Big Dreams (40 page)

Maybe it was the sight of those gondolas by the Sunkist plant, but I had a sudden desire for an Orange Crush—nothing else would do. Pixley didn’t have much in the way of stores, though. It was a prairie town with a one-room school, where farmworkers lived. Poverty of the severest kind hung over it like a layer of grit.

At midday, many unemployed men were on the streets. They had the look of prisoners from Corcoran or elsewhere who’d been paroled or who had finished their term and hadn’t yet summoned the energy to imagine where to go next, or who knew deep down that there wasn’t a next place to go, not ever.

Noon, and the temperature was fixed at 103 degrees. The only industrious person around, a stout fellow pouring sweat by the bucket,
scraped thanklessly at the weeds growing between sidewalk cracks, his shovel clanking.

“We have good hunting around here, anyway,” he told me. Doves, grouse, and lots of quail.

At the General Store, I had to reconcile myself to a 7-Up and sipped it while I leaned against the storefront. A Greyhound stopped, and a driver in bright blue trousers opened the bus’s door and shouted, “Any passengers?” There were none.

When the ’Hound left, a little hatchback rattled up to the store. The car was very old and as smashed as a cast-off aluminum can. A Hispanic man was at the wheel. His lover glared at him from the seat opposite as though he had never earned a nickel in his life and was never going to. She was a rail-thin white woman, her body worn to the bone before she’d turned forty.

Her daughter was stuffed into the backseat with two small children not yet ready for school. She was a child, too, really, no older than seventeen and already twice a mother. She had a lovely, open face that was as unmarked as a new pane of glass. I thought of all the difficulty that lay ahead of her, and how the deck was stacked for fair whether she chose to stay or to go. Hers was a face that might have showed up among the Manson Family, at once beaming and lost.

I
N 1908, COLONEL ALLEN ALLENSWORTH, A FORMER
slave and an army chaplain to the 24th Infantry Buffalo Soldiers during the Spanish-American War, claimed some land southwest of Pixley with the intent of starting a rural community for black pioneers. The site was a state historical park now, home to animals and birds.

At Allensworth, I saw hundreds of ground squirrels skittering around. Yellow-headed blackbirds were trilling in the sagebrush, while four tiny burrowing owls hopped around their nests in the earth. At the borders of the park were cotton fields and tar-paper
shacks—migrants, itinerants, and tenant farmers collecting any tossed-away object, no matter how rusted or defunct.

Colonel Aliens worth had charisma. By 1910, more than three hundred black families had joined him on the land. One of the pioneer houses still stood. Its wood frame was partially concealed by paper meant to simulate brick, and the fake bricks were bleached to gray now, spotted brown from the sun and rippled with cracks. As I walked toward the house, the soil turned to powder beneath my feet. There were no streams or creeks anywhere close, nothing wet to damp the dust.

The pioneers had access to four artesian wells, but the wells had slowly given out. The crops had slowly failed. The community had no tie to a railroad and no link to the outside world.

Progressive blacks in Los Angeles took issue with Allensworth, charging him with promoting segregation. In less than a decade, his settlement was dead, but it had lived on in memory for a long time. The land in Allensworth had been touched by something special, a spirit that lingered.

In the twilight, I watched the cranky owls do their hip-hop dance and knew how a day such as this one, an ordinary day, must have ended for the pioneers, their hoes and plows put to rest, the animals fed and sheltered, the cooking fires lit, and the air alight with swirling sparks. Families would be regrouping, the weight of their harsh labor briefly lifted, hands blistered and calloused, their feet tired and their backs aching.

I could hear the braying of mules, the scratch of silverware against tin plates, and the slosh of precious water as the dishes were carefully washed. I could see the great western sky darkening toward night, a half-moon rising, and stars in their untold millions.

Said Percy Williams, a boy from Allensworth:

  Heat, dust, tumbleweeds.

