard it was going to be to live in this world as my father’s son without her.
The first time Dad visited the farm was for our wedding in 1982. Other than his presence, he didn’t contribute much to the ceremony. For me, it was a wonderful event with a streak of pain because Mom’s death was still so recent. For Julie, I think there was a mixture of joy and discomfort. During our UC Davis days, she had spent time with my father when my parents visited, but our wedding was the first time her parents had ever met him. She recalls being seated between our two dads at the dinner table. Her father, Jim, was an Irish cop and restaurateur from Brooklyn. Known as Big Jim or Diamond Jim, he had a larger-than-life personality, which evidently paired interestingly with my father’s. Julie has several stories about the encounter. One of them involves Dad asking Big Jim if he had ever been backpacking in Yosemite.
“I’ve never been to Yos-uh-might,” Jim replied. He added that the only time he went backpacking was between steakhouses, with a few beers in his bag. Later, and with a good dose of humor, Julie nicknamed my dad “Big Mac.”
Julie’s is a family of singers and joke tellers, and everyone has a nickname. This was never the case for the McNamaras. Our marriage was the beginning of an evolution for me in my perception of my family and its dysfunction—out of the familiar dark, again. I also can’t overlook the pain that Julie has felt in coming to grips with being part of my family. I know that she felt marginalized by my father at times. I also know that she was continually hurt by his absence from the farm, from our lives, and from her life more specifically. Dad supported our choices, but he placed a boundary around his personal life, which almost seemed like a condition of his financial support. Though officially retired, he kept himself busy. After Mom’s death, he was on numerous corporate boards, and he began writing books. He threw himself into these things, I think, in order to cope with losing Mom.
Soon his grandchildren were growing in the California sunshine, the same sunshine that nurtured him as a young man. Our oldest son, Graham, was born in September of 1984, just as the walnut harvest was getting underway. In the delivery room, the nurses weren’t sure if I should touch my baby son, because my hands were so stained from walnuts. I often took Graham with me on the farm as we harvested the crop. For Julie and me, new parents, he was the center of our world, and we enjoyed introducing him to all of our friends.
I don’t think Dad was aware of how much we missed him. I had often hoped that being a grandfather would help ease the regrets of his life and the loss of Mom, but his pattern of absence continued. It was another missed opportunity to come closer together as a family. Instead, he called on the phone to talk about the production of the farm—or when he needed help. Being a lifelong incompetent at household tasks, and with Mom no longer around, Dad used to call Julie and have her recite instructions about operating the washing machine, the dishwasher, or the coffee maker, writing everything down while she spoke into the phone.
There was another factor adding to the pain in our family life. Dad was my financial partner.
I couldn’t have afforded to purchase farmland on my own. Throughout my life, Mom and Dad had set aside savings for my sisters and me. My savings went toward the down payment we made on the farm and our house.
That had always been part of the plan; I had anticipated borrowing from my parents when I had my own farming business. The goal was to eventually buy out Dad’s shares in our operation and be independent, but I knew that we faced a long road to get there. Work and ingenuity alone wouldn’t be enough; we were also beholden to the climate and global prices, plus local politics and economics. I remember those first two years, both buying the farm and getting married, as filled with tremendous pressure compounded with a sense of risk. Although my father had put me in a position to achieve my dream, my thoughts and feelings toward him were still conflicted. I was mostly attuned to the self-conscious feeling of being in debt—owing money, making payments.
Julie’s position made things more complicated at home. We lived on the farm together for two years before we were married. Because Dad and I were legal partners prior to our marriage and since the farm borrowed heavily on its annual production loan, Julie had to sign a quitclaim deed issued by our lender each year. In doing so, she transferred any interest that she had in the property to my father and to me, thereby quitting any right or claim she had. Every year until we paid off the loan, as the date to sign the quitclaim approached, I shuddered, lost sleep, and felt sadness and anger. It caused such heartache between Julie and me. It was not right that she was being forced by the bank to sign a loan document that was neither fair nor necessary. It was also not something I had much say in. It was one of those intractable problems in a relationship, the type of thing that my family never talked about. Had my mother and father gone through something similar, it probably would have been painted over with the words We never had any problems.
“Your family isn’t normal,” Julie sometimes told me. Without her perspective, I doubt I would have learned to see them with some distance and objectivity.
Dad never understood the nuts and bolts of the farm. I could tell that he appreciated my love for the work, but he truly didn’t know a thing about production agriculture. Sometimes when we talked on the phone, all he wanted was big data. His constant requests for spreadsheets, financial balances, and rate of return bothered me. In fact, those conversations reminded me of the misleading statistics that had so doomed his wartime strategy.
I remember him saying that he couldn’t taste the difference between organic ingredients and something produced conventionally. Coming from a person who liked to drink freeze-dried Sanka coffee, who insisted that it tasted the same as a freshly brewed pot, I kind of believed him. But he was also a lover of garden-fresh tomatoes. My earliest memories are of him and my mother in their garden in Ann Arbor, plucking the juiciest red tomatoes from their vines. With a saltshaker in one hand, he’d sprinkle salt on the red, ripe flesh in the other and take a huge bite, the tangy juice, seeds, and shiny tomato skin dribbling down his chin, landing on his khaki shirt.
