Imperial (115 page)

In 1965, California is second only to Texas for cotton. How much of that do you think is Imperial County cotton? I assure you that that year cotton comes in a glorious number two for profitability; I have never been cheated out of a bale in my life!

The 1974 edition of the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
informs us that
some of the land between the Colorado River and the Salton Sea is irrigated; the principal crop is cotton.
Imperial County grows more than seventy-three thousand cotton acres that year;
²¹⁸
the yield is over two and a half bales per acre. Mexican Imperial contains a disproportionate number of cornscapes, but in 2000 we find seventy-one thousand, three hundred and twenty acres of cotton in the northeast corner of the Mexicali Valley alone.

We don’t grow cotton here anymore, lamented Richard Brogan in 2004.
²¹⁹
I think the government just expired the program. The money that went out, I used to marvel at it. I wanted to get it myself.

The following year, cotton came in a respectable twenty-fifth out of the county’s forty top-earning crops . . .

Chapter 118

SAN LUIS RÍO DE COLORADO (
ca.
1968)

And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flowerpots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamor to cover the silence that Mars made waiting outside the door and the shaded window.

—Ray Bradbury, 1950

S
an Luis lies on the far side of the Colorado—in Sonora, actually, where in 1777 the explorer de Anza found some petrified wood to send to His Excellency down in Mexico. Two hundred and twenty-six years later, in my hotel room, ants ran across my belly with remarkable speed.

The next day I asked a hairdresser what the city had contained when she first arrived thirty-five years previous, which is to say in about 1968, and she replied:
Nada.
Just a train station. Then markets, shoe stores came, because the people from the ranches would come. I started my business after three years. I studied cosmetology in Nayarit and married a lawyer here. More than twenty years ago, the bars arrived. On account of the climate, the people drink a lot of beer.

It’s a nice place if you like to dance, she said. Me, I don’t like to dance.

Chapter 119

CERTIFIED SEED (1959)

Nor can I sing in lyric strains
Of private, little woes,
When Greed is reaping golden gains
From bloody seeds it sows.

—IWW Song, before 1923

I
n the year of my birth, 1959, Imperial’s crop reports introduce two new categories. The first,
MILLION DOLLAR CROPS
(carrots, lettuce, cantaloupes, watermelons, cotton, alfalfa, and other fine commodities, in whose company we unfortunately fail to find grapefruits), all of us should have seen coming, because what could be more Imperial? I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life. But the second category shows a more novel species of genius. Seed crops are now divided into
NON CERTIFIED
and
CERTIFIED SEED
, in the latter of whose ranks stand such grandees as New River Flax (sixty acres), Imperial Flax, Star Millet, Brawley Sorghum, DD 38 Milo and D Imperial Kafir.

Won’t agriculture be better off, when its manifold productions have been
certified,
when an agency, a laboratory or at least a brand name stands behind each and every one? We’re on the way to never-ripe tomatoes that will not squish in transit, to genetically engineered alfalfa, to crops with consistent characteristics, so that everything can be more predictably grown, moved and marketed. Speaking of marketing, in 1958 we find a lettuce producer fretting at a marketing order meeting in El Centro that chain stores are controlling the buying more. What if they decide to buy only lettuce derived from a specific certified seed? What if the company that sells that seed gives the supermarkets a kickback? Well, then the lettuce growers will know their marching orders.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

Chapter 120

SUBDELINEATIONS: OCEAN PARKSCAPES (1966-1993)

... the tension of “something about to happen” . . . recurs years later in some of Diebenkorn’s . . .
Ocean Park
paintings . . .

—Jane Livingston, 1997

I
mperial is Rothko’s flat bright multiforms and then his earthy canvases going gradually toward black.—What then defines Imperial’s antitheses, Los Angeles and San Diego?

I nominate the Ocean Park paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.

In 1966, he moves into a new studio in Ocean Park, Venice. Jane Livingston writes of him:
Rarely has an artist been more finely attuned to nuances of changing light, temperature, landscape, and streetscape.
What then might we expect the coast of Los Angeles to do to him? Diebenkorn writes that his paintings flattened out.

