California: Cousin David's Olive Farm

Sandbox Memories

My flight from Denver to Oakland on the 12^th was uneventful and, I picked up my little rental car with no problems and headed northeast on I-80, then north on CA29 toward my cousin David’s farm, 3 hours north of Oakland. It was a fitting first stop on this journey of personal as well as professional exploration. You see, I’ve known David longer than anyone still living with whom I’m in touch. I was an only child and my parents are long gone as are my aunts and uncles. With the exception of David, I never knew most of my cousins very well. 

Napa Valley vinyard south of St. Helena, California

 

Actually David and I had a rather rocky start – from my perspective at least, since David was less than 2 when we met and can’t be held responsible for any of the initial difficulties. In August 1950, I was 4½ when David came to stay with my parents and me for several weeks. As an only child who had had little contact with other children (day care for middle class children was virtually unknown 60 years ago). My dad worked long hours as a golf pro, greens keeper, and club manager at a rather modest country club with 9-hole golf course in the small town of Cresson located between Altoona and Johnstown in western Pennsylvania. Thus, we saw little of him except in the winter, and I had my non-working mother (a former English and French teacher) pretty much to myself most of the time. I was used to getting things my own way but not to sharing. When Dad’s WWII buddies, golfers, and my parents’ relatives showed up at the house, I was the center of attention.

 

So suddenly here’s this toddler who gets all the attention from visitors and cuts into the time I was used to getting from my mother. However, my most vivid memory of that summer with David involved my sandbox. As a precocious and observant little kid who loved trains and cars, I was heavily into road and rail construction projects in my sandbox and was very personally invested in my creations. David took his naps in the morning and I took mine in the afternoon. Therefore, I would construct something in the sandbox during the morning while David was napping, break for lunch, then head upstairs for my afternoon nap. When I came out to the back yard later in the afternoon, I found to my horror that David would have routinely messed up all my morning’s work.

David never came to stay with us again for any long periods. Over the next 15 years, I saw him every couple years when we would visit Uncle Roy, Aunt Mildred, and David at their home in Sharon, Pennsylvania (north of Pittsburgh) where I had been born in early ’46. They visited us several times as well. David and I got along OK but I think I harbored some sub-conscious, lingering resentment dating from the sandbox incidents.

 

A Peaceful Visit to Cousin David’s Farm

I didn’t see David at all after 1968 and lost touch with him until another cousin helped put me in touch with him in the mid-2000s. We had several great phone conversations about our family and what we’d been up to all these years. We laughed about the sandbox incidents which, of course, he didn’t remember but had heard something about from his parents. I learned that David had gotten an anthropology degree after a stint in the navy including a couple years in Viet Nam. He eventually established a contracting business restoring old homes in the Oakland – Berkeley area, met and married his spouse, Janet, and bought some land near Clearlake, California where they built a house and several other buildings.

David and I finally met briefly when I was in the Bay Area for a short-course in 2007. Our time together was way too short and we hoped for the opportunity for an eventual repeat. This current trip gave me an ideal opportunity to spend a couple days with David and Janet before continuing west to Hawaii.

It was an excellent two days not only seeing David and Janet but walking around their acreage on a gently sloping, ancient volcanic bench with chaparral-covered mountainsides in the distance. They have several acres of olive trees which yield small olives used to make olive oil. It is a serene spot where life is good. I particularly enjoyed helping David spray the olive trees with a mixture of molasses and a compound that messes with the sex lives of some insect pests. The spraying took place in the cool crisp early morning air before the sun’s heat made us retreat to the house where the interior temperature was mitigated by a swamp cooler.

 

Cousin David ready to attack insect pests

 

David & Janet's modest but very comfortable home

 

 In the meantime, we also spent maybe 20 minutes in David’s sweat lodge avoiding the late morning heat outside rather than sweating. One of our numerous philosophical conversations had moved to the subject of the environment in general and global warming in particular. It came to a climax there in the sweat lodge when I made an observation to David: “What’s missing here is the elephant in the room that most people are afraid to bring up. What do you suppose that is?” David didn’t have to think long before replying with the answer I’d been looking for: “Too many people on the planet. But of course,” he went on whispering, “you can’t talk about it because people get offended about the idea of the need to limit, and even reduce, human population.” We got back to work and using a pick axe and lopper, cleared branches and unwanted vegetation from on an overgrown trail before returning to the house for lunch.
 

I'm enjoying David's sweat lodge with one of his canine companions

 

Speaking of global warming, David had recently finished a book entitled, The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World without Ice Caps by Peter D. Ward (Basic Books, 2010). I read the introduction and learned that the book is a narration by an observer who is describing the earth around 2050, 2100, 2300, and 2500. It relates how various parts of the world will be affected by rising sea levels and changing climate over the next few hundred years. It starts off with a description of south Florida where the fight against the rising sea level is eventually abandoned by Federal, state, and local governments. There is massive out-migration with people walking away from low-lying homes which had been red-lined by homeowners’insurance companies in the 2070s. Miami becomes a lawless non-community with many homes literally under water, no public services, and drowned airports and interstate highways.

Returning to the subject of David’s farm, I was shown several stone walls constructed on hillsides along the contour to inhibit loss of topsoil where fruit and olive trees are growing. David also told me about current and past forest and brush fires which are a threat during the long hot dry summers. Seven years ago, a fire made it to their property and only missed the house and outbuildings because of David’s efforts to keep a roughly 100 foot perimeter cleared of most trees and brush. 
 

Stone walls inhibit soil creep

Evening shadows in an olive grove

Written on 15 July 2012 over the Pacific en-route to Honolulu