Frieda Kipar Bay engages with plants and landscapes, at first, by watching and listening.
“It helps me learn what the land has to teach me, and what I might offer in return,” she said.
The practice feels especially meaningful as she gets to know her new home.
Her family recently moved to Montague from northern California. They’re grateful for our region’s beauty and the welcoming spirit of local residents, but they’re also in deep grief.
Kipar Bay left Sebastopol, California last August with her partner, Jesse Olsen Bay, and their children, Yarrow, 11, and Altair, 4.
“If it was just me, I would have stayed,” she said. “But we needed to find a place where our kids could fall in love with the landscape without having to watch it burn. We left our home due to the heartbreak of climate change.”
Like many others north of the Bay Area, they evacuated multiple times. Long before the pandemic, they wore N95 masks due to smoky conditions.
“Every autumn for six years, we experienced red alerts and persistent haze,” said Kipar Bay.
Intense winds pulled down power lines and spiked fires. “We learned the difference between wildfires — which move in a more natural way — and firestorms, where destruction is swift and unpredictable. It felt apocalyptic, seeing the orange sky day after day,” she said.
Despite their grief, the Bay family is moving forward. Frieda Kipar Bay is an herbal clinical practitioner who teaches classes in herbal medicine-making.
“I love sharing knowledge about herbal energetics from a Daoist framework,” she said.
Jesse Olsen Bay, a musician who spent much of his career providing live music for dance classes and performances, is currently gaining credentials as a music therapist. He’s the grandson of Tillie Olsen (1912-2007), a widely published author and leading feminist who worked as a union organizer and political activist. Her stories about the lives of women and working class people remain popular. In 2014, Olsen Bay created a recording for which he set to music some of his grandmother’s writings that were never published.
When asked if they feel like climate refugees, Kipar Bay said, “I reserve that term for people who have it much worse than we do. In many parts of our world, people are suffering terribly due to the impacts of climate crises. My family has been able to land somewhere that feels safer than the place we left. I think of myself as a climate transplant.”
An avid gardener, Kipar Bay tracks where medicinal and other plants are moving. “The plants follow the water. The Northeast is getting wetter, while parts of the south are getting much drier.”
Kipar Bay finds it impossible to deny that the environmental situation in her former home is worsening. “The fire season in northern California used to be from September through November. Now it’s July through December. We had to ask ourselves: how will we adapt?”
She’s dismayed that many of her friends seem numb to the crisis.
“Those who can afford to leave the area during the fire season, go to Mexico or Costa Rica. That wasn’t our reality, though,” she said.
Kipar Bay falls in love with the place where she’s living. “So I’m doing that now in Montague.” She admitted, however, “When I drop that practice, I feel devastated. I spent 22 years in northern California. I love it intensely.”
As parents, Kipar Bay and Olsen Bay had to process the move with Yarrow and Altair. “They miss their friends,” said their mom, “but they like that there’s no fire threat here. While still in California, they used to ask, ‘Will we be safe tonight?’ That was heartbreaking.”
Their son Yarrow, at the time 10 years old, had been hearing for months that they were probably going to move. Now he says that it didn’t seem real “until we were literally packing up.” He added, “I understand why we had to leave. Our house was in danger of burning down, and one of our favorite places, a spot with hot springs and cabins and yurts, did burn down. It was on the side of a mountain. It was really sad.”
Yarrow misses his California friends, but loves his new home because he prefers winter to summer.
“I love snowboarding,” said the innovative pre-teen, who also enjoys playing the violin, reading, building with Legos, harvesting wild food, and creating debris huts. “This is a great area.”
Kipar Bay grows medicinal plants, including blue cohosh, goldenseal, black cohosh, and Solomon’s seal. “I focus on medicinals, while Jesse pretty much takes care of the vegetable gardening,” she said.
She’s interested in establishing woodland herbs rather than conventional farming. “I like to learn about what’s already here and to discern what the earth naturally wants.” Kipar Bay emphasized the need to address invasives like knotweed and bittersweet. “Invasives manifest as big swaths and take over the understory. It’s vital for us to tend to the understory because, if we don’t, the understory goes away.”
Kipar Bay’s approaches to growing and tending plants align with her interest in holistic health practices.
“I always consider the environment and ecology, which can be a hugely subversive act in the face of modernity and colonialism. I want to help people understand that our health and the health of the environment is in our own hands,” she said.
This past winter — Kipar Bay’s first in western Massachusetts — she looked forward to plants returning in the spring.
“Getting my hands in the dirt is what keeps me going,” she said. “But during the winter, in the absence of greenery, I engaged in animal tracking. Just being outside, getting to know the area … that really helped.”
Kipar Bay was happy to discover a project in our region called the People’s Medicine Project, which reminded her of work she did in California.
The People’s Medicine Project website states that “healing is not an individual process, but a collective one” which must engage with “larger contexts of community care, land stewardship, and social justice in order to create lasting effects.” The Project runs free alternative health clinics at sites in Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden counties, offering herbal consultations, trauma-informed body work, and community care.
“In Sonoma County, I was part of a project that went to farms to attend to migrant workers,” said Kipar Bay. “We addressed headaches, diabetes, foot problems, and chronic pain, and offered acute first aid. So it was great to learn that there’s something like that here, too.”
For the Bay family, homeschooling means engaging the children in real work. “We make medicines in order to learn fractions and proportions,” said Kipar Bay. “There are so many ways for kids to learn.”
In leaving California, the Bays moved from an off-grid home in a small farm compound typified by community living.
“We had a composting toilet and greywater system. We want to move in that direction here, but these things take time … and money,” said Kipar Bay.
Olsen Bay added, “Our move to this area feels like an experiment,” he said. “This is a wonderful place to raise a family. We’re embracing the unknown.”
To learn more about Frieda Kipar Bay’s work: www.friedakiparbay.net
Eveline MacDougall, the author of “Fiery Hope,” is an artist, homeschooling mom, and musician. Readers may contact her at eveline@amandlachorus.org.