The Fruit Hunters Read online

  “Bunny,” as Bunyard’s buddies called him, sent them sexually candid limericks. In turn, they provided the names of young male secretaries in Florence. Of one, named Parceval, Douglas writes: “He is very obliging. Don’t hesitate to use, and abuse, him!”

  Bunny seemed more tormented by melons than Italian boys, bemoaning the unattainable ideal of melonic perfection. Depressed and bankrupt, he shot himself in 1939, at the onset of winter, postponing his suicide until the end of cantaloupe season. “Into the last shadows let us not follow him; we know not what they concealed, or in what secret temple his soul may have found its peace,” read his obituary. “All the time he is searching, seeking. He is looking for the nurseries of Heaven.”

  Like many of his disciples, Bunyard took a bestial delight in produce, writing of his quiet carnal anticipation for the “lustiness” of peaches. He composed wistful passages about “the plump turgescence of youth,” and in pears found the “soft rapture of attainment.”

  Other fruit writers have also dropped libidinal hints. The nineteenth-century clergyman and novelist Edward P. Roe noted how strawberries—“morsels more delicious even than ‘sin under the tongue’”—directly affect “that imperious nether organ which has never lost its power over heart and brain.” Lee Reich, author of Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden, channels Humbert Humbert when discussing an odd little Yugoslavian pearlike fruit called the Shipova: “Shipova. Speak the name. It makes a pleasant sound, especially with the middle syllable emphasized and drawn out ever so slightly. Intoning the name is equally pleasant to the lips, the end of each syllable leaving the lips poised for the beginning of the next: Shi … po … va.”

  Karp moved to his filing cabinet and pulled out some “triple-X” photos he’d taken of golden raspberries. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if they were banned upon publication. He then confided that whenever Cindy-Cat wants to get him really excited, all she has to do is mention a certain variety of plum, Prunus subcordata, if I recall correctly.

  There’s a subtle connection between fruit sublimation and another inexhaustible foible. Bruce Chatwin, in Utz, tells of a concerned mother bringing her porcelain-obsessed son to the doctor.

  “‘What,’ Utz’s mother asked the family physician, ‘Is this mania of Kaspar’s for porcelain?’

  ‘A perversion,’ he answered. ‘Same as any other.’”

  But behind every fetish lies a more complicated need. Emperor Rudolf II was a devout naturalist who owned a coco-de-mer and a portrait, painted by Arcimboldo, that depicted his head as consisting entirely of fruits: a pear nose, apple cheeks, mulberry eyes and grape-pomegranate-cherry hair. Collecting exotica, he said, was the only thing that alleviated his depression. Like Augustus the Strong, he became impassioned by the fever of acquiring porcelain, emptying his coffers for figurines of bejeweled canaries in pearl headdresses, or dancing naiads as pretty as Rodin’s marble sirens, or melancholy princes with slender fingers and gilded epaulets reclining on hoofed thrones. Such collectors have a drive for completeness that is, at its core, a pursuit of perfection, of death. “The craving for porcelain is like a craving for oranges,” Augustus remarked at one point, trying to explain his “porcelain sickness.”

  There are certainly overlaps. Both fruits and ceramics were sources of wonder, tokens of status, emblems of esteem. On a surface-level, they suggested sex and luxury. Beyond the concupiscence, however, was something more insubstantial. “The search for porcelain,” concludes Chatwin, is a quest “to find the substance of immortality.”

  Turning back to the books, Karp explained how, of all fruit writers, Bunyard is of paramount importance. Karp’s own soon-to-be-released guide to thirty-five fruit varieties is described as “a book of fruit connoisseurship based on the principles elucidated by Edward A. Bunyard.” Bunyard is also a touchstone for Karp’s other gurus, such as Andy Mariani and the “Fruit Crank,” C. Todd Kennedy, who compares a nectarine’s ideal flavor to a pheasant hung until high. While I was trying to make a joke about the taste of partridge in a pear tree, Karp pointed at a book called Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables and said that the author, Elizabeth Schneider, was his mentor. “She was my inspiratrice. She showed me that it is possible to take produce very seriously.”

