The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  At age eighteen, he walked into the California state park office in mile-high Idyllwild to ask for a job in the San Jacinto Mountains. His only qualification was that he was a farm boy, unafraid of hard work. He walked out with a crisp beige button-up shirt with a grizzly bear stitched in gold.

  Three summers later, my mother, Flip Divine, a skateboard city girl with curls that bounced against her backpack, waltzed into his life without a permit (or so he claimed). My mother had iron calves and a winsome smile. Having just returned from a fifty-mile hike in the Sierra Nevadas, she was barely winded after an eight-mile climb over thirty-two hundred vertical feet, and felt strong enough to drop her pack and stroll back down the switchbacks to help a friend’s dad carry his gear the last few miles.

  My father, though impressed, did not fail to reprimand her later that evening when she whirled across the meadow with her girlfriends in an impromptu hora: She was in danger of trampling the wildflowers and delicate native grasses.

  Family legend has it that she simply grabbed his hand and made him dance with her. I would like to believe that this is true, although it would have been out of character for him. He isn’t usually one for dancing.

  It wasn’t an easy courtship. Not specializing in romance, my father once boxed up a roadkill turtle to send to a girl who had expressed a fondness for tortoises, never suspecting that the gesture might be misconstrued.

  When they discovered that they would both be attending Cal Poly Pomona agriculture school that fall—where she had enrolled for the sole purpose of marrying a farmer—she was on the lookout. But when she finally spotted him, two and a half weeks later, in front of the cafeteria, she blurted out: Why, Ranger Jon, I didn’t know you were so short! (She is not one to hide her disappointment.) He was five-five sans uniform and hiking boots. She would have loomed over him if she had worn heels instead of Birkenstocks.

  Eventually, they won each other over. She wooed him with homemade bread; he brought her radishes and carrots that he had grown in boxes on the roof of his apartment (the manager mistakenly assumed that he was growing weed). After botany class, the twenty-one-year-old farm boy who could hike his friends into the ground lingered to point out wildflowers to a girl.

  The first time she visited the Anderson family date ranch in the desert, several hours away, he took her on a hooting-like-screech-owls joyride in the moonlight. The headlights picked up the scared wide eyes of jackrabbits in the dust. He howled, then grinned.

  He wasn’t yet ready to relinquish his bachelorhood when she ran out of money to finish college, so she moved a thousand miles to Oregon to prove her independence. She woke at five a.m. to ride her bike in the rain to the strawberry fields and answered his letters with whimsical watercolor sketches. A fox whisked his tail in the woods; musician friends kept her up all night to sing in the dawn.

  He drove up to see her in a green Toyota pickup, and they hoed the mint fields side by side while she quoted lines from Romeo and Juliet.

  —But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!

  —Don’t stop working to talk, he chided. —The farmer is watching.

  Her hair and hands smelled of spearmint.

  * * *

  They were married a few months later, on a cloudless January day in 1975, under a palo verde tree in the California desert. The homespun wedding, planned in four weeks, went off without a hitch (aside from the neighbors’ dogs running off with a few of the wedding gifts to chew to shreds under the pomegranate trees). My father’s only regret was that the Thermal Thrift Store didn’t offer a wedding registry.

  My mother wore a hand-stitched cotton dress in olive, tangerine, and ochre, with a ruffled yoke and high neckline; she thought she might wear it again for potluck suppers. The great-grandmothers, not quite sure what to make of this new generation, perched on hay bales and exchanged stiff pleasantries. One gray-haired rancher’s wife noted that Flip Divine had done well to marry the Prince of Coachella Valley; Grandma Tyrone, not to be outdone, said that Jon Anderson was lucky indeed to have won the Queen of Long Beach.

  For two future missionaries, the religious overtones of the ceremony were notably muted. Under the bright blue of a desert sky, a friend read lines from the Sufi mystic Kahlil Gibran: Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. My father’s former Baptist youth pastor offered a blessing, and the Divine siblings warbled a Presbyterian hymn in four-part harmony.

