A different kind of garden spot
Every once in a while, bumming around California, you come across a place that strikes at the heart of memory, like a picture flashed suddenly on a large screen. Such a place is Whitley Gardens.
It’s off to the side of a busy two-lane, no-passing, turn-on-your-headlights highway between here and Bakersfield. I stumbled upon it meandering up 101 on vacation, when Cinelli suddenly said, “Turn here!”
Since we were just blowing along like an ambient breeze with no special destination, I followed her advice to veer off Highway 46 at Whitley Gardens. I discovered later she’d seen the name on a map and thought it might be a place to buy exotic plants.
Her garden at home covers half an acre and is abloom with more colors than a prom dress. There’s a pond on one side and a bridge over a creek that cuts through the yard. Pathways connecting both sides of the bridge wander through perennials and annuals that thrive among oak trees, and amid shrubbery that keeps the garden green when the seasons change.
I mention that only to explain that she has a Pavlovian response to the word “garden,” which is why we were on a street that seemed as if it were in another place, at another time. Not Mayberry, exactly, but close.
It took a moment to realize that there were no formal gardens on the lane that suddenly seemed to disappear into Missouri, or maybe Kansas. Cows grazed in an open field on one side, and small wood-frame houses graced the opposite side.
“You think they’re the happy cows that make good cheese?” Cinelli asked, referring to the TV commercial that makes being a cow sound like more fun than a monkey at a banana farm.
“If they are,” I said, “they aren’t really happy, according to the animal activists at PETA . They live in filth and die in pain. But then that’s PETA for you. Always looking for screaming creatures.”
“I’m not sure they’re even dairy cows,” she said, “but they look happy to me.”
I saw no point in pursuing the question of how one could tell if a cow is happy, because by then I was beginning to realize that the whole scene seemed somehow familiar to me, the way a strand of music sometimes strikes a place in memory.
We pulled off the road not far from a house that looked a little like the end of someone’s dream. If not abandoned, it was on the verge of dilapidation, overgrown with weeds and sitting silently in the distance. Farm equipment sat to one side, and I’m guessing that someone had big plans once that didn’t work out, because the equipment seemed unused and left to die.
A single red-blossomed hollyhock plant grew out of the weeds as a kind of symbol of what was, and maybe even what might have been.
The street made a loop, and the homes were more casual than arranged, as if they’d been built one at a time over a lot of years. Roses of different colors blossomed here and there, glowing with an inner light in the gold of a fading spring.
I sat in the car while Cinelli took pictures of the hollyhock blossom. A fly buzzing by added a kind of country melody to the silence, touching a boyhood place in memory where the sun always seemed warm and pollywogs turned into frogs in a creek near home.
East Oakland seemed rural back then. We lived near a dairy once, and I remember standing in muck up to my knees, but I liked the feel of the place. It stuck in my head.
A heavyset woman in a housecoat suddenly emerged from a yard about half a block from where I’d parked the car. She was walking a dog about as big as a rat, trailed by a black-striped cat that looked like it had done this a hundred times before and was bored out of its little cat mind. The woman could have been Aunt Bee from Mayberry. She stopped to talk to Cinelli, who explained what we were doing there.
It required an explanation because a few moments earlier a man in a pickup had warned that she was on private property when she had ventured a step or two to get the hollyhock picture. Cinelli can sweet-talk an owl from an oak tree, and the guy nodded solemnly after a moment and drove off, but not before I shot him the kind of gunnery sergeant glare that can wilt petunias.
We left the place the way we’d found it, no flower picked and no picket fence violated. It’s a nice little spot, and I hope they keep the cows and the trees and the old lady with the dog, and the cat trailing along. It will occupy a place in the soul that will emerge when the drums of the city grow too loud and I need to find peace in my memory, where it so often dwells. I’ll just think back to Whitley Gardens.
*
Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays; e-mail al.martinez@latimes.com.
