I
woke up one morning in The Garden of Eden.
My mother was there and she told me to go outside and play all day while
she unpacked our things. It was already
hot that day; 10:30 am and it was already 80° in San Jose. Bulldozers had hurriedly scrapped the earth
around our new tract house, so right out the back door there was a thirty foot
DMZ and then the orchards. The nearby
orchards had been neglected for the year or so that it took to build the first
wave of our tract. They were doomed to
go in the next wave. Right on the edge
of the plum orchard directly behind our house was a mature broadly sweeping
tree with huge leaves that looked exotic, like I imagined palm fronds. The tree was heavily laden with dark purple
or black pear shaped fruit. I'd never
seen a fig tree before and I didn't even know what a fresh fig looked
like. At best I knew it was something
that was ground up and stuffed into sweets.
We
had just arrived in the Valley of Hearts Delight after a cross country
permanent move, on spec by my father, to find his fortune in California. They pulled me our of school two months early
and after motel-ing for a while, we had settled into a rented tract home for
the Summer.
I
knew no one out here. My fellow fourth
grade boy friends in Detroit were in another world, impossibly far away. Jim, Dick, John, and I ran in a pack and
continually got in trouble together and I was their leader. The two neighbor girls down the street had
just turned ten and eleven and that Spring they had been teaching me how to
play Doctor. We would do this in the
basement of our Moran street house. One of
the sisters would stay on lookout while the other one and I would play
"full checkup." We kept
looking for whatever it was the parents were scared we would find, but we never
did find it. It seemed to be a lot of
fun looking though and I felt very alone without my friends and no new ones to
be found until September, two months away.
Back
in the house my mother told me this thing was a fig and that it was okay to eat
if I washed it. Back at the fig tree, I
pulled a big fat one off and wiped it on my T-shirt. It was hot and when I bit in, it exploded in
my mouth, almost with effervescence, like it had been fermenting. Figs from the store are nothing like the ones
you pick straight from the tree on a hot summer day. Dried, they are too chewy because there's
more skin than pulp. Cold, they are too
fleshy and disgusting, like eating a piece of raw animal. But big and hot and ripe, the fig fills you
with a feeling of euphoria like the food of Gods.
Like
any fourth grade boy in those days, I was innocently fearless and insatiably
curious, and so I began my summer of wanderings through the orchards of San
Jose. Living all my life in a city, I
was immediately immersed in such solitude that I would roam from sunup to sundown
and rarely see another living soul. The
joy to me was the fecundity of the land around there. Around the ugly scar of our rock and
cement-droppings back yard, I found wild tomato plants, sprouted from the seeds
of construction worker's left over lunches.
They sprouted without any tending and produced the most beautiful
fruit. The heat, though, of the
California summer adds both to the aroma and the taste. The smell of tomato plant when you crinkle a
leaf or two still drives me wild with memories.
The taste of those small, hot tomatoes was rich and filling; in with one
bite and chewed with two more. All the
fruit around me then was much smaller than the things you get in stores
today. Plums and tomatoes are sold by
the pound. If you can make them hold
more water, then you can profit 89¢ a pound for virtually free irrigation
water.
Beyond
the fig tree was an orchard of plums.
The ground below each tree was strewn with rotting plums, but there
still was limitless supply in the trees.
The sweet smell of these wasp-covered rotting plums was delicious. It made my mouth water and I had to learn,
the hard way, to control my daily intake of ripe plums. They were tiny and you could pop the whole
thing into your mouth. Just picture all
the flavour of one of those giant plums you get today concentrated into a piece
of fruit a quarter the size, without irradiation and chemicals and poisons
added in. Since they fit into the mouth
whole, the trick was to bite across the broadest part of the fruit. They were ovoid in shape like a partially flattened
egg with a seam. You bit on this seam
and the plum would split in two. Then
you could extract the pit, still in your mouth and spit it out. If the plum was properly ripe, the pit would
separate easily. I was so in tune with
the earth as the weeks passed by that periodically I would run into a large
mound of freshly bull-dozed dirt and I would strip off and bury myself in it up
to my arm pits, just to feel the earth in touch with my body.
To
balance the sugary aspect of this daily diet, there were walnuts and
almonds. It took a bit of learning to be
able to harvest a walnut. The skin is
thick and light green if you pull one off the tree. The juice in the skin is so strong that it
will stain your hands and it takes days to work it off. If the green skin completely seals the nut
shell, you can't really get it off; it's bonded to the shell. You have to wait for the skin to dry out and
fall off, but once the shell is on the ground with no skin you can't tell how
old the walnut is. So best is to spot a
withered skin that can be easily flicked away.
Next you have to crack the shell.
Never try it in your mouth, it will crack teeth. You place the walnut between the bases of
your two palms, like you're praying. You
want the seams between the two halves of the walnut shell in contact the your
palms. You can interlock your fingers
for more leverage, and then squeeze and the walnut will split in two. If the walnut meat is too green, it's chewy
and bitter. If it's too old, it's like a
black peanut. Just right and it's a bit
tasteless but full of protein. Almonds
are tastier and they can be cracked in your mouth. Same routine with the fuzzy skins though.
