Big Dreams (17 page)

Since the 1940s, when a professor from the University of California
began growing a domesticated strain as a potential food for ducks, farmers on the floodplain had been experimenting with wild rice, banking on the mild climate and the virtually pest-free environment. Their efforts increased through the 1970s, and Zambello had joined them in 1986 by purchasing and refurbishing a dilapidated rice drier and a cobwebby warehouse.

His partners, who did the actual farming, stuck to a strict routine, he told me. Seeds were air-dropped from February through May, and they had a growing season of about ninety days. Wild rice couldn’t tolerate any weeds or chemicals and germinated at a lower temperature than white or brown rice. Sometimes rice midges attacked the crop in the early stages, but there wasn’t much to fret about after that. Once the wild rice was harvested, it had to be dried and carefully roasted. The precious seeds were stored in water at a temperature close to freezing.

The first year that Zambello was in business, he had made a killing on a bumper crop. He and a friend, Daniel Maohs, had devised a means to ship wild-rice seeds without damaging them, and he had sold about 7 million pounds of green, field-run product to marketers and processors in Minnesota—he had harvested 19 million pounds in all. Unfortunately, some competitors soon hit on the same innovation, and things were never quite so good again.

Zambello sometimes sounded frustrated when he talked about the obstacles facing him. Wild rice was costly and had an exotic reputation. In general, he said, Asians wouldn’t touch it, and neither would Hispanics. People were confused about how to cook it, and about what to do with it once it was cooked.

Still, Zambello had his fantasies. Someday, he thought, the Wild Rice Exchange might be a tourist destination on the order of a Napa winery. He would call it the Old Rice Mill. It would have a tasting room for wild rice and a gift shop with T-shirts and the entire line of Gourmet Valley products. He had even gone so far as to hire an architect to draw up the plans, and he pulled out the sketches to
show me. The Old Rice Mill resembled a Moorish palace crossed with a sand castle.

In 1986, that banner year, Zambello had believed that construction on the mill might soon begin, but he knew now that he would have to wait. He would have to be patient, as well, yet he was not without hope. He was in California, after all, where the transformations were always imminent and continuous and many a left-field scheme had turned to gold.

T
HE CHINESE WERE DISAPPEARING FROM MARYSVILLE
, but new immigrant groups continued settling in the Sacramento Valley to take their place. Sikhs from the Punjab were among them. On Bogue Road one afternoon, I had to blink when in the midst of tract houses I passed a blue-and-white temple with minarets. It had the effect on me of seeing a mosque in Levittown. Christmas lights were strung about it, as though every day brought a reason to celebrate.

The head priest at the temple was called “Bengal,” or so I heard his name when we talked on the phone. Bengal’s English was heavily accented and hard to decipher. He agreed that I could visit the next day, but he neglected to tell me where to meet him, so I wandered about peering through doors until I came to one that opened onto a glossily waxed corridor. Some old men were sitting on the floor of a room at the end of it and drinking tea.

Bengal stood out from the others. He was still young. He had an intelligent face and eyes that burned. He wore a gold-orange turban and a silk pajama suit. He looked regal. Some kernels from a Chico-san rice cake were clinging to his scraggly, black beard, but he paid no attention and comported himself with great dignity. He had the proud, stiff-spined strut of a British colonial officer and paced a few steps before putting his hand softly in mine by way of greeting.

An old man fetched me a cup of tea. It was rich and sweet,
thickened with condensed milk, and I drank it in throaty gulps, following the example of the elders.

“That is how we do it!” Bengal said. His voice was both musical and exclamatory. He smiled brilliantly, as if the sight of me, a visitor from another planet, would never fail to delight him.

Sikhs had been migrating to such valley towns as Yuba City and Nicolaus for many years, Bengal told me, fleeing from the bitter turmoil of their homeland. They were often farmers, so they farmed in California, but poets and novelists were among them, too, as were turbaned gas station owners and proprietors of 7-Elevens.

Sikhism was known as a tolerant religion, I learned. Its founder, Gurū Nānak, was said to have lived first from 1469 to 1539, then until 1708 reincarnated as ten different gurus. His Alphabet of Teachings had a finely wrought humility. It taught that faith and contentment were the food of Angel-Beings, and that the world was a passing vanity. Sikhs didn’t fast or believe in penances, and they didn’t worship images, statues, or idols.

