A prune tree gives you three completely different things, and most people never meet more than one of them. The wood smokes meat better than almost anything, low and slow, that particular sweetness working its way in. The fruit comes off the branch fresh, plump and oh so sweet. And dried down it becomes those wrinkled purple-black nuggets your grandmother kept in a bowl on the counter. Same tree, three reference points, three completely different experiences. I know all three because in the summer of 1984, when I was twenty, I worked on my dad’s Uncle Bill’s prune farm in the California valley.
We always called him Uncle Bill, my dad’s uncle, my grandpa Halsey’s brother. He grew prunes and walnuts in Colusa, on what was left of the Oakland Prune Company property that the family had been part of a generation back. Bill had been at it for decades and knew every acre, and he was also an inventor. After the war he bought a lot of surplus military planes off the government, not to fly them, but for the wooden crates they came in. He turned those boxes into housing for the crews who came to bring the prunes off the trees.
Picking prunes by hand is brutal, slow work, so Bill built a machine to do it. The harvester came in two halves, a shaker unit and a receiver unit. Two gas-powered rigs you drove down either side of a row. The shaker would reach out, take hold of a tree, and shake it until the ripe fruit came down. On the early models a canvas rolled out to catch the prunes and spooled them back into the receiver. Later he reworked it so the canvas dropped its whole load straight into the receiver bin. Every two or three trees you had a full wooden bin. They built the machines right there in Colusa, next to the dehydrator. A working farm that designed and built its own equipment.
For part of that summer, my job was the field lift. You ran out into the rows, forked up two of those bins at a time, and hauled them back to the truck. All day, every day, for about a month, until everything was in.
From the field, the bins went to the dehydrator. They held French plums: green on the tree, prunes once they are dried. Ripe, they run almost forty percent sugar, about as sweet as fruit gets. The plant laid them on drying racks, stacked the racks high, and ran them through long tunnels until they came out the far end as prunes. The whole idea is a leftover from the gold-mining days, a way to put fruit up for the winter when there was no other way to keep it. You can still buy them at Costco. Sunsweet calls them dried plums now, because somewhere along the line the word prune picked up a reputation, the thing your grandparents ate at breakfast with a little cream to keep things moving. Same fruit. I loved that summer, and everything I saw there about manufacturing and drying stuck with me. A lot of it carried straight into the wood business I am in now, the drying especially. Green wood and green fruit are not so different. You are managing water and time.
My mom’s dad, Bill McPherson, was a lumber broker, and to a kid he was something close to magic. A big, happy, generous man with a great smile. We lived in the Bay Area, and in the summers I would come up to stay with him in Portland, where he would set out berries and cream for breakfast and then head off to spend the day buying and selling lumber. It looked like the coolest thing a person could do, and he had built his whole career on handshakes and relationships. He was one of the founding partners of Tumac Lumber back in 1959. I worked two summers for companies Tumac had picked up over the years, KD Cedar one summer and Disdero the next. When I graduated I went to work at Disdero in Portland; which meant I saw him a couple of times a week. My grandma had passed years before, and he had retired to Charbonneau, just south of Portland. I would drive over, cook him dinner, and sit out on his back porch mostly to hear what he had to say. I was there the afternoon the World Series turned into something else, the A’s and the Giants at Candlestick, when the ground let go and the broadcast went from baseball to the Bay Bridge coming apart. We watched it together.
He gave me a lot of advice over those years, but one piece stuck harder than the rest. I was complaining, which I am capable of, that my sales territory ran from Eugene down to Ashland, all of southern Oregon, a stretch with more sawmills than lumberyards. Hard country to sell lumber into. He asked who our biggest customer was. A spa outfit called Pacific Marquis, I told him, a hot tub maker. He asked where they were. Up in the Willamette Valley, I said, over near Salem. Then he said: wherever your territory is, there is plenty of opportunity. Don’t complain about it. Do something about it. Not long after, I got a stack of phone books from my dad and started working the route south, out of southern Oregon and down into northern California, calling on customers nobody had bothered with. Grandpa passed in 1994. I still miss him.
A few years after Grandpa died, word came in that Uncle Bill’s old prune ranch in Colusa was available. It was a working farm, still producing. There was some money we all had together, not a lot but enough for a downpayment on a loan that had come from my grandpa’s estate. We put it into the prune farm, reinvest, get into land. My grandpa’s Tumac money went to work growing Sunsweet prunes. That felt right to all of us. It was the first real step into farming we ever took as a family.
Eventually a federal farm bill created an incentive to remove old orchards. We took it, pulled the prune trees, and paid off the loan. After that we crop-shared the acreage with a local farmer and shifted to row crops. Our primary go-to ended up being lima beans. Not glamorous, but the ground liked it and the numbers penciled.
Then came 2008. The Great Recession hit and the Colusa milling operation could not find a buyer at a reasonable price for our dried and bagged beans. We held them in storage and waited. Same story in 2009. The pile grew and we waited some more.
Late in 2009 my dad called. He had a buyer.
When the receipt came through, I looked at the broker line. It said Tumac.
The same Tumac my grandpa helped start fifty years before. His old trading company, the one that built the money we used to buy the farm, was now closing the sale on our lima bean harvest.
The prune trees at Colusa were gone by then. We bought land of our own up in Newberg to carry it on, and in 2002 I planted twelve French prune trees there. I wanted my boys to know that taste, the fresh fruit and the dried fruit, and the smoke. Some things you can only understand if you’ve done all three. And some things you can’t plan. They just come back around on their own.
My grandpa would have liked knowing that.