Imperial (180 page)

—Rob Leicester Wagner, 2004

D
uring the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the Inland Empire’s population is projected to increase more than that of forty-five other states!

I look at an orange box label from the W. R. Strong Company (Riverside, California), and see green groves, people, a horse, Wisconsin-like fields, low snowy mountains and high blue mountains. Although it might never have been like this, I wish that it were. Decades after Riverside’s Chinatown had died, archaeologists found red, black and white eyeball-like gambling beads; and a shard or two of an opium pipe whose bowl had been fashioned to resemble a crab. Which of these two survivals is now more exotic?

I look at the label from Old Baldy Brand (California Citrus Union), and find myself returned to the striped gazebo on Euclid Avenue in Upland, with an American flag flying over the orangescaped boulevard, lovely houses on either side and a snowy peak on the horizon.

God bless America, my neighbors say; but, America, where are you? Have you gone west on the street called Mission Inn, past the bell-like streetlamps with their so-called Indian crosses?

Imperial is America. So is the Inland Empire. Once upon a time, the Inland Empire was or pretended to be Old Baldy Brand.

In search of, let’s say, Old Baldy, I swim down the highway, following Wilber Clark’s hypothetical drive, and presently arrive at the

RIVERSIDE CITY LIMITS
NEXT 12 EXITS

If names can be nut-trees, I’m now in an orchard at Almond and Eleventh; and here comes Chestnut, with the desert’s rubbly hills abruptly tamed at the beginning of this street shaded by cool high palms and other trees. Here drowse houses with hammocks and porches, homes where I dream I would have loved to live, and for scenery the occasional American flag.
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.
Riverside begins here. Or, if you like, here it ends, then goes up into grass and dirt which becomes sand and rock.

Once upon a time, in 1906, the stifling, narrow funeral parlor on Main Street offered folding chairs, a piano, two American flags at perfect diagonals, a black cushion or pall embroidered with a white swastika, a chandelier resembling twin trumpets, and on the wallpapered walls, framed pictures that in the badly printed photograph looked faded even then; and I could hardly bear the dreariness, which was to me and my conception of Imperial what the muddy fly-specked provincial towns of Russia must have been to Gogol; and I thanked the omniscient narrator that I had not been condemned to die in Riverside after having lived all my life there.

Never mind; there’s space enough to breathe in now!
³⁴⁹
What the Inland Empire has that the coastal counties don’t . . . is vast amounts of available land for future growth
—twenty-eight thousand square miles!—
and plenty of affordable real estate for your home and business.
My citrus dreams survive weakly here; on the lawns of the old houses with their fences and porches, everything well-painted wood—look, an orange tree!

A house with Japanese fans in the windows, another with a forest of planters, some frat boys chugalugging beer in the lawn, why can’t these be metonyms for the Inland Empire? So green and good is Riverside, so nice and humid.

If you drive through Riverside in the correct direction, you’ll come first to Lemon, then to Lime Street; and the long humid light of late afternoon will get distilled purer than Imperial’s, and cooler and cleaner. There will be a bitter smell, a bitter clean smell of plants, and as a train whistles, the palm fronds will slowly move in the almost cloudless sky.

From Mount Rubidoux, you can now see freeways and mountains in the evening light and hear the cars go by beneath you like wind, the breath of golden California.

Looking down on Riverside, you see an almost jungle-lush zone of trees, almost bluish-green in richness, very sharply demarcated by the square corners of intersecting roads which set them off from the more olive-colored desert scrub and from the railroad tracks and the steep mounds of desert which burst out of the greener lowlands like kinks of eviscerated bowel. Especially in the evening light, the palm trees appear more tropical than they really are; and Riverside’s streets are narrow ribbons of bluish-greenish-grey which vanish into an almost-imaginary jungle of such delicious potency that it obscures many of the old buildings, only a few new Los Angeles-style skyscrapers breaking through this act of imagination that ends itself both subtly and gently in the beginnings of Imperial which, resolutely defying their own reality, tone their greys, reds, oranges and ochers into a loving orange veil about the jungle which could almost be the sunset sky.