The place called Ocean Park ends at the ultramarine-blue Pacific itself, the flat horizon sharp as a brush-line across masking tape; I also remember the ocean sky, pale and vague just above the horizon, gradually darkening into a lovely blue which is still much less than half as dark as the ocean itself; the tan rectangle of beach—an assumed rectangle, that is, for its ends project beyond my eye-canvas on either side—the palm trees, the cocky seagulls whose crops pulse in their throats; they stand webfooted on the sidewalks and dip their beaks in the puddles.
²²⁰
On the lawn, an Anglo couple sit at a rectangular concrete picnic table with their baby in its pram; another man, Hispanic, sits on a table making silent love to his guitar.

In “Ocean Park No. 107” (1978) we see a coastline of Rothko-like colored zones: green for a park, yellow for sunshine;
²²¹
the red is your guess—a sporty car, let’s say; and all this clings across the topmost quarter of the canvas; the rest consists of ocean squares of various milkinesses, bleached indigos and blueprint etherealities.

That was “Ocean Park No. 107.” What about Nos. 41 and 94?
Each one creates its own, self-contained chromatic universe,
continues Jane Livingston; and in complexity,
Mark Rothko takes a distant second place to Richard Diebenkorn.
Imperial-lover that I am, I take proud exception to this, as I do to her assertion that seeing the Ocean Park series as landscapes or cityscapes is
well off the mark.

What is Los Angeles to me, but
abundance of water?—
In 1881, that ex-Ranger named Horace Bell looked back on his early days in southern California and remembered his journey from San Pedro Harbor to the new American metropolis:
Finally, when all hands were seated, a portly looking young man . . . offered to each of the passengers an ominous looking black bottle, remarking,
“
Gentlemen, there is no
water
between here and Los Angeles . . .
” But through an assertion of will far more effective than Imperial’s, because Imperial’s Ministry of Capital was only occasionally visited by the Chandler Syndicate, whereas Los Angeles was developed through the undivided attention of the big boys, Los Angeles has achieved water everywhere!

The water that Diebenkorn paints is indeed ocean, therefore saline, nonpotable. His Los Angeles thus becomes not only an antipode to Imperial, but also a twin. Someday, when civilization ends, the sea may kiss the remains of Los Angeles; but Imperial will lose her green fields, and her canals will fill with dust.

What then is Ocean Park, and Los Angeles itself, but an ironic waterscape which defies physical and other laws?

Two characteristics of the Ocean Park series, so a monograph informs us, are
the hesitant-yet-defining diagonal cutaway
and
the half-erased boundary.
Indeed, Diebenkorn writes, probably from this period, that
what I enjoyed almost exclusively, was altering . . .
Thus as his series progresses, doing the same thing over and over again, sometimes more boldly, sometimes more discreetly, subdelineation asserts itself more steadfastly in him than in its object. He enjoys the altering; he’s the William Mulholland of painting in that respect; he works and reworks his images; but his goal, unlike Mulholland’s, remains beyond expression. So, of course, does the “real” universe that we live in and feel. In a pretty essay, John Elderfield describes a typically altered Ocean Park canvas as
a visibly imperfect surface that shows signs of its repair.
I disagree. For me, Diebenkorn’s surface takes on an ever more “worked” texture until it approaches the infinitude of earth itself.

In “Ocean Park No. 32” (1970), a gorgeous rectangle which is not quite Mars yellow has been subdivided by a white strip, like a highway; in the lefthand lane, a dipper-shaped zone of dark blue has been set; this immediately transforms itself into a hole, because it is the same blue as the ocean at the upper righthand corner, which the almost-Mars yellow sector protects itself from through a scuffed-white cap, like a beach or parking lot that follows the coast; inset in this is a wide triangle of green, like one of Los Angeles’s traffic islands. All this occupies the righthand two-thirds of the canvas. The lefthand third consists of a rectangle not quite bisected by a warm white triangle and a milky-blue quadrilateral. To me the almost- Mars yellow area, together with the white and green that caps it, resembles the entrance and exit roads to a marina; and the dark blue dipper might be a puddle of rain or seawater; this entire assemblage cleaves the rest of the painting, like the deck of an aircraft carrier moving through the sea on a mission.

