[Way back in the first decade of the 21st Century I was briefly a guest-poster over at Michael Bérubé‘s joint, and during that period in which Michael had inexplicably entrusted me with his readership I posted this as a July 4 travelog-essay. I was on my way to the US-Mexico border in the Arizona desert to report on environmental aspects of the cross-border migrant issue. (Thankfully, we’ve got that heartbreaking dilemma completely and humanely resolved now.) I holed myself up in a motel room on the night of July 4 2006 and wrote this. Seemed like an appropriate weekend to dredge it out of Michael’s archives and share it again.]
July 4, Central Valley CA
I spent the Fourth in as American a fashion as possible. I drove a pickup truck at 85 miles per hour in a straight line for four hours. At that, I was slower than some of the traffic I encountered: an obstacle to Angelenos’ speedy transit of California’s Central Valley. Unless your eye is attuned to the pale blonde slopes of the Inner Coast Ranges, unless you find entertainment in counting the red tailed hawks sitting on fence posts or sputtering outrage watching the inexorable spread of suburb from the Bay Area southward, Interstate Five can be a trifle monotonous, and so people hurry through it.
Not to me. I always find something to write home about. Today there were long stripes of discarded tomatoes left by the harvesters, pale green windrows on fields so flat they could have been brown corduroy ironed on a kitchen table, and on one such windrow two ravens jumped in glee at finding so much food. One discarded tomato in a hundred had ripened in the heat, enough to feed a thousand ravens to bursting.
But I have odd tastes, relishing the swoop of barnswallows on the semis’ pressure waves. I’ve traveled this road since my early twenties, a quarter century next year, and I’ve watched the terra cotta carcinoma spreading. If the price of oil does not spike, and soon, the valley will be one suburb from the Grapevine to Sacramento. In 1987 my friend Matthew and I chased the Perseids out to Grant Line Road near Tracy, lay on our backs on the dark shoulder of the road and watched the shooting stars until three in the morning. That stretch of road butts up against an outlet mall these days. I fear the day when Los Angeles drivers find more to interest them along I-5.
Oddly, none of them seem to take advantage of the alternative. Head east on any of a hundred high-speed two-lanes, each of them seemingly termed “Blood Alley” by their respective locals, and you will reach the older, more settled north-south route through the Valley: Highway 99. 99 traverses the Valley of literature. This is the land of oil rigs and orange stands, packing sheds and dusty oleander hedges. William Saroyan, Joan Didion, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Soto, Gerry Haslam, Cherie Moraga, Merle Haggard: does any other piece of real estate in the country boast so many fine writers? The Colorado Plateau, perhaps. And Manhattan I suppose, although that little island’s parochialism wouldn’t last long in a Fresno summer. Wasn’t it a Manhattan-based newspaper that referred to the Californian author of Angle Of Repose as “William Stegner”?
A bank of thunderheads sat atop the Sierra Nevada today, ready to wash more soil down into the Valley. The Valley’s soil, in places, is more than a mile deep. Twentieth-century farmers took so much Pleistocene water from the depths that the land began to settle out from under them. One cannot pump too much from this landscape too quickly. I drove today across the bed of the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River. Or it was. Tulare Lake fell victim to the cotton growers a lifetime ago, its feeder river dammed to irrigate fields, and the lake disappeared: an American Aral.
Turn on the radio most places in the Central Valley and all you will hear is country music. That said, you do have a choice of several different countries. Norteño and Banda dominate the AM spectrum, a bridge to the homeland for those who braved the crossing to El Norte so that Victor Davis Hanson could exploit their labor on his hobby farm outside Fresno, and a link to the old ways for their American kids. Flip through the FM band and Hmoob, Hindustani and Basque join the broadcast Babel. Sometimes, as I did today, you will get lucky and tune to a station just as they start a torrid Vietnamese torch song by Duy Khanh or Than Tuyen, or a staccato Spanish commercial for auto insurance will fade into Shakira asking where the thieves are.
