From when I first met Marcos Olivarez on Milpas in 2011 — and he vexed me sorely until I got him indoors — to his helping others out of homelessness on the pioneering Milpas Outreach Project that landed us all on the cover of the Independent, to adopting him as our crazy uncle and getting my mom to drive him to appointments, Marcos was a main character in our lives.
Retired Santa Barbara Police Department officer Keld Hove helped me get Marcos off the street back in 2012, and Marcos quickly became the Sally Army’s favorite client, starting a garden on their property. I wrote a grant to the Fund for Santa Barbara for Marcos to start Pushy Shovels in the city’s community gardens on the Eastside, where he helped others suffering from addiction to reconnect with soil, plants, and the joy of growing food and sharing it with others. He could make plants literally jump up out of the ground. I used to think of him as an agronomist, someone so gifted with soil and plants, but with no land.
Marcos would drop off multiple five-pound cabbages for my daughter and me from his garden, and we often wondered where he thought we were hiding the Russian army that would eat it? He helped an Eastside team cultivate a garden at Franklin Elementary, and the kale was tree-sized.