Imperial (23 page)

Chapter 5

THE WIDEMOUTHED PIPE (2002)

We attribute motives, agency, intention, and experiences to one another all the time. The investigation of who attributes what to whom, when, why and how is a science in itself.

—R. D. Laing, Self and Others (1969)

B
ut Imperial is also a Mexican girl on flat white sand, her lovely legs silhouetted, her ankles together, who stands on her high heels, wearing a knee-length white flower-dress, and she is handing something to the first men in a rigid line, with the stadium behind her, her profiled face gentle and serious. In the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali they could not tell me who she was. She might have been older than the Salton Sea! I’d swear she was rich. Imperial is a place I’ll never know, a place of other souls than mine; and how can anyone know otherness?—Through study, perhaps; through history.—If I never came to know her, if I thought this landscape bereft of any feelings, which is to say just itself, beautiful and indifferent, then I would have failed. Always those wide, wide, empty streets! Upon Imperial’s blankness, which might as well be a light table, it becomes all too easy to project myself, which is a way of discovering nothing. I sincerely wanted to do better and be better. In the brown fields between Mexicali and San Luis Río Colorado, pure water spews from a widemouthed pipe and falls three feet into a ditch. Imperial is water; it flows, and flows away. If I lack the strength to dig for it, I said to myself, may I nonetheless seek the water of life which comes glistening from the ground and then returns to earth! Let me seek something grander than myself, something that I have not known; because what I do know is nothing, which is to say myself. (Thoreau:
I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well.
) Who was she? Who was Imperial then and now? I closed their album and went outside, into the hot, wide, empty streets.

WARNING OF IMPENDING ARIDITY

This book represents my attempt to become a better-informed citizen of North America. Our “American dream” is founded on the notion of the self-sufficient homestead. The “Mexican dream” may be a trifle different, but requires its kindred material basis. Understanding how those two hopes played out over time required me to cultivate statistical parables about farm size, waterscapes, lettuce prices, et cetera. I have harvested them (doubtless bruising overripe numbers on the way), and now present them to you. Some may be too desiccated for your taste. If you skip the chapters devoted to them, you will finish the book sooner, and never suspect the existence of my arithmetical errors. As for you devotees of Dismal Science, I hope you will be awestruck by my sincerity about Mexicali Valley cotton prices.

Chapter 6

THEN AND NOW (1844-2002)

Standing today by the grave of that infant civilization which blossomed, amidst such hardships, upon a desert, we would fain lift the veil and see the unthought-of transformation which fifty years will bring.

—Judge F. C. Farr, 1918

I
n January 1903, two months before Mexicali’s official foundation date (by 1904 there were a dozen-odd adobe buildings in that city; they’d all get washed away two years hence), the
Imperial Press and Farmer
published a special holiday edition to celebrate the holy “ministry of capital” in prose as optimistic, if not quite as purple, as Harold Bell Wright’s. The reclamation of Imperial is the largest irrigation enterprise in the nation! Imperial will be more fertile than the Nile Delta!
My experience this season,
writes Mr. V. Gant,
demonstrates the superiority of this land for producing feed crop, over any I have ever seen, either in California or Arizona.
How do such hopes and certainties stack up after a century? Imperial then and Imperial now cannot add up to Imperial, which is, we must never forget, infinite and hence unknowable, but to the extent that Imperial can stand in for something more limited (say, “America” and “Mexico”), the comparison might illuminate something. This land is stripes now, bands of white sand, road, then green-grown canal ditch, horizon and border wall, tree-line and power wire, furrow, everything harshly lit or shadowed, with the black silhouettes of hay bales reigning. Imperial is sheep, palm trees, flatness, then migrant workers clustered around their trucks in the leafy-lobed fields as if they were bees imparting sustenance to their hive. This is probably what Mr. Gant and his neighbors wanted, what they worked for. Their watchwords: own, use, delineate.

Imperial differs from their projections, to be sure. Where have the splendid duck-lakes of the New River gone? Where in particular is Blue Lake, and the brand-new township of Silsbee which abuts it?—Washed out by the flood which made the Salton Sea. Silsbee went to Seeley.—Whatever happened to Flowingwell? Where’s Iris, where the Southern Pacific Railroad line reascends to sea level?—Vanished, just like those eight Mutual Water Companies whose stockholders were the owners of the irrigated farmlands.—For that matter, where did the perfect climate go? A. W. Patten, “a prominent citizen of Imperial,”
reports that the weather is not uncomfortable in the New River section. The men, he said, work through the middle of the day without experiencing any discomfort. They have the opportunity of laying off during the warmest part of the day, but prefer to work right on through.
That might have been true, if they were paid by the hour.

