Awake in the Garden of Eden

I woke up one morning in The Garden of Eden. My mother was fixing me some breakfast, she said, “Go outside, and play while I unpack.” It was a hot day, 10:30, and already 80° in San Jose. Bulldozers had scrapped the earth around our new tract house. Right out the back door, there was a thirty-foot DMZ, then the neglected orchards. They were doomed to go in the next wave of building. Just at the edge of the plum orchard and directly behind our house was a broadly sweeping tree with huge leaves that looked exotic, just as I imagined palm fronds. The tree was laden with dark purple, almost black, pear shaped fruit.

We had just arrived in the Valley of Hearts Delight after a cross-country, permanent move by my parents to find their fortune in California. I knew no one out here. My fellow fourth grade friends in Detroit were in another world, impossibly far away. Jim, Dick, and I had run in a pack and continually got in trouble together. I was their leader. The two neighbor girls, Beverly and Frances, down the street in Detroit had just turned ten and eleven that spring. They had been teaching me how to play Doctor. We would do this in the basement. 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 our parents were scared we would find, but we never did find it. I felt alone without my Detroit friends and no new ones until September, two months away.

Back in the house, my mother told me, “This is fruit. A fig and it is okay to eat if you wash it.” 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, as if it had been fermenting.

Figs from the store are nothing like the ones you pick from the tree on a hot summer day. Dried, they are too chewy because there is more skin than pulp. Cold, they are too fleshy and disgusting, like eating a piece of raw animal. However, big, hot, and ripe, the fig fills you with rich sugary sweetness.

Like any fourth grade boy in those days, I was curious and fearless, and thus I began my summer of wanderings through the orchards of San Jose. All my life I had lived in a busy city. Now, immersed in such solitude, I would roam from sun-up to sundown and rarely see another living soul, except birds. The joy to me was the fecundity of the land. Around the ugly scar of our rock and cement-droppings back yard, I found wild tomato plants, sprouted from the seeds of construction workers' lunches. They blossomed without tending and produced the most beautiful fruit. The dusty heat of the Santa Clara Valley summer added 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. Growers sell their plums and tomatoes by the pound weight. These days they grow them to hold more water and then the growers profit 89¢ a pound from free rain and irrigation water.

Beyond the fig tree was the orchard of plums. Rotting, but sweet-smelling plums strewed the ground below each tree, but there still was a limitless supply in the trees. The sweet smell of these wasp-covered rotting plums was delicious. My mouth watered 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 flavor of one of those giant plums you get today concentrated into a piece of fruit a quarter the size, without irradiation, chemicals, or poisons.

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 partly 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 were properly ripe, the pit would separate easily.

I was so in tune with the earth, as the weeks passed by, that periodically as I ran into a large mound of freshly bulldozed dirt, I stripped and buried myself in it up to my armpits, just to feel the earth in touch with my body.

To balance the sugary aspect of this daily diet of tomatoes, figs and plums, there were walnuts and almonds. I learned that summer how to harvest a walnut. The skin was thick and light green if I pulled one off the tree. The juice in the skin was so strong that it stained my hands and took days to work off. If the green skin sealed the nutshell, I could not get it off; the shell and nut were one. I had to wait for the skin to dry out and start to fall off. Once the shell was on the ground with no skin, I could not tell how old the walnut was. So best was to spot a withered or cracked skin that was easy to flick away. Then I broke open the shell by placing the walnut between the bases of my two palms, as if I was praying. I kept the seam between the two halves of the walnut shell in contact with my palms. I interlocked my fingers for more leverage, and then squeezed and the walnut shell split in two. Too green and the walnut meat was chewy and bitter. If it was too old, it was like a black peanut. Just right was tasty and full of protein.

The Valley is now made of Silicon, not fruit trees.  I prospered from this transition.  But I regret that these moments are lost to history.