Hunt Prothro statement on his Pond Farm experience, 1972-1978

I loved being at Pond Farm during the summers of my 20s. We camped out with the rest of the Pond Farmers and worked an intense but relatively short day. We closed up shop at 3 PM, and there was still time to take long runs up the hill or go to the beach. We ate late, tucked the children into bed in the big canvas J.C. Penny tent my parents had given us, and walked up the path to the showers in Schoolhouse Canyon campground.

The path was unpaved and deep in powdery silt, as fine as talc or the dust of magnesium carbonate. A stark black, peripheral rim of redwood trees against the pale night sky, even at 10 PM in mid-July, formed the spiky western horizon. This same evening silhouette in any other context, the Sierra in summer or an evergreen and deciduous skyline in the winter back east, brings to mind the fragrance of bay, of madrone and redwood and the cool evenings of the Russian River valley. It is centuries ago and this morning and I am never far from the sensuality of that thoughtful life.

In the mornings I rode a bike up the hill through Armstrong Woods. Despite the hard ride, I don't think I ever really got started until after coffee at the 10 AM break. The fragrance of coffee and clay in the viscous, cool mornings of studio life everywhere takes me back to those Pond Farm mornings. No, I don't think I have ever left Pond Farm. It is hard to imagine how it all began; it was such an improbable choice. Even now, in the studio, I'll look around in surprise at this way of life, in disbelief, more or less, that my work is still unfolding in unexpected ways, and that the legacy of Pond Farm is a continuous present.