I interviewed Nina Blasenheim and Freeman (nee Linn) House together at their home on California’s Lost Coast in August, 2010. It was the third serious Diggers interview I had conducted in less than 18 hours and listening to the recording later, I could tell that although my enthusiasm for the subject was undimmed, fatigue had set in and my lines of questioning and follow-ups were not as solid as they should’ve been.

But it’s still Nina and Freeman, together. What a joy to be in the presence of these two big minds, as they ribbed each other and made each other laugh, as they mulled over memories and tried to come to some sort of understanding about how it all happened the way that it did, and what it might possibly mean. When I walked through their door, they told me they had just been talking together about why exactly interest in the Diggers kept coming around, even after all these years. They seemed genuinely puzzled, and for a few minutes, it was me who was being interviewed about what the answer might be.

Our conversation flowed, with some stops and starts and many detours as they picked through the many Diggers-related documents that I’d brought along with me as conversation/memory prompts. Editing the conversation into a satisfying beginning-to-end piece like some of the other oral histories on this site was always going to be a challenge, and it wasn’t until recently, all these years later, that I finally understood this simply isn’t that kind of piece. It’s something else, which is fine.