The Gift of Burbank, or; Things I Learned From My Orange Tree

Six years ago I moved from Los Angeles to Burbank. As the car drives, that is a distance of about 10.5 miles. In practical terms, it is roughly the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Los Angeles, especially the area in which I previously resided, known as Mid-City West, is densely populated, noisy, traffic-congested and more or less urban in feel. The neighborhoods around you -- Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Hollywood proper, the Miracle Mile and so forth -- are all along the most famous and the most heavily visited in the city. Real estate is at a premium and getting more expensive by the minute (when I moved into Park La Brea in 2010, I paid $1,420 for a one-bedroom apartment: as of today the same apartment goes for about $2,000). Just about every aspiring actor, comedian, musician, model, writer, director and producer who comes to the city settles in this vicinity, at least for awhile, reasoning that it is best to be at the epicenter of the entertainment industry than somewhere on its fringe. The young trust-fund jockeys and bunnies of the West Side also come here to "rough it," and on the other end of the scale, so does seemingly every homeless person, schizophrenic, and drug addict not presently residing on Skid Row. Sherlock Holmes' buddy and my possible relation, Dr. John Watson, once observed that London was "that great cesspool to which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained." Well, Los Angeles can claim similar honors. If it's noisy, dirty, snobbish or entitled, it's here.

The net effect of all of this gravitation is that long-time residents, like myself, become somewhat inured to it all -- the press and police helicopters blasting overhead at treetop altitude for hours at a time; the expensive cars whose speaker-systems rattle windows for blocks in every direction at 3 AM; the winos screaming delirious nonsense outside your window; the buses jammed with tourists who stare at you like a beast in a cage as they trundle past. You don't like it -- you don't like the stench of ozone, human piss and rotting garbage, either -- but you get used to it. The endless shriek of sirens, the enormous traffic jams, the road construction that never seems to build or repair anything, the fact that your gym or favorite restaurant is closed two days out of every seven so someone can shoot a movie there, it's all just so much white noise.

It is only when you move to a sleepy studio community like Burbank that you begin to understand how traumatized you were by all those years amid the cacophony. This awareness strikes you almost the moment the moving truck drives away in a cloud of dust, because even the dust in Burbank is different: it is actual, organic dirt particle of the sort God allegedly made, and not pulverized concrete and asphalt. In Burbank, which is climatically a semi-desert, you nevertheless realize you are closer to nature than you can ever be in L.A. -- there are trees and shrubs and grasses everywhere -- and this, along with the lesser congestion and population density, give the air a different, more natural, cleaner taste.

When the truck is gone you stand on what is now your street, and experience a sense of confusion whose cause takes a moment to determine. You eventually realize the source: silence. In Los Angeles silence is an incredibly precious and rare commodity. There is no time of day or night at any time of the year where you are likely to encounter it. Summer is noisier than what passes for winter, but both are quite cacaphonous. Here in Burbank, at seven o'clock on a summer weekday, the only sound you hear are insects, and even they are keeping it down.

That night you require a certain amount of white noise to ease you to sleep: you're used to sirens and choppers and speakers and arguments resonating through your windows and walls, after all: silence is eerie. But you soon get used to it, and the sense of relaxation you discover within your muscles as you rise in the morning and go about your business makes you realize, with a start, that you have been carrying yourself in a state of coiled-spring tension for longer than you can remember. In L.A., just walking down the street to buy a cup of coffee carries with it the element of risk: you could be hit by a car (I have been, and nearly struck on two other occasions) or you could be accosted by a lunatic demanding money who won't take no for an answer. Because of this, you find yourself perpetually tense, perpetually at-the-ready for some kind of minor confrontation. But there is no need for this in Burbank: as you soon discover, confrontation of any kind here is rare, and even when I came eye-to-eye with a coyote in the middle of the street one night, he politely padded away without causing any mischief.

Burbank being a semi-desert climate, the summers are long (about 6 months in duration), and in the words of Michael Caine, "insanely hot," with triple-digit temperatures practically the norm. For someone like me, of pure North European ancestry, that poses a lot of problems; but there are benefits. The climate here is perfect for flowering and fruit-bearing plants, and this fact is how I became acquainted with my orange tree.

