Oranges

I grew up believing the modernist doctrine that progress is inevitable. Interesting that both Marxists and capitalists share this basic belief, tho' what each considers to be progress differs radically. In any case, I no longer believe in the inevitability of progress. Things change, yes—constantly—but they don't necessarily improve.

Which brings me to oranges.

When I was still a preschooler, my dad, freshly returned from his role in World War II, built our home. It was set back from the street behind several rows of orange trees. You couldn't really see the house from the street. These orange and lemon groves stretched for miles in every direction—a huge, seemingly endless forest of citrus trees.

I thought they had all disappeared by now, but lo and behold, there are still some orange groves here in the Redlands area—like the one on California Street pictured above.

This grove takes me back to my childhood. It looks exactly like the area all around where I grew up—right down to the trash on the ground. Notice the brown thing dead center in the picture, almost hidden under the tree? That's a smudge pot, used to fend off freezes. And the stubby little concrete thing under the dying tree on the right? That's a standpipe through which water would flow into furrows to irrigate the grove.

Three of my relatives were fully employed in citrus related jobs: Uncle Jake Bert sprayed groves; Uncle Chester (my mom's brother-in-law) cultivated and irrigated them; Maynard Book (Mom's cousin) was a manager at a packing house. Many of my friends and acquaintances earned money during high school and college tending the smudge pots.

Ah, smudging. When the temperature dropped several degrees below freezing, and the frost report on the radio announced that the dew point was at the danger point, the call would go out to light the pots. They would be full of low grade oil, and the guys would go around with torches and light the oil. The heat plus the thick smoke helped protect the trees from freezing. In the morning a dense, black smoke hung in the air. If you blew your nose, black soot filled your handkerchief. Talk about air pollution. I can't imagine that the smudge pot in the picture is ever lit these days.

As a boy I would run through the groves with my friends. We'd have orange fights, play in the irrigation water, and hunt jack rabbits with bows and arrows. The rabbits were pretty safe; I can't remember a single instance of any of us bringing one down. We went barefoot all summer, and by September, the soles of my feet had developed a tough layer of skin akin to shoe leather. No one ever worried about us being kidnapped, even if we didn't get home before dark. Such things just didn't happen. Or if they did, we never heard about it.

Then the pickers would come to harvest the oranges. Big covered trucks would drive up hauling trailers loaded with ladders. A bunch of Mexicans would jump out of the trucks, grab ladders, and spread out in the groves picking the fruit. You could hear them singing and shouting to each other in Spanish. I was sort of afraid of the pickers, but the memory of their songs and calls falls pleasantly on the ears of my mind.

This all changed in the '50s as war veterans and others from the East moved into California by the thousands. They had to have houses, and ranchers found it lucrative to sell off their land to developers. Bull dozers would come in and push the trees into great heaps. Once the trees dried a bit, they would be burned. Again, I can't imagine what the EPA would do about this practice today. Well, maybe I can.

As a child, I found it terribly sad to see those project houses planted where there used to be fruit trees. And the people who moved into the houses were different. They had left behind their homes and families in the East, and it seemed to me even then that they had also left behind their values and much of their humanity.

My world was changing, but it wasn't getting better. Maybe that's when I began to lose my faith in modernism.

Today the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those project dwellers, and many who have since moved here to join them, fill the houses and shop at the malls that have replaced the groves. The groves are primarily memories now, preserved by names (Orange County, Citrus Street, Valencia, Grove Avenue) and by local logos like the one pictured above on a City of Redlands street sign.

So it's been a kind of sad joy to come across small groves that have somehow survived here in Loma Linda and Redlands. I've heard nostalgia defined as warm feelings for a time you really wouldn't want to go back to. And in any number of ways, those good ol' times were also bad ol' times. In fact, while some things have deteriorated, many others have improved. I wouldn't want to go back to the late '40s, but when I see these patches of groves, I can almost feel the hot dirt on my bare feet and hear those pickers calling to each other amongst the trees.

The proton machinery broke down this afternoon, so today's treatment was postponed. That will mean one more day longer in Loma Linda. At this point, that seems like a gift.