The Topanga Frequency
After I got past Scooch, a small terrier with a big bark, who was determined to protect his person, I entered a shaded paradise. The sound of moving water and the lush plant life that surrounded me, along with the wooden house and deck, immediately brought down my blood pressure as Scooch’s yapping faded into a distant memory. Although there were no stone lanterns or raked sand, I felt as though I had entered a Japanese garden, a sacred healing space, and a hot spring and cold pool would be waiting for me around the corner.
Like a mystical being, Gail floated through her garden whispering to her plants. Her feet were bare, and it was obvious that she had a deep connection with the plant life around her, one that was beyond my comprehension. Like golden coins, loquat seeds sat collected on a plate on the wooden table where we sat to talk. Gail looked me in the eye and said, “Topanga has a frequency, a very pronounced frequency. And I think that’s why it’s always attracted the people it has.”
Barefoot Adventures
It was as though Gail’s life began when she moved to Topanga. “Can we go back to where you were born and where you grew up,” I asked.
“No,” she said.
That threw me off a bit, but later she explained, “I couldn’t embrace the path of my parents. I had to find my own. I’m just cut out of a whole nother pattern.” She believed that in the sixties and seventies young people began searching for a deeper meaning. She found it in Topanga. This is where Gail really “experienced life to the fullest.”
Gail’s Topanga story began when she met Devon Carter and Merrick Davidson, a couple that lived over a bridge and down a dirt road that no longer exists called Brookside Drive, down at the bottom of the S-Curves.
“The minute I stepped my foot in Topanga, it was so right. And I couldn’t get rid of that, that knowingness. I knew I had to be here, so I just stayed.”
When she visited Devon and Merrick in their Topanga cabin she had found home. “I just moved in,” she said with a smile. She slept on their living room floor for a time and remembered adventuring, often barefoot, through the canyon with Devon, bringing their straw baskets to the Health Food Store to buy veggies and fruit and raiding the Goodwill bin at the center to make hippie clothes. “It was like the best shopping ever,” she remembers. It was at Devon and Merrick’s cabin that she met their friend, Russell Tune.
Endless Gardens, a Gypsy Caravan, and the Celebration of a New Life
“The minute I met him, I knew he was so special.” Gail described Russell as a “beautiful soul.” He was “tall and willowy” with strawberry blond hair and beard, “all muscle, not a drop of fat.” Russell was an architect, determined to create with appropriate technology.
“He was all about using what generally gets tossed away,” Gail said.
He bought a piece of land near Topanga State Park and built a “gypsy caravan,” a house on top of a green dump truck. The two of them created their version of a sustainable utopia. With no electricity, their nights were lit by candles and propane lamps and Gail cooked all their meals on a wood stove.
“I grew my own groceries,” she told me excitedly. “Squash, cucumbers, it’s hard to grow leafy stuff because the critters love it, but I managed.” Gail remembers wanting the “total experience,” living off the land, close to the earth, and she “got it in spades.”
Gail gave birth to their daughter, Sage, inside their gypsy caravan. She wanted to inspire other young couples to have home births. When Russell caught his daughter in his arms, a bevy of Topangans witnessed the birth, celebrating Sage’s arrival. Russell constructed a wooden cradle with a crystal embedded in the headboard. It hung from macrame cords and swung from the top of their gypsy caravan. Gail remembers being able to reach the hanging cradle from the loft in which they slept and gently rocking Sage to sleep. Soon, she was running around barefoot, just like her mama. It was time to build a house they could raise a family in. Russell began the process. Sage was two, when Russell’s life was taken by cancer. “It was incredibly heart wrenching,” Gail remembers.
A Voice from Above
After the cremation and a ceremony in Topanga, Gail was in shock, left with a toddler and the frame of a house. She asked “the Lord” for help, because she didn’t know who else to talk to.
“What do you want me to do?” She remembers asking. “Do you want me to build this house, or do you want me to sell the land and move on? The answer was so loud, it was so palpable, ‘Of course you’re going to build that house!’” Startled, she looked around, assuming someone was playing a trick on her, but she sat alone. After that, she never looked back.
“Were you bitter that your man was taken from you?” I asked.
“I didn’t dwell on that stuff,” she replied, “I had a kid to raise and a house to build.”
Merrick, who had introduced her to Topanga, led the charge. He rounded up groups of people every weekend to come to Gail’s property and build the house. Men and women, cooking crews, crews “hammering away and crews doing this and crews doing that.” The community of Topanga came together to help this woman and child in a time of need.
“I couldn’t even tell you where they came from or sometimes who they were. It’s kind of like a dream.” Gail did her part. “If there was wood to be salvaged, I was there. This whole house is made of recycled wood.”
She quickly picked up her building skills. “I was an herbalist, not a home builder, until I had to be. The universe had other plans for me.”
To this day, Gail is astonished that she was able to salvage so much wood and that her friends stood behind her to design and build her beautiful home.
Living in a Salad Bowl
Although Gail never liked the title, she became known as the “Herb Lady.” She put posters around the canyon and organized herb walks that would end at her house. The participants collected local herbs. They sat around in a circle and talked about the properties of the plants and possible ways to use them in recipes and then made a big salad out of the wild edibles that were harvested on the walk.
“We live in a salad bowl, we really do!” Gail is truly a plant lover. “They give us amazing energy. I just love being with them.”
Gail also teamed up with Casey Patterson, a hard-core cyclist, who had won a race across the United States and was also a fellow Topanga mom, to help her with her company, Wilderness Bicycle Tours. They would take groups of people up to the LA-Ventura County line area and guide them through parks. As well as being a guide on the trail, Gail was in charge of cooking up a healthy meal at the end of the journey and presenting it on picnic tables with tablecloths and candles. “We made it very lovely; it wasn’t just strung together.” Gail remembers when Sage and Mary, Casey’s daughter, first learned to ride their bikes on those trips up the coast.
Sage went to Topanga Elementary and Gail was extremely involved as a room mom.
“It’s very important that parents are interested and want to be a part of it,” she said. She would go on field trips and kids would come over to her place to take walks in the park after school. “All of a sudden, Sage was out of elementary school,” she reflected.
Gail recently turned eighty, and Sage was visiting with her two kids on Memorial Day weekend. “It just doesn’t make sense,” Gail spoke about how life passes so quickly. “And it doesn’t feel real. It’s been like a snap and here I am. You can’t get it until you walk through it,” she added.
Topanga Potluck
Gail celebrated her eightieth at the Mermaid with her partner Bill Buerge and over a hundred friends that came to the festivities.
“Topanga potlucks are the best, the absolute best. There’s no heaviness. People are just being themselves. And that’s one of the things I really cherish about Topanga, really awesome people settle here.”
Gail acknowledged that Topanga is changing and as the money rolls in and the mansions multiply, the “little down-home stuff” that makes Topanga special, is slowly disappearing. She is grateful that she “got so many satisfying years out of this wonderful little town.”
As night fell upon her idyllic garden and our conversation came to a close, Gail handed over a last nugget of wisdom, “all the body needs is good stuff to make it stronger and better: good food, good juju, lots of laughter. You know, good people around you.” She smiled and slipped some loquat seeds into my hand. Then she picked me some fresh oregano from her garden and sent me on my way.
