Imperial (90 page)

All these vastly important doings and happenings take up the tiniest bit of Imperial’s fifteenth-century scrollscapes, which Nature painted with tautologically inhuman delicacy.

Indeed, there really
are
scrolls, almost: the Imperial County Assessor’s maps! Many are credited to Geo. H. Derby 1854, R. C. Matthenson 1855, H. S. Washburn 1856, then elaborated on decade after decade.

In Niland 11-14, my consciousness flows through the East High Line Canal, then down the Southern Pacific Railroad to Yuma, after which, south of Niland, I reach the green-bordered tracts of Fidelity Citrus Growers No. 1, 2 and 3; Imperial Grapefruit Growers, Inc., and various other laterals named after letters of the alphabet; finally I come home to a minuscule point with the grand name Date City . . . Of these entities, the canal and the two towns remain.

In Map 13-17, where Sunset Spring meets Pine Union below the Third Standard Parallel South, I adventure into a blank grid whose legend reads
Drifting Sand Hills;
on Map 14-18 I encounter
Rolling Sand Hills.

Please never forget Holly Sugar on Tract 178 No. 3—six hundred and forty acres on Map 14-14. That’s still there. A migrant farmhand once told me that he had worked at Holly Sugar for a day, but whatever it was they used to make their product white made him feel sick.

In Map 15-15 I see Holtville in lower right, then Pear, and the corner of the page has broken off, but here is Meloland 42A Orange Tract as the Alamo River flows through Rosita Dam; then I let my dreams carry me up through squares, rectangles and occasionally rectangles with strange bites taken out of them; I dream myself through bygone Imperial, serenaded by the smell of old paper.

Chapter 84

IMPERIAL REPRISE (1901-1929)

The sword created the shape of empire; the chisel, the dead, the statues we inhabit.

—Veronica Volkow, 1996

1

The wonderfully fertile valley of the New River in the eastern part of the county is now being opened up . . .
WATER IS HERE
.
We are praying for rain this winter, because if we do not get it I do not know where we will be.
WATER IS HERE
.
Water was in the ditches, seeds were in the ground, green was becoming abundant, and the whole area was dotted with the homes of hopeful, industrious, devoted persons.
Soon the endemic flora will have been displaced largely by these foreigners.
“Opportunities for profit in dairying are greater in IMPERIAL VALLEY than in any district that I know of in the United States.”
The essence of the industrial life which springs from irrigation is its democracy.
Enterprise and enthusiasm have gathered with more vigor around Mexicali than around any other place.
IMPERIAL COUNTY SHOWS RAPID INCREASE: Is Growing Rapidly Richer, Accepting the Tax Man’s Appraisement as Evidence.
A strong syndicate has
been organized, with W. F. Holt as president.
The club motto is, “The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”
So, sign the coupon and send it in
today.

2

I can’t help believing in people . . . I can’t help believing in people . . . I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
There is no escaping the stereotype of an ideal agrarian world.

3

OUR TERMS ARE CASH.
It is in this regard—the pure democratization of the great irrigation systems—that the methods of the United States differ from those of all other nations, ancient and modern.

4

The orchestra is making things lively as it does every night.
This has been the history of all artesian districts . . .

5

The wonderfully fertile valley of the New River in the eastern part of the county is now being opened up . . .
Larson, Albt H
r Wideawake Sch Dist nr New River.
Jury Verdict: Suicide by shooting and slashing wrist with a razor.

PART SIX

SUBPLOTS

Chapter 85

ALMOST AS EFFICIENTLY AS WASHING MACHINES (1891-1936)

So, then, to every man his chance . . . to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him—this, seeker, is the promise of America.

—Thomas Wolfe, before 1938

W
hat thing does our vision make us? Judge J. S. Emory, Kansas delegate to the Irrigation Conference of 1891, still held out for a democratic conquest of Arid America:
Four weeks ago I rode across a farm in Texas twenty-eight miles long, and I was sick . . . Why, I would be sick to my stomach if I rode down that valley in California, over those long miles owned by one man.
But the
California Cultivator,
whose articles and essays are ostensibly geared to agrarian democrats, keeps its stomach despite any one man’s success. In a series called “The Call of the Hen: A Visit to the World’s Largest Poultry Farms,” we learn that Ed J. Callon up in Marin County owns twenty-five hundred laying hens and four or five thousand growing chicks. Well, who am I to begrudge Mr. Callon his kingdom? The promise of America, isn’t that the promise of wealth? Haven’t the excesses of the French Revolution shown that too much equality is bad for liberty? (This long parable of Imperial, and indeed much of the American story, proves for its part that unbridled liberty kills equality, but never mind.) Two years later, in 1906, the
Cultivator
makes more emblematic use of chickens, this time in an advertisement.
You have chickens,
runs the copy.
Did you ever consider them as machines—machines that make eggs? Did you see in a recent Sunday paper where hens were made to lay SEVEN TIMES THEIR OWN WEIGHT in eggs in a year?

That sentiment quickly becomes the official line. In 1925, in an essay entitled “Where Are We Going?,” the
Cultivator
extols
the great ranches of South America, where beef cattle are turned out almost as efficiently as washing machines from an Iowa factory.

