Sometime in the mid 2000’s –I can’t remember when, but I was pretty young and green– I was hitchhiking through California and the desert southwest, reading Ed Abbey (not noticing the misogyny, on account of my underdeveloped brain), trying to find some meaning in movement. It was early winter, but I could not recognize that in places like Barstow, Needles, and Bakersfield, a land deeply foreign to my midwestern upbringing. There was no snow, no ice, no wailing wind– just an unsettling sharpness and clarity in the sky. I can remember seeing fields of lettuce and strawberries populated with bustling, hunched figures— outside of the vast and empty cornfields of my upbringing, this was my first introduction to the idea that the food we eat is grown by somebody.
My pack full of sunflower seeds, water, notebooks, and boxed wine, and looking so much cleaner and more innocent than my fellow travelers, the ones with face tattoos (before they were normal) and flea-bit dogs and grubby hands clasping cardboard signs that said things like “Fuck You Give Me Money” (I think that was in Sacramento), I stuck my thumb out and continually managed to get rides from protective, parental types, who upon seeing this fairly clean kid looking like he just walked out of a sporting goods store on the side of the road, felt obligated to bring me towards safety. Brushing my teeth on a bridge somewhere, I recall a woman pulling over and handing me a half-gallon zip-seal plastic bag full of quarters. “I’m not propositioning you, I just have a son your age,” she said.
It was somewhere around north of Bakersfield that I managed to catch a ride from an evangelist minister– one of the good ones I think. He asked if I needed work and a place to stay a couple nights, and that would become the first time I ever did agricultural work: hauling harvest crates of persimmons around an orchard and packing shed. Other than myself, the employees were exclusively formerly incarcerated men, and the minister/orchardist was operating something of a work rehabilitation program. Despite my initial unease working around men who had been locked up for assaults, robberies, and worse, I quickly learned that there is perhaps no safer or more mindful a group of folks to work alongside than dudes who really don’t want to go back to prison.
During the ride out to the orchard, I was introduced to the Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton, who said, “To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless,” which I suppose offered some context for the kindly orchardist’s operation. This is a fine philosophy, I will admit, and one I wish more Christians were apt to follow in an age where bombing schools and hospitals isn’t headline news any more, but at the time, anything with a hint of religion made me wince. He also shared with me his view that the original forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was not actually an apple, as it is often depicted, but the persimmon. He offered no supporting evidence of this that I can recall, but the dubious claim has stuck with me.