Imperial (47 page)

And they
are
getting better, oh, yes! Look out; here comes another boom! Los Angeles County, which was the merest blankness back in 1850, now teems with little towns and settlements whose names are not yet mockeries: Olive is here now, and Artesia, Clearwater, Santa Fe, Charter Oak, Vineland (which as I write roars with cars and stinks of smog), Lemon, which in my day has long vanished from the map . . . In 1900, Los Angeles already holds nearly one-third as many residents as her big sister, San Francisco. Los Angeles intends to keep right on growing.

Subdivide the old Garvey Ranch near Allhambra, change the name to Garvalia, and you’re ready for business. Here comes Mr. C. H. Newcombe from Minnesota; he’s tired of the cold winters. Buying twenty acres, he plants seventeen of them in lemons.
The water comes from an artesian well on the tract and the thirty shares that Mr. Newcombe owns give him the right to thirty inches of water five days a month at a cost of only $2.50 per day. This is ample to thoroughly irrigate the ranch
by means of underground pipes. Last year he got four thousand sixty-pound boxes of lemons, which he sold to the packing house at San Gabriel for a dollar twenty-five per hundred pounds, cash, of course. Oh, he’s happy he moved to southern California, and I’ll bet that his wife is happy, too.

The Los Angeles River was the greatest attraction. It was a beautiful, limpid little stream, with willows on its banks . . .
That recollection is furnished by none other than Willliam Mulholland, soon to be Riverine Emperor of Southern California.

And the label of Old Mission Brand oranges (office: Los Angeles, Cal.) assures me that fruit packed under this brand, namely, the Pacific Fruit Company, is grown in the finest orange section of California, so Los Angeles must look just like this! Three jolly old monks admire an orange-clustered branch on a desk, with the archway of the picturesquely dilapidated mission behind them, and the sky softly blue and yellow overhead. A cactus-stockinged palmetto spreads its fronds in the foreground, beside two oranges which must each be five feet in diameter. Darling, will you marry me? We’ll move west and live forever.
Ten thousand people from the east have been brought to California during the past two weeks by the railroads, on colonist tickets . . . It is predicted by the railroad companies, that this influx will continue.

The railroad companies, God bless them, are correct. (Good thing Los Angeles
has secured options on the Owens river water, amounting to about 25,000 inches.
) During the first decade of the new century, San Diego and Imperial counties will each grow by a hundred fourteen and one-half percent; Los Angeles County will grow by
a hundred and ninety-six percent.
By that time, although Los Angeles still possesses Orange Slope, Orange Heights, Orange, Orange Grove Place and Orange Crest, these places have begun to alter away from their names. Across Orange Slope Tract alone, the Los Angeles Brick Company, the Huntington Land & Improvement Company, and Marengo Street now stamp themselves, each one a different pastel shade of blankness in Baist’s Real Estate Atlas, with here and there an orange-colored building-rectangle.

Do you know why business smells so sweet in Los Angeles? Because
Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties are leaders in the honey industry.

And now it’s time to describe the locus of Imperial’s ever-optimistic lust: the Los Angeles Market on Third and Central, where so many horses and wagons cluster in the dirt street that the impression is of a stockyard. The people who harvest the hilly, wide-open tomatoscapes of West Hollywood surely bring their wooden crates down here. Parking there costs fifty cents per morning, but it’s worth it, for to take just one case, in Los Angeles
onions are still as good as gold mines. Some Australians have come in the past week which have sold at 6 cents a pound.
That’s why I now see farmers and commission men carrying in boxes of produce to their divinely (I mean commercially) ordained places in the market’s hundred and fifty stalls,
every one of which is filled, with now and then a man standing looking on wishing he could get in.
Outside, on the market-grounds, wait the
smaller sheds, in which stalls of Chinese and other market men are located.
Sometimes I hear arguments between farmers and commission men; sometimes the farmers don’t sort their stock, or else they try to sell it themselves until it wilts; then they blame the commission men—who do every now and then, of course, cheat them. (As for me, I, like Imperial, have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.)

