My father, Angus Wright, died last week, of a fast-moving glioblastoma. He was a scholar of Latin American agriculture and an early member of the discipline of Environmental Studies. He was the kind of environmentalist who thought more about farmworkers than birds, but he loved birds too.

A friend: "I don't trust a man our age who doesn't have a complicated relationship with his father." I pass that test. A fellow CSU Sacramento faculty kid told me in 8th grade, clearly we would be professors. He was half right: he's tenured at Yale now! But I was intent on something – anything – different.

But. I am my father's son, there can be no doubt. I remember a trip he and I took with two former students of his to Baja California, camping on the beach and canoeing. I was 15. A great trip. As he and I drove back to Sacramento, we had a big canoe tied to the top of his car.

We were driving by some tomato fields, and he saw a group of migrant workers applying pesticides to the field. "I'm gonna go talk to these folks. But stay in the car and keep the windows up," he said, and parked the car, with the canoe on top, at the side of the field.

He later described the scene (he left out the canoe!), which I still remember vividly, in his book The Death of Ramón González, the paragraph starting “On a day in June 1985…”

He got back in the car, stinking of chemicals; he had a headache all day. I've never looked at a tomato the same way again. A tomato, a pepper, an ear of corn: I know from my father a long history of indigenous agriculture, colonialism, neo-colonialism.

While that time was for research, still, in many ways, and at many different kinds of times, he loved going and "talking to folks" (always "folks"). All kinds of folks. When he stopped canoeing and swimming as much, he sat by the side of the American River. Watching the mergansers and the herons. Talking to folks.

One called him "King of the River". He was bemused, but I noted that he did not decline the crown. He was that guy, sitting there all the time in his lawn chair by the banks of the river, talking to folks about the river. He loved the natural world, including in the middle of a city, with high-power transmission lines crossing the river, and under them: a great blue heron flying, merganzers. Trees. My sister and I both remember the sun-ripened blackberries you could only pick from the canoe, their bushes pushing out onto quiet parts of the river.

After his death, I found myself at a Sacramento farmers' market. A DJ was playing; sponsored by SMUD, our local energy utility, and powered by solar panels. A pretty pure Sacramento vibe. (If I was as eager to get out of there as Lady Bird, I'm just as loving about it as Greta Gerwig. IYKYK.)

Yes, solar panels, sustainable farmers, and corn tortillas brought echoes of my dad. But another thing came later. I went up to the Food Not Bombs table, picked up a sticker and a pamphlet, saw that they had harm reduction supplies, started talking to them.

"I'm in the homeless union," one guy says. I start asking him about health outreach. He doesn't know of much. I explain funding: "There's grantees in most metro areas, and you can hold them accountable." "HRSA. H,R,S,A." I express concern that there isn't more syringe exchange.

I tell him some more, ask him some, express appreciation for their work. I give him my contact information. I don't know that he'll get in touch. It doesn't matter.

I know what I was doing. I was out there talking to folks. As I do.

* * * * *

Being a doctor helped me find ways to be there for my dad in his last two months. At one point, I drove him to the same Kaiser Permanente ED where he had taken me for ear infections when I was 4. We drove there listening to music I'd grown up with, like the album Kind of Blue, and songs by a mutual favorite, Abdullah Ibrahim:

"My son's too modest to say it," he told a nurse, as we waited for a result. "But he's a doctor." A week or two earlier, a Kaiser neuro-oncologist had shown me MRI images on a Zoom call, and talked to me a long time.

At the end, I asked, “Are there questions I should've asked, that I haven't?”

"No," he said. "You've asked all the questions you should ask."

"And anyway," he said – it would only be kind if said to another doctor, but in that context it was so kind – "you already knew all the answers." He fell silent. “Yeah”, I said. “Yeah, I did.” Then I cried for the first time.

Anyway. There are people without homes everywhere in Sacramento. And various housed people I encounter there say the usual stuff, like, how are we going to get them off drugs, etcetera, etcetera. And, then I of course start in with something like: "Well, if people want help with addiction, of course, that’s important, and I spend a lot of time doing that, but homelessness is about housing supply",... and off I go:

It's structural! It has a history! The history goes way back! It’s like a favela! A dome tent favela! You can't understand an encampment without knowing about racism! about capitalism! About how making land into property changes everything!

Yes.

I am my father's son.