Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Orchards and pastures have become history

By Carl Heintze

Cousin Bev died last month. He was almost 90. He had been predicting his death for several years, but that didn't make it any easier. Cousin Bev's full name was Beverly, an unusual name for an American male of his age, but it never served to make him any less of a man in my mind.

Cousin Bev was the last male in his family, the last of four brothers. Two of his three sisters are still alive. They're both over 90.

Bev's brothers all died at least 10 years ago. He lived on, a hearty, bluff kind of guy. Like his brothers, he was a master of all trades. Like his brothers, too, Bev could repair most anything. When it came to semi-skilled labor, they could do most anything. I suppose this is because they all grew up on a ranch, or what was called a ranch in their day--65 acres of orchard and another 65 of pasture.

It was a ranch owned by their father, a ranch left to him by his great-grandfather, a man who trapped with Jedediah Smith, a man who led a wagon train across the plains to Oregon, a mountain man who knew Frazier Reed, one of the Donner Party.

This man married a minister's daughter when he was 57 and fathered five children, only to see four of them die of scarlet fever. The one who survived was Cousin Bev's grandmother. Cousin Bev grew up on the ranch she inherited from the mountain man.

Cousin Bev's father bought and drove the first tractor ever to till the soil in the county. Cousin Bev used to ride on it when he was a little boy.

On this ranch was a blacksmith shop, a huge hay barn, cattle to milk, horses to ride, prunes to dry, a berry patch, a cider press, chickens and ducks, a pumphouse and a windmill, a vegetable garden, apple trees, walnuts and peaches. It was, in fact, almost a completely independent, self-sufficient community.

Under the stairs to the second story of the house was a gun rack in which rested the Hawken muzzle-loading rifle the ranch's founder brought with him in the wagon train.

Next to it were the rifles and shotguns Cousin Bev and his brothers used when they went hunting. Although they never belonged to the National Rifle Association, they knew and respected guns, and they hunted judiciously, butchering, cleaning and eating what they killed.

Cousin Bev and his brothers went to high school but not much farther. Their education came mainly on the ranch.

They learned to plow and to milk, to cut hay and to shoe horses and to forge metal in the blacksmith shop, pumping the big bellows of the forge by hand. They baled hay and stacked it in the barn; they fed the cows and milked them every night; they separated the cream and the milk.

They didn't make butter, but their mother did. She also made all her own bread and ice cream, the best ice cream I ever tasted. They candled and gathered their own eggs, killed and plucked their own chickens, butchered their own meat and cut their own firewood from the oaks on the hills nearby.

In time, of course, all this changed. Even when I was a boy, which was when Cousin Bev was a teenager, they and the ranch had already become an anachronism.

Horses were no longer used as draft animals, and their mother had begun buying butter and bread in grocery stores.

And in time the ranch itself ceased to exist because it was too small to compete with agribusiness. Eventually my uncle went broke, the bank foreclosed on his mortgage and the property was redeveloped into a subdivision.

Cousin Bev and his brothers moved into town, and he went to work in a shipyard. Like so many others of his generation, he no longer lived off the land directly. He died as he had lived the last couple decades--a town dweller--even if his heart wasn't in it. It was still somewhere in the country, somewhere in the orchard or the pasture that no longer existed.

I think that's sad. I know the family farm was neither efficient nor prosperous. Instead, it was hard work with very little monetary reward. But there was something about it, something intangible, the kind of life that seems, in retrospect at least, to have been worth the living. And now it's gone, probably forever.

That's why I'm sad when I think of Cousin Bev.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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