Hot Date

It’s not what you think – trust me. I’m referring to a visit about a month ago with my father and his wife to Shields Date Garden in Indio. Whenever they visit, Shield’s is one of the places we have to stop so that Alberta can restock her date stores.

Since I’ve lived in the area for six years, and have had visitors a few times, I’m no stranger to Shields Date Gardens, but last month was the first time that I actually took the time to check out the film presentation about the Romance and Sex Life of the Date that’s touted on a billboard on Highway 111.  Back in the day, that sign was pretty racey.

 The film, like the entire Shields facility, is vintage 1950s. The show is travelogue meets fifth grade science film, narrated by a male who sounds as though he does voice-overs for newsreels. Awkward attempts have been made to make the presentation more modern (new photographs spliced in, as well as updated community information) but the best parts are the obviously original pieces of film.

Many of us in California are migrants of some variety, and Shields was not an exception.  He was born in Iowa and schooled in Montana to be a mining engineer. His wife, Bess, was from Kansas. They met and married here. Neither of them had any farming or ranching experience when they arrived in Indio, population 500.

The Coachella Valley is similar to the Red River valley where I grew up, in that it’s the bottom of what was an ancient lake. Plant something in the sediment, it can’t help but grow. When the Southern Pacific Railroad came through here in 1904, people started exploring the area and discovered deep Artisian wells. Especially in the areas around Indio and Coachella, a farmer could poke a hole in the ground and watch a water geyser spew forth.

As the interest in area agriculture grew, the University of California, Riverside got involved and started investigating the viability of growing dates here. They found that yes, dates could flourish in the area, and by the 1920s, date groves lined California State Highway 111 from Palm Springs all the way to Indio, a distance of about 20 miles.

To set himself apart from the competition, Floyd developed a lecture about the romance and sex life of the date. (We all know that sex sells.) The lecture became a slide show and then a movie. 

Floyd Shields

 The east valley was booming by the 1940s. The Salton Sea – a massive body of water formed when the engorged Colorado River broke levees and flowed for two years into the Salton Sink region – was enjoying great popularity as a resort destination. Date farming had taken off, as well as citrus farming and other table crops. Shields constructed his Date Gardens building in 1950, put up the knight in 1953, and has been here ever since.

A couple notes about date farming that I found fascinating: Dates, although supposedly the oldest known cultivated tree crop, are difficult to grow. The trees take 15 years to mature, and 20 years to yield any return. Pollination has to be done manually, which makes the whole romance and sex life thing a lot less titillating. Male flowers are cut from the trees, then bound to females. Workers have to climb the palms and visit the pairings every day, shake out pollen on them with a sort of powder puff. The branches are full of thorns which have to be removed. As the fruit starts to ripen, it has to be bagged and tied to protect it. The groves require 10 acre feet of water per year, which is equal to about 120 inches of rainfall. If it wasn’t for the American Canal that brings water from the Colorado, it would be impossible to grow this crop here. In August, the fruit has to have water proof covers placed over it (different than the bags), and finally ripens about September 1. From then until the end of the year, dates are picked manually about once a week; they don’t all ripen at the same time.

The only date groves left on Hwy 111 now are the Shields’ groves. There are still farms farther east in the valley, but just about the only things growing on the fertile alluvial fan now are golf courses and finely manicured lawns. Parking lots, streets, strip malls, country clubs and massive resorts line the valley from end to end.

In 1921, the first Date Festival was held in Indio to celebrate the harvest. The fair continued annually for a few years, but interest waned. Sixteen years later, in 1937, the festival returned and has been an annual event ever since. Next time: Goin’ to the Fair.

The Stroke

Some of you know that I suffered a stroke years ago. I've just started doing some writing about that, and am sharing the first few words with you here. More about the environs of the Coachella Valley to come.

When I could not speak, I did not use the time wisely. I did not contemplate the limitations yet absolute necessity of language. I did not explore how people compensate for lack of verbal capability with gesture, facial expressions, body positions. I did not meditate in quietude, nor did I accept my muteness with a knowing that my aphasia would resolve and the use of my right hand would return, if a bit cumbersome still, years later. I did none of those things.

