Stanley Crawford: An ode to a maverick mentor
Like many of us, I was saddened by the news of the death of acclaimed author and garlic farmer Stanley Crawford on Jan. 25. Over the past weeks I’ve taken stock, in spare moments, of the impact this great New Mexican has had on my life.
We’ve all had mentors; Stan was among my most significant ones. I met him in 1996 when
I was 25 and at a formative moment. I didn’t know what to do with my life. Far more significantly, I lacked a fitting philosophy of life, a way of flourishing in this world according to inner calling, not outer programming.
After a suburban Long Island childhood and college in an East Coast city, I’d come to Santa Fe to teach seventh grade at Santa Fe Indian School. In the summer between my first two teaching years, I worked on Stan’s El Bosque Garlic Farm to learn about organic agricultural and rural living. When I got the job, I felt awed and nervous. I was an aspiring writer myself, and Stan had recently published his best-selling A Garlic Testament. Also, though I thirsted for more connection to nature, I feared that living on the land would be difficult.
The first time I met Stan, I looked up into his clear eyes and could practically hear Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” playing in the background — bouncing off the mesas behind his adobe house and into his El Bosque Small Farm garlic fields. There he was, gray-bearded and 6-foot-3, esteemed author and friend of literati like Barbara Kingsolver, John Nichols and Bill McKibben. He wore a pair of dirty overalls with a hoe in his hands. I followed him out into a field, to weed some rows, in silence, the cool winds coming off the Sangre de Cristo foothills, the gurgle of the
river running in front of the field.
I was ecstatic. Never before had I cozied up this close to the earth. I bathed in the Rio Grande each morning before working with Stan, and also planted — on an experimental quarter acre nearby — my own blue corn, tomatoes, quinoa, amaranth and nearly two dozen other native and exotic food crops at the full moon, as my new farmer-neighbors did, to ensure a strong harvest. Stan first taught me the word permaculture — resilient, earth-friendly agriculture and culture — and its basic techniques.
Stan Crawford became a sort of earth mentor for me. My time in Dixon was like an internship with someone like Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Rachael Carson or Edward Abbey, all earth mentors. Humans are nature, but civilization forgets this innate interconnection. Earth mentors not only maintain this consciousness but can spark it in others.
However, the most significant gift Stan gave was neither exclusively environmental nor agricultural. Stan was the first person to break me out of mental boxes I didn’t know I lived within. He showed me what it’s like to be a maverick who lives via interior vocation instead of cultural expectation.
Stan had invented a playful balance between laboring in the open air for seven months and writing in his adobe studio for the other five. He and his spirited, creative Australian wife, Rose Mary, who died in 2021, built their beautiful adobe house in the late 1960s brick by adobe brick, entirely by themselves. And they lived without bosses or time clocks, in creative freedom, largely outside the system.
Stan writes in A Garlic Testament about “the pound weight of the real,” the wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic. When selling produce at the Santa Fe Farmers Market with Stan and Rose Mary, I’d weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my $6-an-hour wage and El Bosque’s other farm expenses. They were constantly “snatching from the cash flow,” as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity.
Yet that scarcity is what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area — I shear your sheep, you midwife for me — as well as a traditional communal relationship over irrigation that centered around maintaining the acequias. This wasn’t just pragmatism; a fuller, more genuine humanity blooms from the soil of subsistence. I saw many times again, after leaving New Mexico, when I came to work and live in Africa and Latin America. In the so-called Global South, existing along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps a person linked to others through reciprocity.
This, then, is the second great gift I received from Stan Crawford. And it’s a gift that kept on giving over the years we remained friends after my time on his farm: The awareness that individual happiness is a myth; people are people through other people. A family man, married to Rose Mary his whole life and dedicated to his two children, Crawford’s vision extended beyond the nuclear family into full-blown tribe.
How can I forget that shimmering spring moment — it stirs something in me today — when I moved from being Stan’s paid laborers to a member of his tribe?
On one of my last days at Stan’s, a half-dozen of us harvested a fall crop of squash and basil for the farmers market. Stan and Rose Mary cut basil on either side of me. I could hear the brook whenever the wind stalled; the sky was a powder-puff blue, the mesas a ridiculous paste of orange, and I felt entirely alive, cutting wrinkly basil leaves, placing them in my wooden crate.
Stan seemed elsewhere, “Kind of Blue” on the breeze, perhaps already in his next book. Clip-clip went his shears. (How many basil sprigs did he chop in his decades of farming?) Clip. The breeze picked up and I couldn’t hear the brook, just the swaying trees above, and the smell of chemise and sage mixed with the basil. Stan stood up to his full, lanky height and ran earth-covered fingers through his beard, looking out into the direction of the wind as if for a sign. Then he sighed, almost imperceptibly, and went back to clipping.
In Stan’s fields an idea germinated in me that would much later coalesce into a kind of general principle: Be in empire, but not of it. As the years went on, even as a Yankee pragmatism kept me somewhat cinched to convention, I’d try to follow this, walking up to the edge of radicalism. The heat of the flaming edge I found with Stan in Dixon — and later as a human rights monitor in Chiapas, Mexico; an aid worker in Bolivia and Liberia; and especially while living in a 12-by-12-foot off-grid cabin in North Carolina — kept alive the embers of a healthy maladjustment to what’s expected of me.
The long workday ended. Stan went to the till to fish out my wages. Wages that I could use with my low teacher salary on my high Santa Fe rent. But I couldn’t accept the wages this fall day. “Stan, I won’t take your money for this work,” I said, in young-man earnestness. “There’s nothing I would have rather been doing today.”
The older man looked at me from his heights, his blue eyes suddenly animated, and then he put his arm around my shoulder and invited me to a late lunch of foods from his farm, with his neighbors and kin. This, more than anything else, is what Stanley Crawford cultivated at El Bosque: an awakened, generous humanity interconnected with Mother Earth.