The White Album (8 page)

I have always wanted a swimming pool, and never had one
.
When it became generally known a year or so ago that California was suffering severe drought, many people in water-rich parts of the country seemed obscurely gratified, and made frequent reference to Californians having to brick up their swimming pools
.
In fact a swimming pool requires, once it has been filled and the filter has begun its process of cleaning and recirculating the water, virtually no water, but the symbolic content of swimming pools has always been interesting: a pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body
.
Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable
.
A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye
.

It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recen
tly
.
In my memory California summers were characterized by the coughing in the pipes that meant the well was dry, and California winters by all-night watches on rivers about to crest, by sandbagging, by dynamite on the levees and flooding on the first floor
.
Even now the place is not all that hospitable to extensive settlement
.
As I write a fire has been burning out of control for two weeks in the ranges behind the Big Sur coast
.
Flash floods last night wiped out all major roads into Imperial County
.
I noticed this morning a
hairline crack in a living-room tile from last week’s earthquake, a 4
.
4 I never felt
.
In the part of California where I now live aridity is the single most prominent feature of the climate, and I am not pleased to see, this year, cactus spreading wild to the sea
.
There will be days this winter when the humidity will drop to ten, seven, four
.
Tumbleweed will blow against my house and the sound of the rattlesnake will be duplicated a h
undred times a day by dried bou
gainvillea drifting in my driveway
.
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way
.
I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry
.

“The West begins,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, “where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches
.
”
This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read, and it goes a long way toward explaining my own passion for seeing the water under control, but many people I know persist in looking for psychoanalytical implications in this passion
.
As a matter of fact I have explored, in an amateur way, the more obvious of these implications, and come up with nothing interesting
.
A certain external reality remains, and resists interpretation
.
The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches
.
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control
.
Some fifteen years ago I tore a poem by Karl Shapiro from a magazine and pinned it on my kitchen wall
.
This fragment of paper is now on the wall of a sixth kitchen, and crumbles a little whenever I touch it, but I keep it there for the last stanza, which has for me the power of a prayer:

It is raining in California, a straight rain

Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,

Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,

Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,

Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,

Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile
.

I thought of those lines almost constan
tly
on the morning in Sacramento when I went to visit the California State Water Project Operations Control Center
.
If I had wanted to drain Quail at 10:51 that morning, I wanted, by early afternoon, to do a great deal more
.
I wanted to open and close the Clifton Court Forebay intake gate
.
I wanted to produce some power down at the San Luis Dam
.
I wanted to pick a pool at random on the Aqueduct and pull it down and then refill it, watching for the hydraulic jump
.
I wanted to put some water over the hill and I wanted to shut down all flow from the Aqueduct into the Bureau of Reclamation’s Cross Valley Canal, just to see how long it would take somebody over at Reclamation to call up and complain
.
I stayed as long as I could and watched the system work on the big board with the lighted checkpoints
.
The Delta salinity report was coming in on one of the teletypes behind me
.
The Delta tidal report was coming in on another
.
The earthquake board, which has been desensitized to sound its alarm (a beeping tone for Southern California, a high-pitched tone for the north) only for those earthquakes which register at least 3
.
0 on the Pdchter Scale, was silent
.
I had no further business in this room and yet I wanted to stay the day
.
I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile
.
I want it still
.

1977

the new official
residence for
governors of California,
un
land
scaped, unfurnished, and unoccupied since the day construction stopped in 1975, stands on eleven acres of oaks and olives on a bluff overlooking the American River outside Sacramento
.
This is the twelve-thousand-square-foot house that Ronald and Nancy Reagan built
.
This is the sixteen-room house in which Jerry Brown declined to live
.
This is the vacant house which cost the State of California one-million-four, not including the property, which was purchased in 1969 and donated to the state by such friends of the Reagans as Leonard K
.
Firestone of Firestone Tire and Rubber and Tart Schreiber of the Music Corporation of America and Holmes
Tuttle
, the Los Angeles Ford dealer
.
All day at this empty house three maintenance men try to keep the bulletproof windows clean and the cobwebs swept and the wild grass green and the rat
tl
esnakes down by the river and away from the thirty-five exterior wood and glass doors
.
All night at this empty house the lights stay on behind the eight-foot
chain-link
fence and the guard dogs lie at bay and the telephone, when it rings, startles by the fact that it works
.
”
Governor’s
Residence,” the guards answer, their voices laconic, matter-of-fact, quite as if there were some phantom governor to connect
.
Wild grass grows where the tennis court was to have been
.
Wild grass grows where the pool and sauna were to have been
.
The American is the river in which gold was discovered in 1848, and it once ran fast and full past here, but lately there have been upstream dams and dry years
.
Much of the bed is exposed
.
The far bank has been dredged and graded
.
That the river is running low is of no real account, however, since one of the many peculiarities of the new Governor’s Residence is that it is so situated as to have no clear view of the river
.

