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Eclipse Memories

Close-up of the total eclipse. Photo by Tom and Judith Auchter, digitally enhanced by Lew Phelps ’65

Close-up of the total eclipse. Photo by Tom and Judith Auchter, digitally enhanced by Lew Phelps ’65

Thanks to Chuck and Lew Phelps (both ’65) for the interesting article about the Pomona eclipse event in Wyoming in August. The opportunity to share the experience with Pomona friends and family was stunning, and the article captured the depth of the adventure. It is amazing that they had the foresight to plan two years in advance and to reserve one of the premier spots in the U.S. to view the spectacle. The twins worked tirelessly on every aspect of our time together, including housing, meals, a lecture series and guided stargazing, and they created a deeply memorable experience for everyone on the mountain.

Wishing to honor the Phelpses, attendees from the Class of ’65, as well as the Classes of ’64 and ’66, created a Pomona fund to celebrate our time together. At the final group lunch, we announced the Phelps Twins Eclipse Fund to support Pomona summer internships in science. The response was heartening: 86 donations came from Pomona alumni and friends who attended the event and from some who did not but who wanted to support the fund. The final figure was $52,242. The fund will support more than 10 summer internships for students in future years.

With appreciation to Chuck and Lew for making it happen.

—Ann Dunkle Thompson ’65, P’92
—Celia Williams Baron ’65
—Virginia Corlette Pollard ’65, P’93
—Jan Williams Hazlett ’65
—Peter Briggs ’64, P’93

Excelling Wisely

When I received the Fall 2017 edition of PCM, I was intrigued by the front cover’s puzzle shapes, where work and life fit together. As a creative writing and reading intervention teacher at STEM Prep High School in Nashville, TN, I wrestle with this question of how to fit life and work together without work consuming both pieces. I was absolutely delighted, upon opening to the article “Excelling Wisely,” to read these lines by the president of Pomona College: “We need to tell ourselves and each other that we can achieve and excel without taking every drop of energy from our reserves. That we all need to take some time to laugh.” And later President Starr adds, “Creativity requires freedom, space and room to grow. And achievement isn’t the only thing that adds meaning to our lives.”

This article hit home to me as I was struggling with just one more bout of sickness after a challenging but fulfilling semester of teaching. Its message needs to be heard in every corner of our world. Yes, achievement is important. But the quality of our lives as we accomplish our goals is also important. In my work environment at STEM Prep Academy, I am surrounded by motivated, hardworking, yet caring leaders who themselves are asking these questions. Students today are extremely stressed. Many of our students face particular language challenges, which further contributes to stress. How can we help to close the achievement gap and yet not become consumed by it?

STEM Prep High is intentionally trying to create balance this year by adding once-a-month Friday afternoon clubs.  These clubs enable students to explore interests and to spend more relaxed time in a group of their choosing. I lead a sewing and knitting club, which has attracted a very “chill” group of students. I provide knitting needles, crochet hooks, yarn and other items, assisting as students explore these crafts. Other clubs include flag football, hiking, a Socrates club, games and yoga.

STEM Prep High has also created balance this year by offering elective classes such as Visual Arts and Imaginative Writing. My Imaginative Writing classroom is intentionally filled with creativity and fun, including a bookshelf full of children’s stories, teen books and adult novels.  A stuffed Cat in the Hat and a Cheshire Cat lounge on top of the bookshelves. Plants adorn the top of the filing cabinet near the window, creating a homey, relaxed atmosphere. During the month of November my students and I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). This provided students with an opportunity to creatively express their own life stories or stories that they had made up.

And what about teachers? How can we create a tenuous balance between work and life? Certainly, our work is important, but so are our lives. I continue to wrestle with this question.  One “solution” that my husband created was buying season tickets to the Nashville Predators games. This allows my husband and me to enjoy downtown Nashville and to spend time together. We also enjoy motorcycle trips on my husband’s Harley.

Most of us will continue to face this challenge of how to “excel wisely” throughout our lives. I was most grateful for this issue of PCM and the opportunity to reflect on ways in which I am trying to make this happen and ways in which I can continue to create a healthy balance between work and life.

—Wilma (Fisher) Lefler ‘90

Wow!

Wow! The recent issue of PCM is superb. Each story is meaty and unique and engaging. I’m one who usually reads an issue from cover to cover, and this one left me wanting to start at the beginning again with the suspicion that I’d surely missed important details along the way.

Thank you for the imagination, creativity and careful editing that you give in helping us feel connected and proud.

PS: I’m one of the trio who were the first exchange students from Swarthmore in spring 1962 at the invitation of Pomona. It pleases me that both colleges are currently led by African-American women.

—Betsy Crofts ‘63
Southampton, PA

Alumni, parents and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity.

Citrus Roots

A well-dressed Claremont citrus grower poses among his trees in this undated photo from the Boynton Collection of Early Claremont, Honnold-Mudd Library.

A well-dressed Claremont citrus grower poses among his trees in this undated photo from the Boynton Collection of Early Claremont, Honnold-Mudd Library.

In 1888, the same year that an upstart college moved in, the town of Claremont planted its first citrus trees. At the time, gravel and shrubs dominated the unincorporated town in a region once inhabited by Native Americans of the Serrano tribe.

Twelve years later, Claremont’s 250 residents belonged to one of two camps—the College or the citrus industry.

Early 20th-century Claremont was a citrus boomtown, a battleground for countless brands and packinghouses. Until the mid-1930s, according to historian Richard Barker, citrus was one of California’s largest industries, second only to oil. Particularly in Claremont, “the economy was driven by citrus.” Once, Queen Victoria ordered a shipment of Claremont oranges for her birthday.

Citrus label image courtesy of the Claremont Heritage Archives

Citrus label image courtesy of the Claremont Heritage Archives

One packager, known as the College Heights Orange & Lemon Association, sold citrus under numerous names: “Athlete,” “College Heights,” “Umpire,” and “Collegiate.” A 1930s packing label for the Collegiate brand, pictured above, featured a vintage image of Pomona’s Mason Hall, along with the long-since demolished Harwood Hall for Botany, which once occupied the center of the Stanley Academic Quadrangle.

Many growers were members of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, founded in Claremont in 1893 under a different name. Membership soon exploded, and in 1952, the group formally adopted the name from their longtime advertising campaign—Sunkist.

Team Work

A Voice for Change

Alaina Woo ’17 onstage with NCAA President Mark Emmert

Alaina Woo ’17 onstage with NCAA President Mark Emmert

Alaina Woo ’17 stepped to the free-throw line hundreds of times during her basketball career with Pomona-Pitzer. But she had never stepped onto an athletic stage quite like the one at the NCAA Convention in January when she stood in front of nearly 3,000 of the movers and shakers of college sports for a one-on-one talk with association President Mark Emmert.

“It was a completely new experience for me,” says Woo, who appeared in her role as chair of the first NCAA Board of Governors’ Student-Athlete Engagement Committee, tasked with considering some of the crucial issues facing college sports—including the hot-button topic of how the NCAA addresses sexual violence.

“I felt prepared in the sense that I obviously was very familiar with the committee’s work and I had worked on the Commission to Combat Sexual Violence, which is why I was named chair,” Woo says. “But it’s completely different when you arrive in Indianapolis and see the giant place you’re going to be speaking. The NCAA helped me out by making it be more of a conversation with President Emmert, rather than me giving this giant speech looking out to a crowd.”

