Fruit Maps

Meme Series 1

Nothing makes me sadder than looking at old fruit maps, with their forgotten hobo symbols for “sweet fruit,” “abundant tree,” or “not good to eat—stay away.”

So many of the maps in my possession identify trees that no longer exist or entire neighborhoods that were erased decades ago.

Yes, you can go online and find all kinds of up-to-date fruit maps. You can even take part in the National Yard Fruit Project, if you’re so inclined. But the maps I’m looking at are not those maps. They’re from a different time and speak of a different way of life, a vanished way of life—or at least a way of life that has been driven even deeper underground.

What must it have been like to pass through El Portal or Centralia or Kinneyville or Petaluma or any of a thousand other neatly platted towns in, say, 1913 or ’23 or ‘33, knowing you might subsist for days on nothing but windfall guavas—and then go for months with so very little that ripened on a tree except maybe a sack of wizened apples you’d gathered during the last harvest days of a crisp, advancing autumn?

What must it have been like to slap the dust off your clothes, pull the cap off your head, and ask in your politest voice if, ma’am, you might harvest the pears off the tree whose branches reached over the fence and into the alley in exchange for as many as you could manage in your satchel?

I walk through my neighborhood now, one of the first to grow up on this side of the bay, and see so much fruit rotting on the sidewalks, flattened by the daily passage of shoes and scooters, harvested by no one. And I walk through more rootless neighborhoods still, when I visit those large planned tracts in the Southland where so many of my friends ended up, where harvest time yields no fruit at all because fruit is a nuisance and ornamentals grow instead. Most of my friends can’t name so many as half the species that grow in their yards, if that.

I want the fruit maps back, if not the lean times that made them such closely held prizes. Back then, a man would trade for a fruit map. Kill for one, even. But, then, a man would kill for most anything in the dire frames of mind that took hold in that era—a dirty bedroll, a dirty picture, a dirty look. Under the overpasses and in the canyon creekbeds, some still do—leaving the children, those still allowed to roam free—to stumble upon their desiccated and skeletal remains.

**

My grandfather’s grandfather, Peter Hendrickson, did a lot to promote these fruit maps. Without him, in fact, I might not have known about the fruit maps at all. They are the sum of my inheritance—from Peter by way of my grandfather.

Hendrickson was one of the great horticulturalists of his age. Of an age that possessed “horticulturalists.” You can look him up if you don’t believe me. From the 1870s on, gardeners across the country consulted his two great books, which he updated over many editions: Practical Horticulture and Gardening for Fun and Profit. One of the big seed companies owns the rights to them now. Dozens of editions later, Gardening for Fun and Profit is still in print.

I grew up with those books, though I never paid them much heed. They took their place in the built-in bookcase in my grandfather’s den, alongside his books about the Wild West and pigeon-raising and the South Seas travel journals written and privately published by his friends back in the Thirties, a decade before some of them would return to those islands to fight and sometimes die on the very same beaches. I preferred the South Seas and the Wild West to the gardens in those old how-tos, though their engravings, postage-stamp delicate, did hold a certain sway.

I found the maps rolled up in a cylindrical leather storage case on a potting table in my grandfather’s garage, the satchel dried to the point of mummification. My grandfather discovered me there, poring over the contents of the satchel, nearly two hours later. Though he’s reached the point where he can no longer quite manage on his own, a fact he resents, he can still project his will—the strong, masculine presence of a newspaperman-outdoorsman, at once gentlemanly and gruff. I had come to help him move out of the old place and into a retirement home. Now that he’d resigned himself to this change, he wanted to get on with it.

My grandfather remembered the maps. He made a wry snort when I mentioned them, though he professed not to know much about them. A minor detail of his growing up in Englewood Cliffs, he said. In the warm months, especially, peaking in August and September, a steady procession of men, and occasionally women, would find their way to the big house on the edge of “The Swamp,” as the locals called the marshy ground on the northern edge of town. His grandfather, with his love of Linnaean Latin despite his otherwise plainspoken manner, called these people the itinera.

Many among the itinera knew they stood to be paid if they made their way to The Swamp and found old Hendrickson at home. He paid decent money for those maps. Downright handsomely if his leather-skinned, unwashed guests brought pictures—or even better, seeds or actual fruit, even the fruit was rotten or desiccated and no longer good to eat.

“Greasy things, those damned maps,” my grandfather said, spreading one out on the weathered surface of the potting table. “Opened and closed so often they were usually torn along the folds. Some of them dangled like the goddamned paper dolls my sister Livvy used to make. And some of them stank like you wouldn’t believe.”

He moved his shaky fingers over the symbols and the markings, explaining the maps’ finer points. It was he who taught me the symbols. The mysterious names that appeared in the margins? The names of varietals, either learned from old Hendrickson or, often as not, dreamed up on the spot and then committed to print for posterity in his next semi-annual circular.

“This map here? This neighborhood? A fine old neighborhood in the Germantown section of Columbus, Ohio.”

