Bad Apple

Oak Glen had become more of a Southern California tourist attraction than an agricultural community, so they did their best to hide their secrets. During the late summer and fall people came in droves to visit Oak Glen and get a case or two of apples or a few gallons of fresh-squeezed cider. Not many knew that the small community ran out of apples by early August and that most of what people bought were from Washington State. Would it matter to most? Probably not. With places like Oak Glen it was the journey not the destination that counted. What mattered were the orchards, the large apple presses creating buckets of cider, the hay wagon rides, the petting zoos, the strudel and pandowdy, and the getting out of the city and into a higher elevation where the smog was not so prevalent. The apples and the cider may have been the destination, but they were not the reason people came.

But still, why press your luck? So the trucks from Washington only pulled into town between 4:00 and 6:00 in the mornings, in and out so fast that no one who wasn’t already wise would get so. Now if out of state apples was the only secret the townspeople hid behind their perpetual smiles and twinkling eyes, things would not have been so bad in Oak Glen. But Oak Glen was not as tired and sleepy as it looked.

Copyright 2014 Barry Keller. All rights reserved.