Brand spanking new pickup trucks and 25-year-old sedans with dragging mufflers. Viscid water sidling along irrigation ditches. In Wasco, a dozen roadside businesses advertise pastrami. I turn east onto state route 46: James Dean went the other way in the last hour of his life. Dorothea Lange might have shot some of the houses I passed today, squeezed up against the stuccoed walls of newly metastasized “communities.” This was once a chain of flower-filled ponds four hundred miles north to south. From there it was supposed to become a haven for the farm family, giant federal projects designed to irrigate plots no larger than a couple hundred acres. The families that use that water nowadays are named Tenneco, Cargill, and J.G. Boswell, and the swelling cities enjoy the dirtiest air and water in the country.
America in capsule form, if you ask me. Happy Fourth.
Chris, this is a genuine jewel among the tawdry “patriotic” essays that dominate the papers on the Fourth of July. Thanks for posting it. I’ve spent very little time in the Central Valley, but this piece brings back memories of those brief visits. I’ll link it to my FB page. ^..^
great piece, chris.
irrigation may have begun to benefit family farms, but there were large agricultural interests in the central valley by the time of the dust bowl migration. the effects of the great depression on small businesses, the expansion of irrigation projects during the 1930’s, and an endless supply of cheap migrant labor meant that the corporate agricultural interests became even more powerful in the valley.
being the route less taken, more old-fashioned in the sense of not being so infected by the suburbs and still having a few peculiarities, 99 is the superior route.
you know, honestly, i always preferred the 5. Don’t look east at all unless it is to the thunderheads. Look west between Kettleman City and the 580 split and you can see mile upon mile upon mile of hills, golden-brown (or red with fire) in the summer and fall, green in the winter, many other colors in the spring. A bunch of ephemeral creeks cross, my favorite is Orestimba Creek which still has ancient sycamores right up to the road. Even that miserable stretch between Kettleman City and Grapevine can be amazing when the saltbrush scrub has flowers in between the shrubs for a few weeks in spring. Usually when going south I hit the boring lakebed south of Kettleman as the sun was setting to the west and the sky was glowing yellow. I think the suburbs are worse on the 99, though older. You get to see the rivers… but other than that, just suburbs and old farm towns and big factory farms. The only time I preferred the 99 was during episodes of tule fog (though best not to drive at all)... it seemed worst on the west side of the valley and the lakebed.
I used to do this drive a lot and have seen some neat stuff, really. Flooding rushing off of green hills after a spring storm. Nighttime grass fires. Innumerable dust devils and once or twice huge ‘haboobs’ of dust. Once we hit snow - SNOW! - somewhere near Panoche Creek. (though that day there was none on the Grapevine even!) I even saw a funnel cloud once but it was up north near Williams. The Central Valley is in many ways a story of loss, at least for now… but you can still see things in the cracks. I think as fields salt up in the south, the saltbush is slowly coming back too. Most likely, in 50 years the saltbush will have taken most of that part of the valley back.
Next time you drive through, you should make it a high priority to find my favorite radio station anywhere: 103.3 Kings Radio, Your Oldies Station for Porterville, Lindsey and Hanford. Kings Radio won’t let YOU forget the Forties.
I love Kings Radio; listening to it driving through the San Joaquin Valley at night is one of the more surreal experiences I’ve ever had.
Hope you’re well; hope to catch up with you soon.
P.S. I think I’d like to drive through the Valley with Charlie. He sees things.
Well in this second decade of the 20th century i am spending the Fourth at my business partners estate high up on the San Juan Ridge outside of Nevada City. On monday i will make the trek, driving the rigs on up through the Sacramento Valley, across the Shasta highlands, and north towards Eugene. This is pretty much the same thing i was doing in 2006, and have been for more than 20 years. Drove through the northern edge of Beale AFB the other day, seeing the vast golden (dry) hills of the western slate and live oak, killing a 17 year crop of grasshoppers (literally millions not putting much of a dent in the grasslands). The skies are crystal clear, the stars are starting to come out without the moon, filling the sky with an infinity of wonders. I still really like this part of California; it is just too bad so many people make it so difficult. Perhaps nature is taking a toll, as the South Fork of the Yuba seems to be taking lives each day. It won’t make up for the millions; as the distance between Stockton and Atwater is mostly filled in with people now rather than the old dry farmers of the early 1900s.