The Last Harvest
An heirloom orchard passes into memory
Not all of the trips my partner and I take in our camper van lead to exotic, remote locales featuring primitive conditions, jaw-dropping scenery and abundant wildlife. That is the general formula for our journeys, to be sure, but quotidian travel is also on the agenda.
This was especially the case in most of 2022 and the first half of 2023, as my family dealt with the fallout of an accident at home that sent my mom into a tailspin of deteriorating health, culminating with her death last December. She was followed 6 days later by my dad, whose health problems were not directly related to my mom’s but probably were exacerbated by the 11-month struggle to find appropriate living arrangements and levels of care for them both.
Leslie and I traveled numerous times to Northern California during those months, working with my three siblings to navigate a maze of care options and settings, which involved several moves and a rotating cast of providers. Sometimes we would be there for a week or more, helping with errands, providing emotional and logistical support, trying to lighten the burden that fell most directly on my sister Stephanie and brother Jason, who live in the area and therefore shouldered most of the day-to-day impact. (Our brother Joel, who lives in Seattle, made similar long-distance treks to provide support.)
Sometimes we drove a car on the 400-mile trip and stayed in motels or with my siblings, but other times we drove Next Chapter — including at the end or beginning of longer camping journeys into the woods and mountains — and used it as a home base we could park in a driveway or a rural Hipcamp site a few miles out of town. In the three years we have owned the van, we have spent the cumulative equivalent of more than half a year living in it, and it feels as much a home and refuge as our non-mobile houses in Ventura County. In Next Chapter, away from the whirlwind of medical crises and interventions, we could pretend for a few hours that we were on a less fraught errand.
And then the end came for both Mom and Dad around Christmas of 2022, and our burden shifted in 2023 from managing chaos to grieving, and the long process of settling our parents’ estate.
That process continues as I write this, nearly a year after their passing, and it has been both wrenching and complicated. But a key step on that convoluted journey came this summer, in a dying apple orchard outside the small town of Sebastopol.
Heirloom variety
My siblings and I grew up on a ranch west of Santa Rosa, in the wine country of Sonoma County. Our parents bought it in partnership with my dad’s brother and their mother, and moved us there from San Francisco when I was 5. We lived in a ramshackle old ranch house, amid 23 acres of prune orchards and wine-grape vineyards.
As children, we may not have fully recognized it, but from my adult perspective I realize that there was a deep underlying tension among the partners — hardly an uncommon situation in a family farming operation — that grew more pronounced over time. When I was a teenager, my parents somehow managed to scrape together the money to buy their own place outside the western Sonoma County town of Sebastopol. It was 10 acres of Gravenstein apple orchard and a slightly-less-ramshackle house, and they likely regarded it as an escape hatch in case the family partnership went sour and the home ranch had to be sold.
That did not happen; we lived on the home ranch for many more years, and the Sebastopol house was rented to a series of tenants. In the mid-1980s, when my father was nearing retirement from his job with IBM, he accepted a temporary assignment to work on a project in South Korea. My parents moved there and stayed for three years, and by the time they returned to California, the home in which they raised their children had fallen into such disrepair that it was uninhabitable. They moved instead to the Sebastopol property, and although we never lived on the apple ranch as a family, they remained there for the next 35 years. During that span we enjoyed many family gatherings and celebrations in and around the cramped old house.
When my parents bought the apple ranch a half century ago, the property was beautiful. The thick branches of all those big trees, probably five decades old even then, formed a continuous canopy, casting a deep cool shade over the orchard floor. In summer they hung so heavy with fruit that even those sturdy branches required a thicket of wooden props to keep them from breaking under the burden.
And what fruit it was.
In local lore, the Gravenstein apple is purported to have been introduced into what is now Sonoma County by Russian fur trappers around 1811, although subsequent research has cast doubt on that theory. Likewise, the origin of the cultivar is uncertain, but it is believed to be Denmark, and it has been grown in Scandinavia for three centuries. At one time Sebastopol styled itself as the “Gravenstein capital of the world,” with nearly 10,000 acres devoted to the crop at its peak in the 1940s; the apples were shipped far and wide in the form of fresh fruit, cider, sauce, dried fruit and juice. The town has celebrated its most famous product for more than a century by hosting apple-themed parades, fairs and festivals.
Whatever its provenance, it is a uniquely delicious piece of fruit. Here’s how I described it in a column I wrote for the Ventura County Star, published in August 1995, and I do not think I can improve on it now:
Gravenstein apples are unlike any other variety. Their crisp, greenish flesh is fragrant and dense with flavor, a startling and complex combination of tartness and sweetness that persists even after cooking. This makes them exquisitely suited for pies and sauce, but they are also good fresh. They maintain their firmness a long time after picking, neither too hard nor too soft, each bite snapping away with a satisfying crunch, flooding the mouth with the taste of spring rain and summer sun.
I wrote that piece as a eulogy, for even 28 years ago the Sonoma County Gravenstein industry was in precipitous decline and my parents’ orchard was dying. The industry was being undone by competition from varieties that are less fragile and store longer — the ubiquitous green Granny Smith among them — while our family’s trees were succumbing to age and indifferent management. All around Sebastopol, apple orchards were being bulldozed and replaced by vineyards and luxury homes, while the packinghouses in town shuttered one by one. (The countywide Gravenstein acreage now stands at less than 700 and there is only one apple processing facility left.)
I had long since moved away, graduated from college in Santa Barbara and started a family in Ventura, but nonetheless had a front-row seat over the decades as the orchard surrounding my parents’ beloved second home declined. When my own children were young I brought them there each August when the Gravensteins were ripe, and they learned to harvest apples and the fruit of the wild blackberries that were slowly and implacably colonizing the land where graceful trees had once cast summertime shade. Each year, however, there were more voids in the orchard rows, more toppled trunks, more branches broken from the weight of un-propped fruit, more invasive eucalyptus trees springing up, more messy tangles of berries blocking access to all but the wild creatures that were also reclaiming their place on the land.
Still, we always were able to bring a sack or two of apples home with us. They perfumed the car on the long drive back to Ventura, and then the kitchen while they awaited processing. We’d peel, core and slice them, and freeze them to become the tastiest apple pies the world has ever known over the next 12 months. We continued that harvest tradition for decades, and my children made it their own as adults, the resulting pies gracing the dinner table at uncounted Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthday and anniversary gatherings.
Then my parents died, and my siblings and I had to decide what to do with the ranch they left us.
Legacy or burden?
Another excerpt from my 1995 eulogy for the Gravenstein industry and my parents’ home in Sebastopol:
The farm is a 10-acre rectangle draped over the rolling hills of western Sonoma County, in Northern California. It is a landscape of intimate valleys and narrow ridges kissed by summer fog that drifts on the evening breeze like a fleet of ships with tattered sails.
The same qualities that made that area ideal for apples — warm days and fog-cool nights in summer — also makes it ideal for growing wine grapes. The ranch is located in the desirable Russian River American Viticultural Area, and has a soil type prized by vintners for the quality of pinot noir and chardonnay grapes it produces.
What all this means is that at fair market value, it would cost more than any of us could afford to buy out the other siblings’ interests and hold onto the ranch. Given its dilapidated state, it would cost a great deal more to redevelop it into a productive farming operation. Owning it together and operating it as partners was an unappealing option, given what we had witnessed of the intra-family tensions that such a partnership produced when we were growing up. We are all close to each other — drawn even closer by the events of the past 22 months — and we hope to stay that way, so we reluctantly made the only realistic choice open to us and prepared the property for sale.
This took us half the year, much of the time devoted to cleaning up the property and emptying the house of belongings my parents had accumulated during their 65 years together. It is a profound understatement to say that there was a lot of it. But after filling several large roll-off dumpsters and conducting a two-day estate sale — all of this with the help of multiple generations of family members — we managed it by midsummer.
And our broker quickly found a buyer who, to no one’s surprise, planned to clear the land of its tangled berry vines, fallen apple trees and invasive eucalyptus forest, and plant a vineyard. We signed the papers, completed the inspections, and planned for escrow to close in September.
So this August, as Leslie and I were concluding our journey to the coalfields of southeastern Colorado, we made sure to route our return through Northern California for a last visit to the apple ranch that has been such an important part of my family’s story for half a century. We stayed with my sister and her husband in San Rafael, and drove up to the ranch on our final day in the area.
Thanks to the wet winter, the few trees still standing were loaded with fruit, and the apples were at peak ripeness. The orchard has not been treated for pests in decades, which often leads to worm infestations, but it appeared clean this year, and although a lot of the fruit was small because there was so much of it, there also was plenty of good size. It was as if the orchard knew this would be its last harvest, and had summoned what remnant vitality remained within those gnarled old trunks to push out its best crop in years. Leslie and I fetched three 5-gallon buckets from our van, and filled them to the brim. We also waded gingerly into the blackberry thickets and filled plastic containers with plump, juicy fruit.
We made our way past the old house — empty now of people and possessions but filled still with memories — packed the buckets of apples into the van, and took our leave, likely never to return. We drove Next Chapter along twisting old country roads too narrow for its girth, met my brother Jason for lunch in town, then picked up Highway 101 and headed south.
All the way home, I basked in the perfume of Gravensteins and the memory of celebratory meals long ago, each emphatically punctuated at its conclusion by a perfect pie. Once we were back in Ventura, we spent three hours in the kitchen processing 15 gallons of fresh fruit, preparing our summer bounty for storage.
My freezer is full now of the last apples my parents’ ranch will ever produce. They are the makings of evocative desserts for special family occasions over the next year and more — Mom and Dad’s parting gift to us all.
What a year for you and your family, John. Whew. As I read this beautiful homage to the Gravensteins, and your family history, I kept hearing Jim Croce sing “ Time in a Bottle “ in my mind. You and Leslie , put it in bags to enjoy. Bravo.
We worked together for how many years and I never received a single Gravenstein! Hah. Love it, John. I think "Next Chapter" is gradually working its way into a film. I'd go and see it.