I saw the world end in 1962.
A dense fog covered the San Bernardino Valley that day. The inland vallies of California fall prey to a thick, dry, warm mist called a tule(1) fog. It is not as comforting as the low clouds which slip in off the sea and work their ways up into the dripping canyons of redwoods and horsetails. This fog does not cool and it does not wet. It gets down the back of your neck and rubs at your mood like a piece of coarse sandpaper.
Something different was mixed with the fog that day. The air had a smokey scent to it and little wisps of black and white ash fringed with glowing red drifted out of the sky. My mother led her five-year-old son into a bakery and asked the clerk what was happening. She pointed due east: the day before they had mown down the orange groves with yellow tractors and pushed them into piles. Today they were burning them. My part of Southern California was damned to concrete insalubrity.
You can still find orange groves in Southern California out where the developers have shown no interest. The odd packing house or the bit of useless railroad right-of-way slashing through the housing tracts can still be found in the suburbs. The ambrosial world scented with orange blossoms and greasy smoke from smudge pots has disappeared from the counties where it was king, though. San Bernardino still holds the National Orange Show, but the land around it is given over to housing and service industries. Riverside, Los Angeles, and Orange Counties have all developed in the same way.
Once there was a place of golden dreams, of summer weather in winter, and visions of snow-topped mountains overlooking temperate gardens. It was a world of leisure in the real estate brochures, of hard work for the farmers and the hands who worked seven months out of every year to harvest the crop. Winter frosts brought out oil-filled smudge pots and a thin film of grease on everything around the groves. Men and women broke their health trying to survive on industry wages. The women endured the repetition of the sorting line while the men picked the fruit from the trees and "rustled" the heavy crates in and out of the packing houses. A minority got to live the golden dream of owning a few acres, of being part of a cooperative such as Sunkist, and of living in ease, at least for part of the year. This lucky few got to sell their land when the real estate boom and taxes made it nigh impossible to remain as orchardists.
The history of California is one of moving from one kind of gold to another: from the soft metal to the tangy fruit and finally to the gold in the circuit boards and the gold that was the land. With each step, fewer could enjoy the riches and with each step, the romance of California took on a new visage. These pages are about one of those ages in the Golden State's short history, an age of sweetness and light, where daily life was a poem.