Dreaming About Lost Orange Groves
It is a very sad thing.
No, it is a most joyful thing.
On the way to Claremont there is an abandoned orange grove, weeds almost as tall as the trees are, growing between the ranks of the trees. For five years now I have looked at them, tried not to look at them, as I drive past. One day they will be cleared and a shopping mall or condominiums will take their place. Meanwhile, they stand, in hopeless rows, gray and dead.
At least I thought they were dead. But last week--good heavens, there are some white blossoms on some of them and yes, even a few beginning oranges! The heavy rains must have made them decide to live again.
I know of no other orange grove running right up to Foothill Boulevard. When you drive back to Pasadena from Claremont you see on the opposite side of Foothill another remnant of the orange groves--a near-Victorian wooden farm house with a smaller house in front of it. The small house was an orange stand.
Driving into Los Angeles--gosh, how many years ago, we were still in college in Michigan then, and Aunt Daisy and Uncle John were taking us on the grand trip to California--orange grove after orange grove rushed right up to the road. Oranges, really growing on trees just the way they looked on the wooden orange-crate labels! Fat oranges fallen on the ground under the trees--wouldn’t you think they would have all been snatched up? But no, every quarter mile or so was a stand set out next to the road with signs: “Oranges” or “Orange Juice” or “All You Can Drink 10.”
Incredible. California was true. Uncle John stopped and my twin brother Marc and I drank five glassfuls each, maybe six, I don’t remember. But I remember the groves, the endlessly rolling bushy green of them, fatly covering the foothills, practically bouncing with juice to fill every thirsty person in the world. Why, they were so improbably healthy that they probably had to chop them back from growing right in the road.
All gone. I suppose some kids don’t know that orange trees grew in rows, that there were groves of them. (I have a 1924 book, “Christmas in California”; its cover has Santa Claus picking oranges from an orange-tree branch. It was written and illustrated by Eleanor M. Tucker and proudly says in the back, “This Entire Book, Including Color Printing and Plates, Printed by F. A. Pagenkopf in Sierra Madre, California.”)
Is it impossible to make that valiant small remaining orange grove a historical monument, to let it remain in the middle of what is fast becoming a continuous city? They might even sell orange juice from Florida.
When I drive into Claremont, going east, I am always sadly aware of that desiccated grove. When I drive west, back to Pasadena, I forget to look at it. Instead I am caught by the vacant lots, rolling greenly to the north. They are still there, amazingly enough. Just before you go slightly uphill, entering the 210 Freeway, it seems like the country, but there, like refined Eiffel towers, are the power giants, marching north, black and determined, into the pink-gray haze that passes for twilight at the end of a smoggy day in Los Angeles.