Among the points Woo made onstage: “I think it’s a rare opportunity for student-athletes to have that direct line to the Board of Governors. And like I said, I was a public policy major, and I’m surprised by how often people craft policies or make changes without engaging the people that they’re making the policies for.”

Woo’s role is seeking change from within the NCAA.

“There is so much more to be done,” she says. Citing recent news stories of mishandled cases of sexual violence in athletics and at NCAA institutions, Woo feels that athletics and higher education are a step behind. “Issues of sexual violence have plagued college campuses and athletics—both youth and collegiate—for years. It is imperative that the NCAA and other sport governing bodies continue to work on efforts to prevent sexual violence, support survivors and hold their memberships accountable.”

Basketball and Advocacy
Woo driving the baseline during a game

Woo driving the baseline during a game

Now in her first season as an assistant basketball coach at Tufts University while simultaneously working as a research assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School, Woo was deeply active in NCAA issues while at Pomona, where she is the Sagehens’ career leader in three-pointers. She also is ninth on Pomona-Pitzer’s career scoring list and was the team’s leading scorer as a senior.

Woo was still a first-year student when a teammate took her to a meeting of Pomona-Pitzer’s NCAA Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. That friend and Lisa Beckett, a professor of physical education and associate athletic director, encouraged Woo to get involved.

“They said, ‘If you’re interested in making athletics something where you can make a difference off the court, interested in community service, interested in leadership, you should definitely check this out.’”

By Woo’s sophomore year, Beckett—“a wonderful mentor,” Woo says—suggested applying for the NCAA Division III national Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.  Woo was selected and represented Pomona-Pitzer’s Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and the Northwest Conference for a three-year term that ended in January. Among other roles, she also served on the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics for Divisions I, II and III.

“My interests really lie in women’s athletics and Title IX, advocacy for victims of sexual violence and underrepresented student athletes, so that was why I was chosen for those committees rather than a championship committee or something like that,” Woo says. “My interests were definitely inspired by being at Pomona, a liberal arts campus where there’s this sense to explore how something like athletics could make a difference.”

She hopes for further advances on sexual violence issues after the NCAA adopted a policy last year requiring coaches, athletes and administrators to complete education in sexual violence prevention each year.

The new sexual violence policy has been an opportunity for the NCAA to reflect on what its role is, she says.

“It seems ridiculous that someone who has a low GPA might not be eligible but someone who perpetrates sexual violence is eligible. These are the types of conversations we are now facilitating on a national level.”

Choosing a Goal

Woo’s work at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she is not enrolled as a graduate student but works part-time on a project called Participedia that seeks to crowdsource and map participatory political processes around the world, allows her to continue pursuing the policy interests she developed in her studies at Pomona with Politics Professor David Menefee-Libey.

At Tufts, a Division III women’s basketball power that has reached the NCAA title game the past two seasons, Woo got a foot in the door thanks to Pomona-Pitzer Coach Jill Pace, a former Tufts assistant coach.

Like a basketball player in position to pass, shoot or drive, Woo is something of a triple threat as she starts her career: She could continue coaching, pursue graduate work in public policy or possibly combine sports and advocacy as an athletic administrator.

“I’m still very on the fence,” she says.

“When I’m thinking about being a coach in college sports and mentoring young women, I’m thinking all about policies and politics and power and how to best advocate for my athletes or people in the athletic department who are struggling with things outside of athletics.

“It feels so connected. This work at the NCAA has really tied together my academic interests with my love and passion for the game of basketball.”

—Robyn Norwood

*  *  *

FOOTBALL: A Hail-Mary Memory

Sagehen Highlights

Here are a few highlights from the 2017–18 seasons of Pomona-Pitzer Athletics.

FOOTBALL: A Hail-Mary Memory

For most Pomona-Pitzer fans, the crowning achievement of the year in sports happened at the very end of football season, in early November 2017, when the Sagehens won the 60th edition of the “Battle of Sixth Street” against the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (CMS) Stags, 29–28. The game ended with an overtime, fourth-down, Hail-Mary pass from quarterback Karter Odermann ’20 that bounced off the helmet of a Stags defender before falling into the waiting arms of Kevin Masini ’18, followed by an equally heart-stopping two-point conversion reception by David Berkinsky ’19 to seal the victory. (In the photo above, Sagehen fans lift Berkinsky onto their shoulders.)

The football season was also marked by a series of team records. Aseal Birir ’18 set both the all-time career rushing record (3,859 yards) and the single-game rushing record (275 yards), and Evan Lloyd ’18 set an all-time record for career tackles with 275.

BASKETBALL

The men’s basketball team won 13 of their last 16 games to advance to the finals of the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) tournament before losing to CMS. For the women’s team, Emma Godfrey ’21 was named SCIAC Newcomer of the Year after tallying at least 30 points in six games.

SWIMMING & DIVING

Both the men’s and the women’s teams won SCIAC championships,  the second in a row for the women and the first in program history for the men. Maddie Kauahi (PI ’19) won SCIAC Female Athlete of the Year; Mark Hallman ’18 was Male Athlete of the Year; and Lukas Menkhoff ’21 was Newcomer of the Year.

MEN’S WATER POLO

For the second straight season, the men’s water polo team claimed the SCIAC title both in the regular season and in the conference tournament. Daniel Diemer (PI’18) was SCIAC Player of the Year.

MEN’S CROSS COUNTRY

The men’s cross country team won its first SCIAC title since 2005 and finished sixth at the NCAA Championships.

THE SAGEHEN NIKE STORE

Sagehen apparel is now available from the Sagehen Nike Store.

Nike Store

Picture This

This dramatic image of the Stanley Academic Quadrangle in winter is a view you don’t see very often—unless, that is, you’re a drone.

Stanley Academic Quadrangle

—Photo by Jeff Hing

Ideas That Feel Alive

The author of 29 books for children, Mac Barnett ’04 is always looking for stories that elicit strong feelings.

Leo a Ghost StoryExtra YarnSam & Dave Dig a HoleThe Terrible TwoGuess Again!The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse

New York Times–bestselling and award-winning children’s author Mac Barnett ’04 started reading at the age of 3. As he was growing up, it was just Barnett and his mom. They didn’t have a lot of money, but Barnett says it was important to her that they had books. So they bought all of Barnett’s books secondhand—or third? fourth?—at yard sales.

“I grew up with the generation of children’s books before me and the generation before that,” Barnett says, noting that his collection spanned the years from 1935 to 1975.

Barnett cites some favorite authors and books from his half-pint days: Margaret Wise Brown, James Marshall, Wanda Gág and “The Frog and Toad” series by Arnold Lobel.

Books like those became touchstones for him in his writing, he says, and still evoke a particular set of memories: reading aloud with his mom and telling inside jokes in their family. They found some books ridiculously absurd and others heartbreaking. The best books, he says, made them feel something.

Barnett says that’s what drives him today as a full-time writer: strong feeling. To him, writers aren’t any better at ideas than anyone else, “I just think we tend to hold onto ideas, cogitate on them, turn them into something. The trick for me at least is not how do I come up with something but knowing which ideas are worth chasing down, which ideas feel alive to me.”

For Barnett, there is no barrier between his work and the rest of his life. Those “alive” ideas can come from anywhere.

“I write about the things I care about. Everything I see, every bad book I see, every good book I see, everything I care about that elicits a strong emotion. It’s just experiencing the world and paying attention to the world. That’s the work. That’s the thing that makes your brain a receptive place to an idea.”

