Imperial (123 page)

—Coachella Valley Audubon Society, 1983

W
hat caused Imperial to go wrong?—Well, nothing’s wrong in Coachella!
The wildest dreams of men in the first 40 years of this century have been exceeded. The advent of Colorado River water reduced the demand on the underground basin making possible the development of the area above Point Happy into what has become America’s “Golf Capital.”
Those words were published in 1968.

At the beginning of the 1940s, Coachella was irrigating sixteen thousand acres. By the end of the sixties, over sixty-six thousand acres had come into production.
WATER IS HERE
, and so it is only natural that as we peer down upon this whirling world in the year 1975, Coachella Valley leads Riverside County in agricultural income, ringing in $74,657,000!
This 1973 aerial view, looking south from Bermuda Dunes Airport toward La Quinta, shows vividly how much open desert has disappeared in the past 27 years.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

Chapter 137

THE IMPERIAL IDEA (1950-2000)

He was fast becoming that most tragic yet often sublime sight, a man who had survived, not only his own time, but the ideas and ideals of it.

—Helen Hunt Jackson, 1884

“AND NOT SEE A NEIGHBOR’S LIGHT”

I happened to be down in Calexico for my thirtieth class reunion, said Alice Woodside, and I was really saddened and horrified. They’ve led hard lives. The signs of wear and tear were really there. You know, bad diets . . .

By 1975, in spite of her nine-passenger Imperial Airlines Queenaires and her yellow Air West F-27s, the Imperial Idea was similarly evincing a few wrinkles. By 1985, although a gazetteer could still say of the Imperial Valley:
Principal economic base: market gardens, cotton, sugar beets, alfalfa, gypsum quarries,
the Imperial Idea was going to hell.

Do you remember the Imperial Idea? My homestead is my castle, which I have greatly improved through my own efforts. I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life. Anytime I’m ready, not before, not after, I’ll sell out at a fancy price.

The Imperial Idea was going to hell, but I’ll go to hell in my own way. I’ll call that dirt-ridge over there Salvation Mountain, and I’ll paint it whatever color I want to. If you don’t like it, go paint your own dirt-ridge; just don’t run me off of mine. I pledge allegiance to the flag, because America is the land of the free, and I’m free.

But they’re starting to close in on me a trifle. I don’t like the fact that the Agricultural Commissioner can tell me to destroy my bees. I distrust his power to issue a
STOP SALE
order against me for whatever reason, and even to prosecute me if I try to get around him.

I’m not saying he has no reason to do as he does. The Oriental fruit fly is coming. The citrus black fly and the citrus white fly are on the way. The Mexican fruit fly’s out to get me. Peach mosaic and olive scale are already in the state. But don’t I have my own reasons to do what I do?

I especially dislike being told what I can and cannot grow on my own farm.

At a meeting in El Centro, Richard Campbell, who’s been for fourteen years the manager for William B. Hubbard in El Centro (“and they have some operations in Arizona”) complains about the fundamental concept of a marketing order that
to put it in after the man has planted and grown his crop, then you are taking something away from him.
He elaborates:
And when they can specify that, and the State of California has the authority to do that
[
and
]
they can enforce this by legal machinery which can put a man in jail if he doesn’t do it, then I say that you are jeopardizing his rights.
In utter Imperial style he declaims, and my heart sincerely goes out to him:
I believe that even if one single individual handler, grower, farmer, or what have you here in this business be saddled at this time with this marketing order that he would have a perfect right to ignore the provisions of it in this particular season and following.

What else defines Richard Campbell?
I was opposed to FDR when I was a kid and I am still opposed to him, even though he is not here any more.

