Postcards from the Rogue Valley

Most personal narratives are built word by word. My friend Sophia weaves hers story by story. She is the most free- and deep-spirited person I know, a bookend to the anxiety and isolation that confines us now. 

From the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, Sausalito’s houseboat community, San Francisco’s transformational (a.k.a human potential) movement, trekking in Tibet, teaching survival skills in Northern Ontario, cultivating a gay community of singers and ballroom dancers in the Rogue Valley—Sophia has lived more lives than most cats. She is an artist and a grandmother of seven, too.

If she had a life motto, it might be, “You can do this girl!”

Sophia is 76.

Breaking away

I met Sophia a month after I moved here, through my friend Kathy who is a good friend of Sophia’s. They both belong to the international spiritual community, Eckankar, a religious group dedicated to recognizing each of as loving beings. 

Sophia grew up in San Jose, California, the third child of an optometrist father and a mother who earned a Phi Beta Kappa in Shakespearean English and danced with Martha Graham before surrendering to marriage and kids. Sophia attended private schools, skipped a grade, and in 1960 entered Berkeley at the age of 16, curious but sheltered. 

“Why didn’t you tell me that there are people who don’t believe in God?” Sophia asked her mom on her first trip home from college. Sophia’s father had agreed to support her at Berkeley if she joined a sorority and had a professional future. Sophia had her own ideas, quickly immersing herself in coffee house discussions with existentialists. “You believe in God?” they gasped.

When her mother died in a tragic swimming accident, Sophia a junior at Berkeley, was devastated: “My mother was my world.” It also set her free. “Here was this talented and accomplished woman who had buried her genius to do what was expected of her. It hit me like a bolt: Life is too short to live by other people’s rules.”  

Sophia moved out of the sorority, changed her major to art and psychology, and found a voice in the burgeoning Free Speech Movement, which eventually forced the university to allow rather than punish open political dissent.

“There we were, a bunch of students confronting the ‘machine.’ For the first time in my life, I felt my voice, my strength, I felt democracy at work,” Sophia said.

(Determined to honor her mother who was a champion swimmer, Sophia trained and swam from Alcatraz to Ghirardelli Square and, on another occasion, under the Golden Gate Bridge. She and her mother had dreamed of swimming the English Channel together.)

Houseboats and babies

While free speech, followed by antiwar protests, rattled Berkeley—and other universities nationwide—free living was sprouting at the waterfront in Sausalito, as “bohemians” turned decommissioned ferries into homes. Sophia visited a friend with a houseboat there, saw “all these middle class kids who had a good education but didn’t want to go into the system,” and joined in.

The piers were owned by a millionaire who said that as long as “you kids stayed busy,” they could rent space for a dollar a foot. Sophia connected with a man who owned a retired 90-foot Crowley tug and together they built a houseboat from a 38-foot World War II landing craft that rose and fell with the tides.

In the popular press, the floating settlement, called Gate Five, was variously described as an artists’ colony, a hippie commune, a pirates lair, and a health and safety hazard. The philosopher Alan Watts and painter Jean Vardar were neighbors.

When it came to boat building, Sophia was known as the “key caulker,” bringing the light touch she was developing in the potting studio she’d set up in an empty building on the waterfront. 

Then we started to have children. My first baby was the second baby born on the waterfront, in 1969. At the time, it was a felony to have a baby at home. No midwives or doctors would touch it. So we did it on our own, in our own way, like we did pretty much everything.

I thought I was this mother earth type and I would just have this baby! The baby came fine, but the afterbirth didn’t. The tide was out and no one could reach us. I got weaker and weaker and at one point I left my body and looked down from the ceiling and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m dead!’ 

I flew out a knothole into a field of light beams. Every experience in my life passed before me, in seconds, like there was no time. Then I heard a voice say, ‘that baby needs your milk’ and I chose to come back to my body. It was extraordinary.”

(Sophia, you should know, subscribes to the belief that “Soul”—the true self—may be experienced separate from the physical body and travel freely in other planes of reality.)

When the tides shifted and a doctor was finally able to reach Sophia’s boat, he gave her a shot of Pitocin and the afterbirth came out.

“I learned it was so beautiful and loving out there, that I don’t have to fear death.”

Sophia had a second child, Shiloh—by then a midwife and a doctor had joined the flotilla of houseboats—and soon there were enough kids to start a kindergarten. Buckminster Fuller donated a bright orange dome to fit a floating hexagon that became the community’s first school. Sophia continued to sculpt and invited others to share her studio.

