The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

 

Shades of Wendell Berry, the July 2004 Brown Bag Book selection. 

It takes a while to get into the slow pace of action.  That was my comment about the old Jayber Crow book by Berry.  In our modern urbanized world and as it was for Aristotle, 24 hours is sufficient for a book, movie or TV drama to take place.  In my life’s experience, this was not always the case and I prefer my Greek tragedy Euripidean.  It’s nice to take the pace down a bit now and then.  Reminds me of tide-pooling in Carmel, which I used to do with my grand-kids. 

     You come up to the perfect pool, and all say, “There’s nothing there!”  They’re expecting a twenty-pound salmon to be flopping in the water.  But soon, someone sees a starfish move, or a mussel.  Then maybe a crab or shrimp scurries along; a sea anemone moves with the tidal water flow.   Baby fish become apparent, and snails:   the water is teeming with life,
       we just had to slow down enough to notice it all.

The characters of this book: Talmadge and Della, Clee and Angelene are all quiet people; by heritage bound to the land.  They are some of the strong, silent pioneers of the NorthWestern Territories.  I like to think of my mother (nee Frances Blanche Cox) and her parents as Midwestern pioneers, editing and publishing a county newspaper in rural Nebraska over a hundred years ago.  Pioneers try to enjoy simple lives.  They are not simple people.  Their lives are as filled with money, sex, growth, temptations, evil and heartache as any modern city dweller, even you and I.
They are our heritage as Westerners.  This is a tale of which we want to be a present day part.  We admire their handling of adversity; the avoidance of violence; the extended helping hand.  We also admire their almost Buddhist view of life and death, it comes with living off the land.

For me, this book tells the story of “The Valley of Heart’s Delight”.  I entered San Jose in the Santa Clara Valley sixty-six years ago.  The springtime view from the surrounding foothills was an impressionist painting of billions of flowers: cherry blossoms, plums, walnuts, apricots, almonds; thousands of acres of colorful and fragrant flowers – the valley smelled sweet.  As a youth, I picked berries and nuts, later worked in a canning factory.  It was the Garden of Eden, or so I wrote a few years ago[1].

The referenced video below describes my Santa Clara Valley.  I know all these sites, all the companies:  it is my home-town[2].

 

So, this Orchardist book lulls the reader into a serene Nirvana, then before you realize it, transforms you into a Joyce Carol Oates type of deeply introspective horror story with everyone going crazy.  You, the reader, shake your head free of the soporific effects of apricots & walnuts as the remaining pages grow slimmer.  This has been classic Greek Tragedy: prologue – the Talmadge family, soon to die out;  3 episodes – Della’s story, then Angelene’s, and finally Exodus - the story ends.  And, the Gods are in charge of all the action.  It’s a 400-page excellent read.

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[1] 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

… …

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.

From http://brownbagdiscussiongroup.blogspot.com/2014/10/awake-in-garden-of-eden-by-peter-andrews.html  

 

[2] https://archive.org/details/valley_of_hearts_delight

 

 

 

Awake in The Garden of Eden by Peter Andrews

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.