This confession is significant, because FDR was America’s Cárdenas. He was a friend to the poor and an enemy to monopolists, whose hatred he explicitly welcomed. Were William B. Hubbard a sufficiently powerful company, Roosevelt would have been against them, and therefore against Richard Campbell. (Paul S. Taylor bitterly defines the Imperial Idea, beginning with the valley’s rescue from the Salton Sea accident and continuing with the All-American Canal:
Public assistance came to be highly valued, provided that it came free of public control.
) It may well be (which I possess no evidence to believe) that Richard Campbell pushes his Mexican field workers a trifle. In the 1960s and ’70s, two U.S. Supreme Court decisions would ensure that an employer’s right to control property could no longer keep agents of employee collective bargaining off the property. That laudable outcome certainly goes against the Imperial Idea, and in this context it is all too easy to imagine Richard Campbell uttering thunderations about his outraged rights. But what if (which I also possess no evidence to believe) Richard Campbell had been simply a struggling loner who refused to believe in handouts?
He made a success through his own efforts.

There is a moment in John Gardner’s elegiac
Nickel Mountain
(published 1973, set two decades earlier) when state troopers begin to question a fanatical Jehovah’s Witness who is suspected of having burned down his own home. The interrogation, like the novel itself, takes place in the diner owned by fat, slobbery, Christlike Henry Soames, because it is Henry who shelters the man; and here I should mention that the Nickel Mountain, which looms somewhere in the forests of the Catskills, is nearly as isolated as Imperial itself. What now happens engages us with two peculiarities. The first is that the questioning goes on right at Henry’s counter. Whenever I myself get detained by Homeland Security—even in Imperial County, I’m sad to say—they keep me in one of their nasty little rooms. The second odd thing is that when the troopers first show up,
Henry wouldn’t hear of their talking to Simon until the following day, after he’d rested a little and pulled himself together.
Now, Simon is not a pleasant man. He’s used violence against his children whenever they’ve “sinned.” But Henry intercedes for him with his usual charity, and when the officers try to resume the questioning, Henry’s friend George tells them to cut it out, and they do. Something tells me that life doesn’t play out like that anymore.

Another novel from the same period,
Vandenberg,
follows its eponymous protagonist through a fatal collision with authority. In those years, thrillers and science-fiction tales about Soviet-occupied America were as ubiquitous as cantaloupes in Imperial, not only because we feared the unknown Slavic other, and the possibility of nuclear extinction which our politics and theirs mutually symbolized, but also because the hive mentality which we projected, with some justification, onto Communism had much to do with what was happening in our own cities and towns. The frontier officially closed back in Wilber Clark’s day; and the Agricultural Commissioner had arrived. In theory he was one of us, appointed for us, and it is the genius of
Vandenberg
to keep Northside’s Soviet puppetmasters mostly between the lines. American functionaries do their work for them; ordinary citizens adjust. Unfortunately for Vandenberg, he exemplifies the Imperial Idea, which he describes as follows:
Heavy-handedly I went after one of the last options around: the privilege to make mistakes, to foul up one’s life-style beyond repair.
This is something that Leonard might have said (no doubt with sly humility) about Salvation Mountain. Henry Soames for his part chose to gorge himself to death, knowing quite well what he was doing. In his day, one’s friends, not to mention the state troopers, respected a man’s choices; and Vandenberg recalls:
As long as I made even a token show of following society’s rules, I was left alone . . .
Well, well; Henry dropped dead, and Richard Campbell lost the battle.
I think, very shortly, that somebody like me will be so out of tune, so out of place and out of grace, that death will be welcome.
When the inevitable occurs, and he gets sent to a reeducation camp, I glory in Vandenberg’s secret psychiatric report, which could have been written about me:
Superficially, he shows some indication of cooperation, though making little effort to conceal deep-rooted distrust and resentment.

The interrogator, a good American of the new type, hints that Vandenberg has failed to meet his social obligations.
With the ranch, we turned our backs on all that,
Vandenberg explains, and a host of Imperial characters come rushing into my mind.
People thought we were crazy for buying ninety acres of unimproved grazing land, a wrecked house, no water, no well, no electricity.
I remember sitting beside Kay Brockman Bishop on her back patio on the edge of Calexico, gazing across her ranch at the sunset as she told me: This girlfriend of mine that lives down on the Donlevy ranch now, she took off, her husband had to work until Wednesday night, so she took the kids and they camped in the desert. I never did much of that with my Dad. We usually went fishing for marlin. Anything in the ocean. My Dad used to take us down into the Gulf . . .—Vandenberg again:
My house is on a hill, and at night I could look for miles in any direction and not see a neighbor’s light.

