In the days of my youth I frolicked in the valleys behind Santa Barbara. My folks had a spread with a couple acres of orange trees interspersed with avocados and even a walnut or two. This was a time without fences or close neighbours and past the borders of our property lay an untamed wilderness simply begging to be explored by a boy and his dog.
At the end of one of the orchards a creek ran up into the hills. On summer days, cloudless, hot days that stretched far into the evening, I would pack a rucksack full of previsions and Rocky (the World's Best Dog) and I would set off to find the mouth of the river. We never took along any water because what was that stuff running over the rocks? If it was good enough for Rocky to drink, it was good enough for me. In retrospect I undoubtedly escaped injury or death at the hands of dysentery microbes only because they were too shocked by my stupidity to actually destroy my bowels.
150 yards upstream (which seems like 150 miles when you are 10 and slogging your way through dense underbrush) there was a small clearing that looked out over our valley. Someone had the good sense to plant a large, flat topped rock square in the middle of the clearing; it was on this rock that my best friend and I would take our midday meal. Half a dozen oranges for me and a goodly handful of dog biscuits for him. We always shared.
I don’t know if you have ever eaten six oranges in a single sitting but by the fourth one your lips feel like they are covered with stinging red fire ants. The trouble is they are so sweet, and so juicy and after hiking up the childhood equivalent of the Amazon you are so hungry that you don’t notice the belt sander being applied to your mouth. That is, until half an hour later when you are face down in muddy creek water trying desperately to wash the burn off only to discover that it won’t come off no matter how hard you scrub with sand.
I remembered all this in my kitchen tonight. Standing there, hot and sticky from my ride home, eating an orange over the sink and having my lips tingle with the memory of so very long ago…