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Small town's residents find common ground at the Grange · REAP/SOW

• You are listening to REAP/SOW, dispatches from the front lines of food, farming, and the environment. I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Right now we’re in Mendocino County, California, and we’re at the Anderson Valley Grange Hall’s monthly pancake breakfast. A team of volunteers is prepping pancakes and eggs. This is the Golden State, so a guy known as Captain Rainbow is handling the bacon. Rainbow: Danger, door open, door open. Teresa: They’re gonna go through a lot of eggs here today. Usually about a hundred people show up to the pancake breakfast. Eric Jonas is mixing the pancake batter. Eric: The flour is locally milled. We have the Mendocino Grain Project. It’s absolutely perfect for this, you know, local feast. Teresa: That’s not the only local ingredient in these pancakes. Eric: So here we go. We’re gonna add this magic ingredient. Teresa: From the Anderson Valley Brewing Company. Eric: Just enough to wet the batter down so it’s not sticky. About a half a can. Teresa: Grange halls are meeting places in rural communities. They’ve been around for more than 150 years. The grange began as a fraternal organization for farmers. Even though farming and grange memberships are down to a fraction of what they were decades ago, many small towns still rely on grange halls as community centers. Eric: And whether it’s doing a holiday dinner or they’re hosting a local food bank, it’s a place where people can do what’s most natural to us, which is focus on our cooperative dynamics and community. Teresa: FERN contributor Lisa Morehouse just published a great story about this. She produced it in collaboration with our friends at KQED’s California Report Magazine. I’ll let her take it from here. Lisa: I first heard the word “grange” from Captain Rainbow, and he was the first person to teach me about its history. It started in 1867 as a social and educational organization for farmers, and it gained membership as grangers banded together to fight the high prices railroads were charging for transporting what they grew. Rainbow: ’Cause all these farmers were getting screwed over by the railroads, which controlled all the shipping of all their crops. Lisa: So grangers across the country lobbied to regulate the railroads and make sure mail was delivered to rural areas for free. Rainbow: And the farmers essentially created the grange as like a co-op, and they had some power in numbers like a union. Lisa: And the Anderson Valley, it’s an agricultural community. Dozens of vineyards line Highway 128, and they grow a lot of cannabis in this region, too. But wine and cannabis didn’t dominate the valley when Captain Rainbow arrived here in the early ’70s. Rainbow: When I first came here, the economy of the valley was sheep, sheep farming, and apples and logging. Pretty much. Lisa: He tells me he wore a loincloth, lived up in the woods with some other back back-to-the-landers, and didn’t come into town too much. Rainbow: In those days, if you were a hippie, you weren’t particularly welcome here. The nickname of the bar was The Bucket of Blood, and it was pretty renowned for being a pretty rugged spot. I didn’t go in the bar for about 10 years because it was chainsaw haircut time if you did. Lisa: He still has the long hair. Now it’s gray and in a neat ponytail. Back then the only affordable place in town to hold an event was at the old Grange Hall, built in 1939. Rainbow: Had a really nice old dance floor and a big barrel stove with a bunch of firewood — it warmed the place up — and a little tiny, goofy stage. That’s where we’d have our rock ’n’ roll parties and do our little plays and our clown shows. Lisa: Rainbow says the Grange membership back then was made up of old-timers who were a little reluctant to rent out the hall to hippies. Rainbow: But they didn’t have any money either. And they grudgingly went, alright, you can rent it, give us the money, no drinks upstairs, and clean up the place. And you know what, we love that building, too. So we did take care of it. Lisa: But one morning in 1985, Rainbow heard some terrible news. Rainbow: Did I have a phone? I don’t think I had a telephone in those days. I might have gone down to get the mail or something, and somebody said, the Grange burned down last night. What? Aah! Lisa: And everyone in the valley went to see the damage. Rainbow: There was nothing left. I mean, it was just a pile of gray and black charred stuff. I mean, nothing. It was gone. Lisa: As the grangers were planning to rebuild the hall, the hippies made a bargain with them. If the new building included a stage and a wooden floor for dancing, they would volunteer to help rebuild it. Working one day a week, it took this incongruous group of volunteers six years to build the new Grange Hall. Rainbow: This was, to me, the nut of a coming together of different