Big Dreams (65 page)

I was on my way to the Salton Sea. It was 108 degrees when I left Indio. My radio was tuned to the hits on K-PALM, and I could feel the aridity in my nostrils and looked at my forearms and saw how tan I’d become without even trying.

The Salton Sea was a freak, an accident. At the very end of the nineteenth century, George Chaffey, an engineer, had teamed with Charles Rockwood, who’d been with the railroads, to form the California Development Company and bring water from the Colorado River to the desert. The CDC was a real estate setup to sell irrigated land to farmers, in an area that the partners agreed to call Imperial Valley.

Chaffey designed a canal to bring the river water to the valley. The system didn’t deliver enough water in dry years, however, so Rockwood took it upon himself to cut a bypass, the Rockwood Cut, around the canal and its gate. When the Colorado flooded in 1905, it overflowed the revamped system and poured into an old lakebed, the Salton Sink, which was about 250 feet below sea level. For nearly two years, the river kept pouring into the sink, leaving a “sea” that had no outlet, except for some irrigation ditches.

The Salton Sea was about 45 miles long and some 83 feet deep. I could smell it before I could see it—the heat had incited a powerful stink of algae and murk. It was saltier than the Pacific Ocean because
Coachella and Imperial Valley farmers flushed the salts from their soil with irrigated water, and the water all drained downhill into the sea. So did high concentrations of selenium, a naturally occurring element that can cause birth defects and nesting failure among waterfowl and shorebirds.

At Salton Sea State Recreation Area, a ranger gave me a pass and some materials about the park. They advised anglers to dine judiciously on their catch, because the fish were likely to be tainted with selenium. So spectacular was the birding during migratory season, the materials said, that birders from abroad sometimes made a special pilgrimage.

Up close, the stink of the sea was hard to take, but some children were eagerly splashing in it, anyway. Their families had brought them down from Riverside for a day at the beach. The sea had a greenish tint and was swarming with plant life. Rangers kept it stocked with tilapia, who were algae eaters. Tilapia were rumored to be the fish that Jesus used to feed the multitudes.

You could also catch corbina and croaker in the sea. I watched two black couples scaling and gutting a mess of croaker that ran to the size of sunfish or crappies. The couples were from Riverside, too, and had driven down in a van. They came all the time, they said. They were fleshy and middle-aged. The oldest of the men seemed to be in a private funk out of which he rose to regard me with baleful, bloodshot eyes.

“They’re easy fish to catch,” he told me. “We only fished for about two hours.”

“Were you using bait?” I asked.

“Mmm-hmm. Anchovies.” He accented the second syllable, an
cho
vies.

They sipped from cans of Meister Bräu and went about their job in silence, moving their knives over the croaker to scrape away the scales and then digging in the tip to slit the fishes’ bellies and scoop out the entrails. They held the cleaned croaker under a tap and washed off the blood and the few clinging scales before stowing
them in a plastic bucket, maybe two dozen of them lying there in a silvery pile.

S
ATURDAY NIGHT ON THE ROAD
, twilight, and I was in Brawley, a cattle town in Imperial Valley about twenty miles from the border. In the Mexican quarter, men sat in folding chairs, on car hoods, and on steps drinking beer. The temperature had dropped into the nineties, and it was much cooler outside than in their little houses, where the blades of electric fans were turning.

Brawley was slow and stolid. The town looked flat-out poor. The cops were driving VW Bugs, and many buildings were boarded up. The marquee of the defunct local picture palace was blank but for two letters,
BR
, not yet fetched away by the desert wind.

The Planter’s Hotel was a big, old, rattly place that had been decorated and redecorated countless times. There were just three customers at the bar, Phillip and Robert, who were welders, and a cowboy from some ranch. The cowboy was talking about going to Mexico to get some fancy boots.

“I doubt I could walk in anything but boots,” he told us all, whether or not we wanted to know.

“Last night, I dreamed about an earthquake,” the bartender, Charlene, said as she brought him another beer.

