The San Marcos Trout Club

At the end of June 1997 Numenius and I moved into a leaky cabin from the 1930s that nestled in a tiny hidden community in the mountains above Santa Barbara. Called the Trout Club by the inhabitants and the US Postal Service and “the old fish farm” by the few Santa Barbarans who knew about it, it was originally set up as a place where well-to-do doctors and lawyers could ride their mules or horses up to in the summer months to fish (and escape their families and the oppressiveness of Fiesta, it seems). They built cabins and had themselves a rustic, peaceful, male time nestled among the oaks that bordered San Jose creek.

The Trout Club is now prime real estate. It houses an odd mixture of alternative lifestyle folk who shrewdly bought when they could, early Microsoft investors, and professionals. We were going to rent a cabin from one of the first of these while they travelled for a year to Cuba, Mexico, and Belize. The appeal was great: apart from the beauty of the spot overlooking the Channel Islands, there were forty fruit trees, including four avocados, an outdoor shower with solar-heated water, and a bike commute that went through at least five ecosystems (which led to the most incredible “birds on the way to work” list I ever expect to have in my life, as well as the best bicycling fitness).

It wasn’t pure Eden, though. There were problems, like the proliferation of rodents around all that fruit; the local snakes had their work cut out for them. It was the wettest winter in over a century, and the mountain threatened to fall down around our ears at any moment; the constant rain deprived us of a lot of solar-heated water. But it was exciting and reminded us it was still possible to live simply; that one’s surroundings and the wildlife that inhabit them constitute ample entertainment; and that this might be the kind of place we might consider living—provided we found it before it became trendy and expensive.