110 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM back into the orchard, clearing the brush underneath the trees, making sure the branches were cleaned up and pruned.” Slowly, a thriving orchard emerged. The Chestnut Bandits The underbrush was not the only adversary Hans confronted. Before Hans took over as caretaker, the open space district allowed people to gather chestnuts for free. Some didn’t take kindly to its conversion to a U-pick that charges by the pound. In the dead of night, “people started harvesting them with flashlights,” ocean,” Hans describes. “Sometimes you’ll see the fog come just piling up over the top of the ridge up there.” Hans opened up the orchard to U-pick visitors in 2004. But at the beginning, the going was slow. “I wouldn’t even get 10 customers in a day,” says Hans. He plunged right in, clearing out the overgrowth and dead wood clogging the trees. “You could really only access about 10 percent of the crop,” he recollects. “Over the next five years, I would take whatever I made here and put it BAND TOGETHER Hans recalls. For the first several years, Hans had to lay down the law to earn respect. “I had my dirt bike and I’d go chasing them down the trail,” he relays. The open space district’s rangers supported Hans, alerting him when they found cars parked down the road. Other chestnut bandits tried to distract Hans by paying for small quantities while smuggling out the majority of their bounty in backpacks or pockets. But nothing gets past Hans. “Early on, I’d have two prices. I’d say it’s $5 a pound for what you want to buy, $20 a pound for what you want to steal.” On more than one occasion, someone had to leave a pal behind as The Chestnut King PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHANNA HARLOW
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