APPLE ORCHARD

“Basketbooooll!” sings the duet in Danish and English from the backseat of the van.

A nine-year-old Anton from the damp island of Fyn and his cousin Sofie, two years his senior, from sundrenched California, fidget under their seatbelts.  For two hours they had stared at flat screens and the plain of the Mojave Desert.  Their spring break is a journey in the American West.

As soon as the door slides open, they fly out like birds from the cage. I follow.

The compacted gravel of the court crunches under our feet. A rusty hoop with a sun-dried net looks out of place with the background of snow-coated granite of the Sierra Nevada peaks carving the sky.

Anton picks the weathered ball from a wooden box and the kids take turns shooting it.  The ball passes through the metal ring again and again. My long-range miss sends it into the weeds on the sideline. Sofie runs to pick the ball up, then drops it, pulling her hand toward her chest.

“There are spikes everywhere!” she hollers.

Anton and I rush over to see. Like woodpeckers with several sharp beaks, the puncturevine seeds nail the orange sphere from all sides.

“These sharp burrs are fitting reminders of what this place used to be.” I note. “Manzanar.”
 

“Manzanar is an apple orchard,” Sofie flashes her knowledge of Spanish, “but I don’t see any trees.”
 
“It used to be a concentration camp during the Second World War and there are no trees in those.” 

“What kind of camp was it?” Sofie asks.

“After Japan attacked the Pearl Harbor, the US government brough people with Japanese last names from Southern California here. To keep them under control.”

My wife, who has been examining the dark barrack near the court approaches. She overhears my explanation.

Ewelina’s usually melodic voice is stained with bitterness.

“Ten thousand people! Shop owners serving their customers, Buddhist monks practicing meditation and families in the middle of dinner were plucked away and bussed here. It didn’t matter if they were born in the US like you, Sof, or were immigrants who took a citizenship oath to defend this country, like your dad and I.”

“Couldn’t these people run away?” Sofie wonders.

I point to a long-legged birdhouse of a guard tower.

“From there, the soldiers watched to make sure nobody escaped into the Land of the Free.”
 

Sofie thinks for a moment and turns to Mom:

“Does it mean that if there is a war with Poland, they’ll take you away because you have a Polish last name?”

Ewelina doesn’t answer.

I try to reassure my daughter instead, “Well, Poland and the US are allies, so that shouldn’t happen.”

Anton, who has been doubling his English vocabulary daily on this trip, twirls his straw-blond hair in confusion over this dialogue. 

“Caan we play boool?” he finally asks.

“Yes, Anton,” Sofie mimics her history teacher’s instructive tone, “let me just remove all the spikes.”
 

_______________________________________________________________________


After completion of Ph.D. in 2001, Oleg Daugovish has been researching the delicate lives of California strawberries. He rushes to tell growers about his discoveries and documents them in peer-reviewed journals. Aside from writing about plants, Oleg completed a humorous 61,000-word memoir about growing up in Latvia during Soviet times and sixteen ten-minute stories of creative non-fiction he’d love to share. Eight of them found home in lit mags in 2025 and two won contest awards.