Imperial (183 page)

It won’t be all bad. I love to ride in a car past Citrus Avenue, continuing onward past the immediately following Orange Avenue to the tanning salons, coffeehouses and antique shops around La Brea, whose eponymous tarpits offer up a past whose prehistoric tropicality feels scarcely more alien than the epoch when Citrus Avenue actually grew citrus. (G. Harold Powell:
The dark green foliage and the flaming yellow fruit of the orange groves made a striking picture.
And so did the sabertoothed tigers and dire wolves slowly drowning in tar, upon whose surface the water-mirror of their bygone world trembled and rippled, restoring its choate illusion for the next victim.) In the midst of Miracle Mile, a fountain’s jets blossom cotton-white upon a granite altar. Then here come the department stores. Lovely apartments present the prospect of an
IMMEDIATE MOVE-IN
near the Motor Hotel on Hauser.
GROWING PAINS: Residents crowding into L.A. area make it most densely packed in U.S.

Blotches of Mexicali’s south and east already resemble Calexico in a way—a grubbier, more uneven Calexico, to be sure, but here lie ugly signs and industrial peoplelessness nonetheless. (My favorite announcement to the world: GARY WELLS
WORLD CHAMPION MOTORCYCLIST.) A little farther out, Mexicali regains its houses of brilliantly painted brick glazed with dust, its yards of tires and plastic buckets of roses; but in the zone of Gary Wells, one could be in Los Angeles. (An advertisement for a new cemetery:
TÍPICO AMERICANO
.) And San Felipe despite its whale-skull exoticism will in obedience to forces personified by the expatriate entrepreneurs grow from a small to a large American resort enclave, eventually resembling Ensenada or Rosarita Beach, if the hotel owners can only afford the air-conditioning bills. For a more northeasterly preview, cross the California Wasteway and then the reedy weedy Colorado to Yuma Podiatry Associates, Drive Thru, Avenue A,
Palm Plaza,
AUTHENTIC MEXICAN FOOD
,
Yuma Gardens
, First Church of the Nazarene, an orange tree, a palm tree, the smell of asphalt,
MONTERO CHIROPRACTIC (72°F)
, walls, fences, DISCOUNT LIQUOR,
COLLISION SPECIALIST
, SALT FREE DRINKING WATER and all the rest of Arizona.

Don’t think Imperial didn’t want to outgrow itself! Maybe Imperial County did continue to be the poorest in the state of California, and in the lowest zone of official plant richness; maybe Mexican Imperial likewise suffered from a high failure rate; still, Imperial (or at least Imperial’s developers) never lost sight of the greeny-green dream; Imperial was a sun-abused, abscessed street prostitute in Mexicali who resolutely put herself forward in the best possible light:

Imperial

This bargain reduced for quick sale.

Brawley Investment

This 17 room with kitchen and office used to me [
sic
] a motel. Priced at $700,000 but seller is anxious.

Imperial Home

Fixer-upper 3 bedroom. Large lot. Zoned for animals, large lot disible [
sic
] location. Owner motivated, priced to sell for only $85,000.

West Indio

Just a few years old! Hurry it won’t last.

Acreage in Thousand Palms!

Recently SOLD. Call me if you want to SELL your RANCH or ACRES. I’ll get you top dollar for them in 60 days or less GUARANTEED. (Subject to terms and price.)

Repo Property!

In the search for repos, HUD/VA? Call me, I will hook you up with the best deals in town. Don’t wait no more! Ask for Ramon Lara . . .

THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
, like the lovely oval face of Mary Ellen Tuttle, pioneer teacher. Recently SOLD.
The bountiful continent is ours.
Drive Thru.
It is simply needless to question the supply of water.
Hurry it won’t last.
WATER IS HERE
.
I can’t help believing in people. I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life. VISIT ONE OF OUR NEW HOME NEIGHBORHOODS
.
Repo Property!
He sold out at a fancy price.

He sold out at a fancy price. He sold out at a fancy price.
Don’t wait no more!
He sold out at a fancy price.