The cowboy nodded. “You never can tell,” he said. “You get an earthquake in Brawley, the earth just rolls. It doesn’t shake the way it does in San Francisco. I saw a documentary about it on PBS. Plate tectonics.”

Phillip and Robert were corn-fed boys from Oklahoma. Phillip had played defensive tackle in high school and took up a lot of space. He and Robert, his assistant, were working at a geothermal plant by the Salton Sea. Phillip told me that he had no choice but to go where the work was, hauling his rig from job to job while his wife and his daughter waited for him on a forty-acre spread in Oklahoma.

“I’d drive home in a minute if my little girl needed me,” he
pledged. He came from country where daughters revered their daddies, and vice versa. “I’ve got a fuzzbuster in my four-wheeler, and I’d be there in a minute, all right.”

“I had a daughter, but she died.” The speaker was a new fellow who’d joined us uninvited, a skinny dude from Texas dressed in his best shirt and smelling of cologne. This part of California seemed to slide into the Southwest and into Mexico.

The skinny dude’s story was sad. His wife had left him and his daughter had died. He was down to his last twenty-four dollars. He had looked at a room in an even worse hotel across the way, but it was full of dust and roaches. The manager wouldn’t rent to him, anyhow, because he didn’t have any references.

“I said to him, ‘References? Do those cockroaches have references?’ ”

“Maybe you ought to just go on home,” Phillip suggested to him.

“Ain’t no work in Texas, bub,” the skinny dude informed us. “And I’d do about any old thing! I’d be a damn roustabout.”

“You could try up in Bakersfield,” I said, recalling the oil fields.

“No way in hell am I going to Bakersfield!” he yelled, as if I’d asked him to pull out his fingernails with a pair of pliers.

While Phillip was doing some further career counseling with him, I discussed literature with Robert. He wanted to write a book for children, but he couldn’t spell very well. He’d write a page in his notebook, and then he would read it over, find some misspellings, get angry, and rip it up.

“What’s your advice?” he asked.

There he was, a bad-spelling welder from Oklahoma trying to cope with Brawley by writing a book for children. “Live with your mistakes,” I advised him.

“Okay,” Robert said. “From now on, I will.”

I drank two beers and picked an opportune moment to leave. The bar was getting crowded and smoky, and a very large, bearded cowboy in a Stetson approached Phillip with a conniving smile on his face.

“Well, sir,” he said, rocking on his heels, “you look to be about the biggest guy in here tonight.”

Phillip allowed that it was true. “I do seem to be.”

“Guess you and me will be the ones fighting later on.”

“I guess so,” Phillip said, not budging an inch.

Robert said, “When I get home tonight, I’m going to write a page and let it be. I promise it. I really will.”

I congratulated him and made for the door of the Planter’s Hotel.

In Imperial Valley, baled hay was stacked in fields. There were sheep and cattle being finished, herded in from the open range and fattened up for the slaughter. Cantaloupes were ripening on the vine, almost bursting at the seams. I saw some cotton, some sugar beets, and many little vegetable plots where truck crops grew. The telephone wires were heavy with hawks.

El Centro had a population of more than thirty thousand and was the valley’s big town. It liked to bill itself as the “largest city below sea level in the Western Hemisphere.”

At a pharmacy, a clerk told me that Brawley did have some money, but it all belonged to white ranchers.

“They even have a country club up there,” he said, as if in El Centro a country club had the probability of a blizzard. More economic growth could be expected, he thought, when the new prison was finished in Calipatria, fifteen miles to the north.

I drove on to Calexico on the All American Canal. Arizona was about sixty miles to the east, toward some sandy hills and the Cargo Muchacho Mountains.

At the Mexican border, INS agents were supervising the comings and goings of people to and from Mexicali. On a Sunday afternoon, thousands were passing through turnstiles and gates, carrying shopping bags and straw baskets. They were almost all Hispanic and did not appear to be under any close scrutiny.

I walked through a gate into Mexico. The transition was simple
and undramatic. The border seemed meaningless. Mexicali had some chain stores such as Leeds, National, and Pay Less, some cantinas, a couple of hotels, and many Chinese restaurants. There was life in the noisy streets, a heartening press of flesh that was good to see after witnessing all the main streets in California rolled up and packed away, from Smith River to Brawley.

