Imperial (54 page)

Chapter 44

IMPERIAL’S CENTER (1904-1907)

It was with a singular feeling that I saw the slowly oncoming waters drive back the tokens of an advancing civilization.

—George Wharton James, 1906

N
ext, in photograph number P85.13.1, we see a cypress-shaped plume of muck burst out of dark water. The caption:
Calexico, California: Dynamiting in an Attempt to Change Channel of New River July 1906.
In Mexicali, men in sombreros stand at the edge of a street of steep-roofed white houses, watching the waters eat and eat. Now they are almost at the edge of the end house. Far away, a family poses, very still. The President of the United States calls matters
serious and urgent.

Once upon a time, less than four years into Wilber Clark’s Imperial sojourn, the too shallow intake of the Imperial Canal clogged up. In the immortal words of Otis B. Tout,
silt—that’s the devil we’ve got to fight!
Otis B. Tout was right on the money. The Colorado’s silt content exceeded the Nile’s tenfold.—In 1928 alone the residents of Imperial County will spend one and a half million dollars getting rid of silt.

Since our dollar-conscious California Development Company declines to supply sufficiently powerful dredges, there’s nothing for it but to puncture the Colorado again—temporarily, I promise—down in Mexican territory where the Alamo River grade will make up for lost time.
We hesitated about making this cut, not so much because we believed we were incurring danger of the river’s breaking through, as from the fact that we had been unable to obtain the consent of the Government of Mexico to make it.
Well, he who hesitates is lost. Our attorney in Mexico City will get that consent, a year or so after the fact.

The Imperial Canal now runs through Mexico for sixty miles (some say fifty-two).
Out West
magazine reproduces a dim photo made more melancholy by its lack of focus: “Mexican Dwellers Along the Canal”—namely, women and girls in long skirts, holding sombreros in their laps; we also see an arrow-weed ramada and a dog’s hindquarters.

High water comes early. Unfortunately, the California Development Company is so engrossed in quarreling with the Southern Pacific Railroad about Imperial’s future treasures that the neglected cut widens. An engineer now describes the levee as
sandy soil that eats away like so much sugar.
The Southern Pacific wins the dispute. Flood follows flood; the gap’s half a thousand feet wide now.

On Thanksgiving 1905, a flood greater than its predecessors wrecks the Company’s miserly attempts at diversion. In 1906 it will be worse. (Imperial is a sermon of capital, to be sure—an object parable of short-sighted greed.)
J. C. Thompson has rigged a double cable across New River . . . When one wishes to cross he gets in the box and pulls himself across by the other wire.

A blurred little photograph in
Out West
magazine depicts a man in a wide hat who stands up to his calves in the Salton Sea; he seems to be the chemist of the salt works;
it was he who discovered the source of the water; searching by boat and wading till the muddy waters from New River were encountered. He then traced the water to Calexico and finally to the source of the trouble, . . . the canal below Yuma,
which in companion photographs looks mirror-wide. Even he, I suspect, can hardly imagine that the Salton Sea’s current rate of rise—half an inch per day—will soon increase dramatically enough to drown his salt works for a century and counting.

The New River continues to rush, no matter what channel it might gush in.
The great cataract, which resembles Niagara Falls and is 1,500 to 1,800 yards wide and has a fall of 90 to 100 feet, is working backward at the rate of one-third of a mile a day. If not checked it will . . . ultimately deprive of water every farm along the Colorado River up to the Grand Canyon . . .
Another still more ominous headline:
THE SAFETY OF $100,000,000 IN THE BALANCE
.

(An American doctor remembers Mexicali:
Here was the gay, careless life of the land of mañana . . . A town it was, more distinctively Mexican than it has ever been since. The Colorado washed it away, with only a touch of the corruption which later has become the whole life of the community.
)

Now the Southern Pacific sets out in earnest to close the gap, and on the third attempt, in February 1907, eleven thousand flatcar loads of gravel save the world! Then Northside returns to business, with the Southern Pacific now in full control of the California Development Company. Oh, Harvest Land—Sweet Burning Sand!
Characteristically American,
a settler recalls,
they forgot the river in a week, and in a month few of them could remember the day of closure.

But the Salton Sea is born. Imperial has a center.