Barnett first started crafting children’s stories when he was in college during his summers. He worked at a summer camp, telling original stories to the camp kids. He’d make up stories about his life: adventure stories, espionage stories and more. In the telling is where he found his dream. Barnett spends a lot of time on the road, visiting elementary schools and reading out loud to children. They are who he keeps in mind when he’s building an imaginary world; he pictures himself standing in front of a big group of kids and holding their attention with a book.

When he first told his Pomona College mentor, the late Professor David Foster Wallace, that he wanted to write for children, Barnett says Wallace winced. He said he didn’t have any advice to offer Barnett on how to write for children. But Barnett replied that he already knew how to talk to kids. He needed to learn how to write. He says Wallace’s counsel to respect the reader and always consider his audience was huge in his development as a writer.

Develop he did. Barnett has been writing full-time for 13 years, and in that time, he’s written 29 books. But Barnett is modest when he’s complimented on being prolific. He describes his process as a mess. There are a lot of scraps. There’s a lot of sitting.

“My impression is it’s very lazy. There are so many days when you sit in front of your computer and you don’t write a single word. But obviously something’s happening because there are these books.”

Indeed, something is happening because Barnett is winning lots of recognition, and his books have sold over one million copies, been translated into more than 30 languages and racked up awards like the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award and (the icing on the cake for every children’s book) two Caldecott Honors. Barnett is quick to say that it’s actually the illustrator who gets the Caldecott award, not the author.

“They don’t even give me a certificate,” he says, laughing.

Still, even though it’s not technically his, seeing that Caldecott sticker on his books is very satisfying. He remembers that while growing up he was always attracted to books bearing that sticker. He remarks that it’s amazing that it means so much to readers even that young.

Meaning and memory are what make Barnett’s work, well, meaningful and memorable. Knee-high readers eventually become full-size readers. Barnett hears from college kids who grew up reading a series he wrote called “Brixton Brothers.”

“Some of them have told me that when they packed for college, they packed five books to take with them and ‘Brixton Brothers’ was one of those five. The books we read as children make up who we are… these kids are adults and they are deciding to bring those books with them in life. That is just overwhelming.”

Books and memories that young readers carry into adulthood are one day passed on to their own children, he says.

Barnett is keenly aware of the audience he’s working for. People will tell him kids love horses, kids love robots—but he thinks it’s both simpler and more complicated. Kids love a good story. And lots of different kinds of stories.

“Kids’ literary tastes are as widely varied as adults’ literary tastes. You’re just trying to tell something true that’s stylistically important for that truth. That’s what good art is for adults, too. It’s just a kid’s experience of the world is different from an adult’s experience of the world. Kids love all kinds of different things. Literature for all kids should be as diverse as kids are.”

Barnett’s three favorite books of his own are a motley collection themselves: Guess Again (2009); Leo: A Ghost Story (2015); and his most recent, The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse (2017). He loves Guess Again because it is the lightest in tone, full of jokes, and yet his most philosophical work. His affection for Leo is due to Christian Robinson’s illustrations and the subject matter, which is a paean to friendship. The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse is special to Barnett because it poses big questions about life, death and why bad things happen—questions he wrestles with and that children pose all the time.

It’s a tough audience, Barnett says. The good part: his crowd isn’t fanboying and fangirling over him the way grown-up audiences can do to their favorites. The kids are there because they care about the book; they’re not fawning over the author, he says. But because they care about the book, they keep it real. Really real.

“They will just tell you anything they don’t like about the book.” And Barnett says he takes all of the criticism seriously.

Kids offer other kinds of fun-size observations as well.

“I have a really big Adam’s apple, which I didn’t know until I started hanging around with kids, until they started asking, ‘What’s that on your neck, why is it so big?’ That changed the way I look at the mirror for the rest of my life. That’s all right though—they weren’t wrong. They weren’t wrong.”

How to Advance Mathematics By Asking the Right Questions

Elvis Kahoro ’20 (left) with Professor Stephan Garcia

Elvis Kahoro ’20 (left) with Professor Stephan Garcia

One day last year, in Professor Stephan Garcia’s Number Theory and Cryptography class, the lesson took a surprising turn.

To make a point about the use of seemingly random patterns in cryptography, Garcia had just flashed onto the screen a chart of the first 100 prime numbers and all of their primitive roots. (It would take too long to explain what primitive roots are, so suffice to say that they’re important in modern cybersecurity applications.)

Looking at the chart, Elvis Kahoro ’20 noticed something interesting about pairs of primes known as “twins”—primes that differ by exactly two, such as 29 and 31. The smaller of the pair always seemed to have as many or more primitive roots than the larger of the two. He wondered if that was always true.

“So I just asked what I thought was a random question,” Kahoro recalls. It was the kind of curious question he was known for asking all through his school years, sometimes with unfortunate results. “Some teachers would get mad at me for asking so many questions that led us off the topic,” he remembers.

But Garcia took the first-year student’s question seriously. And the next day, the professor called Kahoro to his office, where he’d been doing some number-crunching on his computer.

“It turns out that Elvis’s conjecture is false, but in an astoundingly interesting way,” Garcia explains. “There are only two counter-examples below 10,000. And bigger number-crunching indicated that his conjecture seemed to be correct 98 percent of the time.”

Garcia and a frequent collaborator, Florian Luca, then found a theoretical explanation for the phenomenon, resulting in a paper titled “Primitive root bias for twin primes,” to be published in the journal Experimental Mathematics, with Kahoro listed as a co-author.

“What I’ve taken away from this,” Kahoro says, “is never to be afraid to ask questions in class, because you never know where they’ll lead.”

 

1

Come to the United States from Kenya at the age of 3 and grow up in Kennesaw, Georgia, about 30 miles north of Atlanta. Go to public schools and discover that (a) you love math and (b) you love finding patterns.

 

 


2

In seventh grade, play a video game based on the Japanese anime Naruto. Discover the source code for the game online and find yourself fascinated by the logic of its code. Decide you want to make computers your life’s work.

 

 


3

Choose to attend the STEM magnet program at Kennesaw Mountain High School because it offers lots of AP classes, including one in your #1 interest, computer science. Join lots of organizations, and do about a thousand hours of community service.

 

 


4

Learn about the QuestBridge program from another student, apply and get accepted. At a QuestBridge conference, learn about Pomona College from your group leader, recent Pomona alumna Ashley Land ’16, who urges you to apply.

 

 


5

Visit Pomona on Fly-in Weekend, meet a number of faculty who make you feel at home and discover that the College’s support for DACA students like you is the best in the country. Apply for early admission and get accepted.

 

 


6During your first semester at Pomona, take a Linear Algebra course with Professor Stephan Garcia, whose problem-solving approach to teaching impresses you so much that you can’t wait to take another course with him second semester.

 

 


7

In Number Theory and Cryptography class during your second semester, look at a chart of prime numbers and notice something intriguing. Ask a question, and learn how just asking the right question can open unexplored frontiers of new knowledge.

Home Sweet Marfa

Home Sweet Marfa
Rachel Monroe ’06

(Photos by Mark Wood)

 

THE EASIEST WAY for non-Texans to get to Marfa, Texas, is to fly into El Paso. From there, it’s a three-hour drive, the kind that turns shoulder muscles to stone from the sheer effort of holding the steering wheel on a straight and steady course for so many miles at a stretch. And when you finally get there, it looks pretty much like any dusty, dying West Texas railroad town. Except for the fact that Marfa isn’t dying at all—in fact, it’s thriving.