  I wondered if Karp, by telling me of his own discipleships, was insinuating that he wanted to, in turn, impart some of his knowledge to me. Trying to steer the conversation toward setting up a proper interview, I asked if he had any fruit escapades planned in the near future. Yes, he said, he was planning a trip to Ventura County for strawberries. I asked if I might accompany him in order to write about his work. He said he didn’t see why not, provided I’d hold his reflective screen while he took photographs. Heading back home, I felt elated. My interview was in place.

  THE DAY BEFORE our expedition, Karp e-mailed me an itinerary with a 4 A.M. departure time. Even though our destination was only an hour and a half away, he wanted to start shooting at dawn. He suggested I sleep in his guest room so that we’d be able to leave without delay the following morning. On March 9, 2005, Liane dropped me off at the Fruit Detective’s home with some pajamas, a change of clothes, a toothbrush—and a notebook.

  From the moment I walked in, Karp was eyeing my white running shoes. I asked if I should remove them, and Cindy-Cat said no. They talked about the living room rug, emblazoned with pomegranates. It had belonged to Karp’s recently deceased mother. They also explained that they’d been having termite problems. Karp suggested that they get an aardvark to deal with it. (He loves anteaters so much that he once climbed through the bars at the Philadelphia zoo in order to interact with one.)

  After another minute or so of small talk, during which Karp couldn’t take his eyes off my shoes, he finally asked if I had brought any boots. I said no. “Those are totally unpractical,” he frowned, flustered. “If you are going to be a deputy Fruit Detective, you need proper footwear for field-work.”

  Luckily, he had an old pair of Fruit Detective boots lying around. They were the right size. Crisis averted, we turned in. As Karp was brushing his teeth, Cindy-Cat took me aside and said she was worried about Karp’s driving. “If it seems like he doesn’t see a red light, ask him,” she said. “Make sure he sees it, because sometimes he doesn’t.” I assured her that I would, and that everything would be okay. She didn’t seem convinced.

  KARP WOKE ME up in the darkness. We ate a few dried persimmon slices and hit the road. To be more accurate, we lurched forward in fitful starts and stops. Karp drove as if the asphalt was his enemy, jabbing at the gas pedal and the brakes like a tap-dancing circus bear. We barely spoke for the first forty-five minutes as he wrestled with Sunset Boulevard.

  On the open highway, he started telling me a little about his strawberry research. He’d been working on this story for three years, and had interviewed dozens of sources, amassing more than 150 pages of notes. I asked him which strawberry he liked best. He started telling me about one particularly delicious variety called the Marshall, which had disappeared except for one plant that he’d found growing in a seed bank. As I wrote down the word “Marshall,” Karp jammed the brakes and asked me what I was doing.

  “Umm, just taking notes. For our interview.”

  “I feel very uncomfortable about that,” he replied. “I don’t want to have to watch what I’m saying around you, and censor my thoughts. What if I were to say something off color? What if I said the word ‘nigger’?”

  I put away my pen and we drove on in silence.

  AN HOUR LATER, we arrived at Harry’s Berry farm in Oxnard. Walking through the fields, I was so excited to be surrounded by strawberries that I immediately, and surreptitiously, started eating them. Their two varieties, Gaviota and Seascape, were juicy, sweet and cool in the morning air. They grew on little plants close to the ground in neat rows stretching into the distance, where laborers in hoodies were stooping and picking in the trenches.

  Karp wasn’t that interested in tasting the berries. He was more concerne
d with the light changing as an overcast dawn appeared. He seemed tense. I held the reflective disk as he snapped some photographs. All of a sudden he became agitated. “Did you see that? Did you see how the sky just opened and the light changed?” He started shooting with machine gun ferocity.

  It was like watching Austin Powers shoot fashion models. He was taking dozens of shots a second, oohing and aahing, cooing, “Spectacular—oh yeah, oh YES! I’m going to open this up all the way—ooh!” I commented on it: “So that’s why they call it food porn.” He stopped shooting, became dead serious, and said, “What do you mean?” I tried to explain myself, but he stopped listening and went back to the glistening strawberries.