“How many Sikhs are there in the area?” I asked.

“Well, let me see. About six or seven thousand?” Bengal replied. Sometimes he tilted his head at an angle when he spoke and put an index finger to his chin, as if he were going to recite some verse.

He took me to visit the temple, leading me into a simply furnished bedroom and instructing me to remove my shoes. I prayed that my socks would be clean, and the prayer was answered. Next, I had to wash my hands at a sink. I held them under the tap for a minute or so and dried them on a towel that dangled from a child’s pegboard, where the hooks for clothing were little plastic ducks.

“Ducks,” I said, amused that they’d been incorporated so easily into an ancient ritual.

Bengal seemed to get a kick out of this. His eyes burned and flashed. “Yes, ducks!” he repeated with a laugh. “Really! They
are
ducks!”

“Is the weather here in the valley like the weather in the Punjab?” I asked.

“Yes!” he cried. “Exactly the same!” And did the Sikhs grow the same crops here? “Yes, yes! Same everything!”

At the temple door, a carton spilled over with orange kerchiefs.

“Cover your head, please,” Bengal instructed, but he didn’t show me how to wear the kerchief, whether to tie it like a babushka or fashion it into a turban, which I couldn’t have done, anyway. So I just let it rest lightly on my head, rearranging it now and then to keep it from falling off. The kerchief smelled of incense.

Bengal pushed open the door, and we entered a large space that was like a high-school gym without the athletic gear. Tinsel and ornaments hung from the ceiling, but they had no special meaning. There were no chairs. During the prayer services, the congregation sat on the brown carpeting. Men and women were always kept apart. A throw rug was spread out before the altar, and a holy book was on it.

With a respectful gesture, Bengal directed my attention to the pictures of gurus on the walls. They came in neon colors, as if they’d been electrified from within, pierced by divine light. Their expressions were intimidating, and their features seemed exaggerated—ears, noses, and hunks of flesh. Bengal counted them off as we passed them.

“Number One, Number Two, et cetera,” he said.

I ran the gauntlet of gurus holding the orange kerchief on my head. I had done stranger things in California, many times.

For a moment, Bengal turned serious and impressed on me that the temple and all its facilities were available to
any
person, Sikh or not.
Any
person could come to Bogue Road and be housed and fed for seven days, as long as he or she refrained from tobacco and alcohol. That was the only point that Bengal felt compelled to stress—not a religious point, surely, or an item of dogma. He had none of the zealot’s urge to convert.

For emphasis, he said again, “
Any
person!”

The old men were still in the tearoom when we returned. I was curious about when the Sikh migration to Yuba City had begun, so
Bengal put the question to the eldest of the elders, who was about one hundred and twenty. The man’s skin was as dark as a filbert and some of his teeth had gone to heaven. He had accessorized his turban with a brown Harris tweed sport coat.

“Ah, ah, 1906,” he responded, though not with much conviction.

I was struck by how uninterested the old men were that a stranger was around. The way they sat and conversed, the subtle chatter and argument, the tea and the rice cakes—it was as if their sole mission in life were to perpetuate the texture and the traditions of a Punjab village in the new freedom of California, far from Hindu threats.

The old men slurped their tea. Not a head lifted as I put on my shoes. I considered staying on to talk some more, but Bengal seemed to be getting impatient, so I thanked him instead.

“I won’t keep you any longer,” I said.

Such bliss! Sublime! A transcendent grin! Bengal was glowing like one of the gurus.

T
HE SMALLEST MOUNTAIN RANGE IN ALL CREATION
, the Sutter Buttes are the most significant landmark around Marysville and Yuba City. Although they rise to jagged peaks of only about two thousand feet, they dominate the level fields and farms of the Sacramento Valley.

In a Maidu myth, the buttes were said to be the result of an accident, dropped by the Great Spirit in his haste to build the Coast Range of mountains as a bulwark against the stormy Pacific Ocean. The Maidu believed that the souls of the dead came back to dwell here, at
Histum Yani
, and they revered it as a holy place.