You may have heard of Marfa. In the past few decades, it’s gained a kind of quirky fame among art lovers. As a writer with an interest in the arts, Rachel Monroe ’06 was familiar with the name back in 2012 when she set out from Baltimore on a cross-country trek in search of whatever came next. At the time, she assumed the little town was probably located just outside of Austin, but as she discovered, it’s actually more than 400 miles farther west, way out in the middle of the high desert.

After a long day’s drive, Monroe spent fewer than 24 hours in Marfa before moving on, but that brief rest-stop on her way to the Pacific would change her life.

*  *  *

A NATIVE OF Virginia, Monroe is no stranger to the South, but she never truly identified as a Southerner until she came to Pomona. “I grew up in Richmond, which was, and still is, very interested in its Confederate past,” she recalls. A child of liberal, transplanted Yankees in what was then a deeply red state, she remembers feeling “like a total misfit and weirdo.”

When she got to Pomona, however, she was struck by the fact that most of her fellow first-years had never had the experience of being surrounded by people with very different opinions about culture and politics. “It wasn’t so much that I missed it,” she says, “but I saw that there was an advantage, and that it had maybe, in some ways, made me more sure of myself in what I did believe.”

Rachel Monroe ’06It was also at Pomona that Monroe started to get serious about writing. Looking back, she credits the late Disney Professor of Creative Writing, David Foster Wallace, with helping her to grow from a lazy writer into a hardworking one. “He would mark up stories in multiple different colors of pen, you know, read it three or four times, and type up these letters to us,” she explains. “You really just felt like you were giving him short shrift and yourself short shrift if you turned in something that was kind of half-assed.”

She didn’t decide to make a career out of writing until the year after she graduated. In fact, she remembers the exact moment it happened—while hiking with some friends in Morocco, where she was studying on a Fulbright award. “I remember having this really clear moment when I was like, ‘I think I want to try to be a writer.’ It was one of those thoughts that arrive in your head like they came from outside of you—in a complete sentence, too, which is weird.”

A year later, she was at work on her MFA in fiction at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, but she wasn’t particularly happy. Her goal was to write short stories, but even as she was churning out stories and entering contests and submitting to journals, she felt like a fraud. “I would get these subscriptions to these magazines that I was trying to get into that were rejecting me, and I didn’t even want to read them. And at a certain point, I was like, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”

So she began to write essays, and something clicked. Essay writing immediately struck her as a more appropriate form for exploring the ideas that excited her, and after years of rejected short stories, as an essayist she found quick success.

Her first published essay, which appeared on a website called The Awl, was about a group of girls with online crushes on the Columbine killers. “I sort of related to these girls in the ferocity of their crushes,” she recalls. “Female rage is something that’s not really permitted, and so instead of being like, ‘Oh my god, I’m bullied, I’m miserable, I’m so unhappy,’ instead of owning that feeling, which is not socially permissible, then you idolize this boy who acted on it.”

Being published was good. Caring about what she wrote was great. Doing research was fun. And she no longer felt like she was faking it. Suddenly, she was off and running on a new, entirely unexpected career in nonfiction.

After completing her MFA, she stayed on in Baltimore for a couple of years, writing for a website run by fellow Sagehen Susan Dunn ’84, called Baltimore Fishbowl. And then, she simply knew it was time to move on.

“I’ve made most of my decisions in life kind of intuitively,” she explains, “so they’re hard to explain after the fact. But I had a sense that, ‘OK, I’ve plateaued here. I’ve reached some sort of limit. Time to go.’”

So she packed up her car and drove west.

*  *  *

ACCORDING TO THE Texas State Historical Association, the town of Marfa was founded in 1883 as a water stop and freight depot for the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway. The rail line slices straight through the heart of town, and a couple of times a day, seemingly endless freight trains come barreling through. The landscape here is flat and barren, covered with sparse grasses and low vegetation like creosote and yuccas, so you can literally see the train coming for miles. But the trains don’t stop here anymore, and their only apparent contribution to the local economy is a negative one—the cost of earplugs provided to guests in a nearby hotel. 

Back in the 1940s, the town’s population topped out at about 5,000, bolstered by a prisoner-of-war camp and a military base. When those vanished after war’s end, Marfa seemed destined to slowly fade away, like so much of small-town America. But in recent years, the town’s population has stabilized at around 2,000, thanks to the two rather discordant pillars of its modern economy—arts tourism and the Border Patrol.

*  *  *

MONROE DOESN’T REMEMBER much about her first impression of Marfa, but she remembers the high desert landscape surrounding it. Somewhere around the town of Alpine, the scene began to shift. “All of a sudden, it just looked kind of rugged and open and empty,” she says, “and I got really excited about the way it looked. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m in the West.’”

In Marfa, exhausted from her eight-hour drive from Austin, she crashed at El Cosmico, a quirky hotel-slash-campground where visitors sleep in trailers, teepees and tents. The next day she took a tour with the Chinati Foundation, one of two nonprofits—the other being the Judd Foundation—that promote the arts in and around Marfa.

Then she drove on. But she couldn’t quite leave Marfa behind.

“When I got to L.A., I was like, ‘You know, if I moved here, I would have to get a job because it’s just expensive. And I don’t want a real job.’ Then I had this plan to drive back through Montana and Wyoming, but for some reason I kept thinking, ‘That Marfa place was real interesting.’”

Since she hadn’t been able to write much on the road (“It’s hard when you’re sleeping on friends’ couches”), she decided to return to Marfa and find a place to settle in for a week or so and write.

What drew her back to Marfa? It’s another of those intuitive decisions that she has trouble explaining. “I’m not sure I could have said at the time. I can make something up now, but I was just like, ‘Oh, that’s a cool place. It’s real pretty. It seems easy to find your way.’ It just seemed like the kind of place where you could go and be for a week and get some writing done.”

That week stretched into six. “And at the end of that, I was like, ‘I think I’m just going to move here.”

*  *  *

THE BORDER PATROL has been an integral part of life in Marfa since 1924, when it was created by an act of Congress—not to control immigration, but to deter the smuggling of liquor across the Rio Grande during Prohibition. That mission soon changed, however, and today, the Patrol’s Big Bend Sector—known until 2011 as the Marfa Sector—is responsible for immigration enforcement for 77 counties in Texas and 18 in Oklahoma.

Rachel Monroe ’06Headquarters for the whole sector is just south of town, near El Cosmico, and uniformed Border Patrol agents are a conspicuous  presence in Marfa’s coffee shops and on its streets. According to the sector’s website, it now employs about 700 agents and 50 support staff. Among them, Monroe says, are quite a few young men and women who grew up right here in town.

The other pillar of Marfa’s economy doesn’t jump out at you until you walk up Highland Street toward the big pink palace that houses the Presidio County Courthouse. Glance inside the aging storefronts, and where you might expect to find a Western Auto or a feed store, you’ll find, instead, art gallery after art gallery.

The story of Marfa as a destination for art lovers begins in the early 1970s with the arrival of minimalist artist Donald Judd. Drawn to Marfa by its arid landscapes, he soon began buying up land, first the 60,000-acre Ayala de Chinati Ranch, then an entire abandoned military base. In what must have seemed a grandly quixotic gesture at the time, he opened Marfa’s first art gallery.

Then something strange and wonderful happened. Artists began to gravitate to this dry little West Texas town to be part of a growing arts scene, and behind them, in seasonal droves, came the arts tourists.

