PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES : Marching Toward the Lilacs

On the floor of Aliso Canyon, by the dry creek that is the Santa Clara River, the lilacs were flowering at the Blum ranch. A slash of peach blossom cut through the blue-green scrub of the San Gabriels. This is a place of peace, calmed by the old and weathered wood and the golden warmth of primeval boulders along the dust path.

Elizabeth Blum Billet’s grandfather homesteaded this land a century ago. He cleared the hard mountain to bring forth plenty. He planted trees and dragged giant stones from the riverbed to hew the lintel and stairway of his house. Each spring, thousands of city dwellers drive out along the Antelope Valley freeway, to return home with armfuls of lilac blossoms, feeling that they, too, have touched the earth.

Elizabeth Billet lends herself well to such nostalgia. She and her husband--himself the grandson of homesteaders--live in the solid stone and wood chalet that her proud Swiss grandfather built for his family during World War I. In the den, a line of pictures--of maiden aunts in long skirts, uncles, cousins, children--recall an unbroken century. Horse ploughs, one-room school, church outings, harvest picnics--the West still whispers here.

Blum ranch is full of memories. The Great Flood of ’38 that swept away the grain fields and pumps. The uncle mangled in an accident who lingered two ghastly months. The world of marrying late--her father at 44, uncle at 52--or marrying early--she and her husband were 17 and 19. If the young Elizabeth Blum had other dreams--of nursing, for instance--they were forgotten in the fight of farming life: the russet mites and coddling moth, linnets and orioles that eat the fruit, coyotes that chew the irrigation pipes and customers who want perfect fruit, untouched by nature, scale- and blemish-free--but not the pesticides that render them thus.

“We gamble more here,” she says, “than we would if we went to Las Vegas.” A sudden summer thunderstorm will bruise the fruit, the freeze of ’55 wiped out a crop, now there is the Medfly and the specter of quarantine, which would lose a year’s income. So the fresh young face--Miss Acton 1952--has settled into the invisible middle age of a competent woman who never stopped to wonder whether she could cope.

Her three children are elsewhere; one works in a gold mine, another in computers, a daughter grows vegetables in Grover City. “They can make more money other places, and I don’t know we could work with any of them, either.”

The families who used to share the valley--the Freyers, Adamses, Nickels--their legacy is spent, too. They once built the “new” schoolhouse together, the homes and farms, and took in the needy. Only Blum ranch is left as some kind of monument; it represents the notion of life before change. And of course, in the full lives of a century, there was always change. The hogs, fresh apple cider, tulips and bee hives--crops and people have come and gone.

And were the lives given to the land any richer for staying put, for holding on, for turning away from restlessness? Along the walls of the chalet are beautiful water colors that Elizabeth Billet’s father painted: irises, roses, geraniums in 1916, but none again until the ‘60s when, crippled by a car crash, he took up the brush. He had been too busy.

To the visitors, carrying off windswept blossoms and faces flushed with the mountain air, it is unthinkable that Blum ranch will go. It is like a childhood room, its toys and posters frozen in time long after the child goes out into the world. The farm is all our “childhoods.”

Round the corner of Aliso Canyon, however, the relentless march of housing tracts continues. The land has been massacred and topped flat, as if the mountains had had no shape, majesty, terrain of their own. The dry creek is yet another reminder that water is still to come for the decorative lawns and bathrooms of the one-acre view homes. “You wonder sometimes,” Elizabeth Blum Billet says, “why you keep fighting.”

The farms go, one by one; and as far as the eye can see, the land gives way to the kingdom of lots.