In the experience of Riverside we may see the commercial romance of irrigation in its striking form. The original sheep pasture, assessed at seventy-five cents an acre, sold readily at twenty-five dollars an acre when irrigation facilities had been supplied . . . The improved orange orchards, which had been evolved from the sheep pasture, were valued, and actually sold, at one thousand to two thousand dollars per acre.
Those words were published in 1905. Riverside was a “pioneer orange colony” then. Riverside might as well have been Imperial. And Riverside kept selling out at a fancy price, until finally (don’t wait no more!) Riverside was eaten up by Los Angeles.

Actually, that’s an exaggeration. It only seems to me, because I’m not from there, that Los Angeles is a monoculture. For example, West Covina’s pine trees, grass, smog and fast food seem to me like Los Angeles, but they’re really just West Covina.—Well, yes, agreed my friend Jake the Engineer, who’s lived in Long Beach for ever so long now, I guess I would have a finer-grained perspective. There’s a lot of wilderness here, even at Palos Verdes ten minutes away from my house where I like to bicycle . . .—I asked him when he had last been to Riverside, and he said not for ages. I asked him to describe Riverside as he remembered it, and he said: Hot. Drab. It’s probably a checkerboard of new development and orange groves. I’m sure they still have orange groves. It was just twenty-five years ago that they bulldozed some more orange groves to build the campus where I worked in Huntington Beach. And that’s Huntington Beach, which is pretty close in. There’s so much land out there that I’m sure there’s quite a bit left. It isn’t wall to wall by any means. They call it the Inland Empire. There are people who will live in the lower-priced houses out there and take the commute from hell. There’s a lot more land out there that’s already got somebody’s hooks in it for preservation or something . . .

You know, Jake said after awhile, they still have unique names as cities around here. Sometimes when you get off the freeway you can find the old main street. You can see these two-storey brick buildings and you can know there must have been a feed store, and sometimes there’s still a grain elevator two blocks away. The difference is that there’s a big freeway and lots of housing developments . . .

He sounded almost sad, maybe because he was from Kansas originally and had worked on a ranch with me when we were young (he always made the best ice cream) so I asked him if he could board a time machine for southern California
circa
1900 and live out his days as a homesteader in one of those fresh-born miraculously irrigated farming towns, would he do it, and if so, would he expect to have a better life than the one he was having, and without hesitation he replied: Oh, yes, in spite of the occasional whooping cough. Could be fun . . .

THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
.

THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
.

THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
.
TÍPICO AMERICANO
.

DELINEATIONS

In Northside, where there are fewer parades and one has to look awfully hard to find the Virgin of Guadalupe painted on any wall,
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
. So does water. I remember one time when Jake and I explored one straight-edged section of the Los Angeles River; we ran up and down the steepish concrete walls and then stepped over its two inches of flow. Just a few years old! Hurry it won’t last. Southside, couples sit tightly embracing on the park benches, gazing so seriously into each other’s faces. Northside I find Palm Springs’ white houses, palms everywhere, quiet money and subdued cubes, poodle-shaped trees, white houses and white walls, white marker-stones, and nobody sitting outside, nobody embracing nobody.
He sold out at a fancy price.
Should I write
IMPERIAL DISAPPEARS
? But what is Imperial?
He sold out at a fancy price.
That’s everywhere. At the turn of the twentieth century, Fullerton was the walnut kingdom; now Fullerton is simply Los Angeles.

