When Fletcher was still living in San Francisco, he would sit in Dolores Park and watch the hawks that circled above, write in his journal, and make observations about the birds he saw. “Once I watched a peregrine falcon attack and kill a pigeon. It just started to pluck the feathers out of the bird,” says Fletcher. He noticed that the falcon didn’t care where it was; whether in a city or a canyon, it would still roost and hunt in the same way. But Fletcher felt differently. The landscape around him mattered. “There just wasn’t enough wilderness. I needed more,” he says. “It wasn’t enough just to see the hawk occasionally.” In the city, wilderness felt like a parenthetical insertion, experienced only in rare moments. Fletcher was desperate for a deeper, more immersive, and more visceral connection to the wild.

Back then, Noël was working a desk job in the corporate sustainability sector. It was interesting work but she was unhappy. “I think I was so overworked that the only way I knew how to exist there was to just be a consumer,” says Noël. “I was buying fancy clothes and drinking fancy cocktails.” She decided to take a break from the city, seeking refuge in a nine-month farm and garden apprenticeship program at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where she began to learn the basics of working with the land to grow food and plants. She had been a backyard gardener before that, but she remembers being stunned by how much of a beginner she was when she started the program. “It was surprising to me that I had no idea what I was doing, that I had no idea what the plants were. It was all completely new to me,” she recalls. “It was a really steep learning curve, but it was also magical how the horizon kept shifting. First I got a basic understanding of plants and then … I became more drawn into the wild landscape.”