The day I decided to start MOR·O’/SOL CO., I sat on my parents’ couch and stared out the window.
I had just graduated college three months prior — my second degree — and found myself back home after failing to secure a job despite applying for twelve months before graduation. My mind filled with worry, unsure of what to do. I tried clearing my head, but whenever I did, all I could hear was the tick, tick, tick of my mom’s clock hanging on the kitchen wall. A painful reminder of time lost.
I feared I had fallen for the trap: get a degree, get a job. I’d always believed that if you followed the right path, everything would work out. Unfortunately, life doesn’t really care.
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand why I kept getting those emails — “We regret to inform you…” blah, blah, blah. I understood the job market had changed, seemingly overnight. I was just disappointed. I had eight years of work experience, two degrees, two internships. I’d been involved in on-campus organizing, events, networking — you name it. I’d gone above and beyond most college grads. I’d taken my older siblings’ advice before I ever left home, the same advice that had worked for them. But somehow it no longer applied to this new world. I asked them for guidance anyway. They had no words. They were just as unsure as I was. I was alone, again.
All that work. All that effort. All that time. And for what?
Then, a text from my father: “Hey son, got any more of that soap?”
I’d taken up soap making to distract myself from the disappointment of life — just one of the many hobbies I’d picked up over the years. Wine making, mushroom cultivation, vertical garden farms, sourdough starters, kombucha, cooking, writing, guitar. The list goes on. It’s what I did to stay sane when things got hard.
I replied: “Yeah dad, I got you. I’ll see you this Friday.”
Friday came, and I made the 30–45 minute drive to see him. Passing through the Central Valley, I took in the scenery I’d always known — rubble and trash along the roadside, orchards doused in chemicals for miles, a smoggy haze where a clear blue sky should have been. Home sweet home, I thought.
In my passenger seat sat a couple of bricks of lavender-eucalyptus soap I’d made. I pulled up to the spot where I always met my dad — a small burger joint off the road in a town whose population couldn’t have topped a couple thousand people. I saw him step out of his beat-up car, covered in dirt and the residue of the pesticides and herbicides he worked around every day. I knew the drill: don’t touch dad until after he showers.
I spent my childhood running toward him with open arms, ready for a hug, only to be waved off until he’d finished spraying himself down with the hose in the backyard and scrubbing off with cheap soap from the dollar store. He’d spent the last thirty years of his life as a migrant farm worker — it’s all he’d ever really known. Somehow the old man never caught cancer, though he now manages a long list of other health issues, almost certainly the result of decades spent breathing in and bathing in toxic chemicals.
My car rolled to a stop. I parked, grabbed the soap, and stepped out. He looked up as I approached, a smile spreading across his face. “Hey son!”
“Hey dad, how’s it going?” I smiled back.
“Good, mijo,” he said.
We caught up, made small talk, and eventually he asked about the job hunt. I told him the truth — how I was really feeling. The anxiety. The stress. The disappointment. After thirty or forty-five minutes of me venting about how much everything sucked, he tapped me on the shoulder. No advice. No words of wisdom. Just one thing:
“We should take a trip to Sequoia. Do our routine. Hike up Morro Rock.”
We made the drive out to Sequoia that Saturday morning, windows down, the smog of the Valley thinning into pine and granite the higher we climbed. It was the same drive we’d made together since I was a kid — the same turnouts, the same jokes about who’d get out of breath first, the same silence in the good stretches where neither of us needed to say anything.
Morro Rock has always been ours. Not officially — plenty of families hike it — but ours in the way a place becomes yours when you’ve returned to it enough times to measure your own life against it. I’d stood on top of that dome as a kid too small to see over the guardrail, as a teenager who thought he had it all figured out, and now as a college graduate with two degrees and no job, wondering if I’d figured out anything at all.
We climbed mostly in silence. My dad didn’t have much to say, neither did I. We were both too focused on not falling to our deaths while climbing — but somewhere around the second switchback, he started talking. Not about the job market, or my resume, or what I should do next. He talked about the land. About how the same soil that gave him a paycheck for three decades was also the soil that made him sick. About how nobody ever asked the workers what was in the tanks they were told to spray. About how “healthy” produce left the field in a truck lined with plastic, wrapped twice, dressed up to look clean by the time it reached a store shelf — as if the packaging could undo what the growing had cost.
I’ve heard this before. I’d just never heard it all at once, on a mountain, with nowhere else to be.
We reached the top and did what we always did — stood there and looked out over the mountains. From up there you didn’t see rubble and haze. It looked like home. It looked like something worth saving and preserving instead of escaping.
That’s when it hit me — not as a lightning bolt, more like a tumbler finally clicking into place. I’d spent my entire life following a path that was supposed to prove all my effort meant something. But the thing that actually meant something had been sitting in my trunk in bars of lavender-eucalyptus soap, and standing next to me in a pair of dirt-stained boots. My dad had given his body to a system that sold health with one hand and poisoned the people who grew it with the other. I’d spent years distracting myself with the exact skills — making things clean, simple, and by hand — that could actually answer that.
I didn’t have a business plan on top of that rock. I didn’t even have a name yet. What I had was a thought: whatever came next wasn’t going to ask people to choose between taking care of themselves and taking care of the planet, or between a paycheck and their health, the way my dad had been forced to for thirty years. It was going to close that gap.
The name came later, back in the car, with my dad about how many times we’d made this exact climb. Morro. Sol. The rock and the sun. The place that had never once let either of us leave with the same problem we walked in with.
MOR·O’/SOL wasn’t born in a pitch meeting or a business class. It was born on a couch, in a text message about soap, and on top of a rock in Sequoia National Park with my father standing next to me — proof that the cost of “clean” shouldn’t be somebody else’s body.
