Last Night At The Pear Tree

We have a Saturday evening ritual where I live. When the sun has gone down and there’s only a little light left in the sky, we walk down to The Pear Tree. To be clear, while there is an actual pear tree at The Pear Tree, the tree itself is not the attraction. The Pear Tree is a bar, or I suppose it would be more accurate to call it a pub. There’s food and music and friends and above all, beer. And plenty of it.

The crowd used to be much larger. But the town where The Pear Tree is situated used to be much larger too. Years ago, in its heyday, San Bonaventura boasted as many as 15,000 residents, but now you’d be lucky to find 500. California isn’t what it used to be. Climate change pretty much did for it and the entire West is reverting to what it was after the last ice age ended. Scrub and desert. No water means no people. Or at least not very many people.

So we few holdouts still cling to the old ways and come down to The Pear Tree to forget the realities of the present and, as the old song goes, party like it’s 1999. Except that we’re all old and none of us has the same capacity for beer that we once had. Still, we manage to have a good time. The music is excellent, though amplifiers are a thing of the past so it’s not particularly loud. Which is fine, as it happens, because most of us aren’t dancing so we talk instead. The oil lanterns provide a soft warm glow that is incredibly kind to aging skin and we can all pretend we’re 20 years younger.

It’s a bittersweet night though. Because it’s The Pear Tree’s last. Mattie Berwanger, whose father opened the pub back in 2025, is ready to call it quits. Her clientele are all moving away or dying and water for making beer has gotten scarce and expensive. The pub’s been open for 55 years and now she’s throwing in the towel. She wants to move back East and see her grandchildren while she can still get a plane from San Francisco Airport which will be permanently closing next year. Otherwise it’s a long, dangerous overland mule trek through vast stretches of uninhabited desert or a trip around Cape Horn in a leaky hybrid steam and sailing ship through pirate-infested waters. Flying isn’t particularly safe these days but I guess she likes her chances better in a plane than the other two alternatives.

I’ll be sad to see her go. She’s good people and The Pear Tree has been the heart of our little town for as long as most of us can—or at least care to—remember. But I suspect that once the Pear is gone the town will not last much longer. Eventually it will become like most towns out here: empty, burned out and forgotten. We built with wood out here because of the earthquakes. Wood buildings, being flexible, tend to do a better job when the ground starts jumping around. But they burn easily or rot if you don’t take care of them. It won’t take long before they’re gone.

And the high rises, made of steel and concrete? Eventually the earthquakes and the elements will bring them down, too. You can already see big cracks in the old Transamerica pyramid and most of the glass is gone from the Salesforce tower and a bunch of the others don’t stand straight anymore. Once the rot sets in things devolve quickly.

But I wasn’t thinking about that now. I was watching Tanya Frank, eyes closed and swaying to the music, looking like she did when I first met her 30 years before. I wondered if we’d be able to summon some of the old magic before the evening was over. It was a stretch but it was the end of an era and anything was possible. I took a big gulp of my warm beer and walked over to dance with her. Or at least the best approximation of dancing I’m capable of these days. She opened her eyes and smiled at me and we both swayed happily for awhile.

When the song ended Mattie banged a wooden spoon on a big metal tub for attention. We all looked at her and she asked us all to go outside into the back where there was a beer garden. It was also where the pear tree stood. We all dutifully followed her out and gathered around the tree which she stood in front of, holding a burning torch. I noticed that there was a pile of wood scraps and old branches distributed around the base of the tree. I smelled gasoline too, which is not something we see too much of these days. She’d found some somewhere. It didn’t look good.

“My friends,” she said, “This is where we say goodbye. I’ll miss you all.” With that she bent over and touched the torch to the wood pile, which burst into flames immediately. We all stepped back because the blast of heat was sudden and shocking. Mattie was in tears as she watched the leaves of the tree curl up in the heat. Eventually the tree itself caught fire and burned to the ground surprisingly quickly. It had barely clung on for several years because Mattie hadn’t given it as much water as it needed to really thrive. So it was probably pretty dry to begin with, which left it particularly vulnerable. Whatever. It was soon gone.

When it was over there wasn’t much to do but to leave. We all said goodbye to Mattie in our various ways. I caught Tanya’s eye on the way out but whatever chemistry had been there earlier had long since gone. We smiled and went our separate ways.

When I got back to my place I sat on the porch with a warm beer and looked at the night sky. The crickets sawed away and I watched as satellites moved among the stars. Most of those satellites were just empty shells now, having been non-functional for years.

I wondered what would come next.