Farming’s the Apple of Their Eyes : Family Is Happy With Rustic Life in Santa Ysabel

For some people, they’re a way of life. They’re a way to raise kids, a way to pass one’s days out of a city. They’re a way to keep a litany of fireside stories building through the years, a way of bringing back the memories, the good times, the good people.

It’s hard to imagine a ripe piece of fruit packing that kind of power, but it does.

For Ray and Helen Meyer, apples are life, the fruit of 26 years. That’s how long they’ve lived in what some locals call “Greater Julian”--actually, Santa Ysabel.

For eight years, the Meyers have operated Meyer Orchards, a fruit stand on California 78 between Santa Ysabel and the booming hamlet of Julian. Meyer Orchards is an annual “pit stop” (no peach puns intended) for carloads of tourists seeking escape from the bump and grind of Los Angeles and San Diego.

Passers-by come to whisk away edible mementoes--apples, pears, peaches, cider, squash, peanuts, olives or dried apricots. Even pumpkins and Indian corn. Or maybe they come just to be graced by the Meyers’ country hospitality.

The Meyer menagerie includes more than just humans. There’s Charley, the big dog, who usually sleeps under the counter beneath the cash register. And for years, the Meyers have had cats--legions of cats, with names like Lucy, Lizzy and Ysabel (in honor of the town that serves as breeding ground for the 75 or so Mrs. Meyer estimates she has fed--not all at once, of course).

For the family, Meyer Orchards is much more than a stand. It’s a livelihood, a reason for being, a stamp of distinction.

The Meyers are the last full-time “apple family” working in the Julian Valley. And even their three children have grown and gone. Several other merchants operate stands or grow apples, but none is full-time. Those privileged souls have the luxury of other jobs, independent wealth or see apples as merely a hobby. Only the Meyers grow, pick and sell year-round, and at times even they see it as little more than a mixed blessing--a nice big red juicy apple with periodic dents. Even threats of worms.

“With anything, there’s problems,” said Helen Meyer, 50, who minds the stand while husband Ray plants and harvests, oversees the hired help or runs the cider mill a few miles away. “But still, we like the life. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t do it.”

What do they like about it?

“Living in the country,” Helen said quickly, with a smile.

“Working for yourself,” Ray said with a drawl. “That’s what’s nice. Being your own boss.”

But the apple life isn’t the romantic fantasy many think it is.

Meyer, 52, doesn’t own real estate. He doesn’t own the house he lives in, or the stand, or the packing shed, or the cooler or the cider mill. He rents or leases everything, including three orchards covering 78 acres. His and his wife’s dream is to get hold of some of these items, but the wherewithal just hasn’t come. If only dreams could come in on little cat feet--then the Meyers might be kings.

Home ownership is an increasingly remote possibility, Ray says. Transplanted urbanites who migrate to the area merely for escape--for isolation and retreat--have driven prices higher than the highest orchard, on the highest mountain.

“The prices have shoved agriculture clear out,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. The business (of growing and selling apples) is fantastic. Couldn’t be better. The trade-offs are no peace and quiet in the fall. October is incredible. I don’t like the pressure. And every year it gets worse.

“Work is the best thing I know for stress--for gettin’ rid of it. But sometimes, I work so hard and get so stressed out, I can’t unwind. That ain’t all. In Southern California the genuine farmer is an endangered species. So many people up here now are just here to get away. They have no interest in minding the land. And for those that do, the price of owning a place and maybe some acreage is outrageous.”

Meyer, a tall, taciturn man with a bony, angular face and deep-set blue eyes, was sitting in a truck, looking at a field. He stared at the rows of apple trees--leaves turning red, yellow, even shades of violet--for several seconds. He lamented first that they were too far apart--30, maybe 35 feet. Trees should be only 12 to 15 feet apart, he said. That way there would be more trees to bear more fruit--wouldn’t waste space. Space in these parts is valuable, and expensive.

He lamented further that several years ago such land was bought almost for “turkey feed.” Today, it’s on the market for prices maybe only a few can afford.

Meyer shook his head.

“A real farmer or an apple grower just doesn’t have the money to buy something like that,” he said.

In other words, Southern California is just too popular. So many people and, to Meyer’s way of thinking, too few farmers. Still, it’s not as bad, he said, as it is in the Midwest.

“Back there the banks talked them into buying more and more land, big tractors and combines, and before you know it, those guys all had a huge debt,” he said. “Then they’re in big trouble. If I’m gonna own something, I pay cash. I don’t want to be beholden to no one.”

Meyer and his wife of 31 years moved to Santa Ysabel in 1963. He grew up in Valley Center, she in Whittier. She later moved to Pauma Valley, where she and Ray met and married. They moved to Santa Ysabel to manage about 95 acres for the American Sunday School Assn.