I stand here on the Calexico side of the border, where Imperial is blonde and flat, emerald and flat, beautiful and fresh and eternally approaching harvest; all day a hot wind as if of molten gold pours down upon the yellowish-green sand, blowing north from Mexico, whose borderline of low buildings and trees runs on and on past the beginnings of the dark emerald fields, curving around the edge of the world under the squatness of Signal Mountain; that wind blasted Imperial yesterday as it will tomorow. Today’s temperature is a mere one hundred and sixteen degrees, and A. W. Patten remains unrefuted; it is really not so bad; I can walk around for several hours with seventy pounds of photographic equipment on my shoulder, the sweat pattering down from my forehead onto the black film holders; it is, as the
Imperial Press and Farmer
continually reminds us, a dry heat; as long as I drink water I’m fine. But where are all my fellow climate-enthusiasts? (Thanks to air-conditioning, the Imperial Valley uses more electricity per capita than any other locality in the United States.)—Oh, here they are; see the lines of Mexican workers in the fields; as Officer Dan Murray remarked, they do the work Americans won’t do. (
Another three Hondos just gave themselves up,
says the radio. The Border Patrolman points out Northside’s latest wound: A section of picket fence only half a month old is already tunneled under, gapingly.
A group over the Alamitos on the west side,
warns the radio.) Aren’t A. W. Patten’s descendants working that land? If they’re not, why not? Did the Ministry of Capital speak to them in tongues of fire, so that they learned that it was better, more profitable, to pay a minimum wage to the brownskinned ones while they pushed pencils and clickety-clacked at computer projections of harvest?

Going west, toward the the dusty-white pipes, rocket-shapes, funnels and boxcars of Plaster City, I find myself back in white, white sand, evidently unreclaimable by Mr. Gant and his colleagues despite its green tufts of vegetation, and closer to the greyish-blue translucent arrowpoints of mountains and the Lazy Lizard Saloon in Ocotillo, near which more thirst-killed illegal Mexicans will soon be found, including a couple of adolescent girls; Imperial asserts itself in bewildering dun-colored bluffs of crumbling earth, seasoned with lumps of gypsum (fragile shards of white mineral windowpane on tranlucent bone; it crumbles in the hands); a hot wind shakes the sparse golden weeds and nothing else moves because everything is rock and dirt. (Imperial County, by the way, is not as spectacular as the pastel-colored badlands of Anza-Borrego to the west with their mazes of washes and secret oases.) It was around here that back in 1903 they were finding fourteen-inch oyster shells
(some of the finest specimens will be presented to the Chamber of Commerce).
But if he ever paced these yellowish humps of wrinkled crumbly dirt, Mr. Gant would have pronounced the verdict: Worthless, at least until we can get water here. And if we can’t, then it’s not Imperial.

Going east, the shines and shimmers of the East Highline Canal bid me farewell, after which Imperial gets sandier and scrubbier and more characterized by white salt stains; then it’s all sand, sometimes yellowish, sometimes white, ornamented on the right by the All-American Canal’s hydro plants; and thanks to that sand there are diamond-shaped hazard signs which reassure the lovelorn: SOFT SHOULDER. Yuma lies ahead. This zone also must be excluded from Mr. Gant’s Imperial.

It is 1900. Blue Lake already boasts ten registered voters; the town of Imperial is inhabited; Silsbee, Heber, Calexico
³³
and Brawley have just been staked out. J. B. Hoffman, Imperial’s first justice of the peace, has just
invented the open air jail, consisting of a chain between two mesquite trees.
Imperial is a fallow virgin ready for the sowing. What makes her so?
Potash, lime, magnesia, sulphuric and a trifle of phosphoric acids.
I am quoting from the freshly expanded and vindicated edition of William E. Smythe’s
The Conquest of Arid America.
In our eastern states, those “valuable elements” were dissolved in “the rains of centuries” and carried off to the sea.
On the other hand, these elements have been accumulating in the arid soil of the West during the same centuries. They lie there now like an inexhaustible bank account on which the plant-life of the future may draw at will without danger of protest.
Imperial equals profit to come, national assertion, universal improvement at a dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, plus a bit over eleven dollars more for water, supplied at bargain rates by the Imperial Land Company. And why the Imperial Land Company? Because
it took the Government a half century to wake up . . . The Government was too slow. It represented the people, and the people required too much time for educational purposes, and before the people got ready to act through their representatives, private enterprise . . . commenced the great work of illustrating the motto of the California Water and Forest Association, that “Moisture Means Millions.”—
Or, as a grizzled pioneer puts it in his memoirs,
Throughout this history the almost pitiful dependence of the settlers on outside capital will be noted.

