A recent feature article about the Nature Boys in The Topanga New Times struck a personal chord in me. As a lifelong resident of Topanga (since 1949), I knew and experienced a very different side of the Nature Boys than the article suggested. They were not hippies, dropouts or squatters. I lived through that era, too, as the counter-culture of the 1960s and ’70s came to claim land in Topanga as if it was free and open to all. As a young woman, I regularly woke up to strangers who had moved onto our family’s Old Canyon Road property—in a van, truck, teepee or tent—to set up camp. These counter-culturalists created stress for families in the canyon who had worked hard to establish homes and ranches. This was the beginning of fences here. • • • The Nature Boys, by contrast, were just that—young men living in the wilderness and off the land, making their way in the world through hard work, creative enterprise and enlightenment following the second world war. The “Hippies� of the 1970s were largely about taking; the Nature Boys of decades before were contributing to canyon families and culture. By far, their biggest contribution to this world was health. They advocated for the vegetarian way and contradicted the claims that meat and potatoes and white bread were the only American way. The nature boys were health nuts. So was my father [Cyril “Cy� Wood]. My family was the only vegetarian family in Topanga during my entire childhood. So, naturally, the Nature Boys were drawn to our company. One in particular, Emil (pronounced ‘ay-mull’) Zimmerman came to live on our land every summer. Arriving from the Amazon Rain Forest, where he’d live in the jungle during the winter months, he brought two large boxes of Brazil and hazelnuts, one for our family, one for himself. Emil also brought the tools to get those nuts out of their shells: a nutcracker, a hammer and a small hand pick. In return for living in his car on our property, sleeping out under the stars each night in our private corner of the world, he spent his days helping my father build an extension on our small, one-room cabin. He, in particular, was a “fruitarian,� subsisting only on fruits, nuts and berries. He would arrive from the jungle when our patch of boysenberries bloomed, and leave the canyon for Brazil after the harvest. Slowly but surely, several other Nature Boys would come to meet my father—Gypsy Boots, Maximillian, Jim Baker, among others. We also met the one and only Nature Girl, Anne-Marie Bennström. Emil was a soft-spoken, humble, easy-going, six-foot-tall physical specimen with shoulder-length golden hair. He walked around in a loin cloth. Gypsy Boots was determined to produce the first “energy bar� and open the first health juice bar with mixed drinks he called “smoothies.� He did both. Maxi was short, stocky like a wrestler and participated in weight-lifting competitions in Venice. Anne-Marie was a Swedish blonde beauty with a gorgeous body and a degree in chiropractic medicine. Long before Jane Fonda or Suzanne Sommers, she developed exercise programs and tools, and opened a world-famous spa, today’s Ashram in Calabasas. • • • When school let out each year for summer break, there was Emil. Oh boy! I loved watching him work, helping me crack open nuts and going on picnics with him and our neighbors up in Hondo Canyon at the lake. I was a very quiet, shy child, but he was easy to talk to and learn from about the outside world. One summer, I asked about the sandals he was wearing. He told me that he suffered some bone deformities from growing up in a small, Russian village during Stalin’s reign of terror. He was a Russian Jew whose family had escaped the pogroms in the 1920s-’30s. He told me about soup the villagers made from stones and bark, and they would add dirt or soil for flavor. Maybe there would be a potato or two, sometimes. In other words, they were starving to death. Emil was given two left shoes to make do and scarcely had enough clothes to keep himself warm. I recall him being tall and strong, but I could tell that his posture and legs were affected. He recalled when one of the larger women in the village froze to death one night. The villagers took her body and boiled it until the fat came to the top and then they made soap from it. I remember being stunned by this information. I felt rich by comparison. And he thought of us that way, as well. We had only 25 acres of land in what was then a remote area with a cabin without a roof, but by comparison, we had everything.