  The growers, Rick Gean and Molly Iwamoto Gean (whose father was the Harry in Harry’s Berries), came over to greet us. They asked how our drive had been. Karp answered that it hadn’t been too hairy.

  Rick asked if I was a budding fruit grower. “No, I’m a journalist working on a story about people who are passionate about fruits,” I replied.

  “Well, you’re certainly with the right person.” He laughed.

  “Adam’s a fruit groupie,” said Karp, not laughing. “He’s just here to help me take the photographs.”

  I looked at him in amazement. Yes, I’d agreed to hold the reflector, but he’d also agreed to be interviewed. As we sat down in their kitchen, Karp began grilling Rick and Molly, the way a real police officer—or detective—might. I was sitting in between them, turning my head to watch like a tennis spectator as they discussed sprays, growing methods and strawberry varieties. Karp asked whether they might consider growing the Marshall. He was very curious to find out whether flavor was their primary objective. Molly said that flavor was relatively important to them, but so were yields. He shook his head and pursed his lips as though confirming an incriminating piece of evidence. Feeling increasingly weird about sitting there, and not daring to take any notes, I excused myself and walked back to the strawberry fields. After eating some berries and looking up at the sky to see if I could notice any change, I wrote down what had just transpired.

  When Karp was finished, we ate lunch at a small diner with old citrus crate art on the wall. When his sandwich arrived, he took out a couple of containers of dried hot peppers and poured copious amounts between the buns. I remembered that Ossenfort had once mentioned Karp’s addiction to capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers.

  We hardly spoke on the way home, Karp being so focused on his non-hairy driving. I started to nap but he woke me up. I made small talk about traveling to different countries to find fruits. He said that he wasn’t into traveling anywhere except to some archipelago in between Madagascar and Perth in the Indian Ocean. “It’s a perfect sixty degrees three hundred sixty-five days a year,” he said. “There are no trees or fruit because it’s too windy, but you can walk along a desolate lunar landscape and the best part is that there are no other humans anywhere nearby to ruin it.”

  ABOUT A MONTH LATER, I received a mass e-mail from Karp addressed to the many breeders, growers, marketers and nurserymen he consulted while researching his strawberry article.

  He drew a comparison between writing about fruit and growing fruit: “one can put all one’s energy and skill into raising a superior product, only to be confounded by forces beyond one’s control.” The inhibiting force in question was space constraints. Nearly half of his article had been amputated by editors. What remained, he said, was “a barely adequate summary, with none of the complexities” that he’d spent more than three years gathering.

  A few weeks later, as I was getting ready to head back to Montreal, Karp invited the vine and me to brunch. We brought our friend Sarah, a writer and record-store employee who was visiting from San Diego. We arrived late because some vandals had thrown a cinder block through our rear windshield the night before. Cindy-Cat was making pancakes with black raspberry syrup.

  “I love black raspberries,” said Sarah.

  “Oh?” asked Karp, “have you ever tasted black raspberries?”

  “I think so, in Sweden.”

  Karp started tweaking out, barking that the fruit’s native range is actually in the Pacific Northwest and that she never could’ve had a proper black raspberry anywhere in Scandinavia.

  I told him that I’d tried one of his favorite fruits, the white apricot. He said that it wasn’t enough to taste a few fruits. To be able to write about any fruit properly, he said, his voice rising, you have to spend years and years going to private farms and to corporate growing facilities, to germplasm repositories and to university labs and you have to keep on going over and over and over again.

  * Some friends of hers asked me not to use her real name, so I haven’t. “Disappear her,” they said, explaining that she is “pathological about being portrayed to the point of being phobic.”

  15

  Making Contact with the Otherworld

  And then he went into his pocket and took out a seed for a tree … He put it in my hand and he said, “Escape—while you still can.”