*  *  *

MONROE’S WRITING CAREER really took off after she moved to Marfa—a fact that she believes is no coincidence. “It wasn’t my intention in moving out here, but I think living here has been an advantage in that I come across a lot of stories,” she says. “Things kind of bubble up here—not just regional stories either.”

Some of those stories, which increasingly have appeared in prominent national venues like The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Slate, The New Republic, and The Guardian, have grown directly out of her engagement in the Marfa community. In fact, the article that really put her on the map for national editors happened, in large part, because of her decision to join the local fire department.

“I read Norman Maclean’s book Young Men and Fire,” she says. “I just loved that book, and then I was like, ‘Oh wait, I’m moving to a place where they have wildfires.’” Fighting fires, she thought, would be a good way to connect with the land, and as a writer, she was drawn by the sheer drama of firefighting. “And then, you learn so much about the town,” she adds. “You know—not just the tourist surface, but the rural realities of living in a place.”

A year later, when a fertilizer plant exploded in West, Texas (“That’s West—comma—Texas, which is actually hours east of here”), Monroe found that her status as a first responder was her “in” for an important story. In the course of the investigation, a firefighter named Bryce Reed had gone from local hero to jailed suspect. Monroe wanted to tell his story, and her credentials as a fellow firefighter were key to earning his trust.

The resulting article, which she considers her first real work of in-depth reporting, became a study of Reed’s firefighter psyche and the role it played in his ordeal and his eventual vindication. “In my experience, it’s not universal, but a lot of people who are willing to run toward the disaster, there’s some ego there,” she says. “And it seemed to me that in some ways he was being punished for letting that ego show.”

The 8,000-word piece, which appeared in Oxford American in 2014, helped shift her career into high gear. Despite her usual writer’s insecurities about making such a claim herself (“As soon as you say that, a thunderbolt comes and zaps you”), she hasn’t looked back.

Recently, she put her freelance career on hold in order to finish a book, the subject of which harkens back to her very first published essay—women and crime. “It centers on the stories of four different women over the course of 100 years, each of whom became obsessed with a true crime story,” she says. “And each of those four women imagined themselves into a different role in the story. One becomes the detective, one imagines herself in the role of the victim, one is the lawyer, and one is the killer.”

She already has a publisher, along with a deadline of September to finish the draft. What comes after that, she doesn’t even want to think about. “For now, I’m just working on this book,” she says, “and the book feels like a wall I can’t see over.”

*  *  *

THAT DESCRIPTION—a wall I can’t see over—might also apply to how I feel about Marfa as I walk up its dusty main street. From a distance, today’s Marfa seems to be a strange composite—a place where down-home, red-state America and elitist, blue-state America meet cute and coexist in a kind of harmonious interdependence.

As I walk, I see things that seem to feed that theory—like two men walking into the post office, one dressed all in black, with a shaved head and a small earring, the other in a huge cowboy hat and blue jeans, with a big bushy mustache and a pistol on his hip.

But at the same time, I’m struck by the sense that there are two Marfas here, one layered imperfectly over the top of the other, like that old sky-blue Ford F250 pickup I see parked in the shade of a live oak, with a surreal, airbrushed depiction of giant bees stuck in pink globs of bubblegum flowing down its side.

Monroe quickly pulls me back to earth—where the real Marfa resides.

*  *  *

“THIS IS NOT a typical small town,” she says, “There’s not a ton of meth. There are jobs. It’s easy to romanticize this place, but it’s an economy that is running on art money and Border Patrol money, and I don’t know if that’s a sustainable model. You can’t scale that model.”

Monroe is quick to point out that the advantages conferred by Marfa’s unique niche in the art world are part of what makes the little town so livable. That’s why she’s able to shop at a gourmet grocery store, attend a film festival and listen to a cool public radio station. “You know, I don’t think I could live in just, like, a random tiny Texas town,” she admits.

But those things are only part of what has kept her here. The rest has to do with the very real attractions of small-town life—or rather, of life in that dying civic breed, the thriving small town. “This is the only small town I’ve ever lived in,” she says, “and it’s such a unique case. It does have, in its own way, a booming economy, right? And I think that’s not the case for a lot of small towns, where you get a lot of despair and disinvestment and detachment, because there’s not a lot of hope that anything can change or get better. People like coming here, people like living here, because it largely feels good, because it has found this economic niche, so that it’s not a dying small town. And that’s rare, and I think there’s a hunger for that.”

As a volunteer in the schools, the radio station and—of course—the fire department, Monroe is engaged in the community in ways that seem to come naturally here. “Yeah, you can’t be like, ‘That’s not my area. That’s not my role.’ Everybody here is required to step up and help out, and that feels like the norm.”

She has also come to appreciate Marfa’s small-town emphasis on simply getting along. “I wouldn’t say my lesson here has been assuming good faith on the other side or something like that. It’s more diffuse than that—just the sense that when you live in this small place, there is a strong sense of mutual reliance, just one school, one post office, one bank that you share with people who are different from you. And you realize that other people’s opinions are more nuanced.”

Anyway, she says, residents are far more likely to be vociferous about local decisions than national ones—for example, a move to put in parking meters on Marfa’s streets. “People can get way more fired up about that than about stuff that feels somewhat removed from here.”

All in all, Marfa just feels like home in a way Monroe has never experienced before. “It’s a quiet, beautiful life, but not too quiet. I think there’s an element of small-town, mutual care. We’re in it together. That is really nice. I like that my friends include everybody from teenagers to people in their 70s—a much more diverse group, in every sense of the word, than when I was living in Baltimore.”

Ask whether she’s here to stay, however, and her reaction is an involuntary shudder. “Who are you—my dad?” she laughs. “I don’t know. I can’t—no comment. I really have no idea.”

After all, a person who follows her intuition has to keep her options open.

*  *  *

Prada MarfaLEAVING MARFA, I stop for a few moments to take in one of its most iconic images—a famous art installation known as Prada Marfa. If you search for Marfa on Google, it’s the first image that comes up. And a strange scene it is—what appears to be a tiny boutique, with plate-glass windows opening onto a showroom of expensive and stylish shoes and purses, surrounded by nothing but miles and miles of empty scrub desert. Looking at it before I made the trip, I thought it was a wonderfully eccentric encapsulation of what Marfa seemed to stand for.

Here’s the irony—it’s not really located in Marfa at all. It’s about 40 miles away, outside a little town called Valentine. But I suppose “Prada Valentine” just wouldn’t have the same ring.

Critical Inquiry

Critical Inquiry Textgraphic

New Critical Inquiry Courses

Call it Sagehen submersion. Twice a week, first-year students participate in one of 30 Critical Inquiry (ID1) sections—intensive classes that introduce new students to both the joy and the rigor of academia at Pomona. Last fall, there were 30 sections, including10 brand-new courses. Here are a few with intriguing titles.

iSubmit to iSpy

Media Studies Professor Mark Andrejevic says the inspiration for this course came from the recognition that this group of students will be part of the most comprehensively monitored, tracked and data-mined generation in history.

Language and Food

Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science Mary Paster wanted to examine the similarities, differences and connections between language and food. “A culture’s entire way of thinking about and interacting with food can communicate much more complicated things,” she says, “like values, religious beliefs and social hierarchies.”

Say It in a Letter

“There is so much to learn from letters of the past,” says Professor of Art Mercedes Teixido. “As artifacts, they are an extension of the hand of the writer; as a document they capture the writer’s mind in a moment of time.” The course was designed to help students find their writing voice in several ways as they read and write letters that are personal and public, local and global.