  My parents’ faith, such as it was, had grafted on to the stolid rootstock of the Protestant work ethic the generous ecumenicalism of the Jesus movement, where peace and love trumped religious obligation. For my mother, religion was a loose-fitting dress that allowed her to whirl around and drink in the beauty: God loved her; God loved the earth; it was all so beautiful. In more desperate moments, when she felt pinned under the weight of a darkness that she could not shake off, she discovered that if she spoke the name of Jesus out loud, the heaviness vanished. But sin was not an agony that she lost sleep over.

  My father, more rule-abiding by instinct, had been shaped by the date ranch, where hard work and self-restraint were defining virtues—even though his shaggy beard and overalls no longer fit the crew-cut profile of a Future Farmer of America.

  If Grandma Lois had any reservations about her eldest son’s back-to-the-earth spirituality, she was too polite to mention them. He studied his Bible from time to time but reserved his deepest allegiance for the nature mysticism of John Muir. Alone in the mountains, he threw his arms around eight-hundred-year-old limber pines. He needed no greater miracle than the unfolding of a seed in the dark earth to anchor his faith in a Creator God.

  * * *

  As the newlyweds drove off into the sunset to begin their honeymoon, barefoot kids cavorted on the trampoline. My mother was at the wheel—an incidental detail that the more conservative uncles never let her forget.

  Not wanting to be trapped inside a motel, they pulled over beside the highway and camped at an overlook just inside of Yosemite—technically illegal, but my ranger father had a good instinct for which roads would go unpatrolled on a winter night in the off-season. They fell asleep to the moonlit summit of Half-Dome, silver above the snow. A lifetime of unplanned adventure had begun.

  My mountain-man father and his high school buddies were founding members of the Guadalupe Martinez Society (it mostly involved camping out under the stars with cans of beans and bed rolls, having sworn to protect the wilderness), so for their honeymoon hike the newlyweds followed the faint traces of Cahuilla Indian trails across the exposed dry ridges that loomed over the Coachella Valley floor.

  The desert was wild with spring: red tongues of ocotillo licked the sky as jackrabbits bolted through yellow poppies and pale white ghost flowers. Hiking one afternoon in only his boxer shorts, my father was stung by a honeybee where it hurt. My mother laughed so hard she had to sit down on a rock to breathe.

  They had packed just enough water to get them to Agua Alta Spring, where he assured her they’d be able to drink their fill, but when they arrived, they found only a dark circle of moist sand. It was near dusk, too dark to hike any farther—they were still days from civilization—so they dug with bare hands until their fingernails jammed against a stiff obstruction: the rib cage of a dead horse. Buried beneath the bones was a slow seep of water. With this, they refilled their canteens. Contamination might have been a concern, had they been prone to alarm. But they didn’t like to dwell on worst-case scenarios—a sign of things to come. They camped there two nights. The wildflowers were beautiful.

  They settled into a love shack at the edge of a citrus grove, a mile from the family date ranch, and when his buddies warned the young bride that her husband would never leave the desert, she got up from the kitchen table and circled a date on the calendar.

  —This, she announced, —is when we’re moving to Oregon.

  She had
n’t stopped dreaming about the mint fields and apple orchards.

  Three months later, they loaded the green pickup with cardboard boxes and drove the long way, via Nebraska, to stay with her relatives in the heartland—the ones whose Jell-O salads and ten-course breakfasts for the farmhands had convinced her that the life of a farmer was the life for her. The plan was for both of my parents to finish ag school in Oregon.

  As a summer hailstorm roared across the plains, they pointed the pickup northwest. My father let out an admiring whoop when they detoured through Yellowstone to see the white furious surge of Old Faithful. A month later, just before classes were due to start, my mother called her mother to complain of a strange sickness that left her nauseated—but only in the mornings. My grandmother laughed and congratulated her.