Itinerant painters used to travel through the valley to do portraits of homesteads, and farmers almost invariably insisted that the Sutter Buttes be incorporated into the scenery, even if the mountains were not technically anywhere nearby.

A sink of twenty thousand acres fell along the northern and western fringes of the buttes. Waterfowl had always wintered in its
permanent and seasonal marshes. The sludgy, poorly drained soil of Butte Sink made it worthless for farming, so the Department of Fish and Game managed it as an artificial wetland, filling it with well water and the water that ran off from the rice fields. That made for superior duck hunting, and the private hunting clubs of the valley were indebted. A proprietary membership at the most exclusive one could cost a million dollars.

I had hoped to hike around the Sutter Buttes, but a barbed-wire fence kept out people and cattle. I tried to imagine what the buttes would look like with a subdivision at their base. A proposal would soon go before the voters in Sutter County that would permit construction, if approved, of 625 houses on 1,172 acres. Cal-Ontario, the developer, had already started on a golf course. Its master plan called for a second course and also a resort hotel.

A
S I WAS LEAVING TOWN ON HIGHWAY 99
, I noticed a little farm stand by the road that looked so pure and unspoiled that I had to stop and restore my faith that all of rural California had not yet lost its flavor.

A woman was selling baskets of pretty strawberries that she had grown herself on a small plot of ground. For twenty years, she had been growing her special berries, she said, tending them with what I assumed to be a gardener’s love of the earth instead of a craven agribusiness person’s desire for profit, and with that belief in my heart I paid for a basket and buried my nose in the rich, up-floating scent of ripening fruit.

And the taste? Cardboard mixed with sawdust.

W
HAT A SWEET LITTLE TOWN
Colusa was, all red-brick storefronts and creaky wood-frame houses with porches, a farming town still intact. Everybody was riding out a storm on the afternoon I drove through, waiting for the mottled thunderheads in the big sky above to break apart and deliver their blessing. A strong breeze had the leaves of the oaks and the black walnut trees along River Road rattling like castanets. The road was an old route to the gold mines and ran clear to Mount Shasta.

Down Main Street, ever Main Street, came a farmer crawling home on his tractor, its wheels caked with mud from the fields. Nobody pushed to pass him or gave him the finger. Colusa had good manners. There was a good quiet in town, too, a peaceful feeling that seemed to obtain in farming communities that hadn’t yet lost their traditions.

Behind a supermarket, a Chinese man sat on an inverted blue-plastic, milk-carton box and blew smoke rings, perfect ovals, while the young woman beside him busied herself with her hair, rearranging her new permanent every time the wind undid a few strands. All the stools inside the Sportsman’s Club were occupied by
sports who could be counted on to peek out at the purplish sky and decide that another round was in order, yes, indeed.

At the center of Colusa was a courthouse square, the kind of formal public space that you saw in Frank Capra films, those crazy American movies in which justice was always triumphant. The courthouse had been built between 1860 and 1861 in a deliberately antebellum style, with a portico held up by columns. So many of the town’s early settlers had come from the southern states and had expressed such earnest, pro-Confederate sentiments during the Civil War that Colusa had earned a nickname, “the Little South.”

Just as the thunder started crackling, a mother raced by with her baby swaddled in a blanket. She looked like a running back headed for the end zone and trying hard not to fumble. I took shelter in a gazebo where an old man was sitting with his two granddaughters. The girls had on light cotton dresses and were at an age when they seemed to be composed entirely of elbows and knees.

The wind was really whipping. It snatched the old man’s Stetson from his head and threw it down, but he was on it in an instant and snatched it back.

“Funny how you can smell rain,” he said, and it was true. I
could
smell the rain, an odor like no other.

The first drops fell then, and the sky burst open and dumped a ton of rain all at once, fat, nickle-sized drops falling down in a tumble. The girls were shy and giggly and didn’t know for sure what came next, if the storm would end soon or whether it might never end and we would all be trapped in the gazebo forever.

The sensation was bracing. It made me remember thunderstorms out of the past, in other places, drenching downpours in the Tuscan countryside and incredible gulley washers banging on the tin roof of my Peace Corps house in the Nigerian bush.