...where is home?

 When I was a child, I was a dreamer. I had many insecurities about home and family and I tended to explore the boundaries of my world both physically and mentally. Out there somewhere was a center. A place of strength. A place of balance. A place where I wasn’t longing for another place. A home.

My father was tense. He knew the danger of a freeze. As a young man, he had set out the smudge pots between the rows of trees many times on his father’s orange ranch. He had worked into the night filling the pots with oil and keeping them burning. He had waved his jacket to stir the air, desperately trying to break the freeze and save the trees. Now, with no grove to protect, he could only curse the cold and curse the black smoke that he knew was beginning to fill the valley.

 My mother had been a "Great Depression" child and she still could not escape the fear of losing her possessions or the fear of things losing their value.

 "What about my new couch? What if the smudge ruins the material? What are we going to do?" 

Dad responded with frustration. 

"Dammit! Son-of-a-bitch cold! Get some sheets. Where are the sheets. Get the furniture covered. The damn smudge’ll go right through the walls, right through the windows and ruin everything. Cover up everything. Dammit!"

 He was in a rage. With no grove to protect, he turned his instincts to protecting the house and possessions that he had worked hard to own. The family raced through and dodged the rage and scrambled to cover the furniture and utensils. After everything was covered, I went to my room to huddle under my own covers. My father’s rage gradually subsided and the house grew silent. The smell of burning oil became stronger. I shivered from the cold and the excitement until my own warmth filled my blanket cocoon.

 I was 9 years-old and alone in my blanket on my bed in my small room, in our small house on a cul-de-sac, on the edge of the groves that stretched to the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. 

I heard the train whistle blow in the distance. A short burst and then a long howl. And then it blew again. Somewhere between a scream and a howl, the train whistle cast a powerful spell on my thoughts. Its piercing sound filled the valley and filled my head.

 *** 

The train whistle became my cue in the night through those years until I left my parents’ house. It was my cue to wander in my mind. To wander to the railroad tracks and to their mysterious destinations beyond my valley. To wander to the tiny village of Mexicans just beyond the railroad tracks. To wander to Foothill Boulevard, Route 66, the longest road to the farthest place. To wander to the edge of the open field where the huge tent went up for the revival meetings. To wander to the mountain canyons with the cascading waterfalls fed by mysterious streams coming from somewhere near the magnificent summit. And to wander to the stars.

 The train tracks passed through the valley half way between my house and the base of the mountains. At one end of the valley, they wound through a small pass that opened up to Los Angeles. At the other end of the valley, the tracks turned through a mountain pass and headed to the great desert and beyond. Sleek passenger trains carried people with destinations. Places to go, people to see. And seemingly endless freight trains carried the foods, animals and materials that fed the insatiable needs of the Los Angeles basin.

 Not many passenger trains stopped at the tiny Pomona train station. In one of the first Mickey Mouse cartoons, Walt Disney had shown the Pomona train station as a symbol of the last outpost, and Jack Benny always got a laugh when he bragged that he got his suits tailored in Pomona. From the outside, Pomona was seen as a hick town with no claims to fame except the largest county fair in the world and some high- brow colleges in the next town over. Of course, from the inside, we thought we were pretty special.

 The freight trains did stop in the Pomona Valley. They stopped at the packing houses where thousands of oranges and lemons and grapefruits were packed in wooden crates that carried the labels of the various packers. The crates of citrus fruit were carried throughout the country by the trains, and the valley flourished from this agricultural boom that lasted from the late 1800s to the mid 1950s. Who would have known that long after the groves were gone, the distinctive labels placed on the ends of the crates would be called "Orange Crate Art".

 Just beyond the railroad tracks and the train station was a tiny village of Mexican-Americans who worked the groves and fields. The village was an early foothold for those immigrants from below the border who had returned to their rightful land. They cultivated the land and harvested its fruits. Their connection to the land was through toil, sweat and pain - just like my father and his father - but they were poor and they could only hope for a better life. Their families were close. They were religious. They fought among themselves, but they were fiercely united and protective of threats from outsiders. I developed a deep respect for their sense of dignity and I was inspired by their spirit. Their music touched my soul with both its romance and its energy.

 Rubin Estrada was my age. He lived in the village. We met some days in an open field half way between his house and mine and played little-boy games. We ran together and laughed. We imagined battles that we fought together and we acted out dying scenes. At the end of the day, we ate oranges together and then went our separate ways. Rubin never went past the groves toward my house, and I never went past the groves toward his village, except for those times that each of us spied alone on the other’s world, hiding in the shadows of the trees.

