Big Dreams Read online

  Alturas might have no work to offer, but at least you could sign on as a correctional officer in Susanville. It paid the highest hourly wage in the county, a flat $10.00, which compared favorably to $8.65 for a millworker, $8.12 for a truckdriver, and $5.75 for a secretary.

  GOOD-BYE, SUSANVILLE, AND GOOD LUCK! Better to build yourself a squatter’s cabin in the Diamond Mountains, I thought, and live on squirrel stew and blackberry pie.

  Honey Lake, southeast of town, floated like a fata morgana in the ripply heat, its waters a puddle resting in a bowl of cracked and whitened alkaline soil. The entire Honey Lake basin was part of the Sierra Army Depot now. The U.S. military had many such installations in the state’s wastelands, hidden from public view.

  In the spirit of curiosity, I figured I’d take a look at the depot and left the highway for a two-lane road into Herlong, where the tattered homes of army personnel were congregated. From the condition of the place, I deduced that Herlong most be very low on any soldier’s priority list, a duty station with all the plusses of a bus terminal in Waco.

  Ahead, there was a heavy-duty fence separating the depot from ordinary human concerns. A woman in a guard booth informed me that it was against military regulations, depot policy, and virtually every tenet in every army security manual to admit an unauthorized visitor wishing to see nuclear warheads, antiballistic missiles, and any other pertinent hard- or software on the base.

  I turned around. Herlong, I was thinking, what a pitiful town you are, just blistered sand and G.I. rules, so far from the big picture that the concept of “middle-of-nowhere” doesn’t even apply, but then I passed a plain house and there, sitting on what would have been a lawn if lawns grew easily in the desert, was an elderly black couple who looked as contented as people on holiday. They waved as I slowed down, so I parked the car and walked up to them and saw that the house was really a store of some kind, though I couldn’t guess what it might be selling.

  Emma Brown rose from her lawn chair and gave me some instructions. “You go on in and browse,” she told me firmly. “Take your time in there. Go on ahead.”

  Inside, the house/store was brimming with merchandise that I would never need, not in an eternity, lots of metal trays and plastic goblets, lava lamps and gurgling babydolls, toy trucks and paper cocktail napkins printed with silly jokes, the sum of it made in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka. Nothing in the store was singular. Every item came by the dozen.

  I was fondling an Apollo moon-shot commemorative tumbler when Mrs. Brown came in. “You’ve got some of everything in here,” I said to her.

  She laughed and explained how her husband used to go on shopping sprees at wholesale outlets in Reno and Las Vegas every now and then. The store was his hobby. The Browns had lived in Herlong for thirty-eight years, long enough to feel as if they owned the town, and though they were retired at present, they liked to keep busy.

  They had originally moved to California from Louisiana so that Mr. Brown could work at the army depot, and he had stayed with the work through the decades, while Mrs. Brown had raised their children, all eleven of them, nine girls and two boys, who were between twenty and forty-two. She was as proud of them as a mother could be. They were dispersed around the San Francisco Bay Area now and had solid, professional careers. There was even a Correctional Officer Brown.

  Mr. Brown was still sitting quietly in his lawn chair, keeping to the shade. He studied the desert scrub and the electrified fences and listened to the cars going by and to the scream of military jets as they streaked through the sky. He’d had a stroke, Emma Brown said, and she hated to leave him alone. I was reminded of how we make up our world from what we have at hand, from the things that drop into our laps from the junkyard of existence.

  Herlong wasn’t my idea of paradise, but it had done all right by the Browns, yet I wondered if they didn’t miss Louisiana.

  “No way!” cried Emma Brown. “We love it here in California. I don’t care a heap if I never see Louisiana again.”

  “Why is California so special for you?”

  “Better opportunities,” she replied. Then she added emphatically, “For black people! Down home, we lived in the country, and it was always hard times for us. We could never get ahead.”