“How do you know all of this?” I asked.

“My grandfather liked my hand. I was the one who copied them out.

“That was the standing bargain my father made with the itinera: old maps for new, on better paper, faithfully transcribed.

“And that is why I am not a nurseryman!” His laugh was a throaty, mucus-coated warble.

**

Funny, when we say something made our day we sometimes mean it made our life—at least in some small, incremental way that we find ourselves coming back to every now and then, each act of remembering etching the master memory itself a little deeper and imparting just a little bit more meaning to it—even if it’s a meaning we can’t quite explain.

Today something makes my day, and I have the fruit maps to thank for it—them and the beautiful quality of the late summer light, all the more remarkable after the unseasonable weeks of gray that lift this afternoon. This is the time of year the itinera would have been harvesting the neighborhood’s many plums. I count six varieties myself without even trying. I step on the flattened, darkening viscera of the windfalls as I run my neighborhood errands.

I decide to stroll down to the King Pool for an afternoon swim. As I pass by the stately, well-maintained old Queen Anne on the north side of Vine between Milvia and Bonita, the wooden gate that opens to the front yard catches my eye. I’ve never noticed it before. Really, I should have. Its carved wood patterning is elaborate and quite striking. Maybe I’ve missed it because it’s above eye level, situated at the top of a flight of steps, as are so many of the entry bowers to these Victorian homes.

I stop to snap a picture of the gate on my iPhone. That’s when I notice the design of the central stencil: the old symbol for “fruit pickers welcome.”

I climb the steps to the gate and push it open. It swings smoothly and almost silently: well-maintained. The front door, too, has been recently refurbished and repainted.

I knock. The itinera, I know, always knocked, never rang. Three firm, confident raps with a single knuckle. The sound was said to put house-dwellers at ease. After a few moments I hear the resonant echo of someone coming to the door across an expanse of wooden floor. A woman in her early thirties. Her may I help you is low, almost a whisper. Somewhere inside, a baby is sleeping.

“I heard you had some fine plum trees in your back yard,” I venture. “I was wondering if you needed any help picking them.

“I promise I’ll be quiet as can be,” I add.

She studies me with a slight frown and then shrugs, smiling briefly as she holds my gaze.

“Suit yourself,” she adds. And then, after a pause: “If you’d like to pass through the house, you can.”

As she stands by the mudroom door to let me step down into the back yard, she speaks again. “What is it about this place?” she asks. “You’re the only one to stop by this year, but last year we had two old fellows come by at different times to ask if they might help pick the fruit off the trees.

“Is there something I, we, don’t know about?”

“What did you learn about this house when you moved in?” I ask back.

For a moment her face clouds and she retreats into herself. “Oh, I know, we live in a fucking Victorian so it’s supposed to be haunted and there’s some grotesque, sorry-ass story waiting for us to discover. Some old bones stowed in the wall. It’s become such a bore.

“But it’s not like that,” she adds. “This house is goodness and light. The way it picks up the breeze off the bay, the upper story. That orange cast to the late afternoon, when the sun slips below the marine layer…

“This has been a good time for us. I wake up here and I feel just…excellent. Every day of my life.”

“There’s not much I know,” I admit. “I haven’t lived in this neighborhood all that long myself.

“As you suggest, I’d wager your house holds a happy story. You should have a good time finding out,” I add at length.

“But you know something,” she says.

Next to nothing, I reply. I tell her the meaning of the symbol on the gate and that’s that. She finds it interesting but takes it in stride, as Berkeley people do.

**

As plum trees go, this one is old—ancient, even. Plum trees mature quickly and fade long before fig trees, to say nothing of nut trees such as walnuts or pecans. So it’s remarkable to encounter this one enjoying pride of place at the top of a steep, terraced yard, together with a majestic loquat that stands in the opposite corner. Together, the two trees rule over a domain that numbers three figs—each a separate variety, two lemons, a clementine, a pomegranate, an avocado and still another I don’t recognize. A sapodilla, maybe?

A ladder stands open beside the loquat, whose lower fruit has all been picked. At the foot of the ladder, a plastic bucket.

Among the lower branches of the plum tree I recognize the fruit. Mottled purple spots on a golden yellow globe. It’s the variety old Peter Hendrickson called A Cappella, wonderful to taste and now exceedingly rare. I harvest half a bucket before I allow myself to sample one. Ah! It’s enough to hold onto the ladder and close my eyes for a moment and let the sensation of the flesh and the sweetness of the juice possess me.

In my mouth I hold the pit. I climb down the ladder and walk back towards the house. Turning back towards the fence at the end of the yard, I maneuver the pit towards the back of my tongue, rolling the front of my tongue into a barrel. The seed travels a good eighty feet, hitting the fence with a faint little tap.

I look back at the house. The woman is standing at a third story window with her baby. She shifts the baby a little awkwardly, pantomimes applause.

The fruit of August, my own late summer.