FROM APRICOT HAVEN TO HIGH TECH
A drive to Los Banos to visit an old friend opened my eyes to the abundance of the agricultural haven that was once the Santa Clara valley. Why must a place change so radically?
On one of the hottest days in Northern California’s Bay Area, we found ourselves driving to a friend’s place 90 miles away in Merced County. Pat lives in the town of Los Banos which sits in the fertile San Joaquin Valley. The highways that led us to it snaked through miles of bucolic farmland and waterways.
Until that afternoon, I hadn’t realized that the county our family had always lived in—Santa Clara County—spanned about 1300 square miles. This county includes the cities of Campbell, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Milpitas, Monte Sereno, Morgan Hill, Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Jose, Santa Clara, Saratoga and Sunnyvale. Together, many parts of these cities make up the Silicon Valley, a haven for those with an aspiration to build—or work for—the next hotshot technology company. The densely populated area of this county is couched in the valley between two mountain ranges. It also goes by the name of Santa Clara Valley and is 30 miles long by 15 miles wide, with the Santa Cruz Mountains rising to the southwest and separating the valley from the Pacific Ocean, and the Diablo Range fencing it on the northeast.
To capture the flavor of Santa Clara Valley’s past watch a documentary from 1948 that describes the halcyon days of this “Valley of Heart’s Delight”, as it was once known. In the video, the camera hovers, for several magical moments, over miles of white and pink blossoms. It was this quality—of wonder and enchantment tainted with a little greed—that my husband and I experienced on our drive to Los Banos.
On our drive the beauty of rural life emerged almost as soon as we reached the township of Gilroy. Signs of agricultural bounty were everywhere even though the water in the San Luis Reservoir seemed to be at an all-time low during this season of drought. We flew past acres of tomatoes, corn, bell pepper, walnuts, pistachios, avocados and almonds. Handwritten road signs warned us about the sweetest cherries up ahead. Just before reaching the reservoir we saw a warning about the last avocado stop; a little farther along I noticed a sign that I’d be able to buy twelve avocados for a dollar. We stopped for this unbeatable deal. At the stall, the lady pointed to the said avocados in the bin. Let it be said that one avocado in my Saratoga grocery store equals twelve of those avocados. The avocados were smaller than apricots.
“It was almost as if the valley had a richness waiting to be mined. For one thing, the Santa Clara Valley has remarkable alluvial soil, some of the deepest and richest measured anywhere in the world. For eons, rains have been washing loam from the mountains into the valley, where it has gathered, layer upon layer, as the winter rains flow into the San Francisco Bay.”
~~~California Apricots: The Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley, Robin Chapman
About a hundred years ago, growers in Santa Clara Valley harvested 160,000 tons of apricots annually, “a record still not duplicated by California’s apricot business in the twenty-first century”, according to Robin Chapman, author of California Apricots, The Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley. Until the 1960s, the Santa Clara Valley was the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries spread out across it. The area’s salubrious climate had been noticed early on by the Franciscan missionaries in the late 18th century and fruit orchards inside these missions grew apple, peach, pear, apricot and olive trees, as well as vines.
California Apricots also gave me an insight on how some old-timers in the San Francisco Bay Area actually sought to hold on to some slivers of apricot orchards in several cities and that it was, thanks to their efforts, that small clusters of heritage orchards are scattered in a few different parts of the Santa Clara Valley even today. The book is not just a primer on how an agrarian Santa Clara Valley gave birth to an aggressive high tech Silicon Valley. It is at once a moving personal account of one family’s love of apricots as it is a riveting ride through the changing fortunes of the Santa Clara Valley.
I began to understand how while some people minted money from technology, they also sought to honor the old way of life. I learned that the David and Lucile Packard Foundation operates a sixty-seven acre apricot orchard in Los Altos Hills. The orchard was purchased by one of the founders of Hewlett Packard, David Packard, in the 1950s. According to Robin Chapman, Packard worked in the orchard “for therapy” and gave away most of his harvest to his employees.
In an act of historic preservation, in 1997, Apple Inc.’s founder, the late Steve Jobs, bought a property adjoining his home in order to grow an apricot orchard. A story in Wired Magazine offered me a peak into Jobs’ love for and knowledge about trees native to this area. The irony of it all did not escape me. On the one hand, the company that Steve Jobs built renders the sky over China grayer than ever. Yet, while designing his iconic campus at Apple, Jobs hired an arborist who planted a sequentially ripening orchard on the new Apple campus with plums, apricots, persimmons, and seventeen varieties of apples and cherries.
Reminds me of when we had a few acres of apricots when we lived in Hayward many years ago. Not only did we have super yummy apricots for my mom's pies but also we had 10 to 12 year old pals and me doing something dreadful with apricots. The week during July 4th (with lots of firecrackers available) we use to have apricot bombing wars in my neighborhood. We would stuff a firecracker into the nice juicy apricot, light the fuse and throw it over into our neighbors yard where my rascal friends lived. Of course, then we would see apricots flying over our roof towards our yard. This went on until my Mom found out about it and put an immediate end to our air war. Then, of course, we would have to face my dad's lecture when he came home. Yikes!
