Big Dreams (41 page)

It was Art’s father, Victor, who had come to the San Joaquin from Switzerland in 1916 and had started a farming dynasty. Victor Crettol fought in World War I, gained his citizenship, and worked as a custodian at Wasco High School, saving his money to buy land in small parcels. He would later sell much of the land to Wasco as the city expanded, earning a handsome profit. He died when he was eighty-three, but his wife, Marie, the boy’s grandmother, still lived in the adobe house that her husband had helped to build. Marie was ninety-nine.

All the Crettols were going to Switzerland that winter for a family reunion. They were from Saint Luc, a village not far from the Matterhorn.

“Good wine over there,” Louie said.

“Good wine and good food,” Jim agreed.

The Crettols alternated their crops from year to year, depending on the circumstances. Sometimes they grew sugar beets, “dehydrater” onions, garlic, and alfalfa, but they always grew almonds—California’s second-largest export crop—and cotton. They had about 1,200 acres planted to cotton now, the maximum that they could grow and still receive their price supports. Almost every farmer in the San Joaquin followed the same rule of thumb.

They led me out to look at some crops in a field nearby—the “desert place,” by family tradition. The soil did seem miserably dry, like something from the Mojave, but Jim toed it with a boot and showed me how, a few inches down, the dirt was dark and moist. In the valley, the sun dried up any surface water in seconds.

“Last year was a bad one for cotton,” Louie grumbled, with a farmer’s hurt at being let down by the earth.

The plants, he said, were slow to grow, and then three-and-a-half inches of rain fell from April to May, much more than usual. The rain knocked off the young leaves and trashed the crop.

This year’s crop was different, however, among the best that Louie could remember. He yanked up a young plant to demonstrate. It was about twenty inches tall and had a long taproot that resembled a parsnip. The geraniumlike leaves were full and green. They had blotches caused by thrips, a sucking insect, and by such manmade pollutants as smog, car exhausts, and smoke from oil rigs. Thrips was normal, though, and no cause for worry.

Louie separated the leaves to reveal the fragile beginning of a boll. By harvest time, it would be about the size of a large golf ball. He drew my attention to the ground, where the weeds were scarce. The year before, he said, weeds had dominated the field, and the cost of weeding, the only cotton-related task still done by hand in California fields, had leaped from forty to fifty-five dollars an acre.

The brothers sold their cotton through CALCOT, a grower-owned co-op that represented thousands of farmers in California and Arizona. CALCOT moved about 3 million bales annually. That kept Jim and Louie satisfied. They were more interested in the actual farming than they were in the sales angle, anyway. They didn’t agree with Bassett that growing cotton was mysterious or complicated.

“We’ve been riding tractors around here since we were about eight,” Jim said, nodding toward the fields. “You just know how to grow things.”

“You’re born with it,” Louie added.

We moved to the shade of the aluminum shed. It was their
machine shop. On a farm, something always needed fixing. I asked them if they were the only children in the family, and they burst out laughing.

“Hell, no!” cried Jim. “But we’re the only
boys!
”

Louie looked at Jim, and Jim burst out laughing again. Louie was getting ready to enumerate, and he clearly relished the task.

“We have five sisters, see,” he said. “There’s Mickey in Santa Barbara. She’s on her fourth husband. I like to say that she’s given us more brother-in-laws than all our other sisters combined.”

He paused to glance at Jim. This routine had been playing for a long time. “Jeanne’s next in line. She’s married and lives with an oil driller in Bakersfield. Shirley’s in Texas, where her husband—he’s Jim’s wife’s brother—leases geothermal rights for a Kuwaiti company. Carolyn lives around here and runs the farm office. She does our accounting. Claudette’s the baby. She lives in Bakersfield, too. Our mom is in Wasco. She and Art are divorced.”

Things had changed among farmers since the days of “Little House on the Prairie,” I thought. I couldn’t imagine Michael Landon getting a divorce, even if his crops failed and his wife put on eighty pounds and began savaging the dog.

“Hey, would you like some garlic to take with you?” Jim asked, so I said good-bye to Dick Bassett and got into Jim’s truck, which was outfitted with a lot of high-tech gear—a thermometer for tracking soil temperatures, a company radio, a calculator, and a cellular telephone.