After ten years of houseboat living, Sophia and the father of her second child moved to the hills above Sausalito. She decided to give marriage a try. Married in a meadow on top of Mount Tamalpais north of San Francisco, Sophia wore a solid pearl wedding gown while the groom surprised her riding in on a black stallion.

Sophia’s third child was born in a hospital, arriving with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and an Apgar score of zero. Sophia recalls: “A light came through the ceiling, down through me, then over to him. ‘Max, you choose to be here or not!’ I yelled. His chest rose up and Spirit filled his collapsed body.”

Transformation and self-expression

In 1971, a self-educated “thinker” named Werner Erhard made San Francisco his base for a new national movement called “est.” Equal parts Zen Buddhism and Dale Carnegie, est pushed participants to take responsibility for their lives and “get it” by discovering there was nothing to get: i.e., the situations we try to change or tolerate clear up in the process of life itself.

It was a powerful idea for Sophia, for whom personal transformation had become a fascination.

She trained intensively with Erhard and emerged recreated and empowered. She also found her calling.

“I’ve always believed that feeling unimportant is one of the most crippling emotions in the world and that creativity and courage are strong antidotes” Sophia said. “Once I started to experience the power of change and purpose, I wanted to give it away to others.”

She became a certified “awareness” counselor and opened her own practice. 

One of the first things I did was ‘clear’ people of their purpose in life. There was a system called ‘process work,’ in which  you asked a lot of questions, peeling away the veils and eventually wearing down the controlling mind, dropping more into the heart, until you got to the truth of who you are and who you are not, to the gifts you were meant to manifest on this planet.”

Sophia added cranial psychotherapy and energy healing to what she called her “Felix magic bag of tricks.” Some of Sophia’s first clients were AIDs patients, whose needs and deaths were just surfacing in San Francisco.

Like other spiritual seekers, Sophia had long felt a nudge to travel to Tibet and deepen her experience of Buddhism. At the peak of her work as a counselor, she sold everything she owned and set off on a one-year journey through Southeast Asia, one that ended up stretching beyond Tibet and the Dalai Lama. She traveled across China at a time when Westerners were suspect and scarce, subsisting on flexibility and endurance. She volunteered with Mother Teresa and soaked in the smells and colors and poverty of Calcutta. When she reached Tibet an inner voice quipped: “You didn’t need to come to the rooftop of the world to find enlightenment. It’s everywhere.”

While organizing a bus in Lhasa for Nepal, Sophia met Beth, a musical and athletic farmer who had grown up in New Brunswick, Canada, one of twelve children belonging to the town’s only doctor and nurse. They joined their lives for the next 16 years. (Beth nicknamed her “Angel,” a name that has endured.)

Building community

Sophia and Beth moved to Mendocino, California, where they worked a 350-acre farm for two years, then bought a 50-acre farm in the Rogue Valley where they began raising organic vegetables and lamb.

Sophia turned an old chicken coop into an office and started seeing clients again. “The sheep would go baaa-ing by,” Sophia said, as she challenged and supported her clients to find their own voice.

“It was a good life.”

When a lesbian couple, friends of Sophia and Beth, were stalked and murdered in 1995, the community rose up. Rather than protest hate, Sophia and Beth nourished the local gay community through music, dance, and adventure. They helped organize the Women with Wings choir (still alive today) and an outdoor adventure group with moonlight skis on Mt. Ashland and white water canoeing on the Rogue River. On Fridays, Sophia and Beth invited friends to their farm for “music nights.” The Summer Solstice became a yearly occasion honoring the memory of Michele and Roxanne, the murdered couple; as many as a hundred women would gather at the farm’s 80-foot deep gravel pit (with its excellent acoustics!) to raise their voices in song.

Sophia and Beth trained for a year in International Dance to participate in “Dancesport” in the 1998 Gay Games (Olympics for gays) in Amsterdam. They brought back what they learned and started offering ballroom dance classes locally.

As the word spread through the community, our classes became full. They were fun, they brought people out of the closet. But it was also like couples counseling—learning how to communicate, how to hold your partner, to lead and follow, to keep your head up, to flow, to surrender.” 

There were unintended consequences too: “We had a fantastic band and began having actual dances. I would dress all ‘femmed-out’ and soon some of the woman, routinely butch, started catching how much fun it was to wear a skirt.”