But let’s abandon the vulgarly individual perspective, which Marxists have entirely disproven. Let’s consider this scene from the vantage point of economic superorganisms:—Is Los Angeles aware of Imperial, I mean
really
aware, commercially aware? Absolutely! In 1908 a vast row of men in suits and hats will stand in the flour-white potentiality of El Centro; they stretch three boxcars long; they’re the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce; they stand with their fists at their sides, or jauntily, with their hands on their pockets, or with folded arms; some are fat, some are thin; one bold spirit in the front row even crouches in the sand! They’re an army!

And in 1913, a circular put out by the California Land and Water Company, which offers FREE LECTURES DAILY in its Imperial Valley Exhibit and Lecture Room, oh, yes, a very nice company, coincidentally headquartered in Los Angeles, will offer this incitement to buy the newest batch of irrigation-ready land:
Brawley, more than other towns, is possessed of the “Los Angeles Idea,” which means she is united on the one idea of assuming and maintaining her present ascendancy.

Chapter 40

THE IMPERIAL IDEA (1901-2004)

I am not against packing holidays, per se, but I insist on my individual prerogative of choosing those days myself, without the help of some all-knowing Committee.

—Harry Carian, Jr., grape grower in Coachella, 1967

A
nd was there an Imperial Idea to oppose the Los Angeles idea? I think so. The boomers certainly opined that there was. Among their number we find the commercial photographer Leo Hetzel, who, like Otis P. Tout, could always be counted on to portray Imperial County as an exemplar of agrarian wholesomeness and success.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
A Hetzel image from 1920 introduces us to a farmer with a pipe in his mouth; he’s resting his hands on the top of his quadrilateral pig corral, where a dozen piglets with dust-matted fur are gobbling, heads down; while on the running board of the Model T, remaining in place by gripping the canopy above her head, stands a cross-legged Lolita of a girl who leans in toward the steering wheel, gazing coyly at us from around her arm; behind her are fields and behind
them
are trees. Isn’t this the Imperial Idea? The difference between this eternal picture and the equally eternal days of my friend Mr. Lupe Vásquez,
⁷⁴
who gets up at three-thirty to pick crops in and for another nation, is the difference between the right to happiness, which none of us can be guaranteed, and the right to happiness’s pursuit, which I do find written into a certain early document of my United States. So what really
is
the Imperial Idea? What makes me, no thanks to my increasingly un-American government, proud to be an American?

Imperial is the farmer with his pipe and Lolita; it is also the farmer Albert Henry Larson, who killed himself gruesomely six years after Hetzel clicked the shutter. The Imperial Idea is that we have the right to go to hell in our own way. To be sure, one of America’s most prized illusions
⁷⁵
is, or at least used to be, that self-reliant individuals could achieve some kind of free fulfillment in associations of their own choosing; and Imperial has certainly been memorialized in an ancient photograph of a Holtville banquet under the palms, the gentlemen in hats, everything self-serve, laid out on long tables with stacks of plates awaiting all of us, some of the ladies wearing aprons, and every last one of them in ankle-length skirts. (A century later, when I pass through Holtville, I see no one under the palms.) The public meetings of the Imperial Irrigation District begin with the Pledge of Allegiance, and it touches my heart to see everybody in the room rise and place his hand on his heart.

I want to believe than an American is free to belong or to remain aloof, to prosper or to destroy himself, to govern himself well or badly. Among the exponents of this very Imperial Idea I find Leonard Knight, the gentle old painter-builder of Salvation Mountain. Somewhere around 1995 he was heard to say:
I love people,
and I actually believe that Leonard does. He went on:
But when I get too close to people, they always want me to do it their way. And then it looks like I want to do it my way. And most of the times, their way is right. But I still like to do it my way.

