Brian King's approach to teaching seems to fit very well with the sun-kissed, sylvan setting of the hills of western Marin, where he'll be doing it this summer.

"When everything is just right with the world, when you're having a blast, " he believes, "you tend to remember everything."

There will be much to remember for the first crop of kids attending Summer Day Camp at Devil's Gulch Ranch. It will start with the vintage Studebaker buggy, drawn by a tractor, which meets them at the gate, in the storybook village of Nicasio, and it will continue on a jostling mile-long ride, through forests shared with adjacent Samuel P. Taylor State Park, past 17 acres of productive vineyards, to the ranch, where a bounty of animals and crops are waiting to be cared for.

And that's where the kids will make their own memories, hands-on.

"There's things that are happening all the time, 'cause this is a real, honest-to-god working ranch," says King, who functions as the camp's executive director. "In the morning, livestock will be moved and fed, and the kids are gonna be able to participate in that. The older kids may be doing some building, maybe gates, maybe mending fences, working with implements and tractors. The younger kids may be driving some nails, too, and working in the garden."

Much of this activity may be new to elementary, middle school and high school girls and boys coming to the six one-week sessions from more urban parts of the Bay Area and beyond. The mode of learning will also differ from the experience of most classrooms.

"I've been teaching off and on since 1980," says King, who had been an engineer before returning to college to study agriculture and education. "When I was teaching in public school, it was kind of a one-size-fits-all. State standards say, this is what the kids need to learn, and when I tried to teach a lesson, no matter how much I tried to make it relevant, many of them would say, 'Why do we have to learn this?' Whereas how I teach now is the way I always wanted to, because the kids come up to me and say, 'Brian, can you teach me how?' I'm answering kids' questions as opposed to forcing material on them."

King recently completed his first year practicing this alternative pedagogy at the Big Rock Sudbury School in Terra Linda, founded on the model of the progressive Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, and was eager to transplant it to a camp setting after a friend introduced him to Mark Pasternak. Pasternak has owned the 75-acre Devil's Gulch Ranch since 1971.

"My wife, Myriam, and I are both committed to exposing children to agriculture, where our food really comes from, and we both feel that the ranch is an excellent venue for that," says Pasternak, who has two young daughters. Devil's Gulch has provided grapes to several local wineries, and crops and animals to restaurants, but, "We wanted to see if we could add another piece of the puzzle in terms of a business opportunity for us, and for the ranch to make a little bit of money" by hosting the summer day camp.

Pasternak's approach to ranching seemed a good fit with King's approach to teaching, in providing children with role models of healthy and successful agribusiness. The two men will form curriculums appropriate to the age and interests of the enrollees in each one-week session."We'll try to show what we do and why we do it," Pasternak said. "A very good example is with our rabbits. We've got an area where we have a movable rabbit cage on pasture, we move it every day. We have chickens running around under the rabbits, and we're gonna have piglets in there for a while, where they all complement each other.

"A big part of it is the pathogens, which come in the manure of each animal and are specie-specific. So when you have two or three species in the same area, the pathogens get confused, and it helps to eliminate the problems you'd have with a monoculture of only one specie, where the pathogens get to develop to a high enough level to be detrimental. The other thing is, the waste feed of the rabbits gets utilized by the chickens and the pigs, so they get to be scavengers."

In the vineyards, camp kids will also get to see chickens roaming free among the rows of grapes, eating weeds and problematic crawling things and rendering themselves and the grapes healthier.

King believes that the benefits of the Ranch's multi-cropping will be easily understood by the young visitors.

"The rabbits allow money to come in on a weekly basis. The asparagus brings in money early summer, late spring. The grapes bring in money in the fall. And all of that keeps the labor employed."

At a large covered arena, next to a barn put up in 1867 by the two Civil War veterans who started the ranch, camp kids will engage in a variety of tasks, including grooming horses, dissecting smaller animals, tanning hides and soldering pipes for a solar panel, all in an environment redolent with unfamiliar and exciting sounds and smells.

"Kids can see that the people who work here really enjoy what they're doing," says King, and he assures that, "We're gonna be spending a lot of time laughing, we're gonna be horsing around. No pun intended."

Some of that time might be spent swimming in the reservoir and hiking along the creek that flows into it.

"They're gonna see trees, deer, polliwogs, newts, wildflowers and insects and butterflies," King said. "And they're gonna be sticking their noses into the bark of trees, smelling them."

King will also share his longtime love of archery, which he imparted to his 18-year-old daughter Heather, who finished 10th in the recurved division in the recent Junior World Trials in Utah.

"When kids are up there flinging those arrows," he relates, "they stand there, they visualize what their shot's going to be, they notch the arrow on the string, they bring it up above the target, they draw the string back, they put it on their anchor point, they release and follow through. They do that for three arrows. Then they run off and socialize, and completely become unfocused. But the 2 1/2 minutes that they're allotted to fling their arrows down at the target, they're absolutely focused."

Not that King downplays the importance of socializing. Some of the childhood summertime alliances he formed in the San Gorgonio Wilderness, as a refugee from Orange County suburban existence, have persisted through four decades. So "I want these kids to develop friendships that they'll either maintain or remember for the rest of their life," he says.

For more information

The weeklong Summer Day Camps at Devil's Gulch Ranch in Nicasio run Monday-Aug. 27. Call Brian King at (415) 662-1099 or visit