 U.S. Route 66 passed through my valley. It was a road made legend through migrations west and travels east. In Pomona we were near the western end of this great road which passed over a thousand miles through tiny towns and spectacular mountains, deserts and plains on its way to St. Louis. To most of us, it was just Foothill Boulevard with its olive stands, truck stops and an occasional gas station and Mexican restaurant. But this Foothill Boulevard had been the main artery of life that brought people like my grandfather out from his bicycle shop in St. Louis to cultivate his grove and to prosper and to build his magnificent grove house. It was the artery of life for the Okies and Arkies that had fled the disastrous dust bowl. They had rolled through the valley with little or no money, but with big hearts and desperate hopes and dreams. With all of their possessions stacked on their old sputtering automobiles, they traded a chair or a chicken for a little more gasoline. And when they ran out of gas or the family agreed on an area, that is where they stopped and where they began to build a new life and a new society. And they laid the foundation for the thousands and then millions of people who chased the dream of the Golden State.

 Religion provided early common ground for the settlers who poured into the valley on Route 66. There was much to be thankful for and many prayers to be offered. The majority of settlers shared a fervent fundamentalist approach to Protestant Christianity. Southern Baptists, Four Square, Church of God and other groups all brought a strong spirit of repentance to the valley. The congregations grew and more church buildings were built. As the valley flourished, churchgoers gladly gave money to build bigger and greater palaces of faith. But some of my strongest memories are of hearing the spiritual revival meetings that took place at night. A huge tent was erected on an open field near my house and filled with folding chairs that then were filled with soaring spirits. In the still of the cold nights I could hear the fire of brimstone with shouts of "Amen, brother!", "Repent for you have sinned!", "You are saved!", "Something GOOD is going to happen to you today!", and "Who will come forward and confess their sins in the presence of God?". And whether on tune or not, they sang at the top of their lungs about the old rugged cross and about bringing in the sheaves. I marveled at the unbridled enthusiasm and spied on the empty tent by day to see if any saved souls were still kicking up the dust.

 Beyond the groves and open fields, beyond the tracks and the Mexican village and Foothill Boulevard, rose the San Gabriel Mountains and the peak of Mt. San Antonio, commonly called Mt. Baldy. It was a sharp rise to the 10,000 foot peak of Old Baldy with one winding road that passed through tiny Baldy Village and led the adventurous to the summit trail. Lush canyons carved into the mountain cradled streams and waterfalls that flourished most of the year, but disappeared to underground in the summer.

I explored the canyons and ran and leaped along the ridges. I traced the streams that fed the waterfalls until I found the cracks in the mountain from which they emerged. I stood at the summit and looked west, beyond three valleys and past the Pacific coastline to the Channel Islands of Catalina and San Clemente. I looked east across the great Mojave desert and the ranges upon ranges of dark, forbidding mountains. And one day after sitting with a waterfall and lifting my spirit with its song, I came over a ridge and stood eye-to-eye a few feet from a Big Horn Sheep. I told the Big Horn that I had never seen such a magnificent animal and it thanked me for the compliment. It told me that I was on the right trail and to not give up and then the great animal turned slowly and stepped over the ridge. I moved to the edge of the ridge and saw the magnificent form leap down and across the steep mountainside as if on wings. I went back and told the waterfall of my experience with the Big Horn Sheep and the waterfall told me not to forget.

 Before the big city lights filled the Southern California nights, the stars shined brightly. I laid on my back on the grass on many nights and stared at the stars. They seemed familiar to me. I felt a strong connection to the stars. It was as if I were cradled by their warmth. When I watched the stars from a hill or mountain ridge, I often found my hand rising across my body and then reaching out in a broad sweep across the sky. A greeting? An acknowledgment? I don’t know. It still happens.

 ***

 I woke up coughing the next morning with a thick smell of oil in the air. I could see my breath when I breathed. I went to my window and saw the dark sky. It was not night. It was smoke. The valley was filled with smoke and the sun never shined that day. Our furniture had been saved and we all drew together as a family that day, having defeated an external threat. It was a good day even though the sun didn’t shine.

 That was the last great smudge in Southern California and the last year that colorful labels were put on the ends of orange crates. Large airplane propellers mounted on tall poles gradually replaced smudge pots as a protection against a freeze. Cardboard boxes with stamped black and white labels replaced the wooden orange crates. Housing tracts and strip malls gradually replaced the orange groves.

 ***

 I am gone from my valley, but my valley will never be gone from me. 

I am less of a dreamer now and I think I realize that as I looked outside of myself for home, I was really looking inside of myself. I think that I found some things. I still look outside through the window and my hand still sweeps across the starry night. But now I am less afraid to turn away from the window and look inside my house at my family and my friends and animals, and to give and to share, and to lose myself and to find myself in what I am coming to understand as home.