Ah, spring! prune blossoms

The prune blossoms arrived, and spring is in my heart.

I grew up in the pre-silicon Santa Clara Valley, where the California prune industry began. In 1856 a Frenchman named Louis Pellier failed at gold mining and started a nursery in Santa Clara. He introduced prunes to the United States by grafting a variety of French prune plum to the root stock of the native Santa Clara Valley wild plum. The result was a plum that would dry without fermenting around the pit.

The poor prune in this country has long been something of a joke, and subject to clever advertisements: "Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles!" intoned a stentorian baritone voice in an early television ad. A later ad labeled it "The funny fruit." Now prunes tend to be labeled "Dried Plums" to the amusement of prune growers. All prunes are plums, but not all plums are prunes.

The 1933 edition of the Sunset All-Western Cookbook takes up the issue, quoting Jeannette Cramer of Sunset Magazine:

When is a plum a prune, if ever? That question has been debated for a good many years. The impression seems to exist in some places that a plum becomes a prune after it has been cured, somewhat after the fashion of a tadpole which becomes a frog after it has passed through a series of finishing processes, and even the lexicographer agrees in that.

I, however, prefer to stand on the side of the practical fruit man who gives the prune credit for separate existence even while on the tree. We go so far as to refer to prune trees and prune blossoms, than which there is no more delightful snowy sight in all the spring-time display. A drive through a prune-growing region on the annual blossom day is one of the favorite joys of all who dwell in or near prune-growing communities.

As Dad once put it with a grin and a wink, "prunes is prunes."

The prune orchard was the focus of our lives when I was growing up, and it gave us our living. In the spring came the buds all over the trees—then the blossoms, sweet and profuse, perfuming all of Santa Clara Valley. The blossoms set and, barring killing frosts, turned into little green prunelets.

As summer went on, the prunes turned deep purple. The fruit became fat and heavy, and Dad put props under the drooping tree limbs to support them and keep them from breaking. The early prunes began to fall from the trees. Their smooth dusky skins were thick and sour, their pulp golden and sweet.

Then the harvest! Out we went with our tin buckets and began to pick prunes. On our knees around each tree we went, picking up the purple fruits and chucking them into our buckets as fast as we could. Fill a bucket, dump it into a box, pick some more.

Never did we say we were “picking plums” as we scrabbled around the hot dusty orchard on our knees, picking up the deep purple fruits.

We were Picking Prunes.

Devil's Slide and the really big cul-de-sac

Devil's Slide is a rocky promontory high above the Pacific Ocean between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay. When you drive over Devil's Slide you're driving through a slice cut into Montara Mountain. Montara and San Pedro Mountains are the northern part of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the range that divides the San Francisco Peninsula -- the bayside region along San Francisco Bay, and the coastside region along the Pacific Ocean. Moss Beach and Montara are the last little coastside towns you visit before starting north over Devil's Slide toward Pacifica.

To see the Devil's Slide area from a satellite, click here.

Devil's Slide was closed today so that the California Department of Transportation could  remove boulders from above the road before they come crashing down. With the closure our little world became one big cul-de-sac... one big dead-end with nowhere to go. We rather like it that way, actually. Inconvenient, but peaceful and nearly traffic-free. When Devil's Slide is out we can stroll across the highway to visit our favorite tacqueria without fear of death by vehicular misadventure, for one thing.

So, what's the story of Devil's Slide? In the early 1900s the Ocean Shore Railroad blasted a roadbed through the Devil's Slide ridge and laid down railroad tracks. For a few years steam engines chuffed along the precarious stretch, carrying passengers from San Francisco south -- "Reaches the Beaches" was the Ocean Shore Railroad tag line. The railroad never fully succeeded. For one thing, soaking rains repeatedly caused the shale and sandstone above the roadbed to slide down onto the tracks. The Ocean Shore Railroad ceased operation in the 1920s, never having achieved its goal of a rail line all the way down the coast to Santa Cruz.

Barbara VanderWerf tells us, in her wonderful book Montara Mountain:

Originally Devil's Slide meant only the promontory and its inland ridge. In the 1880s, travellers in horse-drawn wagons on the Half Moon Bay-Colma Road, which ran along the top of the ocean bluffs, paused to note the chute-like ridge ending in the massive rock dome. They thought it looked fit for a Devil's Slide and named it so.

In the 1930s, the State of California acquired the railroad right of way and built Highway One on it. The mountain continued to slip and slide toward the ocean, hammering the road with boulders and causing parts of the road to drop away, resulting in periodic closures. In 1995, Highway One at Devil's Slide was closed for over five months. In 2006, it was closed for four months.

Here's what the highway sign near Pillar Point harbor looked like during the 2006 closure:
Driving to San Francisco usually takes about 30 minutes over Devil's Slide from Moss Beach and Montara. When the road's closed it can take up to three hours. Everyone north of Half Moon Bay must travel south along two-lane Highway One and join the southerly coastsiders to squeeze onto two-lane Highway 92 for the trip over the hill to where big freeways zip north and south on the bay side of the peninsula, and east and west across bay bridges.

Our little world will soon become more reliably accessible, though. The tunnel is coming. In the mid-1990s a bunch of us coastsiders branded ourselves tunnelistas and banded together to mount a campaign for a tunnel through Montara Mountain, to provide a safe and reliable way around Devil's Slide. We sported bright yellow Think Tunnel bumper stickers and buttons and t-shirts, and rallied the entire county to put a tunnel initiative on the ballot. It passed overwhelmingly.

The impetus for the tunnel effort wasn't so much to avoid road closures, but to stop a huge freeway bypass over the mountain. Here are some photos, including an artist's rendition of what the freeway would have looked like: Saving Montara Mountain.

The cuts and fills to create that proposed freeway would have devastated a beautiful, pristine area, and resulted in a very steep road over an extremely foggy mountain. When you drive Devil's Slide on a foggy day you drive through a kind of fog tunnel, with the fog rolling up the bluffs and on up the mountain, leaving the roadway clear. At the elevation of the proposed freeway, visibility can be near zero on foggy days. Hike up Montara Mountain on one of those foggy days and you'll know what I mean! Can't see a thing.

There's a lot of story to Devil's Slide...