Michelle Dowd - Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult

Forager

Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult

Michelle Dowd

Illustrations by Susan Brand

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2023

For my mother
(19422022)

This is a work of memory , but I have done my best to tell a truthful story. I met with all my siblings, several of my cousins, my parents, two of my aunts, dozens of former members of the Field, and several current ones (including the current director) to render as accurately as possible what the Field was like from 1976 to 1986 in the context of collective memory. While the Field, begun by my grandfather in 1931, still exists, it has been renamed and Ive been told it is a radically different organization from the one I grew up in.

I have used details (and dialogue) from several of the catalogs, notebooks, and diaries I kept throughout my childhood and adolescence, numerous letters I saved from Luke, and my mothers books and notes. I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology, and have adjusted to get as close as I can to what really happened.

The nutritional information, recipes, and instructions contained within this book were created based on my experiences and my mothers teachings and are in no way intended as a guide on how to eat in the wild. Eating wild plants and fungi is inherently risky. Plants can be easily mistaken and individuals vary in their physiological reactions to touching and consuming plants. And so the information included here should not be used without professional training.

I have changed the names of everyone except my grandmother Ruth, her siblings Bernice and Oscar, her nephew Gary, Dr. Shore, my hospital roommates Sandra and Gayle, the docent Barbara, and all of the dogs.

For 99.9 percent of the time since our species came to be, we were hunters and foragers... We were bounded only by the Earth and the ocean and the sky.
Carl Sagan

I grew up on a mountain , preparing for the Apocalypse.

This doesnt explain the juxtaposition of faith and famine, or how the landscape of my childhood was more amorphous than the boundary of a mountain implies, but its the simplest truth for which I can find words.

For a decade of my childhood, the Mountain was the closest thing I had to a home, and I learned to forage for what I needed to survive on it.

But my real home wasnt a place. It was an idea. An idea my maternal grandfather turned into an organization we called the Field, a closed community both my mother and I were born into, which expanded over the decades onto the mountain upon which I grew up. Both Field and Mountain were governed by Grandpa, the ruler of our world.

Grandpa said he was Gods prophet and would live to be five hundred years old, that the angels would descend from heaven and take him up into the clouds like Elijah. Grandpas followers believed every word he said, because at the Field, he was the only one with authority. His pontifications were the soundtrack of my childhood, and his sincere belief that Gods vengeance would be unleashed upon the world unless a small group of Gods chosen people stayed his hand terrified me. Because we were those people. And as his granddaughter, I had inherited the divine right and responsibility to lead.

From the age of seven to seventeen, I lived on the Mountain, a sixteen-acre undeveloped camp sitting on the San Andreas Fault, in the central section of the Transverse Ranges, within the Angeles National Forest. My maternal grandfather had obtained a lease for this site under a special use permit from the US Forest Service in 1947, ostensibly to run a camp for boys. He had dreamed of developing the land into a little enclave of worship amid the surrounding seven hundred thousand acres of national forest, but when he found a piece of property available in nearby Arcadia, he put his energy into developing the Field there instead.

They say the basin of land in Southern California where the Field is located was a community dump when Grandpa acquired it in 1951, having convinced a sympathetic businessman to lease it to him for one dollar a year. My father and several other boys who were teenagers at the time cleaned it up and built clubrooms and a church hall out of cinder block. They built a brick cross and painted it white, and constructed a stained-glass mural featuring the words Feed My Lambs.

The physical space of the Field opens at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac. There is only one way in and one way out. The small entryway leads down a hill to the basin, now covered in ballfields and a smattering of clubrooms. A pavilion gym, which also serves as a church, was erected in 1979. Leaders live in little homes along the bank of the property.

In the 1970s, the Mountain was approximately a two-hour drive from the Field, and moving there alone with our nuclear family gave my mother distance and license to explore a space away from her fathers watchful eye. During our ten years there, she taught my siblings and me to love and care for the land while taking up arms against Satan, the earths ruler. But she also believed that, like Abraham, she was called to sacrifice her children as a testament to her devotion to her Lord; in exchange, God would bless her, and he would multiply her seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and her seed would possess the gate of his enemies.

So we memorized scripture, put on the armor of God, and bowed to the mercurial tyranny of Grandpa, to whom we belonged. Mother sacrificed us, and like Abrahams son Isaac, we survived her sacrifice, and multiplied her seed.

When we moved to the Mountain, my three siblings and I lived with our parents in a one-room mess hall that was already on the land Grandpa had leased. We slept on army bunks, walked down the hill to the outhouse, and foraged for seeds. We were told the end of the world was imminent and we needed to be prepared. Part of that preparation was learning to survive off what the Mountain would yield. The other part was becoming a soldier in the army of God.

Mother taught us to cull from the forest floor, how to identify and consume yerba santa, yucca, prickly pear, nettles, elderberry, snow plant, dandelion, rose hips, chokecherry, gooseberry, and the seeds, pollen, bark, and sap of Jeffrey, pinyon, sugar, Coulter, and knobcone pine trees and black oak trees. I know what you can eat raw and what you have to pound, grind down, dry, or bake. I know the ratios to dilute, how far to dig during a drought, and what is worth fighting for.

Mother explained how warming temperatures were allowing bark beetles to infiltrate Jeffrey pines, whose seeds we consumed. She saw the destruction of ecosystems as the biblical Apocalypse, and she prepared us to survive the harsh conditions Armageddon would bring. She taught us to sleep on the bare earth, and when water wasnt available, to siphon dew from leaves or distill urine in a pit. She taught us to trust the layers of sustenance hidden in places humans hadnt yet appropriated as their own.

I didnt choose to be born at the Field, nor do I accept Grandpas fundamentalist ideologies, leadership, rules, or vision as true, and I dont want his story next to mine, even now. The Mountain holds his stories tooin the rocks, in the foundation of the buildings, in the plaques on the wallsbut I will not be telling Grandpas story. His followers have their version, and they continue to tell it, heralding him as a hero.