A gaunt, bearded man stands in a pumpkin field. The pumpkins are as immense as boulders. They go on and on, pale against the turmoil of the field; then the eye starts to make out other human figures, first the old man in the white shirt and dark vest who stands with his arms at his sides, holding his hat; he’s between pumpkins; then the little boy in the grubby jacket who rests his tiny white hand on top of a pumpkin which comes up to his nose; I see two strapping men supporting a pumpkin in midair between them; from the look of it, it’s as heavy as a bag of cement; then there are the two pretty, darkhaired ladies, one in an apron, the other in bloomers; each one sits on a big pumpkin, with a little pumpkin in her lap; each one stares off into some diagonal distance; far behind all these people (who without exception are Caucasian-looking) is a fence, then a shed and a tiny farmhouse.—Where are we? The land’s too dark and moist for this reification of the Imperial Idea to have taken place in Imperial; the print bears no caption; the series (seven boxes at the California State Archives) is described simply thus:
Stock photographs, c. 1930-1970.
Once upon a time, the Imperial Idea was the California Idea; so, too, the American Dream; once upon a time, Emerson was right.

And then—what?

Nietzsche:
Nihilism . . . is the recognition of the long
waste
of strength, the agony of the “in vain” . . . being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had
deceived
oneself all too long. This meaning could have been . . . the gradual approximation of a state of human happiness; or even the development toward a state of universal annihilation—any goal at least constitutes some meaning,
In other words, we need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by. But it used to be up to me to make it better, and now it’s up to the string-pullers who write market orders.

Once upon a time, which is to say from the late 1950s until some indefinite year or decade, Richard Brogan lived an Imperial life without undue annoyance from any neighbor’s light.

I was bulletproof, he told me, and I wanted to go out and fight the world of crime. Yuma was forty years back in time. The Cucapah were still living in mud huts. Yuma hadn’t divided; now it’s two counties. My beat, there wasn’t a soul out there, from the Mexican border to a stone cabin. We were granted a lot of authority, a lot of leeway to just work a case to fruition. By the time I was twenty-eight years old, I had worked homicide, sex crimes, child abuse, and I’d worked alone, very limited supervision, with the District Attorney’s office to bring them to trial. The quickest and the saddest thing I ever had to deal with in law enforcement was a traffic accident in Yuma. A drunk driver hit a family. The parents got out and the kids burned up. The next day I was asked to come to deal with the autopsy room and I can remember seeing a couple of tiny burned hands and then I went home to my children. I was involved in a shooting here when two highway patrolmen were shot. I was the dispatcher. One was shot dead and the other kept wrestling the shooter for about two hours. He had a bullet in one lung. Shortly after that I was assaulted in jail and woke up in the hospital . . .

He told me these stories with what I took to be a deadpan pride in himself and his self-reliance in those times when
there wasn’t a soul out there
and a cop might have to wrestle the man who’d shot him in the lung for two hours. He had lived the Imperial idea, and survived, so it is no wonder that he did not like interference. His views on César Chávez, when we get to them, will be quite consistent with this ethos. FDR and Cárdenas both would have sympathized with Chávez. Richard Brogan and Richard Campbell took the other side, because
when they can specify that,
and by
that
I mean anything whatsoever that outside authority can specify, including a minimum wage,
and they can enforce this by legal machinery which can put a man in jail if he doesn’t do it, then I say that you are jeopardizing his rights.

Perhaps
they
are not quite as evil as Vandenberg’s would-be brainwashers. In 1965, the Imperial Valley receives $7,221,448 in federal agricultural subsidies, the number of recipients being two hundred and thirty-one. That’s more than thirty-one grand apiece. But after we make due deductions for natural human greed and hypocrisy, there may remain some grounds for empathy with exponents of the weakening Imperial Idea.