The Perfect Fruit Read online

  This turned out to be a good thing. While I did want to understand pluots, I wasn’t ready for them to be over. So the unsettling feeling of not understanding them was the excuse I had to keep exploring them. Like an old troubadour, I wanted to prolong my desire, not satisfy it. I wanted each answer to make a new question spring forth. Otherwise, what was the point?

  My first inkling of that idea came to me in the fifth grade, as I stood in the doorway of the audio-visual room at my elementary school. The school held grades K through six, with kindergarten through second grade on the first floor and third grade through sixth grade on the second floor. Until third grade, you never really had an excuse to go to the second floor, and when you did it was with a discrete task, which you completed with your head down so that when you walked past the open doors of the full classrooms, you wouldn’t have to see the older students noticing you walk by. By the end of fifth grade, though, I had traveled both floors thoroughly and had the school mapped out in my mind. I’d even snuck into the cafeteria kitchen during one of the school’s open-house nights. The one room I’d never seen was the audio-visual room, which sat at the top of the side stairs, near the cluster of third-and fourth-grade classrooms, and overlooked the school’s auditorium. The plain wooden door to the AV room was always locked during school hours, and no light was visible through the crack beneath the door.

  The first time I noticed the light on, I was looking up at it from the auditorium stage, dressed in a toga and holding a plastic orange while playing a bit part as a Roman fruit vendor in our school’s abbreviated production of Julius Caesar. After that night’s performance, while we all milled around outside the auditorium with our parents, I hustled up the stairs toward the third-and fourth-grade hallway. At the top, I saw that the door to the audio-visual room was open and I walked in to see that it was a long, tight room that looked down toward the stage, which seemed very, very small. I felt an immediate click of satisfaction, but then that satisfaction was muscled out by a queer sadness at having something end. This was the last unexplored place in the school, and seeing it meant that I could scan through the building now and see how the thing was connected. There were no more undrawn areas in my mental map of the school, and those undrawn areas were what had kept the place interesting. Standing there in the doorway, I felt small, the last unknown place known, my work there done.

  And so the goal was to see as much as I could of pluots without hearing that satisfying click in my mind. I wanted to savor them, to string out the knowledge of them. And so that partly explains why, having become obsessed with pluots, which were bred and almost exclusively grown in California, I did the only logical thing and in the spring after our first trip to the Zaigers’, left with Elizabeth to live in the apple country of New En gland.

  WINTER

  1

  WHAT WE IN theory might love about the plum—its fragility, its delicateness, the diversity of varieties available to us—is often what leads us, while shopping, to pass it over for some other, more reliable fruit. Gently pressing the soft, matte skin of a “red” or a “black” plum, we wonder whether this will be a good one or a bad one. We’ve been burned before. Wistfully, our eyes drift over to the next row, where the clearly labeled assortment of apples gleam hard out from their bins, and the bananas—fruitdom’s sure thing—lie uniformly in wait. Why risk it with a plum?

  This raises a simple truth about plums in the United States: They often suck. Not always. Maybe not even most of the time. But often enough so that it feels risky to buy them. And the problem is not that they’re all inherently bad plums (though some of them are); it’s that they’ve been picked early, packed hard, shipped for days, stored improperly, and then lumped together into two categories—red and black—which are meant to make them easy to classify but which in the end don’t really help us choose a good plum.

  Put another way, the problem is not the plums themselves. The problem is what humans do with the plums. Consider, for example, the common red plum/black plum problem. There are so many different varieties grown over the course of the plum season—more than two hundred plum varieties are shipped out of California every summer—and those varieties are available for such a short period of time that it would be impractical to assign each one a price lookup code, or PLU. (A fruit’s PLU is the number that goes on those little stickers, the ones that are impossible to peel off a plum without tearing the skin.) To simplify matters, plum PLUs are based mostly on color and size. Four colors—red, black, green, and purple—have two codes each, one for large plums and one for small plums. (There’s another code for Italian prune/sugar plums.) This way, supermarket chains can buy plums from many suppliers, move them through their distribution channels and into stores, easily display them in the produce section, and have easily identifiable codes for their cashiers to use to ring up produce at the checkout. Without the PLUs, the logistics of plum-related commerce would be too daunting to manage on the supply side.