The plan was, they would grow and harvest apples and pears and oversee a group of children in a kind of year-round camp project. The idea was growth and development, not only of apples but also of people. They did it--enjoyably, memorably, unregrettably--for four years, until suddenly, inexplicably, the Philadelphia-based group sold off 39 acres and kept the rest, but shut down the camp.

Meyer said he still doesn’t know “the whole story,” but thinks it had a lot to do with an absentee landlord and, of course, the bottom line.

“Sure, we were disappointed,” Helen said. “When you think you’re settled down to your life’s work, and then it’s all taken away. . . .”

She laughed.

“You know, the funny thing is, we just fell into the apple business,” she said. “Got into it purely accidentally because of what happened with the camp.”

In many ways, she’s happy for the accident. Helen Meyer is an open, self-effacing, gentle woman with a seemingly guileless nature and a reverence for animals and plants. In some ways, the two are related. She now sells bouquets of flowers, grown in a semi-circle around the stand, using the proceeds for horse feed. She and her daughter own two horses.

Daughter Ruby lives in Ramona. Another daughter lives in Porterville, near Bakersfield, and the Meyers’ son lives in Oregon, where he tells his father that farmers can earn an honest buck without having to worry about carpetbaggers or gentrification.

The best thing “the apple life” has given the family is just that--what Ray calls a sense of family. Santa Ysabel was a great place to raise kids.

“They learned to work ,” he said. “Loren (his son) did everything I did. He learned to run a tractor and a chain saw. Prune trees. That way, he never had trouble finding work. Now he runs heavy equipment on a construction crew up in Oregon.

“My kids knew how to do things. My daughter learned to garden and to put up trees. They learned everything the country way. Anymore around here, kids are having problems with vandalism and drugs, just like they do in the city. It’s still a good place to live--where we want to be and plan to stay--it’s just . . . different. But what isn’t?”

As Helen puts it, Ray just “goes and goes.” The work is hard, almost bone-breakingly difficult and repetitious.

The Meyers are up early, with the cats. Helen opens the stand and Ray heads off to load boxes into a truck. He may go to the cider mill, then to the fields to pick fruit, or to load boxes full of fruit that others have picked for $1 a box. (Apples are about 95% of all the produce he grows.)

The trouble with hired help is one of the worms of the job--one of the dents in the juicy fruit. It’s tough finding good people, Ray said, but some of the work can’t be done alone.

If someone doesn’t show up, as happened on a recent weekday, Ray gets stuck with picking and all the other chores as well.

The public’s demand for apples--for pies and cider--is, he said, at an all-time high. The naive observer would conclude that that is wonderful. And last year it was. Meyer then enjoyed a record harvest of more than 8,000 boxes (holding roughly a bushel each). A bushel sells for $16 and a pound for 65 cents.

This year’s shortage is serious--about half the crop it should be, he said. Some growers have imported apples from other counties, some from other states, but Meyer refuses.

Adamantly.

“People coming in want them to be from around here,” he said, “so they are. They’ve got to be real.”

Meyer said passers-by are sometimes stunned when the hear that the Julian area is hardly one of the world’s best for apple-growing. Rocks, hills and unpredictable weather often mitigate against what he calls ideal conditions. He views the Columbia River basin of Washington as one of the best, mainly for the balance that a plenitude of water lends to a lush ecosystem.

“Here, some areas get way too much water and others not enough,” he said. “It’s just never quite right . . . never quite perfect.”

He picked up one very bright apple with a gaping hole in the side.

“Hail,” he said. “We had hail in early August.”

The spring brought frost and frigid temperatures, while early October has meant paradoxical heat and searing Santa Ana winds.

“All that change is just death on apples,” he said. “And that’s the main reason we’re short this year.”

The first Sunday in October brought the biggest number of customers that Meyer ever remembers showing up at the stand. On Sundays, it often takes seven people to handle them all. While short, this year’s harvest isn’t near as bad as 1970-72, which Meyer said are the lowest years on record. The Great Depression of local apple-growing.

Still, it’s worth it.

“If we figured out what we earned by the hour,” Helen said, “we’d be getting really low wages. But we’d much rather live here than in town. We go to Los Angeles or San Diego as little as we have to--you know, to visit friends. Despite our complaining, we do like the company--the people who come up. We understand why they need to get away. We welcome them.

“And, we eat well. We grow our own vegetables and fruit, and, of course, I love to cook.”

Best evidence of the quality of the product may be in Ray Meyer’s diet. As a man in perfect health, great shape, it may be due, he said with a smile, to a staple.

Three apples a day.

No matter what.