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Tuesday, July 04, 2006

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.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/04 at 11:31 PM
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