Harvesting History While Farming the Flats

Near the beginning of Harvesting History, a memoir of land and filmmaking and family, it is 1969, and Muriel Aggie Murch, a nurse, and her filmmaker husband Walter have moved north from Los Angeles, where Walter Murch had attended USC film school with a cadre of friends who included George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola has just founded his independent film company, American Zoetrope, in San Francisco, and the band of friends have settled where they can find affordable homes around the Bay Area. Walter and Aggie and their young son land in a houseboat in Sausalito, then very much a counterculture community.

It is the time of Woodstock and the Stonewall Riots, the Viet Nam War, and the very beginnings of organic farming. The Back to the Land movement has just begun to sprout. Aggie, a Brit who came to America after nursing school and met Walter at Johns Hopkins, is teaching Lamaze while Walter writes screenplays and edits whatever films come his way from George and Francis. A few years later, when their daughter is on the way, they buy four acres of a former dairy farm near Bolinas, across the bay from what is now Point Reyes National Seashore.

Those four acres, which the Murches name Blackberry Farm, will root their growing family and their peripatetic life following film productions from The Godfather to The Unbearable Lightness of Being around the world. The land also roots Harvesting History, a charming narrative of local and natural history, family memories, recipes, and film industry and farm lore, which rambles like the old roses that drape Blackberry Farm’s sagging wire fences.

The place comes alive in Aggie Murch’s memoir: the old farmhouse, built by the Portuguese family who parted out and sold off the former dairy after a divorce, the greenhouse, the big two-story barn built with stalls for the family horses below and a film studio and guest quarters above, the fruit trees, old roses, and vegetable gardens.

The story is peopled by neighbors, local characters, film crews and stars and friends from the industry, Aggie’s colleagues from the public radio station she helps found and records programs for, and family and friends from distant places, along with a changing cast of horses, chickens, and all manner of wilder creatures. All are part of the the fifty years of Murch family life in the four acres of land near Bolinas Bay, where the sometimes glamorous world of filmmaking meets the dirt-under-the-fingernails world of cider making, and the food and company are equally delicious.