We drove by an alfalfa field and stopped at a field where de-hydrator onions were being grown as a contract crop. They were a hybrid and had much less water in them than normal onions did. Spice manufacturers bought dehydrators to use in onion salt and flakes, chipping and shredding them.

Jim grabbed an onion stalk and jerked it up. He brushed off the dirt, peeled away the crinkly outer skin, cut the onion into rough halves with a jackknife, and sliced a thin piece for me to sample.

“That’ll put a heat on your tongue,” he warned with a smile,
and it did—a raw, dense, superoniony taste as sharp as a chile pepper.

Across from the onions were sugar beets, their cabbagey leaves wilted and yellowing. Jim repeated the tasting procedure, serving me a beet sliver on the tip of his knife.

“It’ll be sweet, then bitter,” he cautioned me again, proceeding to a garlic field and bending to harvest several bulbs. Fresh out of the ground, the bulbs had an odd look of surprise, as though they’d been disturbed at sleep. You could smell them fifty feet away.

Jim handed over the garlic. He told me to cure it for a couple of weeks in the basement of my house. He knew San Francisco a little from his trips there to lobby for lower water rates before the Public Utility Commission. The city was nice, he said, but he was always happy to get back to Wasco. The farm, his family, some dirt beneath his fingernails—that was California to Jim Crettol.

T
HE CRETTOLS HAD ABOUT TEN STEADY HANDS
, and Sam Cravens was among the most valued. He’d been with the family since 1952. He was a product of the Dust Bowl. An uncle of his had blown into Arvin during the 1930s, and when Cravens turned sixteen he had migrated to his uncle’s place and had picked squash for six months before deciding to retrace his steps. It wasn’t the hard work that had put him off. It was the girls.

“Damn California girls just didn’t suit me,” he explained to me one afternoon, while I was hanging around the machine shop. “So I had to go on home and get me an Oklahoma one.”

Cravens returned with his bride, settled in Wasco, and worked for several farmers in the area before hiring on with Art Crettol. He was an expert at holding a grudge, and he liked to point to the other outfits where he’d been and say, “I used to work for that son-of-a-bitch over there, and the son-of-a-bitch next to him, and the son-of-a-bitch over yonder.…

Sam Cravens did look like a farmer. What hair he had he kept hidden beneath a tractor cap. He wore overalls and workboots and
blew his nose in a bandanna. He served the Crettol boys as a general factotum and would-be majordomo. They had known him since they were little kids and sometimes deferred to him even when they thought he was wrong, out of respect and because of his temper.

Although Cravens couldn’t read or write with any proficiency, he had learned to sign his name over the years and was proud of the fact. His lack of a formal education had not affected his command of cuss words, though. He swore with brilliance and ingenuity. I listened in awe one day as he spent half an hour berating the Texas rod weeders attached to his cultivator. Made of spring steel, the rods were gentle enough to brush against mature cotton plants and yet tough enough to tear up the weeds between rows.

Cravens fiddled and fiddled with the rods, studying them from various angles, but they still refused to adjust to the proper height. He stomped around, kicked at the dust, and stooped a last time for a microscopic inspection of the problem, which continued to resist all solutions. Then he rose to his feet and let those goldarn, son-of-a-bitching, good-for-nothing Texas rod weeders have it.

You could usually find a few other people hanging around the machine shop with Cravens when there wasn’t much else to do—Jim and Louie and often Tommy Dunlap, a big man who handled the welding chores and cared for the various motors and engines, his T-shirts oil-spotted and seldom quite reaching to his jeans. Tommy’s brother, Jimmy, liked to hang around, too, and he was just as big and showed more flesh between the garments meant to clothe him. The Dunlaps had been with the Crettols for more than thirty years.

Then there was Preston McCurdy, a lanky, red-skinned fellow who did odd jobs and tended to some irrigation. He kept to the fringe while I was at the shop and seemed bashful and quiet. He spoke so seldom that I couldn’t understand exactly what he was up to, so I asked Louie about it once.

Louie shouted over the roar of Tommy Dunlap fixing something, “Hey, Preston! What is it you do for us?”

“Little as possible,” was Preston’s droll reply.