It is an altogether curious structure, this one-story one-million-four dream house of Ronald and Nancy Reagans
.
Were the house on the market (which it will probably not be, since, at the time it was costing a million
-four, local real estate agents
seemed to agree on $300,000 as the top price ever paid for a house in Sacramento County), the words used to describe it would be “open” and “contemporary,” although technically it is neither
.
“Flow” is a word that crops up quite a bit when one is walking through the place, and so is “resemble
.
”
The walls “resemble” local adobe, but they are not: they are the same concrete blocks, plastered and painted a rather stale yellowed cream, used in so many supermarkets and housing projects and Coca-Cola bottling plants
.
The door frames and the exposed beams “resemble” native redwood, but they are not: they are construction-grade lumber of indeterminate quality, stained brown
.
If anyone ever moves in, the concrete floors will be carpeted, wall to wall
.
If anyone ever moves in, the thirty-five exterior wood and glass doors, possibly the single distinctive feature in the house, will be, according to plan, “draped
.
”
The bathrooms are small and standard
.
The family bedrooms open directly onto the nonexistent swimming pool, with all its potential for noise and distraction
.
To one side of the fireplace in the formal living room there is what is known in the trade as a “wet bar,” a cabinet for bottles and glasses with a sink and a long vinyl-topped counter
.
(This vinyl “resembles” slate
.
) In the entire house there are only enough bookshelves for a set of the World Book and some Books of the Month, plus maybe three Royal Doulton figurines and a back file of
Connoisseur,
but there is $90,000 worth of other teak cabinetry, including the “refreshment center” in the “recreation room
.
”
There is that most ubiquitous of all “luxury features,” a bidet in the master bathroom
.
There is one of those kitchens which seem designed exclusively for defrosting by microwave and compacting trash
.
It is a house built for a family of snackers
.

And yet, appliances notwithstanding, it is hard to see where the million-four went
.
The place has been called, by Jerry Brown, a “Ta
j
Mahal
.
”
It has been called a “white elephant,” a “resort,” a “monument to the colossal ego of our former governor
.
”
It is not exactly any of these things
.
It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolen
tly
“democratic,” flattened out, mediocre and “open” and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn
.
It is
the architecture of “background
music,” decorators, “good taste
.
”
I recall once interviewing Nancy Reagan, at a time when her husband was governor and the construction on this house had not yet begun
.
We drove down to the State Capitol Building that day, and Mrs
.
Reagan showed me how she had lightened and brightened offices there by replacing the old burnished leather on the walls with the kind of beige burlap then favored in new office buildings
.
I mention this because it was on my mind as I walked through the empty house on the American River outside Sacramento
.

From 1903 until Ronald Reagan, who lived in a rented house in Sacramento while he was governor ($1,200 a month, payable by the state to a group of Reagan’s friends), the governors of California lived in a large white Victorian Gothic house at 16th and H Streets in Sacramento
.
This extremely individual house, three stories and a cupola and the face of Columbia the Gem of the Ocean worked into the molding over every door, was built in 1877 by a Sacramento hardware merchant named Albert Gallatin
.
The state paid $32,500 for it in 1903 and my father was born in a house a block away in 1908
.
This part of town has since run to seed and small business, the kind of place where both Squeaky Fromme and Patricia Hearst could and probably did go about their business unnoticed, but the Governor’s Mansion, unoccupied and open to the public as State Historical Landmark Number 823, remains Sacramento’s premier example of eccentric domestic architecture
.