The First Crusade: Monks of War

Professor of History and Classics Kenneth Wolf’s class was inspired by the involvement of monks with warriors and their “holy violence” between the years 900 and 1150.

Running for Office

Politics Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky designed her course “to dig deeper into the reasons why we have the elected officials we have and, more importantly, what would need to happen to change our politics by changing who runs for elected office.” She hopes some of her students may eventually throw their hats into the ring.

Into Desert Oneness

One person’s wasteland may be another person’s wonderland, says Professor of Geology Jade Star Lackey, who has crisscrossed the American West for years in his research. The class looked at complex interactions between people and the natural desert.

Her Little Slice of Heaven

Her Little Slice of Heaven
Jazmin Lopez ’09

Photos by Glen McDowell

TUCKED AWAY IN a corner of Greenfield, California, a rural town located in the heart of the Salinas Valley, Rancho Colibri sits on a narrow sliver of land bordering a large vineyard with dormant vines.

Standing at the center of the property, wearing scuffed leather boots and Levi’s jeans—the unofficial uniform of most residents in the area—is Jazmin Lopez ’09, who loves to welcome visitors to her “little slice of heaven.”

At 4.2 acres, Rancho Colibri consists of a renovated midcentury house, a large barn where two owls make residence, a mobile chicken coop with squawking residents, sprawling protea plants, a variety of citrus trees that include the unique Yuzu lemon and Australian finger lime, garden boxes made of repurposed materials and a variety of succulents, herbs and native California plants—and of course, the unwelcome gophers that Jazmin is constantly battling.

Rancho Colibri

Rancho Colibri

Although she and her husband, Chris Lopez CMC ’08, took the name for their farm from the Spanish word for hummingbird colibri, Jazmin shares that her father nicknamed her property La Culebra (The Snake) because of its curving, narrow shape. Either way, it’s home sweet home.

Here, with views of the valley floor and the Santa Lucia Mountains, Jazmin is at peace—but don’t let that fool you. She is full of bursting energy, ideas and dreams for her farm. The goal: to one day have a working farm, grow the food she wants and make a living off the earth.

A Napa Childhood

Having grown up in 1990s Napa—a smaller, calmer place than it is today—Jazmin got a taste for the outdoors at an early age. Her parents come from a rural town called Calvillo, located in the state of Aguascalientes in Mexico, and settled in Napa, where they raised four daughters: Jazmin; her twin, Liz; and two older sisters.

Jazmin Lopez ’09 gathering eggs from her portable hen coop

Jazmin Lopez ’09 gathering eggs from her portable hen coop

“When they moved to Napa, they brought a little bit of their rancho to Napa.”

The Lopez children grew up on a street that dead-ended at a creek. Childhood in Napa “had a rural feel to it because some of the sidewalks were missing. There were lots of walnut trees we’d go pick nuts from, and we had a surplus of wild blackberries at the nearby creek.”

They also grew up with a rural awareness of the realities of where food comes from that most urban Americans lack. “We had a lot of rabbits growing up. I thought they were my pets. But I soon realized at a young age that the chicken we were eating at our family barbecues was really rabbit.” That’s why, she says, when their neighbor gifted her and Liz each a rabbit on their first communion, she made it a point to tell her parents, “Este no. Este es mi mascota. No se lo pueden comer.” (“Not this one. This is my pet. You can’t eat this one.”)

Once, she remembers, her father brought home a cow that he had bought. Butchering the animal was a family affair that took place in the garage, with Jazmin having meat-grinding duty.

“We grew a lot of our own food. We always had fruit trees, strawberries, tomato plants, chiles, tomatillos—I hated harvesting the tomatillos. Every time I had harvest duty, my hands would turn black and sticky. They’re delicious in salsa, but a pain to harvest and clean.”

As teens, Jazmin and Liz would sometimes accompany their dad on the weekend doing odd jobs like gardening and landscaping, plumbing and electrical work. Jazmin picked up the basics from these trips—practical skills she’s honed as an adult at Rancho Colibri.

“I’ve always been really passionate about gardening.” With a deft pinch or twist of the fingers, she was always bringing home cuttings to stick in the loamy Napa soil—a habit that her husband says continues to this day.

When it was time for college, the twins separated—Liz off to Bowdoin College in Maine and Jazmin to Pomona College. Today, as she sits in her living room, where a white and brown cowhide adorns the hardwood floors her father helped install, Jazmin tries to recall why she never worked at the Pomona College Organic Farm or visited the nearby Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Gardens.

“It’s almost like I put it on hold,” she says adding that academics at Pomona were rigorous enough to demand most of her time and effort. An international relations major, she also felt pressure to follow a certain kind of career path. There’s no regret in that self-reflection. After all, she recalls college as four years to focus on her academics and try new things.

After Pomona, Jazmin accepted a yearlong Americorps placement at a legal-rights center in Watsonville that provided free legal services for low-income people. She liked the work, so after completing the Americorps program, she moved to Oakland—just a few hours north of the Salinas Valley but a world away—to work for a successful criminal immigration lawyer.

There, despite the joy of living with her twin sister and seeing friends who lived in the area, Jazmin soon came to a hard realization: City life was not for her. “It was easy to feel lost and insignificant in such a densely populated area,” she says. “I also missed being able to be outside and feel connected to nature.” She pauses and continues softly, “I don’t know. At times, it just felt overwhelming.”

Trusting her instincts, Jazmin left the city for the countryside with a feeling of coming home.

Dreaming of “Ag”

Located in the town of Gonzalez, off the 101 freeway, family-owned Pisoni Farms grows wine grapes as well as a variety of produce. For the past three years, Jazmin has worked there as compliance and special projects manager. In the office, Jazmin has an unobstructed view of the fields immediately to the south and west and the mountains that form the valley—a gorgeous view she doesn’t get tired of.

Eggs packaged with the Rancho Colibri label

Eggs packaged with the Rancho Colibri label

Inside her mud-speckled Toyota Corolla, Mexican rancheras are playing at a low volume, background music as Lopez expertly maneuvers the car through clay mud to a paved two-way street. As she drives past fields with budding greenery, she explains one project where she was tasked with measuring the levels of nitrate in the soil to ensure efficiency in the use of fertilizer. Turning onto another dirt road, she parks her Corolla alongside another project that she oversaw—dozens of solar panels waiting to harness the power of the sun.

Jazmin’s days at Pisoni are always different, full of projects that balance office work with being out in the fields. Off the top of her head, she mentions a few recent projects she’s proud of, including the solar panels, which she researched and helped install on the farm, and getting to work with local high school students who helped test water moisture in the soil. “I love working in agriculture, so when I have the opportunity to encourage kids to learn more about the industry, I invite them to the farm. I like to expose them to how diverse this industry is—there are a lot of opportunities.

From the solar panels, Jazmin spots a familiar face on a tractor down the fields and sends a friendly wave. She seems to know almost every worker. Switching to her native Spanish, she’ll flag them down to ask them about their families and how the day’s work is going. Do they have any questions? Can she help them with anything?

After a short 10-minute drive to one of Pisoni’s vineyards, we see a small group of eight to 10 workers pruning dormant grapevines by hand, one by one—special care that they say makes for better-tasting wine. One of the older men, Paco, without missing a beat from deftly pruning branches, starts to wax poetic about la maestra Lopez—she’s a teacher, he says, because she gives them important training and workshops and, he adds, she’s just a “chulada de mujer” (a wonder of a woman).

