Long before Kathy Ocean ever saw the Pacific, she dreamed of it. As a child in landlocked Indiana, she experienced what she calls “devastatingly realistic” dreams of the ocean, so vivid she could taste the salt air and feel the cold water on her skin. Waking up in her bedroom in the middle of Indiana felt like a betrayal. Though she had once dipped her toddler toes into the sea in southern California, the ocean remained a phantom limb, an absence that shaped her entire childhood.
Kathy at Indiana University Student Union, 1979, with the guitar her parents gave her for her 16th birthday.
At seventeen, during her junior year of high school’s spring break, her parents, inexplicably, she still says, allowed her to fly to San Francisco with friends. She fell in love with the Sonoma County beaches so completely that when the plane lifted off the tarmac to return home, she felt, quite literally, that she had left her heart behind. The phrase is a cliché until it happens to you. Four years later, after dropping out of Indiana University midway through her sophomore year because she felt “physically sick” being there, she sold everything she owned, packed a guitar and a trunk, and boarded a train west. She didn’t know any-one. Within twenty-four hours, she had a job. Within days, an apartment in the San Francisco Marina District.
The year was 1981, and Ocean, then Kathy Dupler, was twenty-one. Her mother was a registered nurse, and her father, a Marine-turned-dentist who had been drafted by the Chicago Bears but chose dental school instead, had raised her with a practical, systems-thinking approach. She lasted briefly in a nine-to-five job in the financial district before playing hooky, picking up a newspaper, and spotting an ad for cocktail servers at Club 2001, a disco on Union Street in the city. “Experienced only,” the ad specified, but Ocean thought, How hard can it be? Hard enough, apparently, to be interesting. She made twice the money, slept in the mornings, and ditched the uncomfortable 9-to-5 clothes. That was the end of dental offices.
What followed was a characteristically non-linear path. Ocean “hopscotched” through her education, as she puts it, from environmental science, elementary education, and English at Indiana University, to journalism and photography at San Francisco State, then to interdisciplinary consciousness studies at JFK University in Orinda, where she studied biofeedback and the mind-body connection. She married a chiropractor and helped him set up his practice in Martinez, drawing on the systems thinking she’d absorbed from her mother. She then opened her own wellness consulting practice.
When their son, Devin, was born in 1989, she announced to everyone that she would not be a stay-at-home mother; her career was too meaningful. Then she closed her practice and stayed home to raise him. Their daughter, Aly, arrived in 1991, and Ocean threw herself into homeschooling, eventually moving and becoming the marketing director for a holistic learning center in Nevada City. In 1999, the learning center handed her the largest budget it had ever worked with and tasked her with organizing a three-city tour for author Joseph Chilton Pearce. She had never produced an event before. She was, she says, “freaked out.” One afternoon, while picking up food at a Mexican restaurant in Martinez, she found herself standing behind Jim Ocean, a singer-songwriter and concert producer she knew slightly from the local music scene. They had first met at a protest march against a proposed toxic-waste incinerator.
Now, waiting for takeout, they sat down and talked. Jim offered to mentor her in event production. Over the next two months, they developed what Ocean calls “a really nice friendship.” The events went well, and after they were completed, there was no reason to keep up the friendship.
Two years later, her marriage had dissolved, and she and her husband parted ways. Ocean had a thought: I wonder what Jim Ocean is up to? She sent him an email suggesting coffee. He almost didn’t respond (annoyed she hadn’t kept in touch), but eventually he did, and suggested dinner instead. She was living in a yurt in the Sierra foothills with her two children; he was living on a houseboat in the Martinez Marina. They had dinner, then another date, then a weekend. Then they lived and worked together. “It was just immediate,” Ocean says.
She joined Jim’s concert production company, Creative Musical Alternatives, which at its peak produced more than 120 events a year, running concert series across multiple cities and venues, handling everything from contracts to marketing to trash pickup. After a festival weekend at Stillwater Cove on the Sonoma coast, Jim turned to her on the beach and asked, pointedly, “So, Kathy, how is it that you always dreamed of living by the sea but you live fifty miles away?” The following week, during a flood, Ocean went to see a real estate agent in Guerneville.
The Oceans and their companion head down the coastal trail, living the dream Kathy carried from Indiana.
By 2004, they had bought a half-acre property with outbuildings and a guest cottage. Ocean was finally home. Today, Ocean and her husband, who married in 2008 in the fairy ring on their property, describe themselves as cultural activists, using words, music, and event production to build community. Together, they run OceanWorks Productions, producing the Guerneville Rotary Club’s Rockin’ the River concert series and creating environmentally themed projects, such as their album FrankenClime and The Party for the Planet benefit concerts. Ocean, who once dabbled tentatively in the coffeehouse scene, now performs alongside Jim, her voice as strong as his. They’ve co-written a novel, John Lennon’s Glasses, and adapted it into a theatrical performance. She describes herself as a “visionary and powerhouse” behind the scenes, the systems queen who keeps things running while preferring Jim to take the spotlight.
But Ocean’s real work, perhaps, has been following what she calls her “throughline,” living a life authentic to her values and passions, practicality be damned. It’s a philosophy that carried her, improbably but inevitably, from the cornfields of Indiana to the fog-shrouded coast of Sonoma County, where simply walking out her door keeps her, as she says, “grounded and sane.” The ocean she dreamed of as a child is finally within reach, no longer a dream she has to wake up from.
BY CATHERINE HUGHES, HOME ON THE RUSSIAN RIVER MAGAZINE | PHOTOS BY NORAH BURROWS, NORAH BURROWS PHOTOGRAPHY