  I was her first feminist dilemma. Neither of her sisters nor her parents had graduated from college, though her older brother was about to. There was no one to insist that she earn a degree. She joked that she had already acquired the one credential she’d gone to ag school to find—she was a bona fide farmer’s wife. (The regret over this lost opportunity wouldn’t kick in for a few more years.)

  They moved three times in nine months and spent the last trimester scrambling like field mice to hoard a nest of savings. She drove a school bus with wooden blocks bolted to the pedals so that she could reach the brakes around her lumbering belly. He shoveled manure from the university chicken barns into an empty gravel lot and harvested sweet corn and fat, round squash from soil that a skeptical neighbor had assured them would never yield a crop.

  He even dusted china and raked leaves for an imperious professor’s wife who paid a stingy two dollars an hour, hinting that the landed son of a date baron must already have a vast inheritance tucked away. He cut and hauled Christmas trees in the rain. But the worst by far was the cannery, where he donned a hairnet and stood in a clanging assembly line to stuff three ears of corn into a tin. When a coworker told him he’d never find another job that paid so well, he felt the noose tighten around his neck. Work that bruised the spirit wasn’t worth the paycheck. He quit.

  * * *

  I arrived two weeks before their first anniversary and made the front page of the local paper as the first baby of the United States of America’s bicentennial year, born at home in a green chair (the joke was that they should have named me Liberty Sparkle).

  In a faded newspaper clipping tucked into the family photo album, my mother smiles wearily up at the photographer. Her curls spill over her ears like a spunky halo as she holds a squalling baby in her arms, caught like an unwitting Madonna in the glare of the flash. My father, bearded and grizzly, leans protectively over us in the plaid shirt that she had sewn for their first Christmas together.

  When strangers at the park complimented my parents on their front-page act of defiance (even in hippie-friendly Oregon in the 1970s, midwives were still a scandal), they laughed and tried to change the subject. They were happy to jettison the status quo for the sake of idealism, but they hadn’t planned on the unwanted publicity.

  In the evenings, they propped me in a baby walker by the chicken coop so I could watch the hens while they weeded the garden. We had moved yet again, this time to a field outside of town where musician friends had parked a mobile home.

  All we can say is thanks a lot, my father sang, his scratchy voice soft as he rocked me to sleep, for Jon and Flip and Apricot.

  * * *

  Not until his graduation from ag school did my father begin to grapple with his destiny. My mother argued for land in Oregon, where they could start a new life together, but my father was adamant: it was time to shed the prodigal lifestyle and return to the family date ranch (as well as the desert mountains). Duty trumped impulsiveness, and the hard-earned diploma was tucked into the back of the pickup alongside the stuffed green chair.

  My mother, once again in the driver’s seat, pulled onto the side of the road just before we crossed the California border to stretch her tired shoulders. Will I ever come back? she wondered as she gazed back across the forests of Douglas fir and incense cedar.

  Oregon disappeared behind us in the tilted rearview mirror.

  * * *

  For three months that summer, until the date harvest herded us down the mountain, we shared a six-by-ten cabin in the San Jacinto Wilderness—the very same valley where my parents had met four years earlier. After a day on the trails, my ranger father told stories around the campfire and sang lines of poetry from John Muir while she strummed her autoharp: Climb the mountains, and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you, like sunshine flows through the trees And the storms will blow their energies into you, while cares fall off like autumn leaves.

  My mother washed my cloth diapers in a basin of cold creek water and sewed me a pint-size ranger outfit by lamplight, one painstaking stitch at a time. Once, in an attempt to stave off loneliness, she picked a thousand tiny gooseberries for a pie. My father swore he’d never in his life tasted anything so delicious.

  I tottered along the trail in tiny leather boots that had cost a full day’s wages. My mother had tied bells to the laces so she could hear me if I wandered off. The creek sang and the branches swayed overhead, a curtain of green through which I could see the sky. I tipped back my head and babbled my first words to the trees.