On a smogless evening, Riverside still almost smells of oranges.

Chapter 197

COACHELLA (2003-2004)

In the Coachella Valley you can roll along the San Andreas Fault on a chuck wagon, lope through a date farm on a camel, soar above 100 golf courses in a motorless sailplane, float over the desert at sunrise in a hot-air balloon . . .

—Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine, 2004

T
hey’re coming in here so fast that they’re shedding a lot of the ranches out, said Carolyn Cooke, who had lived in the Coachella Valley for almost exactly half a century. Before there were houses here where I live, it was a grapefruit ranch.

Does the development worry you?

Well, I think it’s inevitable. Of course we can’t do a thing to stop it. I think there’s been so much development without any planning. A beautiful valley has changed to the point where I’m not sentimental about it.

There was no traffic light in the whole valley when I was first here, she went on after a moment. And coming home from the Chinese restaurant in Palm Desert, you could see every star and every phase of the moonlight, and I was in my seventh heaven. And when we went out of the valley to Los Angeles; and coming back, coming over the pass, there’s a pass near Whitewater when you look into the valley, and my eyes would fill with tears and I would get goosebumps and I was so happy that this valley was my home. Now there are acres of houses where there used to be acres of flowers. It’s going to be like one of those places where you can’t move for traffic.

When and where did the heavy development start?

Well, Indian Wells, the early developers were ranchers now that I think about it. There were citrus ranches and date gardens over there. And then there were hotels, and then there’s the tennis garden. In ’57 there was hardly anything there. There was an artist there on the south side of Highway 111. I forget his name. And then there was Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who had a hotel that they used to frequent when we were there, and we loved it although we never used to actually
see
Lucille Ball.

The Coachella Valley was green,
she said. The areas down around Thermal, Mecca, Coachella were all ranches and so you saw a variety of greens. Right here in Indio, when we bought this house there was an orange grove on one side of us, and then there was a date garden. Well, now they’re both gone. It’s all houses. I can’t see my mountains anymore. All the animals and the birds are gone.

Was there any specific time when you could say that things had gone far enough?

Miles Avenue when we first came was beautiful to drive on; it was just a double-lane road and you could see these vistas of dunes and wildflowers and mountains. I think the first development was a failure at the corner of Miles at Washington; it was about 1990 maybe when that came in, and then there was another built in next to it and then they jumped a couple of subdivisions in and now Miles Avenue has become a four-way throughway and it’s no longer fun to drive.

We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
I can’t see my mountains anymore, but that’s what one should expect when
WATER IS HERE
. In the decade since I began this book, Indio and Palm Springs have finally eaten up the space between, thereby perfecting Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Desert Hot Springs, La Quinta, Cathedral City . . .

Yes, what about Cathedral City? Cathedral City is actually a great choice with which to end this list, because as
The Coachella Valley’s #1 Real Estate Magazine
informs me:
Cathedral City . . . What a Great Choice!

I had a call girl from Cathedral City once. She came all the way down to my motel in Indio, which was awfully nice of her. It took her awhile because she got stuck in traffic.
³⁵⁰
Once a sleepy community, Cathedral City was subdivided in the 1950s and has experienced tremendous growth over the past 10 years . . .
It’s all houses.
What a Great Choice!

The Coachella Valley was green.
Well, wasn’t it still green? Can’t you see the vineyards like living factories on the east side of Mecca, everything squared up? In spite of or because of César Chávez, table grapes continued to be the valley’s primary cash crop. On Avenue 52, right at sea level, darkskinned men stooped over green stripes in the tan dirt, and then there was a sign:
COMING SOON!

