Big Dreams (63 page)

Our release from the cool, dark theater into full sunlight was another shock to the system. The strategy of Disneyland became apparent—little shocks of a minute or two interspersed with cottony periods of waiting. It grieved me to think that somebody had spent countless hours devising the formula, that market researchers had been set to measuring just how much manipulation a human being could tolerate before he or she went over the wall.

What next? I did some shooting on Boot Hill at the Frontierland Arcade and rode the Mark Twain paddlewheel steamer and saw some Indians, a burning cabin, and some robot deer and elk. In Adventureland, I had a glass of pineapple juice at the Tiki Juice Bar, where the host was Dole Pineapple. For lunch, I went to Big Thunder Barbeque, where the host was Hunt’s Ketchup and Barbeque Sauce.

And then, at one in the afternoon, I went over the wall.

Disneyland was a magnificent achievement, I thought. Whether consciously or not, Walt Disney had managed to anticipate the exact feel of life as it would later be manifested in much of surburban California. He had kept things neat and tidy and had given his park the appearance of virtue. For that, he owed a debt to his Bible-thumping
father, Elias, who had always craved a world where there were no dark rides.

As Ronald Reagan was the Ultimate Californian, so, too, was Disneyland the Ultimate Suburb.

The organization that Disney built had survived him, and it had prospered through the 1980s. Its stock jumped from $12.50 a share in 1984 to $113.75 toward the end of the decade. Its CEO, Michael Eisner, earned a total compensation of $40.1 million in 1988, more than any other executive at a publicly held corporation in the United States.

In interviews, Eisner was modest about the company’s profits. He attributed them to a favorable exchange rate that had attracted foreign tourists, a reemphasis on family values, and an indefinable something that he called “a quest for things past.”

I
N ANAHEIM
, packing up for Palm Springs, I bid farewell to my traveling companions, Edwin Bryant and William Brewer. They had not explored the meridians to the east or to the south, or the far reaches toward the border. Their California existed only in flickers now, in preserves and museums, in the depths of rivers, and in memory.

Bryant had lived out the balance of his life shuttling between Kentucky and the West. For a time in 1847, he served as
alcalde
, or chief magistrate, of San Francisco, and got caught up in the real estate craze and sold town lots until 1853, when he went back to Kentucky again. In 1869, he made a final trip to San Francisco and died there in a hotel, possibly a suicide.

Brewer met with a cheerier fate, accepting a chair in agriculture at Yale when his tour with Professor Whitney was over. He married for a second time and had four children, Nora, Henry, Arthur, and Carl, and taught for thirty-eight years before retiring.

Despite his commitment to teaching, he never lost his taste for
travel. He joined an expedition to Greenland in 1894 and journeyed to Alaska five years later when he was seventy-one. The University of California rewarded him with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1910, the year of his death.

Brewer’s life was long and full and good. He was a great appreciator. On a Sunday evening in 1861, while camped in the Santa Ana Mountains, he looked up at the sky and wrote dreamily, “We have the most lovely sunsets I have ever seen.”

S
AN JACINTO TOWN
on the way to Palm Springs was dry and bleached and almost empty of citizens on a Sunday morning. Roadrunners darted through it on their way to Arizona. The mayor, Trammell Ford, had left some business cards around that gave his home phone number. It made you want to call him up and say, “Here I am in San Jacinto, Trammell,” to see what he could possibly produce in the way of entertainment.

The cards also showed some potatoes rolling out of a cornucopia into verdant fields. Potato farms and dairies were links to San Jacinto’s past. In its future, there were Republicans, golf courses, and two thousand new houses.

San Jacinto was in
Ramona
Country, a region of California that Helen Hunt Jackson had put on the map with her novel of that name. She was the child of a Brahmin minister from Massachusetts. Her friend Emily Dickinson had counseled her to take up writing when she was about thirty-five, as an emotional release after her husband had died.

Jackson went to work with a vengeance and quickly poured out a flood of poems, stories, and travel sketches. She became a famous
literary figure before she was fifty, hobnobbing with the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Jameses, Henry and William.

After she married for a second time, she went with her new husband to live in Colorado. Her life underwent a profound change in 1879, when she was on holiday in Boston and heard some touring Indians from the Ponca tribe address a public meeting at which they outlined their grievances against the U.S. government for trying to move them from their ancestral territories in Nebraska to a reservation in Oklahoma.

Jackson was incensed and turned into a staunch defender of the rights of Indians. Two years later, she published
A Century of Dishonor
, a pamphlet that was an indictment of the government for its crimes against Native Americans. That led to her being appointed a commissioner of Indian affairs by President Chester A. Arthur, who asked her to compile a report of the Mission Indians of southern California.

In 1883, she and a fellow commissioner traveled through the domain of such tribes as the Serranos, Cahuillas, San Luiseños, and Dieguiños. Sometimes Jackson spooked the Indians by wearing a hat made from the entire head of an owl. She recorded a pattern of abuse wherein white settlers were forcing the tribes from their lands, trashing their fields, and stealing their houses.

In San Jacinto Valley, she came to a Soboba village at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains. The Indians were “greatly dispirited and disheartened at the prospect of being driven from their homes,” she said. They had always supported themselves as farmers and by hiring out to shear sheep and do vineyard labor, and they had no desire to change.

A Soboba schoolchild, Ramon Cavavi, had written a letter to President Arthur, and Jackson had inserted it into her report.

Cavavi’s handwriting, said Jackson, was “clear and good.”

After finishing her report to the president, she set about composing a “sugar-coated pill,”
Ramona
, whose intent was to create a sentimental fiction that would drive home the fact that Indians were being mistreated throughout the nation. The story was a spin on
Romeo and Juliet
, telling of a doomed love affair between a beautiful halfbreed, Ramona Ortegna, and her full-blooded Indian husband, Alessandro.