  Saved

  Thermal, 1978

  WHEN WINTER SNOWSTORMS buried the tent cabin in the mountains, my parents towed an eight-foot-wide aluminum trailer to the edge of a mesquite grove on my grandparents’ ranch in the desert, surrounded by eighty acres of dates, pecans, and citrus.

  In the California desert, only tenacious plants survive without human interference. The spindly ocotillo plays dead at the first sign of drought, dropping its gray-green leaves like a showgirl stepping out of her sequins. The barrel-chested cactus shrivels to a shadow of its former self. But when raindrops spatter the flood-carved arroyos, watch out, world: Here come the glitterati. Flame-red blossoms burst from the withered ocotillo. The barrel cactus, swollen with hoarded rain, plumps out bright globes of fruit. Palo verde trees glow under neon yellow blossoms, buzzing with hummingbirds.

  It is a landscape of excess—showbiz or bankruptcy; a landscape that breeds either loyalty or despair.

  * * *

  On nights when I squirmed with heat rash, my father plopped me down on the bench seat of the green pickup and took me on aimless drives through the desert, where the bumpy rhythm of the ruts and windblown hillocks of sand lulled me drowsily to sleep, my sweaty face imprinted with the seat fabric. His rough hands were gentle when he carried me back inside.

  He disappeared early, before the sun’s glare rendered him useless, to cut firewood or work the date ranch with his brothers. The ten-acre plot of organic vegetables that he and my mother planted in an unused corner of the ranch, called Palm Shadow Produce, was their first entrepreneurial adventure, a quixotic attempt to get out of the shadow of the family business; my mother had deduced in short order that there were too many great-aunts, siblings, and second cousins waiting to divide a limited inheritance.

  As my parents walked the long rows of vegetables in the evenings, bending over to uproot weeds and check germination, I understood that the jackrabbits were our enemies, creeping out of the shadows to tear off tender leaves. My father and the uncles kept them at bay with twenty-two-caliber rifles fired from the back of the Jeep. I sat between my mother’s legs in the passenger seat and screamed encouragement. Search lights glared from the roll bar as the Anderson brothers hooted war cries and clouds of dust kicked up, white in the headlights. Ranch dogs ran alongside, ears flapping. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough for a gun of my own. I was disappointed when another pregnancy put an end to that wild jostling, the crack of the rifles fading into the night as my mother washed my feet and, despite my protests, put me to bed.

  After my first little sister arrived—Laura Meadow, yet another girl with an unexpected blaze of red hair—my moth
er had even less energy than before. Left to myself, I figured out how to shimmy up the veneer walls of the trailer while my mother clattered in the kitchen. I wedged one sweaty footprint onto each side of the hallway until I could touch the ceiling: a child’s momentary conquest, the illusion of perspective.

  Sent outside to play while the baby napped, I ordered my invisible friend Bango Bongo around the cardboard playhouse. I was careful to avoid the thin patch of grass that bloomed into green only in the two-foot radius of the dripping faucet, where the bees swarmed and stung.

  On slow afternoons, I hiked up the sand dune to Grandma and Grandpa’s trailer. Sometimes Grandma Lois filled the corn tank with water so I could splash in aimless circles, then flop on the trampoline in wet underpants. Or I’d sit at the kitchen table and scribble with broken crayons while she typed up church bulletins.

  —Oh, that’s just wonderful, Grandma would say, glancing up and readjusting her glasses before turning back to the typewriter as the dryer tumbled yet another load of frayed cotton T-shirts.

  I lived for the days when the Nishimoto cousins drove down to the desert to visit and we sat cross-legged under the damp wheeze of the swamp cooler with a stack of Uncle Linden’s comic books. In the hallway, a row of framed high school pictures smiled fixedly at the opposite wall: the six Anderson siblings. My father was the eldest.