Chapter 41

WILBER CLARK’S HOMESTEAD
(1901-2005)

For an hour or more Barbara, at the piano, sang for them the simple songs they loved, while many a tired horseman, riding past on his way to his lonely desert shack . . . paused to listen to the sweet voice and to dream perhaps of the time to come when such sounds would no longer seem strange on the Desert.

—Harold Bell Wright, 1911

W
ilber Clark arrives in Imperial in 1901, possibly by means of that newfangled miracle of self-sufficiency, the automobile. Why has he come, if not to improve the land? Mr. Frank B. Moson, President of the Green Cattle Company, will soon be citing
the wonderful advantage of the Imperial Valley as a fattening center.
Who says we can’t fatten our own fortunes? Imperial, reifying herself in an eponymous town at her valley’s geographical center, has already begun rising grey and grimy from her own creased silt. Next will come the municipal water tank, creamery, warehouse, barley crusher, ice factory—and not least the jail!
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

Along the county’s eastern edge (it’s still San Diego County, of course), miners scratch out gold at Tumco and Picacho. Picacho will run out first; Tumco remains in operation until the First World War. I’ve heard that everything happens at Picacho, even bullfights. Many miners there speak Spanish, you see; they come from the other side of the ditch.—And what other human novelties mark Imperial? Well, there’s been a railroad depot in the sand and boulders of Old Beach for twenty-four years now. (Someday Old Beach will turn into Niland.) Meanwhile, the Cahuilla Valley finally changes its name to Coachella, a combination of “Cahuilla” and the little seashells called
conchas.
⁷⁶
As for Imperial Valley, thanks to George Chaffey it has worn that title for a full year now; it used to be the Valley of Death.

Almost in sight of that adobe ruin where the Butterfield Stage depot used to be, Blue Lake holds no fewer than ten registered voters, who will be allotted another five years of groundbreaking before the great flood cleans them out. In a caption to a picture of that locality’s single white tent and awning, with Signal Mountain in the background just as it will be in the Imperial County seal, while a flag flies over flat grey nothingness, Otis B. Tout informs me that
before Imperial was laid out Blue Lake was Headquarters for Surveyors and Visitors.
And what a well stocked headquarters it had been! The
Imperial Press and Farmer
finds in it
more ducks and other water fowl on the lakes than an army could slaughter. Standing room only for new birds.
On the other hand, nobody has briefed us about mosquitoes. So forget about Blue Lake. After all, Imperial has now indeed been laid out. It boasts the Hotel Imperial (on Imperial Avenue, naturally); this establishment offers
tent house accommodations.

But such amenities are nascent when Wilber Clark is packing up in Los Angeles. Imperial townsite comprises
less than a dozen souls in
March of 1901—in other words, about the same as Blue Lake. Almost all of them are male. I presume that George W. Donley belongs to this first wave, for he
came to Imperial when the town consisted of only three tent houses.
L. E. Cooley
entered the town as pioneer, driving a pair of mules and followed by a spotted dog;
he too is probably improving his quarter-section of land by the time Wilber Clark pulls the starter cord of his automobile.

Again, this automobile is hypothetical. His biography in Judge Farr’s tome simply has him
driving down from Los Angeles;
he could have done so by stagecoach; on the other hand, other pioneers generally
removed to
Imperial or simply got there; ignorance gives us leave, as to any science-fiction writer, to entertain ourselves speculatively; so I’ll suppose him to be one of that brave new breed, a motorist.

On Tuesday, the fifteenth of May, 1901, the headgates of the Imperial Canal resemble a giant loom upon whose top lean many men in hats, accompanied by a seated lady or two. They’re here to see our century begin:
WATER IS HERE
. Water descends from Pilot Knob, which is a rolling purplish-dark hunk of something volcanic sprawling quite far away from Imperial with one white streak wriggling down it. And water deigns to return twice a week, swirling right down the Imperial town ditch! By year’s end, so they say, five settlers are pulling in each day.