  California, the land of opportunity: here it was again, the familiar refrain, but for the Browns the transformative possibilities of life on the Coast had less to do with geography than with an attitude, an openness. They had found a freedom that was unavailable to them elsewhere, and they had cherished it even in the raggedest desert, laboring to compound their accrued benefits and passing them on to their family, as did all good tenants on earth.

  “How is it that your children have done so well?” I asked Mrs. Brown.

  She deliberated for a time. “Well, I was around for them,” she said. “That was one thing. I was there in the morning and after school. It was a lot of work for us, you know? But they never got away with anything. If they did something wrong, they heard about it. That’s about all you can do, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  Mrs. Brown patted my arm. “That and saying your prayers.”

  SO THERE I WAS IN RENO ON A SATURDAY NIGHT, across another border, lost in the pink palace of Circus Circus and gaping at some trained chimps as they rode their little motorcycles around a ramp inside the casino. Bing, pop, ka-pow, the casino was one big echo chamber of noise. Matrons from the hinterlands were plunging quarters into the slots, while croupiers in bargain-basement toupees kept a close eye on the dice rattling across the green felt.

  On South Virginia Street, in the heart of downtown, the Susanville cruising scene had been magnified and pushed to its logical conclusion. Traffic was at a standstill as the young people conducted a rollicking gala on wheels, shouting at one another and trying desperately to score a phone number or a motel room number where the night’s hot party would be going on.

  They were in rebellion, I now understood, against the country through which I had just traveled—in rebellion against the shuttered mills and the crippled ocean, the distances and the wilderness and the difficult frontier. They wanted no more of forests, streams, or mountains and craved instead to be linked to another California, the one in which gratification was instant and orgasms were titanic.

  A case could be made that the Far North really didn’t belong in the state. As a distinct bio-region, it had more in common with its neighboring regions in Oregon and Nevada. In the past, there had actually been some attempts to dignify its apartness by granting it a new independence.

  The Siskiyou Plan, for example, although it was never implemented, had yoked together seven northern counties as the state of Siskiyou. In 1941, Del Norte, Trinity, Siskiyou, and Lassen counties had merged with Josephine and Curry counties in Oregon and, as the state of Jefferson, had indeed seceded from California. There might still be a Jefferson if the Japanese hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor right after Secession Day. The brand-new Jeffersonians felt so bad and disloyal that they quit their bid for sovereignty and rejoined the United States.

  I thought about the duffers of Fall River Mills and had a vision of the Far North’s future. In the absence of any logging or commercial fishing, when the water was tightly rationed and the big cattle ranches were all but gone, other golfers might well be marching north and scaling any Modoc walls in their path to buy second or retirement homes and play on courses where the mills and the canneries had been. There would be more suburbs, and more prisons. The realtors would have a field day.

  Ah, well. Cheer up, I told myself as I watched those dynamite chimps go round and round. In my hotel room, long past midnight, I unfolded my maps again and picked a road that would take me into the Central Valley, where I planned to begin the second stage of my wandering. May had turned into early June, and I’d been gone from home for about six weeks.

  PART THREE

  ELDORADO

  I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump, for I was certain t
hat it was gold.

  —James Marshall

  Buy land. They’re not making it anymore.

  —Will Rogers

  CHAPTER 7

  DAWN IN YOLO, CALIFORNIA, northwest of Sacramento. I was parked by a wheatfield to watch the landscape come alive. All along County Road 194, the earth was as flat as a Kansas prairie, and there were farms large and small. The first seasonal planting of corn was sprouting, row upon row of green seedlings that rustled whenever a rare breeze blew. The wheat tassels rustled, too, a grainy whispering. The sun blazed.

  In the heat and the stillness, every sound stood out for me to hear—the hum of a powerline, the hiss of a sprinkler, the coughing chug of a tractor starting up.

  Redwing blackbirds, dots of scarlet and shiny black, dipped into the fields and crooned some courting music in their electrical way. Driving slowly, looking, I saw tomatoes growing, then some strawberries and some beans. Sloughs and irrigation ditches cut through the farms. The oaks were hung with Spanish moss.