“EXACTLY OPPOSITE TO THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION”

When I began to study the history of the period, my mind remained unbiased by knowledge. All I knew was that somehow Imperial County had altered from being one of the richest bits of farmland in the United States to the poorest county in California, and I couldn’t fathom how.

John Steinbeck’s
The Pearl,
set in Baja not far south of Imperial, is a parable about how lives can be ruined by wealth. When a poor man finds the pearl, everyone wants to get it from him; he becomes endangered and dangerous.

The great wealth of Imperial, the pearl whose discovery revived her parched silt, was the water to which one accident of geography, a second of relative seniority, and a third of American water law’s generosity (left over from an epoch which believed, as had Judge Emory, in agricultural democracy) entitled her. And, like most of us, Imperial saw her water as a means, not an end. (Judge Farr:
The sleeper dreams of his rapidly ripening fruit and their early arrival in the markets to catch the top prices ahead of other competitors in less favorable regions.
) When exactly it was that Los Angeles and San Diego decided that buying Imperial’s produce was the merest side game, that what really needed to be done was to take Imperial’s water, remains a secret locked in the vaults of the respective water agencies. But when beef cows were just starting to be considered as somehow equivalent to washing machines, Imperial was neither endangered by nor dangerous to her neighbors, with the possible exceptions of various produce consortiums which could not hope to compete against her twelve-month growing season.

That was a once upon a lettuce time, when citrus still lived happily ever after.
He sold out at a fancy price.
But there now sprouted up two mutually exclusive problems for Imperial, and indeed for all American agriculture:

1. How can we maximize production?

2. How can we sell the resulting surplus?

We twenty-first-century consumers of genetically engineered soybean milk which comes in vacuum-sealed little plastic-or-paper boxes can see how those problems solved themselves: through the creation of imperial agribusinesses.
I would be sick to my stomach if I rode down that valley in California, over those long miles owned by one man,
but suppose a corporation owned them?

Well, let’s not go gently into that good night! Let’s close our eyes right up to the end!
The history of agriculture,
continues that 1925 explication of where we are presumably going,
is that the large holdings come first . . . As the population grows these large holdings are cut into smaller farms.
¹⁵⁴
These in turn are cut still more . . . into city and suburban lots. This fact is particularly noticeable in California . . .

And what might subdivision prove? Something quite reassuring to readers of the
Cultivator: The individual spinners, weavers, shoemakers and such industrial workers have long ceased to be and large scale operation is doing their work. But large scale farming operation is giving way to the agricultural producers. The agricultural revolution is working exactly opposite to the industrial revolution.
Thank God for that!
I would be sick to my stomach if I rode down that valley in California, over those long miles owned by one man.

ECSTASIES OF A SAFEWAY FARM REPORTER

In 1936 that most unprejudiced source, the Safeway Farm Reporter, pays a call upon Mr. Charles Anderson, who owns an eleven-hundred-acre walnut farm near Stockton. Mr. Anderson takes time out of his busy, successful life to explain to us that
I don’t believe it would pay nowadays to operate a big walnut holding like ours if marketing conditions were as they were some 15 or 20 years ago . . .
In other words, I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
I am willing to give a good deal of credit to the new methods of retail food stores. Modern merchants like the Safeway grocers increase the demand for farm products . . . Compare the inviting, well-arranged stores of the Safeway type with the kind we can all remember.

Well, bully for him and his big walnut holding! The agricultural revolution seems to be following the Industrial Revolution in his case, for which
I am willing to give a good deal of credit to the new methods of retail food stores.

As for those
machines that make eggs,
well, what can we say about them but that progress continues? In 1953, their productive life lasts for three hundred and twenty-five days and a hundred and ninety-eight eggs. By 1973, their care and feeding and perhaps even their composition have been upgraded for a productive life of five hundred and twenty-two days and three hundred and thirty-four eggs. In consequence, I am proud to say that the average California chicken flock has increased from three thousand in 1950 to fifty-two thousand in 1970. In 1975 an “egg farm” in San Diego County will proudly describe itself thus:
Petitioner’s operation is more akin to a light industry than to a farm, and Petitioner employs the latest engineering and computer techniques in an effort to maintain rigorous quality control over its product.
Petitioner’s holdings: Two million chickens. Take that, Ed J. Callon! We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

AN ENDNOTE ABOUT WATER

Had the Safeway Farm Reporter gone back in time to 1925 and dropped in upon a Coachella Valley rancher, physician and landowner named Doctor Jennings, he would have heard the same tune. When we look in on him, the good doctor is on the warpath against certain small-minded citizens who complain of an overproduction of farm goods, which they then point to as evidence that there is no earthly need for a Highline Canal to Coachella.
Most of the inability to dispose of farm products,
he aphorizes,
is perhaps not due to an overproduction, but rather to an improper distribution and improper marketing of such products.
This is what the orange-juice people will also say in time, and the broccoli associations, lettuce cabals, watermelon magnates, and finally (I suspect, although I cannot prove it) the water farmers. Doctor Jennings concludes, and I am sure that all Coachella stands with him (by the way, he happens to be a member of the Board of Directors of the Coachella Valley Water District):
We accept in theory and fact the principles of the Colorado River compact and expect to receive our benefits subject to its terms.