“Boy, this is a great tomato,” he’d say.
As an adult, when I tried to explain to Dad that organic produce really does have a richer, fuller flavor, I used tomatoes to illustrate my point. Also statistics.
“You see, Dad,” I tried to say once, “a tomato is ninety-three to ninety-six percent water…”
And, I went on to say, the quality and mineral content of the soil and the climate in which a tomato is grown really do contribute to the flavor. This combination of factors is referred to as terroir. That would have been during one of our many phone calls when we discussed the business and finances of the farm.
The 7:45 a.m. phone calls might be the thing I remember most about our partnership. That’s 7:45 a.m. East Coast time, 4:45 a.m. in California. Dad’s rationale for calling before 8 a.m. was cost savings, as the rates went up after eight o’clock. He was a true Scotsman, thrifty and efficient. It would be pitch-black outside, and the phone by my bed would ring. Julie still says that she’d have to “peel me off the ceiling” as I grabbed the phone.
On the other end of the line, with an inquisitive voice, my father would ask, “How’s the walnut crop looking, Craigie?”
“Dad, I can’t really see the crop. It’s still dark.”
His questions would roll from the phone like a cascading river: Is there enough labor? Have you considered vertically integrating your business? How’s the market? With the sun not yet up, just that first glow on the horizon, I’d think back to faded black-and-white images of him sitting before some congressional committee, getting grilled, until he’d jolt me to awareness with another sharp query.
Eventually I’d make it down to the kitchen. There I was at least able to get a cup of tea while talking to him. As quickly as the call began, it would end. It was 7:59, and the rates were going up.
I was totally oriented toward sustainability, which was an unusual attitude in the 1970s. I’m not sure I ever convinced Dad that organic produce tastes better. I do know that he enjoyed eating our organic walnuts, especially on cross-country ski trips to the hut we had built in memory of Mom along the Continental Divide. As long as I was carrying the extra weight of the nuts in my backpack, he was all in. Our lunch spot on those trips, the one we had picked out twenty years prior, was alongside a fallen aspen tree. We’d need to brush off a foot of new snow from its trunk in order to set our backpacks down and spread out lunch. When we sat down and he saw the lunch ingredients emerge, I could tell he appreciated me for carrying his food, which was the heaviest addition to the pack. He liked to have a slab of Vermont cheddar cheese on whole wheat with a slice of tomato. For dessert he liked Toblerone Swiss Milk Chocolate with honey and nougat.
“Only two triangular pieces, please.”
Our ongoing ski trips provided material for conversations. He was so loving during those times, and the walnuts I’d grown were in his hands. We had a bond with nature that came from the beauty of those surroundings. But that did not replace the missing pieces. Eating walnuts with him on the trail reminded me that he had not visited the orchards for a very long time.
“When do you think you might get out again, Dad?”
“I’m not sure, Craigie. How’s it looking?”
We had perfected the paradox of our relationship. We were so close on trips to the mountains, and his absence wounded me deeply during all the other times. Each hiking or skiing trip repaired the hurt a little, and then the emotional scabs would break open.
My love for Dad contributed to what was a kind of identity crisis. When I was a young walnut farmer, my dreams were coming true: a beautiful new family, something I’d always wanted. However, I was now a landowner—a momio. I still felt strongly aligned with socialist politics. I still admired Fidel Castro. In the beginning of my farming career, I truly believed that making a profit was wrong. This was juxtaposed with Dad’s more industrial approach. It was not a comfortable time. I talked in the early mornings with my father, who had loaned me money, who had been in LBJ’s cabinet, and he always asked me about the goddamn spreadsheets.
Farming over many decades made me aware of qualities in myself that come from my father: a desire to work, far-reaching ambition, and a drive to push forward through every obstacle. It was not easy to be his partner or his son, but in this part of my life, I truly discovered myself as both.
As I was remembering this time, I became interested in doing something Dad might have done. I analyzed my income. I opened my most recent annual report from Social Security and followed my number from the first year I started to earn a salary. In 1967, at seventeen years of age, I earned $260. There were several years while I was on the road in Latin America when I earned zero.
Things picked up a bit when I drove a tractor during tomato harvest in the summer of 1977. I earned $6,170 that year. The year I bought our farm, 1980, I earned $28,197. For the next twenty-five years, my salary hovered around $50,000.
First-generation farmers are rare. The pressures and risks defeat many people. The entry price deters others or keeps them out of the game. I know that I had help, but I also never thought of my career as something belonging to me alone. It was about the land and the crop, the substance of what I was doing. My responsibility, I felt, was to deliver a healthy and sustainable product.
To Dad it was more of a business. I wish he had come and walked the orchards with me, dug the soil with me, held it in his hands. I remember his hands as smooth, his fingers long and narrow. Those hands were more accustomed to holding pencils than nails. He always tracked and calculated the elevation of his daily ski runs. At the end of each day, with gusto and a happy sense of accomplishment, he would announce how many vertical feet he had skied that day. Over the course of many summers hiking the Rockies or walking briskly on South Beach at Martha’s Vineyard, his arms and legs became freckled and tan. But he didn’t know about toiling with the earth.