A
LONG THE BUMPY BACKROADS
of the San Joaquin I bounced, listening to country music on the radio and slaking my thirst with soda and beer. Pond, Wasco, Shafter, here was the brittle country that John Steinbeck had traveled in an old bakery truck in 1936 while reporting on the sorry state of farmworkers for a San Francisco paper and gathering the raw material that would become, in time,
The Grapes of Wrath
.

Everything had changed since then, of course, but also nothing had. At the North Shafter Farm Labor Center, I saw a man in coveralls spraying chemicals up under the eaves of some shacks that housed migrants and their children, poisoning whatever lingered there.

Cotton was the king crop in the lower valley. It loved the land and thrived on the weather. After grapes, it was the most valuable agricultural commodity in California, worth more than $1 billion a year. Its importance was global as well as local. No other crop earned our farmers as many dollars in export.

Dick Bassett knew all there was to know about cotton, having worked in the San Joaquin for more than thirty years. I met him at
the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cotton Research Station outside Shafter one afternoon. The scientists at the station had the job of tending to growers as growers tended to their fields, advising them on new farming methods and sharing the data that they collected on their rounds.

Bassett was a Wyoming native and had a degree in soil sciences from Rutgers University. There was a western spareness to him, all gristle and no fat. His eyes were alive with good humor, and he liked to be active and out in the sun and was looking forward to a vacation trip to his home state, where he planned to go trout fishing with his son.

Although the Spanish padres had grown a little cotton at their missions, relying on seeds imported from Mexico, Bassett told me that its true emissary in the San Joaquin was W. B. Camp, an employee of the federal government. During World War I, a shortage of a special type of cotton—extra-long staple—had developed, and Camp was sent to California to try and cultivate some. The cotton, which was also known as American Egyptian (and, later on, as pima), had a number of war-related uses, most especially in the canvas wings of biplanes.

Camp arrived in the valley in 1918 with seeds from USDA labs around the country. He did a big test planting in Arvin, southeast of Bakersfield, at the foot of the Tehachapi Mountains, and followed it with others. The crop did moderately well, but the bottom fell out of the cotton market after the war, and the price per pound plummeted from a dollar to a dime. Camp’s experiments continued, anyway, and he opened the Shafter Cotton Research Station in 1922, on forty acres that the Kern County Land and Cattle Company had donated.

After the failure of American Egyptian, most San Joaquin farmers went back to the standard cottons that they’d been growing before—such upland varieties as Durango that were old familiars in the United States. Camp and his associates at the USDA believed that the farmers would be wiser to concentrate on just one variety,
the better to master its subtleties. Why not find the type of cotton that was most ideally suited to the specifics of the region?

Alcala proved to be the choice variety. Its discovery was something of an accident. In the early 1900s, when boll weevils were decimating the cotton fields of the South, USDA researchers scoured Mexico and Central America, where most cotton seeds had come from, to search for a weevil-resistant variety. In Mexico, they located a strain that satisfied them and called it Alcala after the town where it grew. When the cotton was tested more thoroughly at home, it flunked—the weevils did not resist it—but some Alcala seeds made it to the San Joaquin and flourished.

The match was very nearly perfect. Alcala loved the arid climate and the alkaline soil of the valley. It yielded fairly large bolls with fibers that were unusually strong and quite long, cotton of the finest kind. By 1925, Alcala had so outpaced the upland cottons in terms of production that farmers were petitioning the legislature to designate the San Joaquin as a one-variety community, thereby preventing low-grade, bastard strains from “mongrelizing” it.

Alcala still grew in the valley and still yielded abundantly. It was relatively common for a farmer to get three bales, or 1,500 pounds, of cotton per acre. In spite of that, the region had dropped its one-variety status in the late 1970s, when the USDA had canceled its breeding program. Private breeders filled the gap and offered several new possibilities, and now there were about six varieties growing, all of a uniformly high quality.

About a million acres in the San Joaquin were planted to cotton at present, largely because the price supports in the United States were so favorable. The supports allowed American growers to compete against growers abroad who got government subsidies, and also helped the beleaguered farmers in such southern states as Texas, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. Those farmers had to contend with pests, floods, freezes, and hurricanes just to harvest an inferior cotton whose weak fibers were consigned to the cheapest denims instead of the finest yarns.