  For you and me, though, the system makes choosing plums a crapshoot. While the flavor of peaches and nectarines is somewhat homogeneous throughout the season, plum flavors vary week to week. If you really know your varieties—what the skin and flesh colors are, when their maturity dates are, and so on—you might be able to distinguish between the several varieties of “black plums” mixed together in the store at any given time, but even two plums that look alike can have completely different flavors. So the only way to know for sure what a plum tastes like is to take a bite.

  As stone fruit people are prone to do, one packer I talked to used apples to draw out the point. “One time, you pick up a Fuji apple and you get Fuji flavor. The next time you pick up a Fuji apple, you get Fuji flavor. Same goes for Granny Smith. Those two apples look different on the outside so you can tell the difference between them. If you want Fuji flavor, pick up Fuji. If you want Granny Smith flavor, pick up Granny Smith.

  “Well, you can pick up a black plum with yellow flesh and get the Fuji sensation. And then you can go back a week later and pick up a similar-looking black plum with yellow flesh, and you get a Granny Smith sensation. We often have two different flavor sensations for what looks like the same piece of fruit. People look for consistency when they buy fruit, and we’re not giving it to them.”

  In the supermarkets back east, I was consistently experiencing this inconsistency. And though plums were almost always cheaper than pluots, I sometimes found identical-looking fruit with the same label in both the plum bin and the pluot bin. As often as not, the supermarket’s laminated display card had something about how pluots were “three-quarters plum and one-quarter apricot,” which I now knew wasn’t necessarily true (but was definitely easier for shoppers to grasp). It was also not uncommon to see displays advertising “plucots,” “plumots,” “plutots,” “pluofs,” “plutos,” “plots” and—my favorite—“plouts,” which sounded more like a Bavarian potato dumpling than a hybrid stone fruit. While most stores carried “pluots” (or some close misspelling of them), others had similar-looking fruits that were labeled “Flavor Safari” and “Dinosaur Eggs.” Were those pluots, too?

  At the end of my first summer in New England, I called Leith to ask her about these labels, and she suggested I get in touch with David Jackson, a fruit grower near Fresno, who might be able to fill me in on the “Flavor Safari” and “Dinosaur Egg” labels. I made an appointment to visit David in December, when there wouldn’t be a plum in sight. The last fruit would have been picked during the first weeks of fall, and after a month or two of sorting out the harvest season, collecting the last payments for late-season varieties, and making some basic repairs to equipment, this was when most growers were in the thick of pruning. A week after Thanksgiving, I flew to Los Angeles and rented a car. I was headed back to the Central Valley, American stone fruit’s ground zero.

  No matter where you’re traveling from, to get to California’s Central Valley you have to go down. Down in elevation, but also down as in to a lower sort of pla
ce, the sort of place you don’t want to linger in, like an underground mall parking lot or the stall of a bus station bathroom. The second sort of down does depend on where you’re coming from, I guess, but it’s at least the prevailing view of most coastal Californians, among whom there’s a saying that “California, fifty miles inland, is Arkansas.” Anyway, going down in at least the literal sense was what I was doing one hour north of Los Angeles on I-5, just inside the Kern County line, on a six-degree grade in the fog. Six degrees is the most an interstate can slope and still qualify as an interstate, and you could smell why on the way down. Semis flashing their hazards crept down the far right lane, and the friction from their brakes made the air smell like an underground mall parking lot or the bathroom of a bus still idling at the station. As the December fog broke, I got a first glimpse of the Valley, a little snatch of land to the north that disappeared as the road dipped. Then the view opened again and I could see a whole stretch of the Valley, the curving eight-lane I was on now leveled out below me and jutting into the flat and empty-looking terrain. It was disorienting to look down on the Valley from here; too much altitude and too little distance separated this jagged world from that flat one. The angle just didn’t seem possible.