One morning, Randy Priest stopped by the shop. He had the solid build of a bronc rider, somebody you’d mess with only if your life depended on it. Randy was younger than the others, a valley bon vivant. He had a neat beard and lustrous cowboy boots. He worked as a salesman for Pioneer Equipment, but he was new to the job and seemed exasperated by its demands.

“Where’s your territory?” I asked him.

“Oh, hell!” he exclaimed, as though he were overwhelmed by the notion of such scale. “It’s every damn where. Yesterday, I was in Pixley. Today, I had to go all the way down to Buttonwillow.”

Priest and some of his pals were about to go across the border for a two-week vacation. They’d rented a motor home and had chipped in a hundred dollars apiece to stock it to the gills with Tecate beer.

“That’s the Budweiser of Mexico,” he informed us.

“You heard any good jokes lately, Randy?” Louie asked.

Priest looked sheepish and pawed at the ground with a boot. “Well, I have, but I don’t think I ought to tell them while B.J.’s around.”

B.J. was Jim’s boy, Brian. He had just finished seventh grade in Wasco and hadn’t figured out what to do with his summer yet, so he came to the machine shop to hang around, too. He was a wholesome, bright-eyed kid who ached to be more grown up and able to take a bigger bite out of the world.

Louie and Jim had four children between them, two each, but B.J. was the only male. He was aware of certain pressures, however indirect. He would inherit a farm someday, and a son’s place at the center of it, but did he have farming in his blood? He didn’t know. He couldn’t even test things by riding around on a tractor as his father and his uncle had done in their youth, because of safety issues and liability insurance. California farmers were drowning in paperwork and government regulations, Jim complained to me once.

B.J. was a bit car-crazy. Cars were potent symbols for him of
everywhere he wanted to go. His father used to own and drive a pair of speedballs, but they were stored in the machine shop now. One was a yellow 1970 Mustang Mach 1 made for burning up the roads. B.J. showed it to me one day, lifting aside a tarp as if to reveal a treasure.

“All right!” he said, whistling in admiration. “It’s
sooo
bad.”

The doors of the Mustang opened onto a scene of devastation. The bucket seats were eaten through and covered with mouse turds. There was a stink of rot and decay.

“Phew, rat piss!” B.J. fanned a hand in front of his nose as he slid into the driver’s seat. “This would still be a pretty good first car, though, wouldn’t it?”

The other car was a dragster that Jim and Louie had built from scrap. They had called themselves the Alpine Okies, playing on their Swiss ancestry, and had competed at drag races in Bakersfield and Hemet and at the sand drags in Salt Lake City, at tracks all across the West.

The dragster rested in neglect on a catwalk under the eaves of the shop. Again, B.J. had to lift away a tarp and broach a swirl of dust and odors. He touched a finger to the script,
Alpine Okies
, stenciled on a door.

“Well?” he asked eagerly, traveling in his mind at great speeds. “What do you think?”

T
HE UNITED FARM WORKERS OF AMERICA
were in their sixth year of a boycott against nonunion table grapes, so I decided to go to Delano, where the UFW had an office, for a look around. When Jim Crettol heard about this, he phoned a farmer friend there and arranged for me to attend a special banquet that was held twice a month at the Slavonian Hall.

“You’re a Yugoslav, you’ll enjoy it,” Jim said, patting me on the back.

I appreciated the gesture, but my feelings about the banquet were
mixed because Yugoslav grape growers in Delano and elsewhere in the San Joaquin had been the archenemies of Cesar Chavez, the UFW’s president during the great farm-labor strikes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the Armenians had done in Fresno, the Slavs had pooled their capital to buy land cheaply in the valley, often for as little as $125 an acre, starting right after the Depression. They were industrious and ambitous, plowing their money back into the ground and creating an iron-fisted fiefdom.

Delano was about fifteen miles north of Wasco on the Southern Pacific line. It had vineyards on its east side and cotton fields on the west.

The streets in town were crowded with retired farmworkers going about their daily chores. Some of them walked with the help of canes, while others had a peculiar, stiff-legged gait that came from eons of bending over crops. Their skin looked burnished and leathery. In their ranks, I could see each successive wave of immigrant labor that had washed over California to tend the farms.

A young Hispanic woman at the Delano Chamber of Commerce was puzzled when I inquired about the UFW and its office, asking after Cesar Chavez, who was still alive then, and his associate, Dolores Huerta.