groups of people who needed each other. They needed us to do the work for free, and we needed them to provide this space and this place and the possibility that we could have a dance hall again. Lisa: Because even if a hippie had a bad encounter with an old-timer at The Bucket of Blood saloon the night before … Rainbow: The next day, hungover, both of you would be hanging Sheetrock together, and you’d find out that, hey, you’re all right. Lisa: Instead of drinking or talking politics, they were building something together. Rainbow: I gained a lot of friends in the valley that way, and I’m not sure if this holds for everybody else in the valley, but to me that was the time when things opened up. Because we were engaged in a common purpose. Rather than looking at our differences, we were looking at our sameness. Lisa: As the Anderson Valley grangers saw their peers getting older, they looked around at the younger volunteers who were showing up with skills and interest, and they saw something else: potential grange members. Rainbow: One day one of those guys came up to me and said, Hey, you know, you wanna join the grange? And my eyes got big, and I went, you’re kidding. Really? And they asked other people who had been volunteering as well to become members. We couldn’t believe it. We went, what? You’re kidding. You really, you want us? You want us? And they did. Lisa: Both sides had to compromise a bit. When they became members, they had to go through some rituals. Rainbow: Oh, man. Learn the secret handshake and the password. Oh, yeah. Lisa: This new hippie contingent wasn’t going to go all in for the traditions of a fraternal organization, but Captain Rainbow and others learned the origins of many of these rituals and began to understand. Rainbow: The secret handshake and all that stuff came about because they would go to Washington, D.C., and lobby for farmers’ rights and different stuff, and they had to know who is a granger. Lisa: And soon enough, Captain Rainbow found himself appointed grange master, and he’s been involved ever since. These days, people know the Anderson Valley Grange Hall for its annual variety show and as a place to hold meetings and dances, quinceañeras. But it still has agricultural connections. Voice: So if this is my rootstock … Lisa: I see this in person two months after the pancake breakfast, when I come back to the hall for an event. I got the last space in the parking lot. Voices: And that, that’s a pretty good angle right there. Okay, so yeah, it’s a pretty good angle, but don’t do that … Lisa: The Anderson Valley Foodshed has rented out the grange hall for a day of exchange and education. Voice: The Grafting 101class is beginning in that room. Lisa: People carry containers full of seeds and grocery bags with cuttings from trees, young shoots called scions. Inside the grange hall, tables are covered with scionwood. Barbara Goodell is showing me around. Barbara: I can see nuts, grapes, figs on this table. But there’s apples, peaches, persimmons, plums — anything that you can graft. Lisa: Grafting let’s growers join two different plants together into one, like a hardy rootstock with a scion of a really delicious apple variety. Barbara: So it’s not rocket science necessarily. It’s putting two sticks together in the right way. Lisa: Barbara and I moved to the other side of the hall, where it’s all about seeds. Barbara: There’s five different seed libraries from the different county libraries. Voices: I don’t have a big space, and so we’re always worried about cross-pollination. And where are you located? Lisa: Kat Wu and Sab Mai came up from San Jose. They’re chatting with Jini Reynolds about how to save seeds from their small home garden. Jini: The important thing about saving seeds is to mark down, like, what kind of climate you grew it in, the things that made you successful, like the soils. Lisa: Jini’s encouraging. Jini: I’m with the Grange, and we’re a national organization. So you have granges down in your area, too. And so you want to, you know, maybe put together some kind of seed exchange so that you can all share information. Lisa:Jini’s not just with the grange. She’s an advocate and leader at every level. There are seven community granges in Mendocino County. She’s a member of one about an hour away. She’s president of the regional grange here, and she’s helping state granges rebuild their membership. She’s also on the diversity team of the National Grange. Fifty years ago, Jini moved to a one-acre farm in Mendocino County, and she’d attend parties and PTA meetings at the local hall. Jini: But I had no idea what “grange” meant. Lisa: As she learned more about the organization, she got more committed. Starting about 15 years ago, there was a lot of tension within California granges. There were rifts over values, leadership, and property. Many groups in California broke away from the National Grange, but during this time, Jini studied grange history and