~~~Bob Jones, Los Altos. To know more about Bob Jones, don’t miss reading my post on the California Gold Rush.
After reading California Apricots I felt that those us who immigrated much later into the Santa Clara Valley had never had the chance to experience something very special. A hundred years from now, the success of high technology may be a thing of the past, too. I wondered if places and governments must strike a balance and hold on to a slice of history and success just as families cherish and hand down heirlooms.
My recent stay in Singapore brought the importance of this into focus. In one of my first posts from Singapore, Small Stories, Epic Events, I wrote about how Singapore used to be a collection of villages (kampongs). In the drive to propel the nation into prosperity, its village life was gutted, leaving many Singaporeans reeling from a sense of loss as they moved from villages with a sense of community to modern apartment buildings offering sanitation and electricity. Today, this affluent little nation had done a volte face and it was keen on preserving its history and heritage and it meticulously records its evolution.
I suppose the only constant in the world is change while change itself seems somehow irrevocable. To my question about a sense of loss in Santa Clara Valley, Robin Chapman’s response was pragmatic. She reminded me that in California’s Central Valley, there were some 800,000 acres of almond orchards alone, and that we still produced more apricots than any other single country. “It’s just not in Santa Clara Valley anymore,” she said. And ultimately, as she pointed out, “we are a nation with a free market and the market drives the changes.”
As land prices soared along the coast, the orchards of Santa Clara Valley moved farther inland in the direction of Merced County. One of the most beautiful ways to celebrate the agricultural past was always available to residents, Robin Chapman pointed out to me. “I suggest to people that if they want to remember the innovative days of the Santa Clara Valley as the world’s largest fruit orchard—plant an apricot tree or three and enjoy the fruit, “That’s a great way to remember those times. And it is a good way to enjoy the scent and the taste of this exotic fruit the Romans called prunus armeniaca.”
The agrarian way of life that had once brought name and fame to a Santa Clara Valley renowned for its apricots had been erased forever in response to the needs of the nation and the demands of the world. Yet it was possible to savor it all just a few hours away, as we realized on our drive to Los Banos.
After a morning filled with food and conversation, we left Los Banos in the heat of the early evening, sailing past rows of almond orchards. Minutes outside Pat’s home was a universe of almonds, with countless trucks lined up, just as the trees in the orchard, by an almond processing plant. 713 acres of almond orchards were on sale at the moment. I wondered who the buyer would be. Our day trip to Pat’s home had given me a glimpse of the past and I wondered how the land around Los Banos would transform a hundred years from now.
About an hour into our drive back home, we reentered Santa Clara county and this return was marked by a perfume. Gilroy stinks of garlic on any given day and on some mornings out in our front yard in Saratoga, I’d felt the sharp odor of garlic and I’d wondered if smells could actually travel through the air over forty miles. Aware that we’d be marauded by garlic fumes, we turned into a shopping plaza for a cup of coffee.
“Oh my god, I can’t bear the smell!” my husband said, scowling, as he opened his car door to grab the chai latte from my hand. I told him that I too was about to faint under the miasma of garlic. Like the durian that I swore to never try in Singapore, I shall leave the world having never tried the garlic ice cream of Gilroy.
Despite the tang of Gilroy, I felt fortunate for the lushness of the land I called home. I knew exactly what Robin Chapman meant when she wrote about how much she missed the scent of the apricot in the Santa Clara Valley. “The fruit of the apricot carries the scent of citrus and jasmine, peach, gardenia, honeysuckle and cardamom,” she writes in her book, while trying to summon up the olfactory experience of an air heavy with ripening apricot. I told her I just couldn’t imagine the smell of it and she had an evocative response for that, too: “All my life I have loved that scent, which is at its richest when an apricot is picked warm in the sunshine.”
Robin Chapman does wear a perfume redolent of the apricot and I don’t believe she was joking when she said that it was the secret of her success. “I have worn it every day for many years now. I love it because it smells like apricots to me.” Called “Fracas”, the French perfume by Robert Piguet is available at Neiman Marcus. I will be wearing it any day now.
Beautifully written piece on CA agriculture then (Silicon Valley) and now - in the Central Valley. Robin Chapman is a good writer. I used to work with her mom Faye in Civil Engineering at Stanford.
Although San Mateo was not part of the Valley of Hearts Delight, we did grow
a Blenheim apricot tree in our backyard when I was a kid. On the day the fruit was ripe - all of it waited for a warm day to ripen all at once) we picked it and stayed up all night canning. My mother hated this but Dad was an apricot nut. He made the best apricot ice cream in San Mateo from the squishy pulp.
During WWII he spent a vacation or two picking apricots around Sunnyvale. One year he ate so many on the job that the foreman had to bring him him home, he was so sick.
The orchard by the Sunnyvale Community Center has a Blenheim apricot orchard and sells them when ripe for a small fortune. Worth it!