Ramona Drive

We’d heard you could find oranges just lying around on the streets for the picking up in California.  ramonadrThe Land of Milk and Honey at the end of our Exodus.  But we didn’t find any free oranges, and the place turned out to be pretty dirty really.  Moving from SC to CA was a big change.  We gained things economically and lost our connection to the culture we had been raised up in.

This is Dave, in the cowbow hat, and me, and Steve with that big metal pole. We are standing out back of the house on Ramona Dr, though the house wasn’t probably built yet, but in its first stages.  As you can see we had much managed to move into the middle of nowhere again; this time East County San Diego which wasn’t all that built up in 1956.

We had about ¾’s of an acre that went back to about that pile of wood you can see behind us, and then on down the gulley and up the hill on the other side you can see to the right a darker patch.  That’s the truck farm that grew tomatoes and peppers.  On beyond that stretch pretty barren hills right on up to Mount Helix—that you can’t see in this picture.

Directly behind us you can see the ’47 Studebaker that carried us and towed all our earthly belongings in a U-Haul trailer from one end of the USA to the other.  That car gave us its life for us because by the time we got to CA the rear axel had broken, and the car sat out back for a number of years, as is the Southern tradition.

The dirt immediately beneath our feet looks pretty white and was called locally leche, which is Spanish for milk.  All white and crumbly, it wasn’t real dirt at all.  You couldn’t grow anything in it.  As far as I was able to learn, it was dried up sea shells and such left from a time long ago when the whole area had been under the ocean.

One Reply to “Ramona Drive”

  1. Hey Nick,
    Those are great pictures you’re posting. What a history. Where did you all live when you first got to CA and while your house was being built? Please don’t tell me you lived out of your car.
    BC

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