Going home to visit family in Southern California always leaves me nostalgic, but maybe not in the way you think. Sure, I’m reminded of family and friends, people living and dead who passed through my life when I lived here. But there’s other stuff too.
There’s also nostalgia for place and landscapes of my youth, as well as the fading landscapes that were already lost by the time my family moved to the home where I grew up in the late 1960s. I may miss that imagined world of a past that predates my childhood most of all.
I grew up in a desert valley in Riverside, California. Our subdivision was one of the first that crept up the valley floor, displacing the orange groves that a few decades before had replaced the desert scrub ecosystem, a not-quite-native landscape that had already been altered by livestock grazing and the introduction of cheat grass.
Riverside will always be a good place to grow oranges, but before the post war boom it had to have been nirvana for citrus farmers. The seedless navel orange was developed at the agricultural station here, the climate was mild and sunny with only an occasional threat of frost, and while it rarely rained, there was plentiful ground water to irrigate the groves.
Those groves near our home were still actively farmed when we first moved in, and the farmer had a reputation for dealing harshly with youngsters he found messing around near his crops. I suppose that makes sense as we were young and dumb and didn’t have the slightest clue that when we helped ourselves to his oranges, either to eat or throw at one another, we were cutting into his profits.
On one boyhood walk through the groves we found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest and died under the tree. We were so fascinated by its translucent, featherless body that we returned with a packed lunch the next day to bury it and dine on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
We were sitting under one of the trees memorializing the fallen chick when we heard the farmer’s tractor approaching. We bolted from the grove at full sprint, certain our backsides were soon to be peppered with the rock salt the farmer loaded his shotgun with to punish wayward orange grove invaders. But the shots never rang out and we made it home unscathed.
Eventually, the encroaching subdivisions and meddlesome suburban boys who lacked even the most basic understanding of the economics of farming took their toll. Well, there was that and also the sacks of money developers paid the farmers for their land. In time the groves were either replaced or abandoned. Once left fallow the groves would hang on for a time, but without irrigation water the trees were soon just skeletons of Riverside’s rich agricultural history.
It’s the post Word War II, pre-subdivision era that I never knew but imagine as a kind of paradise lost. Orange groves in the valley bottoms, valley quail on the hillsides. Traces of that time lingered well after the groves had died. There was an old barn beyond the dead groves that in our young minds was a full day’s hike away. This was the type of adventure we undertook only with great care and planning, including a backpack stocked with provisions for the journey — PB&J for all, and a real canvas-covered canteen for water. H2O out of a plastic bottle has never tasted that good.
The old wooden barn had been abandoned long before the groves and probably wasn’t safe. But we entered the mysterious structure and climbed around a bit, before the fear of a salt loaded shotgun overwhelmed our curiosity and we began the long trek home.
We never told our parents about our adventures of course. These were secrets to keep just among us boys.