22 DESTINATION VASHON || 2010–2011

four-mile triangle engaged in a daily con-spiracy of cheating death and redefining youthful insanity. It was a Charles Russell painting, a Paul Harvey broadcast and Mad Magazine all rolled into one impos-sibly pastoral scene.

But behind the enchanting facade, it was hard work, aching backs and dirt under the fingernails, homemade clothes, home-canned vegetables and homegrown tedium. Housecleaning, cooking, dishes, clothes washing, baby tending, garden weeding — a farmer’s daughter’s life added up to work work work work work. The only urbane moments in life came from Life Magazine and books and, on Saturdays, the Texaco Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, a much beloved soundtrack to weekly cinnamon roll production.

As a teenager, all I could think about was escaping — escaping the dirt, the unending work, the sidewalk-less terrain, the unsophisticated people, the way-too-low-on-the-social-scale farming profes-sion. I loved my family with all my heart, but I yearned to replace their league, these simple farmers with their sunup-to-sun-

down ways, with people I thought were more in keeping with my destiny and high-rent sensibilities: lawyers, architects, opera singers, city people. When I left for college, I had my eyes fixed on New York City and center stage of the Metropolitan Opera. I was a budding opera singer and a fully formed snob.

Little by little, I got as far away from the ranch as I’d dreamed. I sang in Europe. Seattle became my home. My work took me to New York (in the garment trade, not as a singer), Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Paris. When I’d given up the rag business and returned to singing, I lived in Seattle’s Pike Place Market in a redeveloped pen-sioner’s hotel — an elegantly gritty urban home with journalists and artists, trust fund bachelors, brioche-baking café own-ers and picture perfect panhandlers for neighbors. The dirt was where it belonged — in flower pots on the roof deck and under the fingernails of the market ven-dors. I still visited the ranch regularly, and treasured those visits. But $10 million could not have lured me back there to live.

So, what’s that old chestnut? You can take a girl named for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm out of the country, but you can’t take the farm out of her soul?

Vashon Island is my home now. We moved here five years ago on what seemed a whim but now appears a fated course. The day we first set foot on the Island, I kept thinking, “This place feels just like home” — meaning … the ranch in Idaho. How did I know I was being enticed back to my roots, to a community that trea-sured lost domestic arts and the miracle of growing things in fertile soil? How could I know there were farmers — real farm-ers — here, in this New Millennium hide-away? This Island, where farming once ruled the land, had gone through its own revolt — only now to be returning in little grass frog leaps to its own lost pond. How did I know I was coming here to go home?

I had stumbled on a place where a new generation of farmers reaps what it sows and brings those organic fruits proudly to market, contented and tenacious in the unsung heroics of their chosen profes-sion; a place where tractors aren’t yard art, a place where kids are making new-

fashioned jam, a place where farmers named Michelle and Leda are as respected as ones named Kurt and George, all conducting the business of sunup-to-sundown agriculture so that someone else has something to plant or eat. I came home to a place called Vashon Island, and I stood in the presence of these farmers and swooned with admiration, and maybe a little envy, at what they’d embraced. I blushed at my Benedict Arnold campaign against my own agrarian heritage, and felt in that shame an indescribable pride in my family for everything they’d done to make the world a better place, in the pro-fession called farming.

Wittman Farms, now run by third and fourth generations of my family, was named The Millennium Farm of the United States in 2000. My brother and cousin went to Washington D.C. to accept that honor on behalf of generations of careful stewards of fertile land along McCormack Ridge, a place the nuns who were my teachers always referred to as “God’s country.”

My own reward came in living long enough to see the folly in my youthful condescension, the crime in allowing such snobbery to blind me to such a magnifi-cent view. The bonus on that lesson was finding a place like Vashon Island where I can celebrate my roots, be given another chance to get dirt under my fingernails and watch things grow, surrounded by farmers who are careful stewards of an honorable way of life and another little patch of “God’s country,” who are only too happy to share their bounty and their secrets with a prodigal farmer’s daughter.

mon – thurs 11-7fri-sat 10-8

463-216317607 Vashon Hwy SW

RebeccaWittmanRebecca Wittman runs Zeteticus, a marketing design studio on Vashon Is-land. She loves working in her garden, where

she sometimes raises a row of wheat in homage to her family’s farm.