“I get along with my co-workers,” she says. “I’ve had some of their kids come shadow me for a day. We bump into each other at the supermarket. We go to their family parties when they invite us. It brings a lot more meaning to my work, and it makes me feel like I’m a part of something bigger.”

Although it’s not totally unusual to see women in the California’s agriculture industry, her boss Mark Pisoni, the owner of Pisoni Farms, says it’s still not a very common sight. “Pomona should be very proud of her. Her diverse skill set is huge—for us, it’s amazing. We’re all called to do what’s required to be done, and she just jumps in.”

Fixer-Upper: Salinas Edition

Back at Rancho Colibri, the cold Salinas winds are picking up, but the hens and rooster remain unbothered as they cluck and crow in their chicken coop. A two-story affair covered by chicken wire, the coop was designed by Chris (hand-drawn on a napkin) and built by Jazmin in her basement, where the shelves are stocked with tools and supplies that would give any hardware store a run for its money.

Lopez attending to the beehives on the Pisoni Vineyard

Lopez attending to the beehives on the Pisoni Vineyard

The coop she says proudly, is portable. It can be picked up and carried to a fresh spot of grass. With a grin, Chris says Jazmin wishes she could do it all—build the coop and lug it herself—but Jazmin grudgingly cedes that job to her stronger husband. She, however, remains the builder in the marriage.

Chris, who recently launched his campaign to succeed his mentor as Monterey County supervisor, came home one day needing to build a podium for a rally he was holding the following day. With  w a gentle scoff at her husband’s building skills, she came to his rescue. With scrap wood found around their farm, she designed and built her husband a rustic podium—all in one hour.

Jazmin admits that they had nearly given up their dream of buying a home because there were few, if any, properties that fit their budget in the area. As the housing crunch in the Bay Area and the East Bay pushes people out, it’s created a trickle-down effect that has increased property prices in small towns like theirs. In addition, local policies are in place to preserve farmland, explains Chris. There’s a big push not to subdivide under 40 acres.

Almost by chance, Chris found their farm for sale, but the house was in bad shape, unlivable really, and in dire need of some tender love and care. Jazmin—who admits to being a fan of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, a home remodeling show—was not only undaunted; she was inspired. After fresh coats of paint, new floors and windows, new toilets and the coming together of family and friends, Rancho Colibri was born.

Upstairs, the living room’s glass doors open to a deck that overlooks the valley floor and beautiful Santa Lucia Highlands where Pisoni Farm’s vineyards are located. Jazmin, a newly minted beekeeper and a master gardener, has introduced beehives, an insectary and a new orchard of her own design to Pisoni’s vineyard.

Jazmin still has a list of projects around the farm, but the place already has the indelible stamp of the Lopezes. A small hallway table with an odd assortment of jars is both a décor element and station for her kombucha tea fermentation. Midcentury modern furniture, bought used and restored by Chris, dots the four-bedroom home.

A Future Sowed

With her roots firmly planted in the soil, Jazmin is happy.

In early fall, she started a prestigious program she’s had her eye on since the first year she started working in agriculture as a grower education program assistant for the California Strawberry Commission. She’s part of the new cohort for the California Agricultural Leadership Program, a 17-month intensive program to develop a variety of agricultural leadership skills.

“I tend to be on the shy side, and when I attend meetings that are ag-related, I’m in a room full of older white men, and I lose my voice. I don’t feel comfortable speaking up. And even though I know I bring a different perspective as a Latina in agriculture, there’s still that fear that I haven’t been in this that long, that I’m not an expert in this.” The program is challenging her not just to find her voice but to own it.

“I hate public speaking—I can do it, but I avoid it when possible. That’s one thing this program is pushing me to do—to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s a really big deal for me because I want to develop into an individual, a Latina who is able to speak up and share her perspective. It’s a privilege getting to participate in this program.”

Jazmin’s drive doesn’t stop there, however. On top of her full-time job at Pisoni, supporting her husband’s campaign for county supervisor, the never-ending list of chores and home renovation projects on the farm, she’s also just deeply committed to giving back.

For the past few years, Jazmin has been a volunteer with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. As a Spanish-speaking volunteer, she gets called on to interview Latino families to find out what wish a child wants to see come true. “Make-A-Wish does a good job of making families feel special. A lot of the families I have interviewed are farmworking families or recent immigrants. When they get the red-carpet treatment and see a big black limo show up at their apartment complex, it just shines a light of positivity during a dark time.”

Jazmin also recently joined the board of nonprofit Rancho Cielo in Salinas, an organization run by alumna Susie Brusa ’84 that helps at-risk youth transform their lives and empowers them to become accountable, competent, productive and responsible citizens.

Lastly, Jazmin is a Master Gardener volunteer through her local UC Master Gardener Program. Through this program she provides public gardening education and outreach through various community workshops, activities and on the web.“

For a normal person, this might seem daunting, but as Chris says, “Jazmin is a superwoman.”

For Jazmin, making the time for what she loves to do is no chore at all, and Rancho Colibri is the battery pack that keeps her going.

Doing It Right

The first two years of living on their farm was a lot of “trial and error” for Jazmin who would walk around the farm to discover what plants grew on the property. Since then she has learned to distinguish the invasive weeds like shortpod mustard from the native plants and is on the offensive to get rid of the invasives.

Jazmin Lopez ’09“She used to have this little hand pump and walk around the farm, so I got this big pump that hooks up to the battery of this Kawasaki Mule,” says Chris, who explains he drives the small vehicle with Jazmin hunched next to him spraying the weeds. “The neighbors think we’re crazy because I’ll be driving as slow as possible and she’ll be hitting these little things at the base. The neighbors ask why we don’t just boom spray and kill it all and then bring back only what we want, but Jazmin is very passionate about the local flora and fauna.”

Looking at her farm, Jazmin adds, “I’ve never owned this much land before, you know? It’s exciting, and I want to take care of it the right way.”

This coming year alone, they plan to install an irrigation system around the farm so they can plant more things further away from the house and expand their garden, to which they want to add hardscaping. They’ll also continue the offensive against invasive weeds and the gophers. “The garden around the house—I have it all designed in my head,” Jazmin says. “I know exactly how I want it to look and the purpose I want it to serve. On the weekends, I take either Saturday or Sunday, or both, to just work on it and make progress.”

They also plan on building a granny unit for Jazmin’s parents when they retire. “I really think they would enjoy living here in their retirement,” she says. “They could have some chickens and make some mole. That’s another project to figure out this year.”

The more Jazmin learns about her farm, the more she wants to do it all. “I want to have a small fruit tree orchard; we want to have a small vineyard to make sparkling wine with our friends; we want to have a cornfield. We want it all.”

“We’ve put a lot of our time and heart and soul into it, and it’s just the beginning. We have so many dreams for our little ranchito, our Rancho Colibri, and I can’t wait to see what we end up doing with it. I can guarantee you that in five years, it’s going to look completely different.”

Back to School at 81

For Carole Regan ’58 and Valkor, guide dog training was the beginning of a wonderful friendship.

Carole Regan ’58 and Valkor

When I became legally blind several years ago, I first asked the Braille Institute for a white cane. Although the institute gave me excellent mobility training, the cane only helps detect obstacles when you encounter them. As my vision worsened (now 20/350), I felt the need to avoid obstacles, and that’s the job of a guide dog.