Captioned
North Shore Ranch,
a flat building half-hides itself amidst the shrubs of the flat desert. In the foreground are two sheds which might actually be crates. There is little sense of scale.
Bordered by the All American Canal. See the night lights on Salton Sea on approx. 98 ac., with water and electricity, private but accessible. Some buildings and garages. Only $299,000.
That’s an Imperial-style advertisement; that’s old style, with its cheapness, dreariness, and gigantic parcel size—why, it’s as large as one of those mythical American family farms!

Meanwhile, what sort of property would Coachella advertise? Something
subdivided, with tremendous growth.
Southwest Airlines Spirit loves Coachella for
the genuinely casual vibe, the dry desert heat, that effortless quiet, and those intense brown mountains hulking over this little city and its neighboring leisure communities with those names—La Quinta, Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage—that all sounded like even better reasons to retire at 35 and buy some
golf
clubs.
Let’s omit agriculture, poverty, migrant workers’ suffering, water worries.
What a Great Choice!

Walking down one of the long cracked-earth avenues between date palm trees in Coachella, I once saw the tracks of a bobcat. The tall furry columns of palm trees are still there; in fact, somebody’s planting new palm groves, and we can often spy blue sky and the Chocolate Mountains through them, blue-red on the far side of the Salton Sea.

Chapter 198

INDIO (2003-2004)

A narrative, in addition to descendancy charts and family group sheets, can be a good way to share stories, letters and documents, or to set the family in the society in which it lived.

—Emily Ann Croom, 2001

A
man is stroking a woman’s pretty brown foot on Bliss Avenue.

In the real estate guide, a color photo of a little ranch-style homestead with boarded-up windows advises us to cash in on someone’s misfortune:
HUD Repo in Indio.
Four bedrooms, two baths, air-conditioning!
Very central location, mature trees, excellent terms. This one won’t last!

Chapter 199

DUROVILLE (2003-2006)

. . . it’s hard to imagine a situation any worse for migrant workers than the dangerous slum growing on an Indian reservation on the northern shore of the Salton Sea.

—San Diego Union-Tribune, 2003

W
hen I lay down negative IV-CS-DUR-03-01 upon the light table, what I always notice first is the usual Imperial broad grey emptiness; the lower half of the image consists of pavement alone, stubbled like my chin; the twin passing-lines, yellow or white in “reality,” here represent themselves as paler demarcations whose edges bleed into the surrounding asphalt more or less as the pastel bandings of Laguna Salada merge into one another when I gaze down at them from Signal Mountain or Guadalupe Canyon; then the highway continues up past the midpoint of my negative, shadow-hollowed here and there, as if with myriad arm-pits; I don’t remember seeing these at all when I squinted into the ground glass of my view camera; they were probably even shallower than the wind-ridges which form on hardpacked snow in the Arctic. So much for the lower zone of this multi-form Rothkoscape. The upper zone is a heavier, more even grey (which is to say that the positive would be pale white), with the white antitheses of power wires spanning it in dips. Then in the middle, below the lighter greynesses of the Chocolate Mountains, which must really be considered a part of the sky-zone, we find Duroville itself, which like sky and pavement runs edge to edge and which makes up no more than twenty percent of the composition. Unlike negative IV-CS-DUR- 03-02, negative IV-CS-DUR-03-01 actually records direct evidence of life; for on that hot June Sunday afternoon vehicles sped in and out of Duroville, perhaps one every minute or two, and so I waited to click the shutter until somebody pulled in; accordingly, here’s a car, whose motion-blurred license plate I can still read through the loupe; and through the rear window I can see two white anti-silhouettes, the lefthand one being the driver in his sombrero; he turns slightly toward the man in the baseball cap, who, freed by his passenger status from any responsibility for watching the road, faces almost sideways, probably speaking into the driver’s ear as they pass the fence topped by the hand-lettered sign for Frank’s Auto Sales, which offers the world a telephone number in Thermal. Just left of that entrance road stands a speed limit sign: five miles per hour, please, as explained by the graphic of a child. That’s quite official-looking. Then, farther leftward, and higher than Frank’s sign, I see, on a rectangular field adorned, like many motel signs in Indio, with palm trees, this welcome: