The Best of Two Worlds

Spring tiptoes late into Eve Jursch’s valley, with a blush of blossoms in the meadow, a hint of basil in the soil. A recovering CEO, Jursch is an organic farmer now. Eight years after she moved here alone, her life has slowed to the rhythm of the seasons and pivots with the turn of each day.

She spends most of her time running this 20-acre farm. But she still works; once a week she commutes to Ventura. In November, she stepped down from a plum job as CEO of Patagonia Inc., opting to become a part-time vice president of the revered outdoor clothing company. By plane and car, the commute takes up to seven hours each way.

Jursch, 58, spent years searching for balance between her two worlds, trying to figure out just what she is: A farmer? An executive?

After experiencing both extremes, and making some false steps along the way, she has finally answered the question, crafting a life that keeps her in two unparallel universes.

Her transition began years ago, while she was still fully involved in the kind of life professional women are supposed to covet. She had burst through the glass ceiling, becoming a top executive at more than one company. And though she had the big title, the Brentwood house, the Mercedes-Benz . . . she also had the sense that something was missing.

“It started with a yearning for something more meaningful,” she says simply.

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On the farm, Jursch usually starts her day at 5 a.m. with a strong cup of coffee and list of chores.

Just after dawn, she heads out the door without a shower or makeup, a fleece pullover wrapped around her sturdy shoulders. Her four dogs trot alongside her to the sheep shed. Her stride is easy and unhurried. Jursch knows her 25 sheep by name.

This morning, she checks them for hoof rot. If manure gets trapped inside, the hooves will split. Her farmhand, 27-year-old Paco Trejo, grabs Beau by the horns, pulling the ram upright. It is cold enough to see Trejo’s quick puffs of breath.

Jursch stoops to wipe Beau so he can urinate properly. Beau bleats and squirms a little. Next, she shears the black crust from his hooves.

“Getting rid of this stuff, sweetie pie,” she coos, then strokes his face.

When she first moved here, she had no experience with farming or organics--and neither did Trejo, the nephew of a man she knew in Topanga. She once watched a neighbor clip sheep hooves and had seen a video on the procedure.

In May, when it’s warm enough, she and Trejo will shear the sheep with the help of a professional. If they’re lucky, local hand spinners will pay about $40 each for 4 pounds of fleece from a few choice sheep. That’s a bit less than, say, the bottom line at Patagonia, which has $180 million in annual sales worldwide.

But Jursch says she’ll get more out of a sheep’s $40 than any big paycheck she ever made.

“Like Thoreau once said, and I don’t know how he said it exactly. . . . He said there’s a whole lot of people who go to work, back and forth, back and forth, and they come to the end of their lives, and they realized they haven’t lived at all. You know? So that’s what this was. This was for the experience of being free and being in the wild and a whole new life adventure.”

Early Kinship

With the Outdoors

As a kid growing up in San Francisco, Jursch was smitten with the idea of a life linked to the land. Her parents, who raised four kids, stoked her kinship with animals and the outdoors. Her mother, a homemaker, nursed injured animals such as a chicken with no legs. Her father, an engineer for Southern Pacific Railroad, took the family on hikes.

In 1960, Jursch enrolled at UC Berkeley, studying French and Chinese, with a minor in drama. She thought about becoming a diplomat. But two years later, she ran out of money, dropped out and took a job at a department store in San Francisco. She found that she had a good head for business and a knack for reeling in customers.

Nothing slowed her scurry up the retail ladder--not marriage, not motherhood. She worked as a saleswoman, fashion buyer and general manager for major chains, including Broadway Stores and J.W. Robinsons.

In 1980, at 38, then known as Eve Rich, she became CEO at Contempo Casuals, a clothing chain that caters to young women. During a 10-year tenure, Contempo grew from 28 stores to 300. She loved it, and she and her husband and teenage son lived in an art-filled Brentwood home. But traveling 20 weeks a year, working six-day weeks and turning out for society functions were wearing her out.

One day, in 1985, her sister mentioned that she had signed up for a one-week camping trip across the Sierra on horseback. Jursch, who had little riding experience, invited herself along. Just to get away.

Mindful of her manicured red nails, Jursch took her turn packing the mules. The group rode through thunderstorms, on 18-inch-wide trails, into swarms of bees. On their first night, Jursch and her sister begged from tent to tent for peppermint schnapps, anything to take the edge off their aches and bruises.

Had there been phones, says Jursch, “I would have called my husband that first night and said, ‘Drop a helicopter. I want out of here.’ ”

But the trip opened a door.

“I think it released something wild in me,” Jursch says. “When you’re devoted to the paradigm I was in--the big career thing--there’s no time to explore. There was something out there so beautiful that to get to it, I had to change things.”

In the next few years, she bought horses and began riding every day. She traded her Mercedes-Benz for a Toyota 4Runner. Meanwhile, she was drifting apart from her husband, a banker. She felt he had never understood the changes in her; eventually they divorced.

At the end of 1990, she left Contempo and took a job as president of the Thrifty Drug store chain. At the time, Jursch was the only top female executive at a major Southern California retailer. But the experience was not a happy one; she left Thrifty after 10 months. Newspaper accounts quoted from a Thrifty Corp. statement said that Rich and the company’s chairman had “differences over management matters.” A story in The Times noted that she had been known as a “dynamo executive” but was dubbed “autocratic Eve” at Thrifty.

“The parent company wanted it to change, but the company itself didn’t want to change,” Jursch says. “And that was a big switch for me, because I was leaving [Contempo] a company that I really loved, and I went to make [Thrifty] something different . . . but nobody wanted to make it different. It just turned out to be a lost cause, and so we parted company.”

At 50, for the first time in her adult life, she was out of work. With her son grown, she found herself thinking about her childhood dream of a simple, rural life.

Looking Beyond

the Southland

Jursch started to poke around the Sacramento area, where her parents lived at the time. Her son, an archeologist, now 36, had his own life, and there wasn’t much tying her to Southern California.

A real estate agent mentioned Willits, population 5,000, in Little Lake Valley, 140 miles north of San Francisco.

Jursch drove down the valley’s winding roads to a place surrounded by a wildlife refuge and backed by the San Hedrin mountain range.

“When I came down that hill,” Jursch recalls, “I said, ‘That’s it.’ I hadn’t even looked inside the house. It was just for the creek, the pastures.”

In 1992, after a six-week escrow, she packed up a U-Haul trailer and headed north to the place she dubbed Muddy Fox Ranch.

“The first two years [on the farm] were terrible,” Jursch says. “First of all, I didn’t realize how much I was into my identity as head of a company. . . . I was used to being queen bee. . . . And so when I left that, and I was out in the middle of the wilds here with no one caring who I was, that was a big transition. And it was pretty sad at times.”

During her first years in Willits, she still traveled around the country on consulting jobs, which included checking out potential acquisitions for expanding companies. After one especially bad week, she was back on the farm looking forward to relaxing when her friend, Fred Marshall, an organic gardening instructor, dropped by.

Time to irrigate the pasture, he told her. She picked up a drill for the first time and headed out to work on the pipes.

Her black cloud lifted.

“It all kind of just dissipated into this whole magical world,” she says.

She cut back on consulting; she threw herself into the farm, under Marshall’s guidance.

“And when I decided to change my whole approach, you know, my thinking, then I really started to get into it. . . .” Jursch says. “It was kind of a rebuilding of myself.”

With Trejo, she figured out how and when to sow eggplant, specialty peppers and artichokes; in the process, they had long conversations about their lives. They planted 4,000 sequoia cuttings. They sold their eggs, vegetables and other goods to local stores, sometimes breaking even in a season. They heaped sheep manure and sunflower stalks into a compost heap.

“I really love this place,” Trejo says. “We’ve been growing up on this ranch, Eve and me.”

Jursch was learning the cadence of the seasons, when Patagonia threw her for a loop.

Blurring Lines

of Work and Life

At Patagonia, founder Yvon Chouinard, 61, a renowned mountain climber and environmental activist, has built a company known for blurring the lines between work and life. Employees sometimes work barefoot or with wet hair, fresh from the surf down the street. Chouinard zips out the door when the surf is up, schedule be damned. He likes to hire what he calls “dirt bags,” or outdoor junkies. Of 900 employees worldwide, he brags, only three or four have MBAs.

For 20 years, Jursch had shopped at Patagonia’s Ventura store and been tickled at the sight of employees’ dripping-wet wetsuits hanging off the wall. She admired the company’s values, which uses recycled soda bottles in its fleece and only organic cotton in its sportswear.

In 1996, Chouinard asked her aboard as a part-time consultant--just every other week or so, whenever she could make it down from Willits--and Jursch could not say no.

“I went through a period where at first I thought, ‘Oh, I have to get back into the work thing. This is too lonely out here.’ ”

Then, in May 1999, Chouinard offered her the CEO’s spot. Again, Jursch could not say no.

“I thought, ‘That’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I’ll just shift things a little bit,’ ” she says.

She still made it home to the farm every weekend but was being pulled in two directions.

“I kept saying to myself, ‘God, am I an executive? Or am I a farmer? Am I executive? Or am I farmer?’ And then when I found my place, which was none of that, but it was a place that was singularly mine . . . then things started to gel for me, and there was this peacefulness inside that I was able to enjoy and give to and receive from.”

A few months later, Chouinard appointed a CEO for Patagonia’s parent company, Lost Arrow Corp. Jursch saw her opening. She told Chouinard that he did not need two CEOs. She would take a part-time vice president’s job and focus on what she liked best--working with the company’s buyers on product development and sales strategy.

“See, at my time in life, I’m not trying to get to the top spot,” she says. “I want to feel engaged by what I’m doing. . . . I want to work with people I love. And, boy, that’s Patagonia.”

At Patagonia, Jursch was applauded for scheduling work around life, says her colleague, Patagonia Vice President Bob Kelleher. He had worked with Jursch at Contempo, where the market demanded new products in stores every eight weeks. Jursch, he says, was “very aggressive, very disciplined . . . and very competitive.”

Now, he says, “she’s maybe at peace with the lifestyle she has got and is in love with both parts . . . even though they are distinctly different.”

Jursch’s sister, Dixie Finley, traces the changes to their horseback-riding trip in 1985. But she never dreamed that Jursch would push aside her career.

“It’s not her reason for being anymore,” says Finley, 54, an environmental scientist. “Her priorities changed from the mad executive world to really being at peace with herself, knowing what’s important.”

Fashioning a

Simpler Existence

In Willits, Jursch’s wood-frame house has three bedrooms, a brick fireplace and walls brushed in apricot or salmon tones. She keeps it neat and simple, with a decor that includes family photographs, oil paintings of fruit or wildlife by local artists and vases full of fresh flowers from her garden.

Her home-canned tomatoes line a bottom shelf in the kitchen. At her uncluttered desk, she writes letters to friends. She doesn’t log on to her computer much from the farm.

Her library, which stretches across her living-room walls, includes books by Shakespeare and Aristotle, books on computer programs and knot tying.

Her TV has been broken for a year.

Recently, she moved her ailing 87-year-old mother into the house. Family members drop by often, and so do friends, whom she occasionally grabs for a movie or a play in town. Or a hike in the 80-acre wildlife refuge that she owns down the road from her farm.

On this afternoon, Jursch and Marshall, her organic-gardening friend, decide to take a hike. It is pouring rain. They trudge up a hill so steep that it’s known as the toboggan run. Marshall points out the remains of a deer, picked clean to the bone, probably by a bobcat. The trail is bright with wildflowers and offers a spectacular view of the fir-packed valley.

As usual, the afternoon peters out before she’s done with chores.

At 8 p.m., Jursch calls to her dogs, “C’mon pups!” her voice as cheery as it was in the early-morning darkness. “Let’s close! Let’s close!”

In the darkness, she feeds the chickens, closes up the coops and heads to the barn. She breaks carrots in half for the two horses and pets the cats.

“Hi, Mango,” she says to her orange tabby. “Take care of everybody, OK?”

“Night-night,” she says, and turns off the light.

At 8:30, Jursch is back in her garage, shooing the dogs into their houses.

“OK!” she announces and opens her arms like a loopy ballet dancer after one too many pirouettes.

Jursch crawls into the doghouse, her rear-end sticking out. She tucks her dog Marco into his blue fleece blanket, just the way he likes it, and gets more pleasure from that small gesture than she ever got from a first-quarter earnings report.

“Night-night, Marco,” she says.

She blows him kisses. And the day is done.

“Finis,” she says, beaming.

“Fun life.”

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Renee Tawa can be reached at renee.tawa@latimes.com.