  I passed old cars carrying fieldhands to work, Mexican men crammed in tightly, their faces stoical in the morning light. The cars were from out of state sometimes, from Texas or from Oregon. The men had on baseball caps or cheap straw hats and marched into imposing walnut orchards, where the trees stood in dignified columns, and into scrappier orchards of peaches and pears. In the distance, grain elevators climbed toward a sky that was a curious agricultural color, not blue or gray or bluish-white but a soft, hazy, brownish shade that echoed the tilled and furrowed soil.

  In Yolo, I stopped for breakfast at a country store. It didn’t have a coffee machine, so I grabbed a Diet Coke and a donut wrapped in cellophane. A teenage clerk quit sweeping the floor to ring up the sale. He was a snuffly boy who was putting in some time at work until he had to leave for school. It was early June, and he had to last through a couple more weeks of painful education before he would be free to lean on his broom all day.

  “Can you tell me what’s growing across the road?” I asked him, curious about a crop that I didn’t recognize. I was in the Central Valley now, a new part of California, and I had new things to learn.

  This boy was no help, though. He didn’t know the answer and didn’t want to know the answer. Talk of farming bored him. He moped by the cash register and hung his head, as if I’d caught him out at class, and finally he called to his boss, who was busy stocking shelves with canned goods—the Jolly Green Giant’s processed version of the vegetables that were harvested from the fields around us.

  “Customer has a question!” he shouted.

  The boss was an overweight man with an apron tied around his ample waist. He had a bum leg and dragged it a little, and that caused his breathing also to be heavy. The twenty-foot walk was a nuisance to him, and when he got to the counter he fixed me with a baleful glare, implying that I had made a very bad mistake to disrupt his life so early on a Monday morning.

  I was afraid that he might yell at me, but when I put my question to him, he relaxed, and the fierce energy flowed out of him.

  “Why, it’s barley, I believe,” he said sweetly, as though he, too, were a schoolboy, the classroom expert stepping forward to claim a prize. It made him happy to be asked about the place where he lived and probably had lived all his life, to be posed a question that he could answer, something about Yolo and not about the huge world beyond it. Ask me another one, his grinning face was saying.

  Outside, I unwrapped the donut. It had the texture of something you could bury for a few decades, then dig up and find in the same condition. I tapped it with my fingers—solid stone—before tossing it into a slough, fodder for the birds.

  A pickup rolled by carrying two Sikh farmers, their hair coiled in turbans. They were staring intently at the heat vapors rising from the road. Already my car was sizzling to the touch. It was going to be the sort of day when careless girls in shorts got stuck to polyvinyl seats. The valley could be oppressively hot from spring right through until late fall. The horizon at dawn often turned a ruinous orange, as in the aftermath of a conflagration.

  The Central Valley lay in a trough between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range, running for about 450 miles from Redding to a point just south of Bakersfield, where the Tehachapi Mountains began. Even in its widest sections, it was no more than 50 miles across. It had about 25,000 square miles of mostly level land and an ideal growing season that could last for up to ten months in some spots. The harvest months were almost always free of rain.

  Before the first farms were plowed, the Central Valley was a grassy wilderness and home to five Indian tribes of the Penutian language family—Wintun, Maidu, Miwok, Costanoan, and Yokut. The Sacramento River used to seep up from its headwaters in the Klamath Mountains every winter and swamp its banks to form an inland sea. As the river receded in the spring, it left behind marshes cluttered with bulrushes and tule reeds. Oaks, willows, sycamores, and cotton woods took root in the floodplain forest, and some of their descendants could still be found along creeks and streams.

  Geographers often separated the Central Valley into distinct regions. The Sacramento Valley was the northernmost. It could be subdivided roughly in two. In its upper half, towns such as Orland and Corning were known for their almonds and their olives. The lower half, where Yolo was, had marshes and wetlands that were perfect for rice. Prunes, clingstone peaches, sugar beets, melons, and a host of other fruits and vegetables were also grown, along with wheat and barley.