Chapter 45

THE THIRD LINE (1907)

Because no single version of a map can serve all purposes, maps are commonly produced in several versions to emphasize landforms, surface markings, albedo, or other planetary characteristics.

—The Compact NASA Atlas of the Solar System, 2001

N
ow comes Imperial’s third and to date final cut, each boundary not so much enacted as compelled, and with a great deal of bad feeling.

First the line of 1848 divided Imperial into Northside and Southside; then came the line of 1893, which tore off Imperial’s topmost pseudopod, bearing it away in Riverside County’s jaws. Now in 1907 Imperial County creates itself and breaks away from San Diego, which no longer reaches east of the Anza-Borrego badlands.

(In spite of an old photo I’ve seen of a wistful crowd beneath the legend BRAWLEY FOR THE COUNTY SEAT, El Centro takes the prize.)

The entity I call Imperial accordingly sprawls through all or part of four bureaucratic divisions: Imperial County, Riverside County, San Diego County, and Baja California, Mexico. In the ancient Norse
Eddas
we read how the lovely Svanhild was executed by being torn apart by four horses; Imperial, just as lovely, is fortunately not quite so killable, but she’ll certainly be pulled in four different directions from now on. Her severed parts live on as parts of other bodies, forgetting where they came from; only you and I, reader, will be able to see her entire . . .

Chapter 46

SUBDELINEATIONS: PAINTSCAPES (1903-1970)

The magnitude, on every level of experience and meaning, of the task in which you have involved me, exceeds all my preconceptions. And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me.

—Mark Rothko, 1966

T
he first time I came to the Imperial Valley, it unimpressed me as hot, flat, muted and dull. The badlands and mountains in San Diego County appealed to me more; in the most objective sense, they offered entities to look at. Because I’m driven to “understand” things, my own prints and drawings tend to be representational. And mountains are representational, no? From a distance, a mountain may well present itself as something “abstract”—for instance, as a long, wavering zone of blue-grey glazed down by the dusty atmosphere of southern California to a matte acrylic finish; in place of canyons I can discover only a few randomly underpainted brushstrokes. These aren’t mountains at all; so what can they be, but background?—And the freeways of Los Angeles, what are
they,
if not grey-washed zones within which spilled beads of traffic display themselves?—So by “representation” I must mean in part “definition.” A human face, a sun-cracked old woman’s face at Slab City, they’re representational. So I respect the myriad figures in a seventeenth-century French monumentalist canvas more than the colored rectangles of, say, Mark Rothko, no matter that the French painter’s allegories might be stale if not drolly absurd! I’ve enlisted with the Artistic Border Patrol. A painter who proves his ability to render the human form competently has flashed me a valid passport. I’ll permit his entry into Northside. Should the face be proportioned properly, then I can trust him to make blotches and squiggles of his own proportioning. On the other hand, if he “can’t draw,” then how can I judge his proficiency when he paints in an unknown language? I could learn this language, but how bitter I’d feel if his grammar turned out to be fraudulent! Some of us speak English only, we citizens of Northside.

Kandinsky I trust, because his early work identifies him as a competent purveyor of images whose “accuracy” is intuitively measurable. Klee and Picasso may be “abstractionists,” but their pictures remain pictorial enough in the old sense for me to appreciate the figures. Imperial’s petroglyphs and pictographs for their part offer me simple yet deliberate geometric organizations. In about 1600, the Elizabethan miniaturist Hilliard writes:
Now knowe that all
Paintinge
imitateth nature, or the life in euery thinge, it resembleth so fare forth as the
Painters
memory or skill can serue him to expresse . . . but of all things the perfection is to imitate the face of man kind, or the hardest part of it, and which carieth most prayesse and comendations.
More specifically,
the goodnes of a picture after the liffe
(life) consists of
life, favor and likeness.
What comprises likeness? When I see a nude by Gauguin, I can judge it. I have loved women; so has Gauguin; I trust and believe in him. But when I see the rectangular zones of a color within the fieldscape of a Rothko image, how can I determine its degree of perfection?