  The view reminded me of looking out onto Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills, where in certain places the depth of field is so compressed, it feels like you could reach down and flip off the lights in all those buildings. The perspective here was like that, except that when I looked out onto the Valley’s southernmost point, I could see no buildings, no lights to reach out and flip. Anyway, the scale of Los Angeles is nothing compared to the vastness of the Valley. Surrounded on all sides by mountains except at the inverted delta where what is left of its convoluted river system meets a series of bays around San Francisco, the Central Valley is that enormous trough that occupies the whole middle of California. It stretches nearly four hundred miles long from north to south and up to fifty miles wide. If it were to secede from California, the Central Valley would be larger than ten other states. With a little jigsawing, you could fit Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C., inside its borders. In the relief globe at my local library, the Rockies are shot through with shallow etchings and the Himalayas have vast, open plains draped off of them, but nothing above sea level approaches the complete self-containment of the Central Valley, into which I was able to wedge a piece of macaroni and have it stick.

  When people talk about the “Central Valley,” they usually mean the more populated, lower two thirds of that piece of macaroni, a region known as the San Joaquin Valley, the southern border of which I was crossing as the interstate carved through a narrow band of foothills and began to flatten out. At Wheeler Ridge, I passed the recently built Tejon Industrial Complex, which houses a nearly two-million-square-foot Ikea distribution center and a Starbucks-Panda Express rest stop. The buildings form the northern outpost of the Tejon Ranch Company, one of the last intact relics of the Mexican land grant era, whose 270,000 contiguous acres make it the state’s largest private landowner. The Ikea complex stood almost completely alone at the base of the foothills and the absence of anything around it was unsettling; it felt like bait in a trap. Watching it in my rearview mirror, I cut off the interstate and took State Route 99 north. Off to my left were vast, flat fields where nothing but low scrub grew for miles—how many miles it was hard to say because there was nothing to contrast the nothingness against. It was an empty but developed nothingness, like an endless vacant lot overgrown with weeds from years of neglect. As I drove, other objects eventually materialized. A lone oil derrick, a lean-to, and then, suddenly, an almond orchard. Its plumb rows of leafless trees ran at a sharp angle up to the side of the road, and they brought with them an immediate somethingness to the surroundings. I would learn this about the Valley. Because it’s so flat, it’s hard to see anything other than what’s directly in front of you. And so the impression was usually all of one or the other—nothing or something—and rarely that interplay between the two that passes for a view.

  Nearly every written account of the San Joaquin includes a description of its flatness, because that is, apart from its size, the Valley’s most notable characteristic. In many places around the San Joaquin, the view still recalls the one Presley saw in The Octopus, Frank Norris’s classic 1901 novel about the battle between Valley ranchers and the railroad in the mid-nineteenth century: “To the east the reach seemed infinite, flat, cheerless, heat-ridden, unrolling like a gigantic scroll toward the faint shimmer of the distant horizons.” Later, the poet Sherley Anne Williams wrote that the Valley was “as flat as a hoecake” (and then added that its summers were “hot enough to fry one”). And in Assembling California, John McPhee wrote that the Valley is so flat that it “outplains the Great Plains.” Alfred Hitchcock certainly thought so: When he was scouting locations for the classic scene in which Cary Grant is chased by a crop duster in North By Northwest, he wanted an absolutely flat cornfield. No location was flat enough for him in the Midwest, so he had corn transplanted from there to the San Joaquin, where he ended up shooting the scene.

  Arvin, the first exit off of Highway 99, is a city of less than twenty thousand people at the San Joaquin’s southern border. The only reason you might have heard of it is because it was singled out recently by the Environmental Protection Agency for having the most polluted air in the United States. To be fair, it’s not just Arvin (which, passing through, seems pleasant and charming, two metrics the EPA doesn’t measure). Other places in the Valley, such as Visalia and Fresno, are also often mentioned when the subject of the nation’s worst air quality comes up. And to be fair to the San Joaquin as a whole, it takes the fall for a lot of air pollution that’s blown in from the San Francisco Bay area and trapped, with no outlet, in the Valley’s box of mountains.