Running with the wolves

For most of her life, Beth, Sophia’s partner, had taught in Outward Bound, a premier provider of experiential and outdoor education programs for youth and adults. Every summer, she and Sophia would head to an Outward Bound school north of Thunder Bay in Ontario, where they taught three-week courses in cooperation and survival skills. (It was Outward Bound’s most remote location in the world.)

Amid all the 1999 talk about a possible Y2K apocalypse, Sophia, then 56, decided to head to northern Canada for a winter course in survival. She built ice shelters in minus 40 degree temperatures, maneuvered sleds pulled by Inuit dog teams across the frozen tundra. 

On the next to last day, she and one of her dog sled partners got into serious trouble.

The lead dog, Wendy, was the smartest dog, but she couldn’t have anyone next to her or she’d start to fight. But as long as you kept her on course, “”Mush” (let’s go), “Haw” (left) and “Gee” (right), she was okay.

“We got trapped in deep snow, and Wendy began attacking the dog behind her. It was the bloodiest battle in my life. I got off the sled to pull the two dogs apart while my partner settled the others. I became part wolf, it felt like my eyes got yellow and started to spiral. Half animal, half human, I managed to get Wendy’s jaws off the other dog and, covered in blood, we returned to Home Place.”

Wanting to shake the day’s fight from her soul, Sophia set out alone on skis at sun set, across a nearby frozen lake.

As I skied into the colors, the purples and oranges, a black wave on my left  kept coming.  When I stopped, it stopped. When I started, it started. ‘Wow, it’s a wolf,’ I thought. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid, I was so honored that this wolf and I were in communication. I’ve always craved wildness and, there I was, a wild woman who runs with the wolves.”

The Dominican Republic

Several years later, Sophia and Beth broke up and Beth returned to Canada. Sophia sold the farm and bought a small house nearby, surrounding it with over 100 rose bushes she transplanted from the farm.

“It was a quiet and challenging time. I kept asking, “What’s next?”

For years, Sophia and her first son, Dylan, had shared a fantasy of creating a small windsurf business on an island in the Tropics. Dylan had been traveling the world looking for great wind to surf and sail. One day, Dylan called from the Dominican Republic to say he had found the perfect place. Sophia jumped on a plane—following intuition, not impulse, she’d say—and moved to the Dominican Republic.  

“When I first landed in DR, I said to Spirit, ‘If you want me to stay here, show me my spiritual community,” Sophia said. 

After a year of offering water color classes, rescuing stray dogs, and teaching at an alternative school for Haitian girls, Sophia found a transformational dance system from Argentina that captivated her. Sophia explains:

Called Biodonza, which means ‘dance of life,’ it integrates music, authentic movement and heartfelt emotion to create intense experiences and perceptions of being alive in the here-and-now. We dance to feel. We dance to exist.

Around year seven of island life, Sophia “got this powerful sense that I needed to move back to the Rogue Valley.”

Courage, timing, and connections

This time, Sophia settled in a small, manufactured home abutting open land in Talent, just north of Ashland. She has turned the property into a wildlife and plant sanctuary. She’s walked almost every trail in Southern Oregon, often with a group of women in their seventies and eighties who inspire her (she completed an 8.6 mile hike just yesterday). She protects trees, saves cats, and facilitates spiritual conversations for Eckankar. She skis in the winter and swims naked, when possible, in the summer.

“If someone came to me and asked why I’m so courageous,” Sophia said to me recently, “I would tell them that I’ve had so much fear and insecurity in my life that courage is how I’ve survived.” 

She will tell you the importance of timing: “I’ve been fortunate to be on the edge—at Berkeley in the 60s, Sausalito in the 70s, the transformational movement in the 80s. I don’t know if you’d call it cosmic or karmic.”

Sophia will say that she’s always wanted to make a difference and bring connection to separation, courage to fear, and freedom to limitation.

In the age of COVID-19, Sophia hopes for a reset, “where we peel away to what is real and necessary—food, love, touch, spirit.” She reminds us that we are not alone. 

Tears will fill Sophia’s eyes as she speaks of her limitless love for her children Dylan, Shiloh and Max, and for the friends, colleagues, and communities that have supported her in a life she never imagined. 

“I have been so blessed.”

SUBSCRIBE
Add your name to the email “blast” announcing new posts. Please send your name and email address to: postcardsfromtheRV@gmail.com