Great Peaches: Today and Yesterday

The bar for peaches was set impossibly high for me in the late summer of 1967 when I tasted perfectly ripe peaches for the first time while my old man and I were picking prunes in Utah.

Some peaches I bought a few weeks ago at Trader Joe's in San José delighted me and my son, Liberty. I've never had store-bought peaches that were so tasty and juicy. This must be a great year for peaches all over this land. Last week, my Facebook friend Bob Salvetti commented on an early draft of this post I put up on FB saying he and his family have been raving about Trader Joe’s peaches this year too in western Massachusetts.

And today I ran across another FB post from writer August Turak in North Carolina; he has a bumper crop of peaches this year, from his own tree, so many that the branches could bear up under the weight of the fruit, the first such peach harvest in the twenty years he’s owned the property.

The bar for succulent ripe peaches was set impossibly high for me in the late fall of 1967 when my "old man" George and I were in the middle of what turned out to be a four-and-a-half-month camping trip up and down the U.S., which started in Boston and included two forays into Canada and a day trip to Juarez, Mexico. All the peaches I’d ever eaten before then were purchased at the grocery store—hard peaches that would soften but never ripen and never be juicy, and canned peaches in cloying heavy syrup.

George, who was the rebellious offspring of hard-working German parents who were the first generation off the farm, had rejected his parents’ Methodist beliefs. His five years older brother Marvin was a Methodist minister, and George embraced the role of black sheep.

George was a great fan of Bertrand Russell and his ideas that religion and traditional sexual morality were a great hindrance to mankind’s liberty. George had also read several books about how to live frugally so he could work a minimum amount of time each year and spend the rest of the time as he pleased, and one of the things he was pleased to do was travel. I wanted to travel too, like the Beats and peripatric writers I wanted to emulate, and I was attracted to George partly because he was midwestern nice in a group of not-so-nice bohemian types living in the then-rundown South End of Boston on the fringes of straight society, and partly because he had made many camping trips around the country with his former wife and then a much younger girlfriend who had preceded me.

I had been living on my own since the age of 18, for a horribly lonely and impoverished couple of years; he belonged to a group I thought I wanted to be part of, and I craved that kind of adventure and his companionship. I now am ashamed to confess that I didn’t see anything wrong with his having run away with a 15-year-old girl, who had run away from home in Greenwich Village. She had left him for another “groovier” man who was a sculptor, after she and George had returned to Boston a few months before I met him. They timed their return to be after she’d turned eighteen and he could no longer be persecuted under the Mann act.

Everyone I knew who believed in sexual freedom as the greatest good thought that the cutoff for the legal age of statutory rape was just an arbitrary number, a horrifying idea to most of us now. (The cutoff is now sixteen, but as I recall the cutoff was eighteen back then.) Just because “everyone” I knew in my counter-culture coterie wrongly believed that way, I know that’s no excuse. I’m horrified at myself.

Having thoroughly immersed my impressionable young brain in modern psychological theories (I read all the books by Freud and other psychologists on and off the syllabus during a year as a psych major when I was a sophomore at Brandeis) and having lost my moral compass after losing my faith when I was a freshman, I thought this nice guy with a big smile and what I realize now was a wrong-headed moral code was some sort of hero of the sexual revolution.

He was 24 and I was 21. Yes, we were quite a pair.

After we had started living together the previous October, we worked for several months, me at a printing company doing layout, and he painting bridges, to raise money for that trip. He’d got into bridge painting after he left the University of Grand Forks for Greenwich Village in the middle of his freshman year. When the bookstore job he dreamed of was unavailable, since the Village was glutted with English major graduates looking for jobs like that, he started doing scab labor for a painting company. That kind of seasonal work fit perfectly into his frugal lifestyle. He could make better than average money part of the year and collect unemployment the rest of the year. And, I noticed appreciatively, the hard work had chiseled his compact body into contours I’d only seen on statues and vase paintings of Greek athletes.

We scrimped and saved our money, and we bought a five-year-old VW van from a window glass company. He converted the van to a minimally equipped camper by installing a long piece of plywood with an inch of foam behind the front seats to serve as a bed. We threw in a few pillows and two sleeping bags that we zipped together, and a camp stove and lantern, a cheap styrofoam cooler, and a wooden box of pots, pans, cooking tools, and dishes completed the “conversion.”

His runaway girlfriend had picked purple as “her color” in that era of drab-colored clothing, after seeing the pimps in our neighborhood wore purple, suits, shirts, ties, socks, shoes, and even dapper purple fedoras, and so she usually dressed in outfits she made herself in pimp purple. To contrast with her cool purple, I decided “my color” would be warm, orange. I sewed and thrift-shopped some orange clothes and a pair of orange linen espadrilles. And I sewed orange corduroy curtains for the van’s windows.