  —My Dinner with Andre

  WHEN I CALLED Kurt Ossenfort to fill him in on my progress with the Fruit Detective, he asked if Karp had told me about the Children of Light, a group of immortality-seeking virgins and eunuchs growing heirloom date varieties in the Arizona desert. I had heard of individual fruitarians wanting to live forever, but this was something even stranger: a utopian fruit-growing cult.

  I asked Karp about the Children of Light, but he was reluctant to discuss them. After our last outing, it was clear that we wouldn’t be visiting them together, but I decided to go see them anyway—before it was too late. At one point comprising dozens of members, most of these self-proclaimed “immortals” had died of old age. The survivors seemed unfazed. “We still think some of us will make it,” Elect Philip, a cadaverously thin old man, told the Orange County Register in 1995. At that point, the seven people left in the group—all octogenarians and nonagenarians—still believed the apocalypse was imminent.

  I tracked them down by calling Charna Walker, the owner of Dateland, a nearby town. (Walker and her husband purchased the entire municipality—consisting of a gas station, a diner, a gift shop, an RV park, a water well and a date farm—in 1994.) “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know a lot about them,” said Walker, “and I don’t want to say too much about them because I don’t think it would be right.” She did, however, provide a phone number.

  Someone named Elect Star picked up. I told her about this book, and asked if I could come by and interview them. “Sure,” she said, laughing, “I guess that would be fine.”

  Three weeks later, Liane and I drove to Dateland, passing through Arizona’s scorching scrub desert. Hundreds of tumbleweeds rolled by like clusters of brittle bones, or the aimless remains of dried-up sea corals. After stopping for a date shake at the Walkers’ oasis, we turned onto a forlorn country road.

  There was no sign of humankind for miles. Eventually a derelict saloon appeared, seemingly sinking into the ground. Faded cursive letters spelled out its name: “The Whispering Sands.” We drove on through the desolate landscape for another twenty minutes, when an abandoned, sagging church materialized. It looked like the ruins of an ancient civilization that had succumbed to a rapid, mysterious decline. I imagined the pews lined with repentant tumbleweeds, hungover from a hard night at the saloon.

  We kept going. The only signposts were for gulches with names like “Hoodoo Wash.” Just as I was beginning to wonder whether all of this was a mirage, an eight-foot-tall lollipop appeared on the horizon. In the middle of its rainbow swirl, hand-painted block letters announced CHILDREN OF LIGHT: 1 1/2 MILE AHEAD.

  We pulled to a stop in the sandy driveway next to a mid-century bungalow with a large stone chimney and oversized windows. There was a flag above the house, emblazoned with a golden star reading “Purity, Promise, Peace, Perfection.” As we shut our car doors, marveling at the many date palm trees, three seniors dressed identically in white robe
s, red vests and blue aprons came out to meet us. Their names were embroidered on their vests: Elect Star, Elect Philip and Elect David. “There’s just three of us now,” said Philip, explaining how there had once been more than sixty Children of Light.

  Elect Star went into the sewing room to get us a crayon-colored diagram that explained how the Children of Light were supernaturally chosen by God in 1949.

  Philip brought us to a painting he’d done of many different fruits on the same tree. Pointing at the trees, he explained that they grow a variety of Old World dates, such as medjools, halawis, khadrawis, barhis and dayris.

  Philip led us into an oval prayer room, and began to relate the sect’s history. They had started out as fruit farmers in Keremeos, British Columbia, a small town known as “The Fruit-Stand Capital of Canada.” Located in a fertile valley surrounded by mountains, Keremeos attracted international attention in January 1951 after the Children of Light shut themselves onto a ranch, declaring that the world was about to end. “We put that town on the map—in disrepute,” recalled Philip.

  The group’s leader, Grace Agnes Carlson—or Elect Gold, had been informed by God, in the form of a ball of fire rolling down the mountainside, that the world’s expiry date was December 23, 1950.

  That night, the congregation trekked in a procession, chanting hymns in the wind, to the top of “K mountain,” so named because landslides had emblazoned it with an enormous letter K. Elect Gold said it stood for the Kingdom, which was at hand.