Now let the canal be undertaken; let the story begin. (Before water there was no story; that is what Mr. Gant might say. So:)

Once upon a time, which is to say on Saturday, June 22, 1901, the
Imperial Press
and Farmer,
in vast dark letters which march vertically down the front page, partially occluding the boxed and centered notice,
WATER IN THE TOWN OF IMPERIAL
: Tuesday, May 15, 1901, the headgates of the Imperial canal were opened, proclaims:

WATER IS HERE

Next week’s headline reads:
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
.

AN ESSAY ON THE INFINITE

The story of any life is the story of expectations fulfilled or disappointed, of “progress” from birth to death, projects accomplished or not (marry this person, farm this land, write this book), above all, of capital being drunk dry. Futurity spends itself; that’s why Europe’s long perished engravers so often depicted time as a hooded skeleton clutching an hourglass. Yes, the Colorado River can burst through the cut, sweep away Mexicali, and scour a deep gorge for the Río Nuevo to speed through, but someday that gorge will go dry; in fact it already has; the Río Nuevo’s foul black spew is dead and buried. Someday the United States of America must come to an end. Someday the sun will be no more. Practically speaking, then, nothing we can touch is infinite, but that’s only practically speaking; why not limit our awarenesses, as do meditators when they fill themselves with a single mystic syllable? Sooner or later, the woman I love will leave me, thanks to either her own choice or death. I know this, but it probably won’t happen today. Today, therefore, remains infinite, so I shelter myself within it. And I submit to you that this faith in infinitude, which is simultaneously naive, noble and self-serving, remains the emblem of American character.

(What is Mexican character? I’ll get to that, but it will take me several border crosssings.)

In an essay appropriately entitled “The Young American,” Emerson writes (1844):
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.
In other words, the days and lands of my life remain literally innumerable. These words which could have been coined by the Imperial Land Company.—“Imperial!” We patronize the monarchy against which we successfully rebelled; we patronize England as a busy man does his father gone senile; and yet, in the end, what word could be more American than “Imperial”? Half a century after Emerson’s hymn to possession, a successful senatorial candidate advises us:
There are so many things to be done—canals to be dug, railways to be laid, forests to be felled, cities to be built, unviolated fields to be tilled, priceless markets to be won, ships to be launched, peoples to be saved, civilization to be proclaimed, and the flag of liberty flung to the eager air of every sea.
We peeled off half of Mexico; now we’re off to Spanish Cuba! Our soon-to-be Senator elects
us
the chosen people; he dreams aloud of “commercial empire.” In 1904 a mother in the town of Imperial names her newborn daughter Imperial Hazel Deed. In 1930 the author of an article entitled “Niland’s Future” advises:
Give Salton Sea a new name. Call it Lake Imperial. The psychology of a name can often work wonders
. And in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the most self-confident American President ever proclaims civilization in Iraq and Afghanistan—mission accomplished! Meanwhile, Emerson envisions the arising on American soil of public gardens as lovely as the Villa Borghese in Rome. But he’s a practical dreamer, a farmer; he will not object if those gardens are edible.
The vast majority of the people of this country live by the land,
he says,
and carry its quality in their manners and opinions.
How he would have loved Imperial’s honeycolored hay bales, her alfalfa fields like green skies! Imperial is America; Imperial goes beyond all four horizons. Our holdings may not be quite infinite; indeed, Emerson mentions the railroad, which has already shrunk England by two-thirds; and steam power, whose magic has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait; still,
we have twenty degrees of latitude in which to choose a seat.
Someday, this book called
Imperial
will be completed, the last township-lot purchased, the last barrel of oil burned up in America or China or who knows where, my body stricken down into its grave; but that’s a long way off, not this minute, and Emerson, who just as Koestler called Russia
the country of the revolution
calls Northside
the country of the Future,
sees futurity as an American will:
How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise.