I was raised in a house my father built. Native Californians, we settled in Fallbrook in San Diego's pastoral north county and my parents started a construction business. This was in the 1970s, when families from the more affluent warrens of Southern California were fleeing the hazards of city life for rural simplicity. My folks specialized in ranch houses, modest but solidly built homes that sold for about $20,000 each. They managed with a light touch and they were careful to nurture quality work regardless of market conditions. In lean times they paid above scale which subcontractors remembered when the market turned and the bidding for their services tightened.
During the summer months my father and I would hop into the cab of his sky-blue Ford pickup and together we'd check on his build-sites. (The truck, a 1968 F-100, would serve as the platform for my freshman class's homecoming float.) Whenever we'd stop for supplies at Pine Tree Lumber, the only lumber yard within a fifty-mile radius, we'd invariably run into one or two of Dad's subs. They were a thoughtful but hard-boiled lot. Conversations typically began with trade talk: home prices, interest rates, zoning ordinances. Then, like a Soviet submarine surfacing in local waters, the matter of California's fickle building code would emerge. That, in turn, queued heated appraisals of The Damned Government, a generic reference to the Fed's long arm as well as the more immediate clutch of state and municipal authorities.
Pine Tree Lumber was only one of several forums where such topics were aired. Another was Rusty's Ammo Room, a dimly lit diner where conspiracy theories were served up, tossed back and swallowed whole like short beers. One could argue that my home town was the Bethlehem of the current Tea Party Movement.
Years later, while visiting my parents during the holidays, I would jog along a route that took me to the top of Gumtree Lane. It was a sparsely populated asphalt ribbon and at its peak was an abandoned avocado grove consumed by a green sea of elephant grass. From there one could see the Pacific Ocean a good thirty miles away, clinging to the coast and illuminated like a nimbus by the late afternoon sun.
Eventually the avocado trees were leveled and Gumtree Lane was widened to accommodate a huge residential estate. By 2007 the land was terraced and the foundations were poured and a brick wall was built around the entire development high enough to obstruct my sacred sea view. A year later construction ground to a halt in response to the global financial crisis, an event triggered largely by the industrial production of mortgages by bankers who, in the name of innovation, managed to turn home loans into toxic derivatives.
Nearly a decade later, Fallbrook has yet to recover. The urban refugees who settled there a generation earlier returned to Palos Verdes and Newport Beach after their bucolic idyll had become a bore. As mean income levels diminished so did the tax base, which starved the schools and other services of revenue. Last year the hospital closed down, obliging elderly residents to rely on nearby Temecula in Riverside County, a twenty-minute drive, for emergency medical care.
In November my father suffered a heart attack. He has recovered well but such ordeals concentrate the mind and it is clear that our sprawling estate must be renovated, modernized and sold. It's a daunting, bittersweet enterprise. Over these last three months, once again a Fallbrook resident, I've become a familiar patron at Joe's Hardware, Major Market and the Main Street Cafe. Rusty's Ammo Room closed down years ago along with the A&W drive-in on South Mission, but Pine Tree Lumber survives as a citadel for what remains of the local construction industry. My father's subs are long gone and even the studs and plywood sheets, once stacked in the yard like great funeral pyres, are tucked away in wooden lockers to protect them from the elements.
The drill hasn't changed much in fifty years, however. I park my father's '86 Ford Ranger in the pick-up zone. (He sold the F-100 after I moved to Asia; I still haven't forgiven him.) Then I stroll to the office where Marvin rings up my supply list under my parent's account, still active since 1967. Then I return to the yard and hand Jason, an ageless hipster, a print-out of the order.
Jason is old school, thoughtful. He's been around long enough to appreciate Fallbrook for its elegant, melancholic arc. When I told him my father will be ninety next month he was incredulous. "If I could look as good at sixty as he does now I'll be happy," he told me, stretching things a bit but sweet all the same.