At the beginning of this book I wrote that
Imperial is the continuum between Mexico and America.
Well, then what might Los Angeles be? Because I love Imperial and because it comes naturally to me to preach graveside elegies, I began my as yet unwritten novel by hating Los Angeles, which I intended to define in terms of the simpering yellow star of the hamburger franchise on Sunset Boulevard; for hadn’t Los Angeles slain Imperial? Tamerlane’s warriors gallop into the square. One car advertisement on a billboard, another billboard of a human silhouette in the midst of an ecstatic writhe (that was supposed to sell a certain computer product); could I really insist that such images, not to mention the white cube of that Cadillac dealership in sight of the Oasis Christian Center, were really any more vulgar or “un-American” than some turn-of-the-century Imperial boomer complacently announcing that
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life
? And the expensive lawn-greened homes of Highland Park, the neoclassical banalities of Youngwood Court, wasn’t I bemused and even attracted by them? Even if I chose to be so cruelly unfair as to pretend that Los Angeles had become all present, that nothing significant remained of the orange trees and vineyards, the Los Angeles River, the old pueblo, the Indian land, so that only yellow hamburger-franchise stars and car advertisements could be offset against the shabby past upon which Imperial’s half-moribund present was painted; if I closed my eyes to Los Angeles’s art deco towers and all the rest, even so, didn’t I like the palm trees in the median strip of Wilshire Boulevard? What right had I to fail to include in my definition of Los Angeles lush lawns, hedges, banana trees, palms, purple-blue flower-trees like Fourth of July fireworks, hedges, property-walls cushioned by ivy and poppies?

Never mind.
Imperial is the continuum between Mexico and America.
The fact that on Avenida Reforma in Mexicali the Consultorio Dental, the Piano Bar, the
distribuidor autorizado
of Telcel could easily be found in Los Angeles, where even the streets of Koreatown are rapidly Latinizing, makes me wonder whether Los Angeles is eating Imperial or the other way around. (From
The City Observed: Los Angeles, A Guide to Its Architecture and Landscapes,
published in 1988, I extract the following:
Broadway, downtown’s old main artery, now resembles a giant Mexican village in perpetual fiesta.
) At the mega-discount store we can buy dozen-count boxes of hard and gleaming tomatoes,
coated with food-grade vegetable-mineral-beeswax- and/or lac-resin-based wax or resin to maintain freshness,
the official name of this product being item number eighty-three thousand six hundred, grown and protected by Del Campo y Asociados S.A. de CV in Sinaloa, distributed by Tam Produce in Fullerton, which is to say in greater Los Angeles—Fullerton, where almost next to the train station a warehouse offers Orange County Produce. I remember two snobbish girls; they were even Hispanic girls; they kept praising the clothing shops of San Diego, then complaining about the unfortunate Third Worldization, by which they meant Mexicanization, of Los Angeles!
TÍPICO AMERICANO
.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by,
in which case the hybrid which I’ve been calling Imperial may not really be threatened at all; indeed, it may prove to be as voracious and victorious as a pond weed.

SUBDELINEATIONS

I know a place whose lake is a salt-rimmed silver mirror. This place is part of California, but it lies above and northward of Imperial. The gold, ochers and russets of its scrub in springtime fill me with joy. The hard rock of it, the fragile crags, the scree, the high mounds with their geological ambiguities, the dry mountains all around me, comprise the floor and walls of the only house where I have truly felt at home.

