The Gopher Fence

One might think that the small, tidy little vegetable farms and orchards of the Almaden Valley were owned and manned by high-strung, fastidious and, perhaps even, effeminate ancestors of the original southern European settlers who first converted the warm grasslands into the broad row crops and well-tended orchards that I grew up with. Well, such is not the case. The men who owned and tilled the fields that I knew were nearly all salty veterans of World War II and they fashioned themselves after their silver screen idols such as John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Jimmy Stewart. These guys weren’t afraid to keep a “thirty-aught-six” rifle hanging in the rear window of their pickup trucks and stop by the “Five Spot” bar at the end of the day for a couple of shots of bourbon whiskey and some big talking, story swapping before they headed home for dinner with the family.

These guys weren’t the droll, bib-overall farmers of the flat land, grain farms of the classic Midwest, nope. These fellows sported baseball caps, simple plaid shirts with the sleeves loosely rolled up with the sturdy, perennial blue jean Levis covering their legs. When the neighborhood needed a simple fruit drying yard or a community center, they didn’t go to the local government and wait for some bureaucrats to vote on bond measures and haggle over the neighborhood’s requirements, these guys just banded together and simply planned and built what they needed and told the authorities that a “cooperative” had built it, or more usually, a “co-op.”

There were only a few creeks that drained our little valley and they were usually just dry ditches running through the fields except for when the rains came for weeks on end and then these ditches became wild, dangerous torrents shooting the drainage from the mountains to the bay at 60 miles an hour, it was said. Where the course of these ditches made radical turns, these independent and no-nonsense land owners would dump their wrecked trucks and cars and tractors into the creek bed, whatever was heavy, tough and unmovable. These little junk yards in the creeks were maintained so as to keep the torrential flood waters from hurtling into these bends in the course, where the rushing water would want to keep going straight instead of yielding to the creek’s course. The water would breach the banks at the turn and flood the adjacent fields. With the rains were gone, it would take many precious weeks for these stilled flood waters to evaporate out of the fields, fields ready to be tilled and sown. These little junk yards in the corners of the creeks were there to attempt to break the will of the rushing storm waters. Sometimes the junk piles worked, sometimes they didn’t. This impromptu solution to the flooding problem was about all these landowner/engineers could come up with.

In my old age, I’ve come to realize that these “truck farmers,” as they were called, literally – vegetable farmers, were only really good at one thing, farming. They were makeshift hydraulic engineers, they were makeshift carpenters and makeshift mechanics. The economy of the truck farm world was essentially “hand to mouth.” At the beginning of the growing season, the farmer would take out a loan from a local bank so that he could pay for operating his farm through the harvest of his crops. Once harvested and sold, he would pay off the bank loan and live off the remainder of his income until the next growing season arrived when he’d go back to the bank. The cycle would start all over again. In such an environment it was pretty hard to eek out enough money to hire professional engineers, mechanics or carpenters. The truck farmer had to rely on his own ingenuity and that of his neighbors, to do anything but his own . . .

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