In California, the price supports were pure gravy, and every farmer grew as much cotton as he could.

“The farmers down South are envious, all right,” Bassett said, with a chuckle. “They think this state is a big greenhouse, but that’s a misconception.”

True, he went on, the climate was mild and the irrigated water was inexpensive—there wasn’t much irrigation in the South—but California cotton growers did have to deal with a few pests. In the past, the farmers were inclined to solve their problems by applying liberal doses of pesticides, but that strategy had killed off the beneficial bugs along with the evil ones, and the USDA was encouraging a more efficient approach known as integrated pest management, or IPM.

The sterile moth program was a good example of IPM in action, Bassett claimed. It had been evolved in Arizona in the mid-1960s to combat a scourge of pink bollworms. The female bollworms laid their eggs on the leaves of cotton plants, and their progeny later devastated the bolls, but the USDA scientists had hit on a scheme to fool them. They bred sterile moths in the lab and air-dropped them by the billions, overwhelming the females with males who could go through the mating dance but couldn’t reproduce—bugs who got the fun but not the responsibility, as Bassett put it.

The growing of cotton, I learned, had a basic rhythm. The planting occurred in late April or early May. A month or so later, most farmers began irrigating. In September, the preparations for the harvest started. Toward the end of the month, a defoliant such as sodium chlorate was applied in low concentrations to rid the plants of leaves and facilitate the picking. Machines did all the picking now, depositing the cotton in a module at the end of each row.

The harvest was over by mid-November, but ginning continued into January. About three-quarters of the processed cotton from the San Joaquin wound up in overseas markets, with Japan being a major consumer.

I had enjoyed my botany lesson. Cotton farming in California,
at least in Dick Bassett’s version, had an attractive ease and romance. Even the imagery was beguiling—the sterile moths like confetti in the sky, the fields in autumn crowned with whitish bolls. That the federal government would guarantee a profit only increased the charm. Without too much trouble, I could picture myself astride a tractor toting up my annual earnings, while a Merle Haggard tune played through my Walkman.

Bassett must have taken note of my dreaminess because he asked if I wanted to visit a farm where he had some test plots.

“When?” I said.

“How about now?”

T
HE CRETTOLS
were a modern California farming family. They had a spread of about 2,500 acres in and around Wasco and Shafter, neither big nor small for the San Joaquin.

“It’s only a little ways from here,” Bassett said, but he was a westerner applying a western yardstick to a trip of fifteen miles.

Bassett had a beat-up Toyota. He climbed in and instructed me to follow him. The road was a two-lane blacktop, straight and dead flat, and he drove it like a bat out of hell. Pity the poor crow caught dining on roadkill, I thought, for the bird shall be no more. We passed some nurseries where rootstock for roses was cultivated in an ideal microclimate and some potato fields that were a memory from the time when Shafter was the spud center of the world, with two hundred carloads a day departing from town on the rails.

In a while, Bassett turned onto a dirt road that led to some cleared ground in the midst of cotton fields. Two Mexicans were inside a barn-sized aluminum shed filled with tools and farm machinery. I saw a hydraulic hoist and some welding equipment. The men jumped at our approach, trying to cope with the unexpected fact of our arrival while simultaneously wishing that we’d disappear.

Louie Crettol was talking on a phone in a corner of the shed. He didn’t fit the farmer stereotype. His graying hair was stylishly
barbered, a Bakersfield trim, and he wore a little gold chain around his neck. You could tell that he cared about the figure that he cut. He was comfortable with himself and had a puckish grace.

Bassett introduced us. “You getting any?” Louie asked, with a stagy leer.

Jim Crettol pulled up in his truck a few minutes later. At forty, he was the older brother by a year, as handsome as Louie but not yet graying. Where Louie could be funny and even a little biting sometimes, Jim tended to be earnest and a touch high-minded. He handled the farm’s business details, while Louie supervised the field-work. Both brothers had enormous energy and were devoted to having fun. They had another partner in Crettol Farms, their father, Art, who was sixty-seven.