THE HARVEST : In Oak Glen, the Simple Life Isn’t All That Simple

Somebody’s got to pick the apples. On a wet Thursday morning the job fell to the four men of the Snow Line Orchard who tumbled out of the pickup. They stamped their feet and looked at the silvery rain clouds that whisked along the mountain crest. It’s the cold rain that brings out the red on an apple, and these were surely ready. “A perfect day to pick apples,” said Doyle Kennedy in blithe disregard for the chilling, limitless mist.

“It’s over 5,000 feet up here,” said Joe Bowens, as he tossed the wooden crates to the ground.

“I find that very hard to believe,” Kennedy said.

“When it’s clear up here,” Bowens insisted, “you can see almost 360 degrees. You can see Lake Perris out there, almost all of Riverside.” He wheeled around and pointed out the invisible sights. All you could make out was an impenetrable gray wall of fog. We were in the San Bernardino Mountains. The rows of young red delicious and golden delicious trees rose and fell over the wavering earth, but you could barely see past the seventh tree. Two massive oaks bulked against the shortened horizon.

“Sometimes,” Bowens went on, “you can even see the people sailing on Lake Perris, and everything that they’re wearing, and . . . .”

“I find that very hard to believe,” Kennedy said. Then he realized he was being kidded. He laughed like a loon and threw out some more buckets.

Behind his back, Kennedy’s friends would say that he “just has too much enthusiasm.” He has a rambunctious cheeriness, and with it he was a Pentecostal preacher at age 7, and with it he was later an Electro-Lux vacuum cleaner salesman. These days he guides a flock of 35 or so at the Bethel Temple in Banning, but to pay the bills he has to spend five or six days of the week up in the orchards. He can offer you a verse from Scripture that says that if a man does not care for his own, he’s worse than an infidel. Kennedy would quote it with his usual unfettered, aw-shucks happiness.

Bowens, beefier and more intense, has a pair of dice tattooed on his arm. He transports prisoners for the sheriff’s department and wears a little star on his belt. To him, the job of supervising comes natural. His father-in-law, Mert Hudson, owns the orchards, so Bowens helps out. “I sure don’t do this for the money,” he said, buckling on his gathering bag.

The other two men were doing it for the money. They were migrant workers, part of the agricultural system’s jerry-built method of foreign aid. Eugenio, in a child’s ski coat and Skoal cap, had a wide, toothsome smile. Alexandro, older, wore a double-breasted suit coat over his jeans, and with his solemn mustache and worldly bearing, he could have been a deposed secretary of state. Hoisting his green sack, he wedged between the limbs of the wiry young trees and began plucking.

Not much was known about them. They supported families somewhere. They had Social Security cards. They didn’t like to talk.

I walked along the line of trees to get my blood going. The damp had seeped right through my boots. The drizzle was, however, a blessing on the blushing golds, a greenish apple marked by a warm burst of red. The water beaded on the waxy surface and collected at the stem.

“Go ahead and have an apple,” Kennedy hollered. I fingered a clump sagging on a limb and knew that before this morning was over I was going to bite into the freshest apple in creation and that it was going to burst with clarity and perfection and grace and all the finest pleasures of Mother Earth. But for some reason I wanted to wait.

I turned around and could only vaguely see the pickers in the fog. But I could hear Kennedy’s irrepressible voice calling out a singsong hymn, “I’ve Been Redeemed”: “I met the Lord and we both agreed, / I love Him and He loves me.”

This is what I like about Los Angeles. You can get in your car and leave the sun-wracked weariness behind and in 75 miles be in a land of complete surprise.

Kennedy, Bowens, Eugenio and Alexandro were harvesting for the town of Oak Glen, a quaint settlement among the mountain pines. The business of Oak Glen is the natural apple, the apple that has not been scrubbed and polished of its own protections by the supermarkets and coated with other, man-made waxes. The attendant lure of Oak Glen for the flat-lander, deprived of seasonal ebb and flow, is the chance to shop for apples where winter is a-comin’, where the leaves are changing and where your coat is cinched up against the thin, cool mountain air.

