Alix and David Becker celebrated their first season as Hudson Valley farmers with a late September Saturday afternoon “Fiesta del Campo” party at their farm, Farmstead Hudson Valley, in Stuyvesant, NY. There was much to celebrate. Not only had Alix managed to grow enough produce from seed germinated in her basement over the winter to run a stand at the Kinderhook farmer’s market – a brand and design consultant in a former life, she debuted t-shirts bearing the farm’s logo alongside the peppers and squash – but she’d done so during Covid and less than a year after moving to the East Coast from her native California.
Alix, whose personality is as ebullient as the weather at the Napa Valley ranch where her family has grown grapes since the 1970’s, politely balked when I characterized her and David, an artist, as among the California climate refugees that are increasingly finding their way to the Hudson Valley. However, the party was awash in them. There was David’s San Francisco art dealer, now living in Staatsburg, NY. An artist couple from Napa. A Berkeley musician. And Alix and David’s next door neighbor, even though she’s still dividing her time between Los Angeles and Stockport, NY, where the Beckers bought what’s said to be the oldest stone house in Columbia County, dating back to 1650.
“It’s more complex than that,” Alix told me. “For me it was about searching for something real.”
By real she meant the way she remembered the Napa Valley growing up on her parents’ property, Vine Hill Ranch. The ranch goes on and produces a critically acclaimed cabernet sauvignon. “Viscerally, I loved our property there,” she explained wistfully. “But everything has changed.”
The area became a victim of overdevelopment. The traffic got crazy. And then there were the fires. Before the family moved permanently to the Hudson Valley in September, 2020, she and her son Will returned to Napa as the Lightening Complex fires burned across much of Wine Country. Two years earlier it was the Paradise Fire. “We always had fires when we were growing up,” Alix remembered. “But not like we experienced in 2018. We were in the Bay Area but everybody was wearing masks. The sky was gray.
“It wasn’t the thing that drove us here,” she went on. But she recalled her thinking at the time: “’Maybe we should make our home in the Hudson Valley. In the event of an apocalypse we could be here.’”
Priscilla Woolworth, one of the guest’s at the September farm party, happily cops to the climate refugee description. After living in L.A. for thirty years she moved to Taghkanic, NY four years ago. She also said a combination of factors drove her to relocate, among them plentiful water. She explained the gymnastics – technical, gravitational and hygienic – that she performed to capture her excess shower water to irrigate her L.A. vegetable garden. It involved buckets and sump pumps.
An eco entrepreneur with an online store as well as a blogger who lived in New York City as a child, she offered some of the reasons the West Coast lost its allure. “The decreasing availability of water, air quality, and my desire to live closer to nature,” she said. “I also realized I missed the seasons. I longed for the fall. I longed for the winter.”
Before moving she rented houses during different times of year to better understand what living in the Hudson Valley full time would be like. She has no regrets. “I feel incredibly lucky to walk into the woods and forage for wild edibles that I wrote about for years. The idea of having a well? What a luxury! I still save water but I don’t keep a bucket in the shower.”
She rarely returns to Los Angeles. “I sort of went cold turkey,” she said. “I put all my energy into establishing roots here. I don’t want to miss some of the prime foraging times. I don’t want to miss the ramps in April and the morels in May.”
She also loves a small town’s feeling of community. “Our neighborhood is full of wonderful people,” she said.
Alix said the question she often got from the incredulous California friends she left behind was “What about the weather?” I assume they were referring to the Golden State’s abundant sunshine and the East Coast’s blizzards. As an occasional California tourist I can attest that the weather in LA, when the wildfires subside and the earth isn’t quaking, is the equal of anywhere on Earth. And if there’s anyplace that rivals Pandora, the lush alien planet in the movie Avatar, it’s northern California.
Does Alix, a fourth generation California, feel any guilt abandoning her home state? It was her grandfather that sold the National Park Service one of the first parcels of land in the early Sixties that became the Point Reyes National Seashore. Does she feel as if she’d betrayed California?
She gave it some thought and called me back. “I didn’t betray California,” she told me. “California betrayed me. There’s no going back. I feel sad for California. In the 70’s it was this carefree beautiful place to live. I feel incredibly sad what’s happened to the landscape. I feel sorry for people dealing with monsoons and mudslides.”
The Hudson Valley, she said, reminds her of the way California used to be. Farming here is also a way of carrying on a family tradition. “I feel this is so much like that but on a real level,” she said. “Real people doing real agriculture and taking care of their land.”
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgardner.com
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