En route to Tecate one must enter the purplish-grey mountains which I heard one Mexicali man call “the end of home” because as soon as one journeys up there, it starts to feel cool.—And what we call home, he explained, it has to be
hot.—
The mountains of my home are higher and, in the winter, considerably colder. From an Imperialite’s point of view, this place lies beyond the end of the world. Tempted by glibness, I started to call it High Imperial just now, but it’s not that at all. (If anything is “like” Imperial it would be the Canadian Arctic with its flatness and its plenitude of sky.) This high valley holds many Indian secrets, and on horseback I used to seek and find arrowheads by their gleam in the winter twilight sun. I know it so much better than I’ll ever know Imperial. This is where Jake and I worked on that ranch.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
? Never!
He sold out at a fancy price ?
Not here, not anyone I know. That dark-lipped vulva in the mountainside over there leads, I know, to the drunken Roman grandeur of Marble Canyon, where I used to camp. (Actually, now that I’ve been going to Imperial so often, its formations bring to mind the crowded white extravagances of a Mexican cemetery.) And the pale, crumbly ridge to the northeast, I’ve camped there, too, far past the stone phallus, and I remember the ledge where I used to find perfect rodent skulls; and I know where to gather quartz crystals, and I’ve gathered pine nuts and boiled Mormon tea. These wafers of rock on the slopes, and the crumbly clack of rock dislodged onto rock as one climbs, and these rocks the color of bloody water, and these steps of rock in the hills which go up and up, they’re all mine, and my knowledge of this place and my love for it are braided together like the grey flesh of the ancient little trees. Rusty mounds of stones, dark clouds, they’re my riches, which I’ll have forever. What does it mean to be attuned to a place? Well, what does anything mean? On this winter night I’m lying on my back in a sloping sandy wash, with the waist-high sagebrush towering over me; since it’s ten or twenty degrees below freezing, the tip of my nose feels cold, but for some reason my breath does not obscure the many stars. I know that I’ll sleep happily and well. I love the high, cold desert feeling. This place is akin to Imperial, as I said, and to me more beautiful, simply because I know it better, each grain of its sand being a happy memory of my youth and my freedom. I look up into these stars which are far more numerous, precise, brilliant and massive than my human eyes can ever make out, and their greatness exalts me. When I get to Imperial I won’t be able to see them except from the summit of Signal Mountain or from one of those other mounds, cones and peaks which in my opinion belong to Imperial only thanks to various trivial accidents of location. Here in this other zone for which I don’t have a name, this place where I’ve always felt literally at home whereas Imperial for its part will never cease to strike and scorch me with the sunbeats of utter alienness, I love to fall into the stars every night, leaving my body, swimming between galaxies into astral entities which I call starways, not constellations, because they are so inhuman, beyond all associations and understanding, that they might lead me to something beyond myself. What will happen to the universe finally? Where will the stars go? Where will I go? Where should I go? We call these questions sophomoric only because we can’t answer them. The black mountains all around me, the pallor of sand-humps in the darkness, and above all the spill of stars, I am lying in the middle of all this, so happy and grateful to witness the mystery. This place, or at least this landscape with its rotating starscape, remains almost exactly as it was a quarter-century ago, and it welcomes me, or I welcome myself in it, but it is gone all the same because my youth is gone. Here I feel calm; I begin to know what I already knew but had forgotten that I knew. For how many years now have I neglected to listen to myself? I “never have time,” which means that I’ve lost myself, that I’ve failed to live my life and to apprehend the lives of others. But tonight I see another chance to ascend the starways. Where will the stars go? Where will I go? Maybe one reason that I chose Imperial to write about was that this secret high desert valley has been too much loved by me, too much roamed over, so that I’ve fallen into this illusion of recovering myself. Imperial, however, lies beyond the starways, in the great white light beyond the blackness of Pluto. There seems to be something about the dark flatness of Imperial’s fields at night, Imperial’s horizon studded with meaningless lights or, far more often, with no lights; something about the heavy sky, from which even the rare clouds must sink exhausted—well, what is that something? Can’t I delineate it? The
Geological Atlas of California
does so rather beautifully, inscribing the pure sky-blue of the Salton Sea within a lobster-claw of yellow (Quaternary lake deposits: obsidian, rhyolite, pumice, etc.), and then, running parallel to the northeast shore, our atlas presents to us a palish blotch of recent alluvium (the same hue as those white, wide-streeted empty towns), followed by the Chocolate Mountains brown and pink with various Mesozoic granitic rocks. But now comes sunset over the scrub, dim shadows under the awning; Louise sits silhouetted against sky, drinking her beer, delighting in telling me another story about how she gave a cop the finger and told him to shove his attitude up his ass, and her dogs are barking because a strange car’s nosing into the Drops; the moon’s already high, the sky’s red-orange over the trailers; and darkness licks away the low purple mountains over the orange sky. If I had the atlas with me now, I couldn’t read it. Like an earth-worm, darkness has long since ingested Imperial’s vast fields horizoned by low half-silhouetted haystacks which are separated by narrow gaps, so that they resemble gated walls; in the morning all this will emerge from the worm’s other end where Louise’s cop might as well have placed his attitude, and it will be just a little darker and richer for the experience; right now there are no green-on-green hay bale checkerboards on fields; there is no atlas, and near Plaster City that ruined, semiskeletonized building with the word
