5/20/2020 Death of a Radical Rewilder | Literary Hub

L I T E R A R Y H U B

Death of a Radical Rewilder

Joanna Pocock on the Life and Times of Finisia Medrano, 1956-
2020

By Joanna Pocock May 20, 2020

 

e charismatic, nomadic rewilder Finisia Medrano, who died of a heart attack on

April 3, 2020 in Caliente, Nevada, was a towering gure among rewilding
communities in the American West. Devoted to tending and planting native species
and traditional staples such as biscuit root and fritillaria, Finisia was also a realist
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and accepted that increasing climate change meant that invasive plants have a part
to play in the complex ecosystems of the West. She used her vast botanical
knowledge to experiment with planting at di erent altitudes and in di erent seasons
as a way of giving vulnerable species a chance to thrive.

In her trademark buckskin skirt, wide-brimmed hat and ever-present cigarette or

joint lodged between thumb and nger, Finisia traveled on foot, in covered wagon,
and by horseback through Nevada, Utah, and portions of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming,
Colorado, Montana, California and Washington state. For 35 years she followed a
lifeway practiced for millennia known as the Hoop, a seasonal migratory way of
living by following one’s food source, hunting, gathering roots, fruits and nuts, while
planting seeds and propagating en route.

Finisia generously shared her vast knowledge of plants and their place in the web of
life, but she could be equally generous with her sharp quips, her criticism of
consumer culture and her impatience at the stupidity of humans. She could swear
like no one else. Yet, her anger and frustration stemmed from her love for the
natural world. When she spoke of “the refugees without legs,” her term for plants
uprooted by mining, fracking, cattle grazing, escalating wild res and the general
encroachment of human activity, she would burst into tears. She was utterly
connected to the Earth.

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Finisia’s early life, recorded in her book Growing Up in Occupied America, and self-
published in 2013, was not an easy one. Her father was a John Bircher—a
committed anti-communist—whose union boss was gunned down in front of her
childhood home in Vegas. After the shooting, Finisia’s father piled his family into
the car and headed north “to the Coeur d’Alene reservation to live by my Stepmom’s
parents. At this time, they were the only Indians I knew,” she wrote. And it was
here in Idaho that Finisia began her real education at the knee of Native elders,
whom she called her “other Grandmothers.” It was they who showed her how to
pick the seed pods of yellow lilies, how to dig biscuit root, and it was they who
sowed the seeds of Finisia’s political awakening to the fact that she was “living in
Occupied America.”

Finisia generously shared her vast knowledge of

plants and their place in the web of life, but she
could be equally generous with her sharp quips,

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her criticism of consumer culture and her

impatience at the stupidity of humans.

e rst time I met Finisia, in the Oregon desert, she told me how in the 1970s,
pre-transition when she was a pretty young man with a surfer’s body and a Farah
Fawcett ip, she dug a cave in Malibu with her hands and feet. It overlooked a
beach called Pirates Cove and she lined it with pink carpet like a “giant pussy.”
Finisia lived on mussels and seaweed. Visitors would bring LSD and beer. Her cave
had a small walk-on part in the 1976 lm Logan’s Run and it was here she met Bob
Dylan who was building his Malibu home nearby. When Finisia told stories, they
spanned time and space in a way that gave them the quality of myth.

Her early adulthood reads like a psychedelic lm script, and yet her single-minded
devotion to the Earth, and her brilliant ability with words are what gave the rest of
her life its shape. While showing me how to dig biscuit root in Oregon, she recited
her poem “Lamenting the Love of a Friend”: “ ey say I am mad, only half human
/ And half rabid bitch” it begins. And, indeed, she identi ed as much as a coyote, a
shape-shifter, as she did a man or a woman.

Born in Vegas in 1956, downwind from nuclear testing, Finisia underwent sex
reassignment surgery in the late 1970s paid for by her husband Max Miller, a
wealthy PR man 45 years her senior. In 1984, after seven years with Max, Finisia
headed into the mountains to try and kick her tobacco addiction. Instead she
returned home a Christian. Max couldn’t live with a god-fearing partner, so Finisia
signed the divorce papers, walked out of their Los Angeles house with a sleeping
bag and a change of underwear, and just kept walking. is was the beginning of her
life as a nomad. “I gave up everything for Jesus,” she told me. And shortly after this,
she got herself a covered wagon upon which she painted in large letters: “Pulling for
Christ Across America.” Finisia remained a Christian her whole life.

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Along with her faith, Finisia was devoted to living in harmony with the planet in a
way that aligned with her conscience. is required her to give back to the land
more than she took and entailed traveling with her pack horses, replanting and
tending what she called the “wild gardens of the West.” It is against the law to plant
seeds on public lands, and Finisia was jailed twice for doing so.

In 2008, while serving time in Idaho, Finisia penned a manifesto in which she
called her “planting back of the native food owers … and berries without permit on
public lands” both an “act of civil disobedience” and her “duty to God and to Earth.”
She described “this hoop in the west” as “the last place on earth where it is even
possible to live in that symbiotic way. All over the earth this aboriginal planting has
been done away with. e earth has been made to be like a girdled tree and here in
my home in the west is the last small ribbon of bark… I am sick at heart to have
sneaked around like a criminal for 25 years doing this.” She continued carrying bags
of seed with her everywhere she went, enlisting others to help with this work.

Finisia Medrano was no conventional environmentalist. Her approach was not

incremental; it was radical and uncompromising. Her life de ed narrative and
transcended all conception of what is possible. She was complicated, she could be
surly and rude, her language sometimes alienated people, and yet her love for the
Earth, her vast knowledge of the plants, animals and landscapes of the West, her
generosity at sharing this knowledge, and her ability to be a friend, even from a long
distance, were unparalleled. Finisia, despite having her eyes open to the destruction
wreaked by humans upon the planet, never gave up.

A few days before she died she was out planting fruit trees in Nevada with two
friends. On April 1 she felt what she thought was a heart attack. e following day,
another. e next day she died, a mere 150 miles from where she was born 64 years
earlier in Las Vegas—completing the ultimate Hoop—death taking her life so close
to where it had begun. She will be missed by the land in the West and all livings
beings who thrive there.

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Finisia Medrano features in Joanna Pocock’s award-winning book Surrender, a work

of hybrid narrative non- ction blending memoir, reportage and nature writing
examining subcultures who live close to the land in the American West. It was
published in the US on April 7, 2020 by House of Anansi Press.

Joanna Pocock

Joanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non- ction,
Surrender, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in May 2019. Her
writing has appeared in Dazed & Confused, Granta Online, The London Sunday Independent, The
Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Orion Magazine, Tank, 3:AM and the Dark Mountain online edition.
She teaches Prose Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction at the University of the Arts, London.

 PRE-APOCALYPTIC FICTION SHOWS US

WHAT TO APPRECIATE BEFORE IT'S GONE
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A REAL TIGER
QUEEN 

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