The California of glossy dreams is the California of palm trees. But the real California is the California of the eucalyptus
of the fire, my father called us to the top of the driveway to watch the smoke plume above the eucalyptus forest. He warned us that the flames were hardly a mile away. But my siblings and I couldn’t see them so we didn’t really care. We were too busy playing on our new front lawn, laughing as ash from the burning trees tumbled onto the windshield of our mother’s Chrysler minivan. The burnt flakes fell white like a snow we had never seen before in California.
Like his friend John Muir, Lukens believed that California desperately needed more forests. Since the mid-19th century forests, and their loss, had been the principal focus of conservationist thought in America. According to Jared Farmer, who traces the history of the eucalyptus in California in “Trees in Paradise” , Lukens and Muir were particularly keen on growing forests as a way to provide water—always a key to power in the state.
Since then, by some estimates, over 100m acres of eucalyptus trees have been planted around the world. You can find them in the hills above Lisbon, in massive plantations throughout China and in the fields of India. But nowhere have they thrived more readily than in California. In 1909 Lukens and two businessmen from Iowa put $150,000 into creating the Los Berros Forest Company and started planting 8,000 acres they had acquired at the north end of the mesa. It was both a timber business and a property venture. Land with trees was worth more than land without.
I remember standing in the shade of eucalyptus trees wishing life were different, too. In 1996 1.15m Americans got divorced, including my parents. A wave of hospital closures—23 in California between 1995 and 2000—shuttered the one where my mom worked as a dietician. We started getting free lunches at school. My mom sold her van and bought a used car; she brought home McDonald’s hamburgers for dinner, 29 cents on Wednesdays.
I crossed the vacant lot and walked into the forest. Eucalyptus trees are messy, especially blue gums,, the sort Lukens planted in Nipomo. They shed their bark like divas change clothes: dramatically, peeling back layers and switching colours for all to see. As they get old and massive, their branches and leaves twine like the columns of a baroque cathedral. I waited under one until it got dark, ripping the leaves so they stained my hands as I prayed.
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