Mexicali also had 131
maquilas
, the assembly plants where Mexican workers labored for a very low hourly wage putting together everything from computers to elevator parts for U.S. and foreign corporations, doing the work that Californians used to do.

T
HAT EVENING
, I camped in the Anza-Borrego Desert and woke around midnight to a whipping wind and a sky cracking with electricity. I heard thunder and saw streaks of lightning, but no rain ever fell. The lightning flashed like a strobe and threw bolts into the desert and illuminated the spiny, crippled arms of ocotillos. The wind blew hard through the tent to bring scatterings of sand.

I crawled back into my sleeping bag and listened to the thunder. I could hear creatures moving about in the dark making sounds. It was as if the storm had roused every living thing and had started them all skittering across the sandy earth. I lay there unable to sleep, alone and listening to the noises and feeling the immensity of the desert all around me until I finally nodded off toward dawn and woke later to a clear sky and sheep grazing on distant hills.

F
ROM EL CENTRO
I traveled east through Seeley, Dixieland, and Plaster City, where gypsum was mined and off-road vehicles were tearing up the ground. The landscape turned extraordinary again near Jacumba on the border with huge boulders strewn about for miles, a poetry of plate tectonics. The vegetation was various and had an internal sense of order, as composed in its way as a terrarium.

Farther on, I came to the Desert Tower, a work of folk art built
of rock and commanding a view to the north of Anza-Borrego and the Coyote Peaks. An old rockhound sat at a table covered with polished gems and minerals. He was talking to a tourist couple from Washington State.

“We’re from Seattle,” the woman was saying. “We thought we’d come down here because everybody from California’s going up there.”

Walking around the tower, I saw two scorpions locked in an arachnoidal embrace.

Foul brown air drifted up from the
maquilas
in the town of Tecate, at the Tecate Divide on Interstate 8. Between six and nine new assembly plants opened in Tecate every month. The workers were making such things as patio furniture, wine racks, kitchen cabinets, and rubber Halloween masks in the image of Freddy Kreuger.

Then I was climbing into the Cleveland National Forest past Live Oak Springs, Pine Valley, and many Indian reservations—Manzanita, La Posta, and Capitan Grande.

El Cajon marked my return to civilization. Here again was the panoply of strip malls and franchises, the jumble of immigrant communities—Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean—and the card parlors, check-cashing facilities, and adult bookstores. El Cajon was the gateway to San Diego, the last big city in California and also the last paradise before Mexico.

I
N HIS CELEBRATED BOOK
,
California for Health, Wealth and Residence
, (1872), Charles Nordhoff told of a visit to southern California during which he encountered lovely mountain scenery and bright sunshine wherever he went. The sublimity of the climate peaked in San Diego, he said, where the sun shone so constantly that people took it for granted.

Unaccustomed to such splendor, Nordhoff had once made the mistake of remarking on the perfect weather to a San Diegan.

“It’s a fine day,” he’d said, innocently enough.

The man had looked at him aghast and had replied, “Of course, it’s a fine day. Why not? Every day is a fine day here!”

More than a century later, the editors of
Twin Plant News
, a trade journal that chronicled the
maquiladora
industry in California, Texas, and Mexico, where the legal working age is fourteen, conveyed a similar picture of San Diego to its readers:

San Diego, the last paradise. Realtors had built it, too, during the boom of the 1880s, selling off the land so fast that the city’s population had jumped from about 5,000 in 1884 to nearly 32,000 in 1888. Speculators bought on credit and turned their holdings around for a profit in less than twenty-four hours. It could cost you up to $500 just to stand in line to bid for a lot.

The real estate fever hit its highest pitch with the marketing of Hotel del Coronado, in 1888. The owners advertised that the grounds were free of malaria and hay fever, and that languor was absent from the air. Guests would never have to contend with thunder, cyclones, or mad dogs, either. A cage full of monkeys appeased visiting kids, who also got to ride across the lawn on the backs of giant sea turtles.