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. In spite of the hard ride I don't think I ever really got started until after coffee at the 10AM 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.

Yet, Marguerite was a dangerous teacher and it wasn't the easiest of situations. Her absolutist style of teaching and the insistent quality of her line and silhouette could be a brutal master. World history and her interpretation of the Bauhaus, whose intense, rigorous, yet intuitively Modern line she was herself rejecting, could be blamed, I suppose. She fell under the influence of her self-defined 'master' Gerhard Marcks so completely some might consider it psychopathic. It was an influence she never escaped although she tried. The tortured path of this near-escape is clearly revealed in the Hansel and Gretel crumbs of the Marcks/Wildenhain correspondence. Strangely enough, I think the distance she kept from her own students was an attempt to avoid a replication of the patterns of her own life so dependent on Marcks, even if this desire was completely unconscious. Still, she was a great teacher to have. I think about her all the time and use her pots every day. But, one had to pick and choose from the lessons Marguerite had to teach. In the end, that was the lesson.