It is no longer a shrouded hideaway of hardscrabble pioneers. In the ‘20s you could find teams of women wearing gloves and bonnets, wrapping apples in tissue paper and crating them for export around the globe. Where once more than 600 acres of apples spread across the hills, there are now about half that number--barely enough to satisfy the tourist trade. About 10 years ago, the simple pie shops and apple sheds were supplemented by antique shops and the mercantilism that promotes a kind of Christmas-in-July effect.

But go further up the mountain and there are the old, cozy relics such as Snow Line. The proprietor is a tall, retired Army recruiter named Mert Hudson, who leases the shed and its 26 acres from a realtor. It’s a creaky old wooden shed, painted a dull red, and there’s a matching one for the cider press. Spreading over the sheds and the picnic area is a towering Italian chestnut tree. On a clear autumn day, the small lot is often packed with visitors.

How much longer this will go on is anybody’s guess, because Hudson knows that he may have to clear out in deference to the builders of houses. After a career of getting shunted around the world in the Army, Hudson wanted the simple life. Sometimes he finds the simple life not all that simple.

Further around the bend from Snow Line is the Wilshire Ranch, which began in 1876 when Joseph Wilshire paid an Indian $50 for a piece of land. He built it up to 1,500 acres, but after succeeding generations of families have come and gone, selling off parcels to educate the children and so on, about 67 acres are now left. It’s in the care of a woman whom you can’t easily dismiss, Jo Anne Wilshire.

She stands about six feet tall. I found her that misty day on the open-air loading dock of her ranch. Crates of the season’s first apples were propped up and open. She was dropping scraps of lumber into a potbellied stove. Erect and formidable, she has short, salt-and-pepper hair and dark, bright eyes. She was dressed to load crates but still comported herself with an executive regality. In the 33 years that she was gone from the family hearth she really was an executive, traveling the nation for the Shelley’s Tall Girl company. After her second divorce, she said, “I threw away my briefcase and my false eyelashes and came out to the country.” She made it sound like one of her favorite lines.

Her house is now a trailer out back. She has a sheep named Beulah and a hillside full of Indian corn, popping corn and pumpkins. Her shed is about as simple as a shed can get. “We’re trying to keep the nostalgia,” she said. “You have to take time to talk to people who want to talk about their folks up in Minnesota.”

Another fact of life Wilshire faces is that two-acre plots of land are now selling for more than $100,000 in Oak Glen, and that there are people who think that filling up 67 acres with fruit trees isn’t perhaps the most lucrative option. Four people who think that way are her children, now grown and scattered about the West Coast. “My kids ask me: ‘Why are you sitting on all that acreage, mom?’ But I don’t know--maybe it comes with age, but I like to share. I’d like to share this.”

What she shares is lilacs in April, daffodils in May and an autumn full of pumpkins and apples. And all the intangibles. “I feel better now at 53 than I did at 30,” she said, lively eyes dancing. “It’s from lifting all those boxes.”

She doesn’t know whether a fifth generation of Wilshires will one day be ready to lift the boxes.

Driving down the mountain toward Yucaipa that evening, I came across Eugenio and Alexandro marching single-file along the roadway. They looked like soldiers. They faced a hike of perhaps eight miles to town, which is no trip for a fruit picker. I pulled over and gave them a ride.

The first time I saw Oak Glen was as a teen-ager, when my cousin Gaylord took me up in his hot-rod Plymouth. There was a famed place on the downhill passage called Gravity Hill. You had mountains rolling along on either side of you, and there was a place where you could stop your car at the bottom of a rise and, through an illusion given by the terrain, you would appear to be coasting uphill. It’s a great kick for two teen-age guys in a hot-rod Plymouth.

I coasted to a stop and tried to find it. Eugenio looked over at me in wonderment. I was coasting nowhere. I went on to the next hill and eased to a halt. The car just sat there. Whether Eugenio was carsick or confused, he just didn’t look very happy. I put the car into gear and took off again. I didn’t know how to explain to him that all I wanted to do was coast uphill.