During a stop in Fargo to visit his parents, George parked the van in their driveway and painted the van orange with house paint, then he painted the roof rack that had formerly been used for transporting large sheets of glass a bright yellow.

After we’d been on the road for a while, during one stop to visit with some hippies we met in their commune in New Mexico, one of the men there screen-printed a mandala of a Madusa-like woman’s head with streaming yellow locks on the driver’s side door.

George and I saw a lot of glorious spots in the U.S. and Canada during our months on the road. We did a lot of day hiking in parks where we camped, and we semi-roughed it in national forest campgrounds for $1 a night, where we had to pump our own water and use outhouses. Once a week, we’d splurge $3 for a night in a state park campground, get our water from the taps they provided and use real toilets and showers. On the other days, I’d heat up a big pot of water on the camp stove on the picnic table when everyone else was in their tents or campers for the night, wash and towel dry my long straight brown hair and bathe surreptitiously outdoors in the dark. True to George’s ethic of avoiding what he thought were unnecessary expense, we never ate out. Why would he want to do that when I was available to cook all our meals from scratch? I was proud of myself when I developed a system of getting all the dishes for each meal washed and rinsed with one gallon of warmed water.

When we ran out of money in spite of our frugality near Salt Lake City, we answered an ad for a job advertised as "picking prunes,” and then drove about twenty miles to the orchard north of the city. I speculated the plums were maybe being referred to that way because they were of a variety used to make prunes, which are as you probably know, dried plums. But as I found out just now, the botanical name for prune trees is prunus domesticus, and it doesn’t seem that any particular plum variety is best suited for drying. So my thinking that "picking prunes" was a misnomer was probably mistaken.

The scenery was delightful with a mountain on one side and the Great Salt Lake on the other, and the weather was balmy. Picking fruit was more fun, not laborious at all, but an enjoyable adventure. Something to write home about, in his case, or to write about someday, in mine.

(Somewhere there are photos we took of each other standing on our ladders. I remember George’s extraordinarily big smile and his sandy-colored beard and long hair against a background of leaves and branches and unpicked plums, with a galvanized fruit-collecting bucket on a canvas strap around his neck.)

As we each climbed up and down our own rickety wooden ladder propped in our separate plum trees, all day we could hear over-ripe peaches landing with a juicy plop on the orchard floor in the adjoining rows of peach trees.

When we asked the farmer about the wasted peaches, he told us the peaches had gotten too ripe to sell before he could hire anyone to pick them. We ate as many as we could of the peaches before they dropped. You can imagine how perfectly ripe they were and how perfectly delicious.

Incidentally, our Mormon farmer was a bit of a letch—he politely asked my old man if he would share me one evening (!). George took no offense, because he had no chivalrous ideas about defending a woman’s honor, so he didn’t mind, but I cringed. He, equally politely, declined on my behalf. I cringed at his non-reaction too.

I believe the farmer probably figured, as many men raised with traditional morals have often figured, that a woman sleeping with a man without being married was easy pickings. At least, in this case, he figured wrong.

(Forgive the inadvertent easy pickings reference in this digression in this story about fruit picking.)

When we were done with the prune-picking job after a few days of camping in the orchard, we drove away with a soft-wood-and-wire-bound bushel basket full of rescued peaches in the back of the van.

And at our next campground, after a stop at a grocery store for canning jars and lids, I canned the peaches with honey as a sweetener (having read about the dangers of white sugar) in the big pot I used for cooking. Black-striped yellow jacket wasps swarmed me while I did the canning, and that’s when I learned I could wave my hands and shoo them away without being stung, so I lost any fear I might have had of them.

When George called his parents back at his home on a pay phone at a gas station during his weekly check-in, his sweet mother told us that the seal on the peaches would be broken by the jolting movements of the van and that honey wouldn’t preserve them the way sugar would. But somehow in spite of our everything, the jars full of honey-flavored peaches all survived, seals unbroken, and unspoiled, until we had completely enjoyed them all.

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One more time before we got to the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of the Summer of “Love,” we ran short of money again, this time near Mendocino in northern California, so we stopped to pick black walnuts in another beautiful setting. That is how we earned enough to pay for gas and food on the final lap of our trip. After a time crashing with his brother’s family in Berkeley, moved to the Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco, where we stayed without having planned to do so, for several years.

Before we left California again to join his parents in Fargo in December of 1970, we’d married and had our son. On top of everything else I’ve told you in this story, it says something else about the times that we named him Liberty, and it says something about what George believed, and I believed wanting to please him, that we gave him the middle name Russell.

Image: Jar of peaches (c. 1866). By Claude Monet. At Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden. Germany. Public domain. From Wikipedia.