  The Sacramento Valley came to an end at the confluence of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin rivers below Sacramento. The rivers formed a crude delta where the farmland had been reclaimed at a considerable cost—the Delta region. Everywhere you saw dikes and levees to prevent flooding. The soil was a rich mixture of river silt and peat. Delta farmers brought in the most asparagus in the nation. They also grew celery, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and Bartlett pears. There were some islands sown densely with corn.

  Below the Delta was another region, the San Joaquin Valley, which was hotter, drier, uglier, and yet more fertile than its counterparts. Three of its counties ranked among the top-five farming counties in the United States, and the region as a whole ranked first among the nation’s agricultural areas. Drop a seed anywhere and it would germinate, as long as the farm where you dropped it had received an appropriate share of irrigated water.

  Irrigation was vital to the Central Valley, but it was especially vital to the San Joaquin. Its survival as a farming community depended on the Central Valley Project and the California Water Plan, a similar public-works operation of dams and aqueducts that the state had authorized and had begun building in 1947. The key dam in the CWP scheme was on the Feather River in Oroville, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Without the water from both projects, the San Joaquin would revert to a subtropical desert.

  As I pulled away from Yolo on County Road 194, I came upon a common sight in the valley, two shirtless men sitting on the bank of a slough and angling for catfish, enjoying the shade of some cottonwood while their magical stinkbait, spoiled chicken livers or aromatic cheese, worked its wonders down below. They were a California version of good ole boys, red in the neck and beefy in the arms. One of them would own a pit bull, I thought, and keep it on a short leash in a side yard of his tract house.

  “That’s a baaad dog,” he’d say affectionately, if you asked him about it.

  IN NEARBY MARYSVILLE, a Gold Rush town on the Feather River in Yuba County, I had a room near a gracious, leafy park. The motel owner was a former San Franciscan who’d left the city because the fog had stiffened his joints and had given him arthritis. He told me that with a straight face. He allowed that there was also some fog in Marysville, a soupy, ground-hugging layer of air born in the tule marshes in winter, but he claimed that it didn’t affect him in the same way.

  To bolster his case, he trotted out the example of a friend in San Francisco, another man so severely crippled by fog that he could barely walk.

  “So he moved away, too?�
�

  “He didn’t have to. He cured himself with aloe vera pills.”

  I had driven to Marysville from Reno along a route that many pioneers had taken in the nineteenth century, around the northern tip of Lake Tahoe with its steely-blue depths and down through the Sierra Nevada. Along Interstate 80, the Truckee River had looked enticing, but I had ignored it because never, not ever, had I hooked a decent trout there in twenty years. It gladdened me to know that Edwin Bryant had also been skunked on the Truckee, back when nature was practically required by law to be bountiful. He had fished it twice in August of 1846.

  “Not even a nibble compensated my patient perseverance,” he wrote, in a little ode to dejection.

  Bryant and his party had only recently pierced “the settlements of California.” Their journey from Missouri had been momentous. They had kept up a rapid pace, covering at least twenty miles on most days and forty miles on a few. The men had met various Indians and had smoked tobacco in peace pipes. They had seen antelope in herds of three and four hundred. They had shot deer, ducks, a wolf, and a sandhill crane. Grizzly bears had disturbed their camp, and they had eaten a puzzling stew containing some shellfish that Bryant called “muscles.” An insane man had leaped on them from his wagon, and they had dosed him with an emetic.

  Lastly, they had trekked across the great Salt Lake Desert in Utah—“utter sterility”—and had rested by the Truckee before starting their descent from the mountains. On August 30, they paused on a summit to view “the spacious valley of Sacramento” for the first time. Said Bryant:

  A broad line of timber running through the centre of the valley indicated the course of the main river, and smaller and fainter lines on either side of this, winding through the brown and flat plain, marked the channels of its tributaries. I contemplated this most welcome scene with such emotions of pleasure.… I shouted to him [Jacob, a member of the company] that we were “out of the woods”—to pull off his hat and give three cheers, so loud that those in the rear could hear them. Very soon the huzzas of those behind were ringing and echoing through the hills, valleys, and forests.…