Like my rosebushes, it came with the house, and sits in the extreme left-hand corner of my enormous yard (enormous yards for tiny homes are the norm in the San Fernando Valley: why I have no idea, with the possible exception of the fact that this town has an enormous number of dogs). Possessing an orange tree in Burbank is no big deal. This climate excels at producing citrus plants of all kinds, as well as roses -- as I said before, in Burbank you feel closer to nature than you ever will in L.A. In my immediate neighborhood, in addition to orange trees, there also grow pomegranates, lemons, grapefruit, clementines, and limes, all in great profusion. But in my own yard, I have an orange tree.

To be perfectly honest, it is really more a large bush than a tree. I don't suppose the trunk is nearly as thick as my thigh, and its general shape is cubic rather than the T-shape of your average tree. To look at it in the offseason is to look past it: it is simply a big green mass in the corner of the yard, under which my cat occasionally likes to shade himself. But twice a year -- every 6 - 7 months like clockwork -- the tree begins to bud with emerald-green fruits the size of acorns. The baby oranges stay in this modest and unappealing shape and color for what seem like weeks: then, almost overnight, they burst into much larger fruits of the traditional color, and before long can be picked and eaten with abandon. Based on my six years of tending the plant, I would estimate that each "harvest" yields an average of about 70 oranges, but the crop varies depending on a number of factors, like the amount of rainfall or the temperature at the time the fruits blossom. But what is remarkable is not the size of the crop relative to the tree, but the flavor of the fruit.

Oranges have always been among my favorite fruits, but until I picked a ripe one off the vine, peeled it and ate it while the fragrant smell of the blossoms was still on the skin, I had never really experienced what it was like to taste one of the blessed things. My father, who had grown up in Missouri and Illinois, had often insisted when I was growing up that we only eat corn bought directly from local Maryland farmers, because "only fresh corn has any taste to it." Well, he might have added that this also applies to oranges. Biting into one of these is an explosion of flavor that makes your taste buds cramp: it is as far from the tepid suggestion of flavor produced by a store-bought, refrigerated, imported orange as a Guinness is from a Miller Lite. Eating them was a wake-up call that triggered in me a very protective attitude toward the tree.

Now, I grew up in two places -- Wilmette, Illinois and Bethesda, Maryland -- which had boisenberry trees, and believe me when I tell you I spent every summer both cramming the ripe red-and-blue-black berries down my gullet and getting yelled at for tracking the ink-like juices into the house, where they (permanently) stained all and sundry. But as a kid, I never looked at those trees as anything but a kind of benny of summer, manna which fell not from heaven, but from the backyard. I didn't give the trees themselves a second thought, and I had no qualms about hacking away inconvenient branches. As a grown man, my relationship with growing things in my own yard has changed.

In both Pagan, Eastern and Native American and Aboriginal philosophy, there is a great deal of emphasis on the relationship and interconnection between man and nature. In Japan, the samurai were expected to draw conclusions from what they saw in nature; in China, many styles of kung fu were developed by observing the movements of animals and insects. Among First Nations tribes in the Americas, and among Aborigines and European Pagans, there is a commonality in the way the tribes looked at the cycles of the seasons, the behaviors of the animals, the land itself, and even the weather: as parts of a unified whole. From their surroundings, they drew inspiration from their folklore and spiritual beliefs, and to some extent even their way of hunting and fighting. Now, I'm not claiming I sit beneath the orange tree in white robes as the sun rises, murmuring snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom: but I am saying that the twice-yearly ritual of harvesting the tree has proven surprisingly educational. Some of the things which tending the tree have taught me:

Patience. I am not a patient man. Never have been. Probably never will be. When I was studying tae kwon do, my main focus was on the next belt test -- and the next and the next, until I could finally tie the black one around my waist. I was in such a rush for that moment that when it arrived I realized I had failed to savor the process which had allowed it to become possible. It was the same way with the oranges -- months of impatient waiting, then a sudden orgy of orange-eating, a kind of debauchery of citrus. However, as the years have gone on, my sense of impatience has been lessened, in part because I have come to understand that the long intervals between me eating the last of the fruit (which I did yesterday) and me eating the first orange of the following harvest (probably August or September of this year) are actually important parts of the ritual. When you're a kid, you wish every day could be Christmas: it's not until you're older that you realize that it's precisely the fact that Christmas comes but once a year which makes it special. As Major Charles Emerson Winchester III once said on an episode of M*A*S*H, "Anticipation is in itself a sensory delight." To my surprise, it really is.

