Dedication

Project Mojave is dedicated to my grandparents, Dowlin and Daisy, and to their California citrus nursery. Their story’s far from typical.

Their Story

Dowlin and Daisy met in 1955 and married 3 months later in California. Dowlin was 23 and had dropped out of high school several years earlier to work and support his parents (I followed in his steps, but left high school for very different reasons). Daisy was an 18-year old transplant from Tennessee. At the time of their honeymoon, they collectively had $50 to their names.

Their honeymoon lasted a day. The following morning they moved to Yuma, Arizona to start an agricultural labor gig. It lasted a month, and they were paid with a little money and 100,000 seedlings used to start a citrus nursery in California’s Sonora Desert. After starting the nursery, Dowlin worked 18-hour days, tending to his citrus nursery by day and working for others by night to maintain cash flow.

From these humble beginnings came the largest citrus nursery in the U.S. What touches me is not the nursery’s size, however, but the humanity it’s infused with. Yes, millions and millions of citrus trees were raised on that dusty, dry desert landscape. But my grandparents and their nursery also gave birth to aunts, cousins, families, as well as my mother, brother, and me. We’ve all lived there (at one time or another), grown up there, and have hundreds of memories associated with its every square foot. My psyche is inextricably bound to my grandparents’ nursery, to its desolate desert landscape, and to the truckloads of trees that have come and gone over the years.

My grandparents still live on their nursery — I don’t think retirement ever crossed their minds. Daisy runs the office, and Dowlin still drives around in his dusty ol’ pickup, picking fruit, pulling weeds, managing his workers, doing what needs to be done. (He could be driving a Lexus and wearing Armani, but to him that’s the epitome of awkward and I think he prefers the dirt).

My grandparents are in many ways the living vestiges of an almost bygone era of family farms. The nursery has no upper management, no lower management. There’s just my grandparents, one aunt, a foreman, 30 or so seasonal workers, and a whole lot of love.

My grandfather once remarked that he’d like to die peacefully in one of his fields, surrounded by the land he knows intimately and the nursery he’s poured his life into for the last 50 years (those weren’t his words, but I think they represent him). He wants to die sounded by mountains and desert, and the earth he’s shaped even as it shaped him. He wants to die while growing things, and somehow this seems beautiful.

A few months after being married, my grandmother found the check that paid for her engagement ring; the word “foolishness” was written on its memo. Project Mojave is dedicated to this foolishness, and to Daisy and Dowlin.  I love you both.