Ramona
was a cause célèbre, the
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
of its day. It touched the emotions of readers and nudged Congress into action. Three movies were patched together from it, one of them directed by D. W. Griffith, and it also generated a popular love song.

The reservation, Soboba Springs, could still be found in San Jacinto Valley, across the dry bed of the San Jacinto River. The first thing I saw there was a brown mongrel with its tongue hanging out. The second thing was an immense Bingo parlor, as big as a K mart, where an Indian guard in a security uniform was on patrol.

Then the dusty road ran on over bleak, unyielding earth past a Catholic church, a day-care center, two backyard auto-body shops, and a Little League field that had weeds growing in the cracked basepaths and a refreshment stand collapsing into timbers. A hard grounder hit there would roll on forever, all the way to Orange County.

Young Indians left the reservation for nearby Hemet whenever they could, I was told in San Jacinto, and only returned for family emergencies, or if they were ill or had lost a job.

Some of the new houses being built in the valley were not far away, in a development called The Villages at Soboba Springs. The homes were clustered around a golf course that was the only patch of green for miles around. White golfers in peacocky clothes were riding around in carts and smacking at balls.

Maybe you needed the heart of a wealthy Republican to survive down south, I thought, an organ cast in concrete and fitted with pacemakers and plaque-free plastic tubing to let you last through the millennium or the next eighteen holes, whichever came first.

Just another Sunday in the Colorado Desert.…

D
OWN THE ROAD
in Gilman Hot Springs, in a parallel universe, some Scientologists were holding an open house, squeezing it in before the end of the world. Their bait was a trimasted clipper ship,
Star of California
, that appeared to be sunk up to its hull in the ground. Young men and women in quirky naval uniforms scampered over the deck with a paramilitary fervor. The ship and its surroundings had the compelling isolation of a cult compound fortified against a threat, real or imaginary.

Apparently, I had stumbled into a corner of the state where weirdness was king. A few miles away, under a burning sun, Republicans were playing golf on the bones of Soboba Indians, while here the disciples of the late L. Ron Hubbard were making promotional and educational films and tapes about the Churches of Scientology at their compound, Golden Era Productions.

I saw the “gold” in Golden Era and remembered how Charlie Manson’s school bus, with
Hollywood Productions
written on its side, had been parked under the trees at Dennis Wilson’s house. Manson, who professed to be a theta clear.

In the early 1970s, I’d been stopped a couple of times in San
Francisco by recruiters for Scientology, who carried clipboards and elaborate questionnaires and wondered if I were interested in bettering myself by getting rid of irrational behavior. I found them scarier and more intense than any of the Moonies or Hare Krishnas who’d intercepted me. Once, I had even taken home a questionnaire and grappled with it until the degree of self-reference that it required defeated me.

I was still interested in bettering myself in those days. Now all I wanted was a concrete heart.

Star of California
was a tribute to L. Ron Hubbard, who had a passion for nautical imagery and had dubbed his inner core of adepts the Sea Organization, or Sea Org for short. Hubbard himself was “the Commodore” and knew the Colorado Desert well. After publishing
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
in 1950, a nationwide bestseller whose merits were touted in such magazines as
Astounding Science Fiction
, he had holed up in a Palm Springs apartment to work on his second book,
Science of Survival
.

The Churches of Scientology had bought 520 acres of land and several buildings at Gilman Hot Springs from Massacre Canyon Inn, a resort, in 1978 to create a haven for Hubbard, reportedly paying $2.7 million for the property. According to a former associate of Hubbard’s, the Commodore ordered a house built for himself nearby, outside Hemet, insisting that it be constructed on bedrock in a neighborhood where no blacks lived. It had to be free of dust, defensible, and on higher ground than anything around it.

Armageddon was coming in the form of a nuclear war, the Commodore suggested in a bulletin to his inner circle, but his true enemies were the FBI and the IRS.

The clipper ship was meant to offer Hubbard some comfort in his declining years, when he was rumored to be ill, sometimes grossly overweight, and often incapacitated. It had cost about a half-million dollars to build, but the money had gone mostly for materials, with Sea Org carpenters contributing the labor.

Hubbard seems not to have made much use of the
Star of California
.
Instead, he lived reclusively in a motor home on a 160-acre ranch in Creston, about thirty miles from San Luis Obispo, where yet another house was under construction. Six akitas guarded the ranch’s perimeters, and there were also horses, cattle, some llamas, four buffaloes, and Bubba, a prize bull, in residence. At Creston, attended to by his personal physician, the Commodore died of a “cerebral vascular accident” in 1986.

The open house at Golden Era Productions was “open” only a crack. After I signed in at the gate, I was admitted to the compound, where there was a nice Olympic-sized swimming pool with palm trees all around it. The ship was a beautifully crafted piece of work done in rich mahogany and polished brass. Belowdecks, in the captain’s quarters, it did feel comforting and enclosed, a space that was safe from any harm.

A journalist had visited the ship shortly after Hubbard’s death and had noticed that the Sea Org cadets kept things exactly the way he’d liked them, as if the Commodore might drop in again at any minute. Glasses of drinking water were set out, along with the pads and pencils that Hubbard used to jot down ideas. A pair of his favorite black Thom McAn clogs were positioned in each bathroom, ready to be slipped into after a bath or a shower.

While I was in the captain’s quarters, a woman from Golden Era Productions introduced herself to me and said that she would accompany me for the rest of the tour. Free-range browsing would no longer be an option. She was pleasant and ingratiating and had a fixed smile. She would give me the pitch every step of the way, I feared, and try to hook me on betterment again and probably make me pay for it, so I left the compound and missed my chance to listen to the tapes that celebrities such as John Travolta and Karen Black had recorded.