Applying to guide dog school reminds me of applying to Pomona many years ago: neither is for the casually interested and all requirements must be met. Once you’ve decided which school to attend (there are three in California, all funded through charitable donations), you’ll need to line up references, including your physician (are you healthy enough to complete the strenuous training?), your opthalmologist/optometrist (how bad is your vision loss?) and your mobility instructor (can you travel independently using a cane?). Last, you may be asked either to schedule a home visit or to submit a video of your walking and immediate environment.

The first school to which I applied sent a trainer to interview me, but after a walk, he announced that the school would be unable to match me with a dog because I walked “too slowly.” I was stunned, then disappointed, then angry, as his reason smelled of blatant age discrimination.

After submitting another lengthy application to a different school, however, I was thrilled to receive a phone call from Guide Dogs of America (GDA) in Sylmar, accepting me for its November–December 2017 class.

And so, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, there I was sitting with a six-month-old Labrador puppy named June at my feet as Charlene, one of hundreds of volunteers at Guide Dogs of America and a puppy raiser, threaded her way through traffic in downtown L.A. As my apprehension grew, I peppered Charlene with questions about June, but silently, other questions arose that I dared not voice: At 81, how would I manage in a class of much younger students? Would I disgrace myself and future older applicants by “washing out”? These and other doubts would haunt me for the remainder of my stay at GDA.

When we reached GDA’s dormitory, a pleasant young woman named Kim led me into a large entry hall dominated by a very long, corner sofa, explaining that this would be our meeting area. Then she walked me down the long hallway to my room.

At 4 o’clock, our group assembled on the sofas. Five men and four women introduced themselves and shared their causes of blindness, the only characteristic we appeared to have in common. The causes varied from childhood cancer to a severe fall to my macular degeneration. Six of us were getting our first guide dogs and three were back for a refresher course.

The instructors’ were as varied as their students: Two of the credentialed instructors, including Kim, had been trained at Eastern guide dog schools. The third, plus the apprentice instructor (in her first year of a three-year program), had started as volunteers. The head instructor had aspired to be a marine animal trainer at Sea World, but failing that, she had turned instead to training tigers at the Bronx Zoo before gravitating to the safer population of guide dogs.

We learned the rules: no in-room visiting, no alcohol on site, silenced cell phones, promptness for all meetings and meals, walking on the right side of hallways and respect for the rights of others. We would meet at 8 each morning and train until nearly lunchtime. After lunch, we would train again until 4. Only after feeding, watering and relieving our dogs would we have dinner, and after dinner we would often meet again. w

There was no free time, except for a few hours on Saturday afternoon and Sunday. A climate of anxiety filled the air. I think we all feared being sent home in disgrace without a dog.

In the evening, the hazards of living in a blind community became apparent: several of the students became confused about the location of their rooms and nearly collided. Collisions, in one form or another, would be a constant concern for the entire three weeks.

I slept very little that night. After breakfast the next morning, we gathered on the sofa for a lecture, then set off for a “Juno” walk, with the instructors playing the part of guide dogs. We were, it seemed, being evaluated for walking pace.

Excitement grew on Wednesday—the day we would be given our dogs. The instructors enjoyed our excitement, offering to give the first dog to the student who guessed her dog’s name. No one managed—certainly not I. (Who could have imagined “Valkor?”)

Wednesday came, and after lunch we were instructed to return to our rooms and be ready to meet our dogs. There was a knock at the door, and Kim and Valkor appeared with his trainer. Valkor, named by his puppy raisers for a character in a children’s cartoon, is an 85-pound black Labrador-retriever cross and quite handsome. He immediately headed for a toy I had brought with me. I felt somewhat intimidated by his size—it would take me some time to appreciate better his intelligence and calm disposition. Valkor then wanted to show me that he could sit on his haunches and hold up his front paws.

Exactly how we were matched with our dogs remains a mystery, but it seemed to be primarily a matter of walking pace and energy level. Our youngest student received a high-energy dog, and Valkor was described as “a gentle giant.” In any case, the matching seemed to work. We gathered for dinner with nine tails under the table. Everyone seemed very happy.

When packing for my three weeks at GDA I had thrown in a lightweight rain jacket, but instead of rain, that first weekend brought severe dry winds, the dreaded Santa Anas. Monday brought an acrid odor to go along with the strong winds. As we trained that morning, the winds became so strong that at times I had trouble remaining upright. Our eyes burned. All signs warned of fire, but we continued training.

Tuesday morning the odor worsened, and I was glad I had also packed several masks. After our usual morning lecture, we were sent to our rooms to relieve our dogs and wait for an announcement. We all assembled on the sofa to hear the GDA president tell us that those who lived in the area should make plans to return home; those farther away would be sent elsewhere. We were to take our dogs.

Three left; six were accommodated in the homes of staff members and volunteers. Instructions were to pack for an evacuation of several days. Fires had broken out in multiple locations, including Sylmar.

I stuffed a makeshift duffle bag with essentials, including several gallon bags of dog food. Valkor and I met Sue, the GDA bookkeeper, who drove us to her home in East L.A. on the border of Pasadena. Freeway closures forced her to drive alternate routes.

Sue and her husband live in a Craftsman bungalow with two dogs and a grown daughter. Another daughter drops her dog off for day care, so that small house now sheltered four dogs. Luckily, their home also included a small yard accessible via a doggie door. Valkor needed no instructions on its use.

Valkor and I occupied an empty room used for storage. At periodic intervals, Sue’s son—also an employee of GDA— called home to report that the fires were still distant. Fortunately, they would remain so. Valkor amazed me by deferring to the two resident dogs and seemed to understand he was a guest. We were getting to know each other and quickly became fast friends.

Thursday afternoon, Valkor and I piled into Sue’s car for the return trip, stopping to retrieve one of my classmates and her dog on the way. That evening the returning students seemed sober as we recounted our experiences. We all speculated on whether graduation would be postponed. But instead, we were to expand our days and week to make up lessons missed. We would walk several miles in the mornings, afternoons and some evenings, including Saturday.

But what we had missed in techniques we had gained in the vital process of bonding with our dogs, difficult under tight schedules.

In our remaining time, we focused on essentials and tried to ignore the unhealthy air quality and ashes covering the ground. Happily our lessons were mostly out of the area as we learned to negotiate malls, suburban neighborhoods lacking sidewalks, the Pasadena light rail, a city bus, and comfortable parks surrounding lakes. We practiced fending off persistent strangers insisting on petting our dogs. We learned about “intelligent disobedience,” leading guide dogs to disobey the command of “forward” if the situation is unsafe. Valkor, who looks both ways before crossing a street, will not proceed if a car is approaching.

As we entered the third week, our lectures became more intense, covering such complicated topics as negotiating the TSA and airline personnel. We were all exhausted from the stress and began to drowse on the sofas. My blistered, swollen feet hurt from constant walking.

When graduation came, we sat with our dogs in the front row of the large auditorium packed with families, friends and hundreds of volunteers with their dogs, and then took our turns at the podium. When it was my turn, after thanking Valkor’s puppy raisers and the instructors, I cited Joseph Jones, the welder who was rejected by several schools back in 1948, at age 57, because he was “too old” to profit from a guide dog. His machinists’ union then hired a trainer and found a suitable dog. Next, the union established what became Guide Dogs of America, with Jones as its first graduate.

I said that “many organizations espouse nondiscrimination, but GDA practices it.” Then I broke down in tears: At 81 I had survived strenuous training and would certainly profit from having Valkor as my guide.

Now it was time to celebrate.