Of course this diffculty, which I so stiffly resist acknowledging, arises even with that most representational of all arts, photography. Perhaps you know the famous “Clearing Winter Storm” by Ansel Adams. In this view of New Inspiration Point (December 1940), the artist’s eight-by-ten-inch camera has framed a sort of bowl: On the left, a slope stubbled with snow and trees curves ever more gently toward the tree-choked center, which then meets a craggier upcurve to the right. It’s a lovely, peaceful composition, stamped with life, favor and likeness. One could draw a horizontal line from the point where the lefthand curve ascends beyond the image frame to a certain crag about two-thirds of the way to the righthand edge; from this mostly snowy tooth begins a dropoff to a waterfall, after which the bowl curves up again, this time rising considerably above its lefthand counterpart before departing the frame. Is this photograph balanced or not? The vale between rocks is nicely centered; on the other hand, Adams could have panned his tripod head more to the left, so that both of Yosemite’s walls would depart the borders of the picture at precisely the same coordinate along the vertical axis. But then that narrow, sunken, shadowed place of snowy trees to which our eye is drawn would have been off center. What was the artist’s thinking?
I first related the trees to the background mountains as well as the possible camera positions allowed, and I waited for the clouds to form within the top areas of the image.
There seems to be a hint of expediency here; and indeed we are informed that the camera could not have been moved more than a hundred feet to the left without reaching
the nearly perpendicular cliffs above the Merced River,
nor to the right without encountering
a screen of trees
or
an impractical position on the road;
nor forward, which
would invite disaster on a very steep slope falling to the east,
nor backward, for that must
bring the esplanade and the protective rock wall into the field of focus. Hence the camera position was determined . . .
It still seems to me that Adams could have panned an inch left, as opposed to moving the camera a much greater distance in the same direction, and that had he done so, the slightly altered angle of view would not have distorted his distant subject appreciably. But who am I to say that the distortion would not have been appreciable to
him
? Nor can I claim that the composition as I’ve hypothetically reenvisioned it would be any more
favored,
more beautiful; presumably its
life and likeness
would remain as unimproved as Imperial before irrigation.

What is
life
? At the end of his commentary on this photograph, Adams, whose pictures do not emote to me at all—they’re beautiful meditations in which I can refresh myself (as I also can when in “real life” I spy dewdrops on a fern); but they never cause me to
feel
as, say, a Napoleonic battle-scene might—insists that a photographer’s subject ought to be what moves him.
Intellectual and critical preevaluation of work,
concludes this extraordinarily meticulous preevaluator,
is not helpful to creativity; regimenting perception into functional requirements is likewise restrictive.

I go down Imperial’s hot wide street (the shady boardwalks, being more private, usually stink of urine); standing in the barrenness and narrowness of No Man’s Land, I try to see why I would ever desire a non-representationalist to paint me a sunset in a date orchard. (Well, why should a sunset be painted at all? And why not? Ansel Adams’s image of dewdrops on a fern is no more or less valuable than dewdrops on a fern.) Why would I ever want to open the aperture of my view camera’s lens wider than f/64? As it is, I’m obtaining my maximum depth of field; I want canyons on my mountains, not brushwork. I don’t care to exclude any detail; everything is precious to me.

All the same, Imperial is flatness; Imperial is background. Shall we approach its abstractness by degrees; just as Rothko approached his final commission?

It commenced as early as 1948, although back then the colors were too bright and puddled to be Imperial; they actually seemed
interesting
at first glance, which would never do. But gradually the inset daubs become more rectilinear; he was still in his red period then, with globs of blue or yellow on those fiery fields. The “Mauve Intersection” of 1949 encloses more yellow and white than red within itself, and its blue is as dark as the Salton Sea; it’s rectangular, like all the rest; it could be a reservoir or a flooded field. Just as on the way from the Anza-Borrego Desert to Imperial the country’s washes, arroyos and canyons keep thinning out (it’s actually surprising that God allowed anything but flatness into Imperial County, but He did, here and there), so in the career of Rothko concretions of representation keep thinning away. He tells Stanley Kunitz that he wants to erase the Old Masters and
start new
in
a new land.
He’s coming into his Imperial. So many people I know prefer Borrego’s mountains! And I can see their point; I’m that way myself; I prefer
life, favor and likeness.
What do Rothko’s paintings bear the likeness of? Until I know that, I can’t “understand” them.