bylaws. She decided to help the organization grow and change it from within. Jini: I’m now kind of like a cheerleader for the grange because I see that, even clear across the nation, not just in California, all of us are looking at, how do we live sustainably? How do we keep our community centers? Where do we get the support? She says that in the early days, the grange helped farmers organize and fight railroad moguls. But the needs for today’s rural communities are different. Many granges are modernizing their halls to be emergency shelters. Lisa: Jini says members get discounts on propane and can attend practical workshops. Jini: Come on down and learn how to do CPR. Come on down and learn how to handle that ham radio. Come on down and learn this skill on how to put new gravel in your driveway. Lisa: Mendocino County grangers even started a retirement facility, open to anyone, that houses 170 people. In rural California, one concern comes up again and again. Voice: We had the fire here in 2017. Lisa: The Redwood Complex Fire killed nine people. It also destroyed 350 homes, 36,000 acres, and required thousands of people to evacuate. And when the roads opened back up, Jini tells me, she was the one with the key to the Redwood Valley Grange, which was still standing. She let PG&E in to get the propane turned back on. Jini: I told my husband, I can’t close the door. I can’t close the door to the grange ’cause all of our … Sorry. All of my neighbors were going back to see if they had a house or not, or whether their farms were there anymore, whether they had anything left at all. And they were driving right past the grange. Lisa: Jini, her husband, and other volunteers made brownies and coffee and put out a sandwich board saying: Come on in. Jini: And all of a sudden, people were bringing food down there. Red Cross was outside, FEMA was in the room, and they started answering people’s questions. Lisa: And families were able to connect. Jini: And this is all because of a grange hall.If we didn’t have the grange hall, none of this would’ve happened Lisa: Nationally, the grange was at its peak in the 1950s, with over 850,000 members. That dropped a lot over the decades as farmland was paved over for suburbs and membership in civic organizations dropped. But the last few years have seen membership grow incrementally. California has 120 granges, and in the last year alone, seven granges opened, some brand-new, some brought back to life. Jini Reynolds says revitalizing the grange is her calling. She’s working to reestablish granges in Fort Bragg and Upper Lake in the coming months. Jini says she knows that the grange needs to be truly inclusive to keep growing and represent all people living in rural areas. As someone with Paiute ancestry, that’s dear to her heart. She points out the national organization has changed language, like “grange master” to “president.” A number of granges, including in California, have a majority Latino population, and California’s state grange is translating all documents into Spanish. Jini: It’s going to be a while, but we’re working on that. And as far as the Indigenous people, we’re working on that. Lisa: Thinking about the future of the Anderson Valley Grange, Captain Rainbow gets a little nostalgic. Rainbow: When my generation became part of the grange, the old-timers, they needed us. And now I’m a geezer, now … Lisa: A new old-timer. And though the Anderson Valley Grange Hall fills up for dances and pancake breakfasts and seed exchanges, the chapter hovers between 40 and 50 members, and many of them are from his generation. Rainbow: We need some fresh blood. There’s still some folks who are coming and want to do small-time agricultural farming and stuff. Lisa: But he worries there won’t be enough or that they won’t have the same spirit. Rainbow: But who knows? Things evolve, they change. And who am I to claim that I know what’s gonna happen or what’s right. Why I came here was a sense of place and, I think, hopefully, that the grange can serve as a focal point for this sense of place. Lisa: And continue to be a space that brings people together in the Anderson Valley. Teresa Cotsirilos: This story was produced in collaboration with the California Report Magazine, which is a production of KQED in San Francisco. Victoria Mauléon is the magazine’s senior editor, and Sasha Khokha is its host. Suzie Racho is the show’s director/producer, Brendan Willard is its engineer, Hussain Khan is the show’s intern. To listen to more California Report Magazine stories, check them out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. REAP/SOW is a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. FERN News is our home on YouTube. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskawy, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Katie Gardner is the producer and video producer for REAP/SOW. And I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting at www.thefern.org.