Farm life raises S.F. addicts' hopes

PETALUMA, CALIF. -- — Just before dawn, shoveling cow manure in the milking barn, Ryan Medlin feels a world away from his wild life back in San Francisco.

For the onetime homeless addict, that's a good thing.

Last fall, Medlin was living out of his car, blowing his entire six-figure salary as a software engineer on crack and bourbon binges. At 33, he was so gaunt he was nearly skeletal. He walked slouched over, the nights scrunched up in his Suzuki hatchback playing havoc with the nerves in his right leg.

Nowadays at first light -- a time when he'd normally be out scoring drugs -- the Raleigh, N.C., native is on an isolated farm near Santa Rosa, helping to care for 260 lumbering dairy cows and their offspring. After a few moments of meditation with co-workers, followed by a brisk round of calisthenics, he spends his days spreading hay, shoveling manure, hauling heavy buckets of fresh milk.

And getting well -- both physically and emotionally.

"This is what gets you in shape," he says, driving a pitchfork into a hay pile to feed a clutch of lowing cows. "Not too long ago, there's no way I could have ever imagined doing this."

Medlin is one of 40 addicts who spend six months enrolled in an unlikely free program for drug and alcohol rehabilitation run for half a century by the St. Anthony Foundation, a privately funded social services charity based in San Francisco.

The program's regimen combines counseling and daily 12-step recovery classes with the demanding physical labor needed to run a thriving 315-acre organic dairy farm.

Residents are victims of every known addiction: alcohol, meth, crack, cocaine, heroin. One by one, they've volunteered to trade in their danger zones -- corner bars, cheap flophouses and back-alley shooting galleries -- for this far-flung alternative they call "The Farm."

It's a place to strive for a sort of rural redemption.

Healing comes, residents say, from helping to birth calves, feeling their fluttering hearts and spindly legs. It comes from the satisfaction of performing back-breaking chores, working so hard you drop into bed at night from exhaustion. It comes from being a part of something that's bigger than yourself, from putting the needs of others first.

"These people have burned through every dime, every family relationship," said St. Anthony spokeswoman Francis Aviani. "Most are here because they have no place else to go."