Compassion. Like most people, I rarely think of plant life as being worthy of, or even a candidate for, compassion. Plants are alive, of course, but because they are a form of life utterly alien to us -- no brain, no nervous system, no bones or blood -- we tend to look upon them as simple phenomena and not living beings which allow us to exist. A few years ago California was in the grip of a severe drought which parched the soil to the consistency of dryer dust: a lot of lawns died, along with most of the non-indigenous flora, and even the palms and yucca plants were drooping. Although I was extremely punctilious in obeying water restrictions in every other area of life -- dishes, laundry, showers, cooking, all of it -- I braved the furnace-like noonday sun and triple digit temps to make sure the orange tree got its share of H2O via my garden hose. I am of 100% Nordic-Gaelic-Anglo-Saxon descent, so the Burbank sun is my mortal enemy, but damned if I didn't roast myself a redder shade of lobster making sure that thirsty sumbitch got all the water she needed. Was self-interest at play here? Yes -- initially. I wanted my damned oranges and no sorry-ass drought was gonna stop me from getting them. But watering the orange tree led me to notice the withered condition of the roses, the yucca plants, the various cacti and so on, who were also silently pleading for relief. Before long I could be seen furtively watering all of them, usually with buckets filled by the otherwise annoyingly leaky bathroom faucet. I did not like the idea of them dying of thirst: I began to see them as living creatures in need of assistance, not scenery.

Generosity. Everyone has a besetting sin. Mine -- one of mine, I should say -- is greed. I'm not sure where this impulse came from, but I have it in abundance. When I first tasted the oranges, I couldn't get over how good they were, and this led me to pick them in large numbers. I clucked over my hoard of fruit like a dragon over his treasure, and only very grudgingly gave away individual samples to friends and relatives. Because I can only eat so many oranges, however, eventually I noticed that some of the fruits were going bad before I could get to them -- rotting and going to waste because I didn't have the heart to share them. This was embarrassing, so I gradually forced myself to become less parsimonious and to give them away in much larger numbers, even mailing them across the country to friends and family. Of the last crop, I'd estimate at least 30 went to other people, which is quite an increase from my original figure of zero. Of course, about a half a dozen still went bad, so I have room for improvement...but at least I recognize this, which is progress.

Respect. I used to consider the orange tree simply another thing which grew on my lawn, like the roses. Then I began to see it as a gift which provides me, on a yearly basis, with between 100 - 150 delicious pieces of fruit. Now I see it for what it is: a generous friend. I have eaten the oranges off the tree, I have crushed them into juice, I have used them to flavor water, I have made them into a crude form of jam, I have curried favor with them and bartered them for other locally-grown fruits.
I have done all of this without spending a single penny. Except during times of drought, orange tree asks nothing of me and wants nothing from me. Anything that can provide so much and ask for next to zero ought to be treated reverently, and I do try do just exactly that.

Humility. First Nations/Aboriginal tribes tend to maintain that they do not own land; they belong to it. Whenever I feel greed in relation to the coming harvest ("Mine! All mine! Bwahahaha!") I remember that the time will come -- perhaps even this year -- when I will no longer live here and the orange tree will no longer be "mine." Someone else, or perhaps several someones, or perhaps no one at all (you'd be surprised how many nitwits simply let their fruit rot on their front lawn) will reap the benefits. Every time I pick one of the oranges, I keep in mind that having access to the tree at all was either an accident or a gift, and like everything else in life, including life itself, it is temporary. This tree is probably very young -- as I said, it's more of a bush than a tree, and not very large -- and according to my research may live for a century or more, which is probably far longer than I will last. Will it remember me 80 years from now? Was it ever aware of me at all? I don't know. I never will. And in spite of my human ego, which wants desperately to be remembered and revered, I have learned to take comfort in this.

You see, humans tend to think of life as a play -- with a beginning, middle, and end. We seldom see ourselves as part of a larger community, cells in a body, so to speak, whose individual life-cycles simply transpire within the much larger organism of life itself, which on this planet is billions of years old. But each of us is in a sense only one link in an enormous DNA chain stretching back through the ages to some unimaginably ancient past: even this orange tree, which will probably outlive me by many years, has a progenitor, and with every fruit it grows, tries to seed the ground with future offspring. Individually, we die. Collectively, we go on.

I told you before I don't sit beneath the tree mumbling yogic mantras beneath the rising sun, and right now I probably sound as if I do. But among its other properties, the orange tree in my yard is a teacher, and one of the things it taught me is to share.