  But air quality’s not the only problem in the Valley. Six of the San Joaquin’s eight counties are California’s most poverty-stricken, and the Valley contains thirteen of California’s twenty poorest cities. Fewer than half of the Valley’s ninth graders graduate from high school, and of those, fewer graduate from college. In the late 1990s, the San Joaquin was labeled a high-intensity drug trafficking area, with as much as 80 percent of the country’s meth coming from superlabs operated across the Valley, which also has—by a long shot—the state’s highest per capita rate of violent felonies and property crimes. In fact, four cities in the San Joaquin—Stockton, Visalia, Modesto, and Fresno—recently landed on a top-ten list tracking American cities with the highest annual number of cars stolen per one hundred thousand people. The list wasn’t all bad news for Modesto, though, which fell to number five on that list after several years as the car theft capital of the United States. (Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the editors of the 2007 edition of the Cities Ranked and Rated guide from listing Modesto as the worst city in America, period, a title for which it barely nudged out two of its neighbors in the Valley, Merced and Visalia.)

  With the nation’s worst air pollution, the San Joaquin has an asthma rate that is much higher than the state and national averages. Chronic health problems such as asthma and obesity, for which the Valley has the highest rate in the state, are less likely to be regularly addressed in the San Joaquin, where a quarter of the population has no health insurance. But even for those who are healthy and well-insured, it can be hard to breathe in the Valley, where during the summer it’s not uncommon to see ten straight days of temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Those heat waves result in deaths and power outages and all-around disgrun-tledness, which, in extreme temperatures, the governor has tried to remedy by opening emergency cooling centers at fairgrounds, where the public can go and sit together under state-sponsored air-conditioning to ride out the misery and wonder why the hell anybody ever settled here in the first place.

  Originally, it was wheat that brought all the settlers. Since wheat didn’t have to be irrigated, it was a perfect crop to plant in the naturally dry interior
. As a result, it ruled inland California in the second half of the nineteenth century, absorbing much of the labor force that had flooded the state during the Gold Rush. The Valley floor was so totally covered in wheat that, as Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian from 1994 to 2004, recorded, “a plowing section might work all day to reach the end of one field, camp there overnight, then plow its way back all the next day, repeating this process for days on end until the work was complete.” Meanwhile, the tracks of the Southern Pacific railroad were opening up markets in the East and making more lucrative specialty crops—such as stone fruit—a possibility for growers in the San Joaquin. Tie-by-tie, on its way from Stockton southward, the railroad opened up the middle of California. When no town existed where a town was needed, the railroad would do what it had done all across the West: stake out a town grid, with the numbered streets parallel to the tracks, the lettered ones perpendicular.

  By the mid-1890s, as wheat peaked in a glut, settlers had begun to hack away at early irrigation projects to make use of the groundwater and the rivers of snowmelt that ran down the slopes of the Sierras and spilled onto the Valley floor. As they began to control, divert, and irrigate, and were able to plant thirstier, generally more demanding crops, those early farmers discovered that the Valley floor contained a remarkably rich mixed bag of soil types. By the time the first Valley wells were pick-axed in the 1800s, the Sierran snowmelt had been replenishing the aquifers for thousands of years so that the San Joaquin sat atop one of the most abundant stores of groundwater in the world. The control of that groundwater and the snowmelt from the Sierras—the water’s “reclamation”—is what has made the San Joaquin possible as a fertile, habitable place. The homegrown irrigation of the late 1800s grew into municipal-controlled water districts, which led to state aqueducts, federal reservoirs, agencies, and water alliances. For most of the twentieth century, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation joined forces with the state to control every river that flowed into the San Joaquin and to reengineer those rivers for maximum efficiency (or according to the prevailing political will). The modern map of the San Joaquin’s waterways—both the natural and artificial ones—looks like the blue scribblings of a toddler who’s just learned to operate a crayon.