Several of the other Ocean Park paintings, such as Nos. 14½ and 24 (1968), convey more of a feel of pavement. Going away from Ocean Park’s blocky buildings, palm trees, and dandelions in the median strip, going eastward, there comes a dip on the dark road with its white and yellow lines and inscriptions, then almost immediately the ocean feeling begins to be lost. And I think of how quickly the plants beyond the edge of Palo Verde or Calexico go olive, then yellow, then grey. Heat rises from parking lots even at Ocean Park. Yet in these canvases as in the utramarine ones, Diebenkorn keeps his colors crisper than in many Rothkoscapes, as if they have been sharpened by the sea air; and even the grey polygons of asphalt have been blued. Although in 1970 and 1971 the series does approach the bright field yellows of a Rothkoscape, by 1972, certainly by 1973, the ocean blues come back; then for a time everything gets increasingly vivid, like Ocean Park itself after a drizzly night. Sometimes they dull down or go yellow again, but always the water comes back—spectacularly so in “Ocean Park No. 116” (1979), which is a softer version of the same aerial view as No. 108. What John Elderfield calls
an architecture . . . increasingly . . . eroded of complexity
may be seen in, for instance, the hundred and twentieth member of the series (1980), whose tonal values have sharpened considerably; meanwhile the water has shrunk down to a dullish rectangle in the upper lefthand corner. In 1986, Diebenkorn accomplishes “Untitled (Ocean Park)” in ink and charcoal. The effect is not unlike that of a Plains Indian ledger drawing. And always the ultramarine waxes and wanes, taking up most of the canvas in “Ocean Park No. 128” (1984), eating by means of a rectangular bay into the topmost coast of warm white, yellow and green. More yellow forms a solid lower coast, and an extremely thin coastal strip along the lefthand edge of the painting. In “Ocean Park No. 133,” which may be the most beautiful of all, the sea has nearly triumphed, swallowing most of the painting in blueprint-hued zones incised with white and flushed with purple; its subdelineations are utterly true to life; for doesn’t Los Angeles sunshine sometimes gild my downtown hotel’s window-blinds in threes, with glassy shadows and right angles, cubes and squares and lines, white sliced towers?—And then the white and yellow coast hugs the top of Diebenkorn’s canvas as usual.

Omitted, at least overtly, are the longhaired darkhaired women in their sundresses and miniskirts, who walk slowly along the boundary between beach and grass, their legs almost the same pale tan as the sand; undepicted are the slow cyclists and joggers, whose hair rises and falls more slowly than the sea-waves. In the Imperial Valley, who could survive in a sundress except for a Mexicana? Whose legs can stay pale, but a Northsider’s who bunkers himself in long sleeves, long pants and a hat when besieged by the sun?

Not omitted at all is the sea air, the deliciously cool breeze, the sea-waves so refreshing to the eye after Imperial’s sandy glare. Los Angeles can be paradise!

I remember palm tree shadows on the well-kept grass, the smell of salt; all is clean, cool and moist.

In Ocean Park there is a reddish-vermilion irregular pentagon isolated in white; to the left of it, a triangular blue pond is surrounded by sidewalk, and a street separates a green field, a turquoise field and a grey field from a series of pale yellow Imperial-like fields which have been pierced but not entirely severed by a grey aqueduct ending in a beak. All this is coastline; for on the righthand edge of California is a sea-stripe of the same blue as the pond. This 1970 painting (“Ocean Park No. 27”) is more arid than my memories—but, after all, Ocean Park is over so quickly; and then one comes into greater Los Angeles, which sprouts water here and there, for instance in the fountain by the library, and hums with secret aquatic arteries, but remains nonetheless an almost-desert, fragile and therefore pitiable, worthy of compassion.