APPLES
lettered on a rafter deep inside exists only as solid darkness. The humid mysteries of Imperial’s flatness, the blackness of the night’s canals, that solitary lamp which glows so yellow between the palm tree and the shed, all this overlies me with a heavy ephemerality, like a woman I love lying on top of me kissing me so long and so sweetly that I can hardly breathe; after awhile she will rise and go away, and I’ll go with her or without her, after which this hired bed which was ours will support its next passion or sleep; Imperial’s endless, mostly treeless horizontality accepts activity and even fecundation just as it drinks poisons and salts; cruelly hot and indifferent to harvests raped from it or the barrenness of its own slumber, Imperial blesses me with perfection expressed as perfect imperviousness. Imperial is those Mexicali men in jackets who offer me deals in soft, unhurried whispers; they enter restaurants to discuss their propositions, but, respecting the restaurants if not this writer, never go farther than just inside each doorway; if need be, they’ll wait an hour for me to finish my meal, then loyally accompany me outside. None of my refusals can touch them. To them as to Imperial itself I can never be any more than one of those silver-grey water-mirages on the road where the double lane of border traffic almost moves, then doesn’t move; and, occluding the zebra-stripe curves of the international wall’s distorted reflection in a van’s curved windows, two men stride down the pavement’s center, bearing on their shoulders a huge Christ on His cross which they would sell to someone if they could; their doleful slowness, and the immensity of the bleeding figure they bear, reenacts the crucifixion. I have seen them there many times with their Christ; nobody ever wants to take Him. They continue nonetheless. Now it is twilight at last and they are still there, even though Imperial’s greenish-white glare is fading into a celestially white horizon-line beneath blue mountains. Imperial is the father and son who sit high and gently swinging in one car of the otherwise unoccupied ferris wheel which reigns over a sandy night carnival in San Felipe; the lesser counterpart rides, spiderlegged with neon tubes, slowly spin to loud music, but the ferris wheel will not demean itself to turn for nothing; hence the father and son, who hold hands, must wait for somebody else to buy a ride so that it will become worth the man’s while to pull the lever; they’re not impatient; they’re content, and a quarter-hour later, when three girls finally pay to be whirled around and utter happy screams, the father strokes the boy’s head, and then I see their tranquil smiles as they’re borne high into the cool darkness above everything. Needing nothing, Imperial can nourish itself on a tree-shaped shadow, watching the pigeons and crawling flies. Imperial dresses itself in long lines of palm-tree silhouettes below its mountains; Imperial speaks in the sounds of trains day and night like rushing winds. But silence and nakedness would not diminish it.
Both the Imperial and Mexicali Valleys are gradually being filled in by siltation from the Colorado River and peripheral canals . . . Ultimately this silt will raise the floor of the Gulf sufficiently to cause tidal flooding of the entire adjacent low desert region.
And then what?
WATER IS HERE
. Sometime after that, water will not be here. We can’t deny that. In 1849 Colonel Cave Johnson Couts writes in his journal, and in 2849 or maybe 2249 it will be this way again:
Marched from Colorado
[
River
]
on morning of 19th,
heading westwards into Imperial,
ult. making about 18 miles to a
sandhill
which we had to pull the wagons over by hand. Up to this hill we passed through a mesquite bottom which bears every sign of once having been
extensively cultivated.
The irrigating ditches are very numerous and as plain as if now in use.
I’m sure that the bed of the All-American Canal will remain visible for a very long time.
Twelve miles from Colorado we passed what is called the
1st well
or wells . . . We scraped them out but no trace of water was to be found. Nothing in the world was to be found where we encamped but mesquite.
And so they press onward, their mules beginning to die of thirst, and the men not far behind in failing.
The mirage was most beautiful about midday, presenting beautiful lakes and no small number did it sadly disappoint . . .
WATER IS HERE
. None of this makes any difference. Nothing can touch this marriage of land and sky, of heat and salt, this hammer and anvil, this procreating couple whose only child is a plain which unlike a rainforest, an empire or a work of art can outlast anything the planet itself can, anything, even human beings, even water or waterlessness; and if, God forbid, Imperial does someday get riddled with cities, its character will remain almost unaffected; it will go on and on, true to itself, long after such temporary superficialities as “the U.S.A.” and “Mexico” have become as washed out as old neon hotel signs in the searing daylight of Indio.