            I now understand that the state in which I existed for ten days and the months that followed was the low hum of panic; a foundation of fury buried under the mortar of anxiety. Resistance, alternating with acquiescence. But never acceptance. Like so much of my life until then and for years after, not acceptance.

            When I could not talk, it was not because I had contracted the common form of streptococcus in my respiratory system. Nor did I have laryngitis, the kind I suffered as a teenager after screaming at hockey games. When I couldn’t talk, it was because a blood vessel or capillary in my brain closed up, spasmed tight as an unsprung bud. That vessel – one of myriad vessels along the route from lung to heart and on –  cut off oxygen to the part of my brain that enabled me to not only think of language and choose words, but actually make my mouth form them. Since the left side of my brain experienced the trauma, my right arm and hand were paralyzed.

             The year was 1994. After six years of auditioning for regional theater and commercials, I had given up constantly have to choose between buying groceries and paying rent. If truth be told, acting was a lot of hard work with little reward for the schmoozing that passed as an audition. Young, immature, impatient – I did the next rational thing and decided to become a best-selling author. After a bad breakup I found a new man. And although I wasn’t in love with him (our relationship always felt paternal or familiar rather than passionate or romantic) he supported me in my quest to find a creative voice that worked. A therapist kept encouraging me to write. So off I went to the local community college for creative writing courses, the first of which I was completing when I had the stroke.

            “Stroke” is a word I have never understood as it is applied to that brain condition that kills people or steals much of their physical and mental capabilities. A stroke. With which swimmers propel themselves. Golfers keep score. The cam in an engine moves. Crew teams soar. Boxers win. Abusers instill fear. A clock tells time. Batters are out. The Universe bestows luck. A pen removes a word. A lovers caresses. In the 1590s, an apoplectic seizure was referred to as The Stroke of God’s Hand. The word implies mechanical movement, testament to language’s imprecision that a physical phenomenon that freezes activity is called a stroke.

            In retrospect, I should not be surprised by the irony that I lost the ability to speak at the time I was trying to find my voice. If a person wanted to get all metaphysical about it, it makes perfect sense. At the start of my Hundred Years of Therapy, I went to explore another creative outlet – and started a new job working for a woman whose management style was all about stifling me. Of course I lost the ability to speak and write. Of course I lost language.

            Not only did I not have the words then, I hardly have the words now. It is something that I share rarely. People look at me differently when I share that I’ve experienced a condition that generally afflicts old people. Only old people have strokes, and then they lose their minds, drool onto their housecoats in a ratty nursing facility, unable to move, speak, understand or care for themselves until they die. Old people have strokes and can’t talk, can’t feel their mouths, don’t know they’re spitting food on the personal they’re talking to. So I had no words. I still have no words. Until, much like the time in 1994, all of a sudden, I did. Some synapse, some impulse, some new pathway formed and language for this experience finally came.

            I asked my father recently what he remembered about that December and the following months. He paused – looking for the words? – finally admitting, “Not much. I had my hands full here.” He said it with both apology and defiance. What his hands were full of was unapologetic defiance in the form of my mother, who, ironically, had been suffering strokes, probably since her 40s. Often snappish and short tempered, my mother complained frequently of headaches. I can picture her brushing – rushing – past me on the way to the medicine cabinet for buffered aspirin (why buffered? did she take so many that the medication hurt her stomach?) her eyes looking straight through me. When she was finally diagnosed with hypertension, her blood pressure was so high it couldn’t be measured. She spent a lot of time on the couch, watching ball games, mostly the Minnesota Twins, shouting at Killebrew, mocking Pete Rose when they played the Red Sox. “Oh, he’s such a … You’d think that they wouldn’t get so big.” The judgment, “Oh, he’s such a…”  Such a what?  “Such a …” became the ultimate criticism. “Such a …” was a fabulous way to get us kids to fill in the blank. “Oh, don’t be such a …” What? Whiner? Baby? Loudmouth? Chatterbox? For me, being called a Such A usually had something to do with shutting up.