Imperial (24 page)

Speaking of the gardens of Paradise, whose most memorable crop may well be Emersonians, dark-bearded, thinning-haired Mr. Smythe now stares out at us with melancholy tenderness from the frontispiece of his
Conquest of Arid America.
I’ve already quoted his simile of the desert as an inexhaustible bank account of nutrients. But this doesn’t do the dreamy man justice. He’s an opportunist only in the missionary sense; he too subscribes with touching literalness to the Ministry of Capital. His final chapter, fittingly entitled “Man’s Partnership with God,” informs us that
irrigation . . . is a religious rite. Such a prayer for rain is intelligent, scientific, worthy of man’s divinity. And it is answered.
In the gloomy uneasiness of early-twenty-first-century America, these words seem questionable, to say the least. But Smythe has proved his case with enlightened practicality: The expense of such a Brobdingnagian apparatus of levees, sluices and dams as our new settlements require will defeat even a Stanford or a Huntington.
All this lay beyond the reach of the individual. Thus it was found that the association and organization of men were the price of life and prosperity in the arid West. The alternative was starvation.
So it is that Arid America, a huge domain which happens to include Imperial, will be settled not by speculators and their pawns but by ordinary farming families whose laborious canal-digging requires them to constitute themselves upon small allotments close together. The large farms of Massachusetts, the grand plantations of the South, with their attendant slaves and servitors, will never replicate themselves here! We’ll all be equal and moderate neighbors here in Imperial, planting heterogeneous crops so that our mutual companies can weather anything. We’ll be spared what one fellow (who unfortunately just happened to be Imperial’s first engineer) describes as
the natural antagonism of any people living under a large water system toward the company controlling their source of supply.
No, we’ll own that supply together! Living in common, we’ll easily find opportunity to build our schools, libraries, electric grids and churches.
The essence of the industrial life which springs from irrigation is its democracy.

To be honest with you, I find this assertion immensely touching. I want it to be true. How about you? Turning the page, I find a halftoned photograph of a man whose white hat enjoys distant cousinage with the pith helmet of an African explorer; in his sensibly light-colored suit he stands in profile on a grassy levee; he’s put one foot before the other, as if we’d preserved him in the act of taking an immense step; his jaunty gaze directs us into shady grass while behind and above him I see an immense shade-tree whose radiating foliage should be considered an explosion of oxygenated coolness and blessedness; and I see more trees and more, blessed by a tranquil grassy-banked canal of mirror-brightness—abode, retreat, chapel to capital, Emersonian seat—and William E. Smythe writes the caption: TWO YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS PRIOR TO THE TAKING OF THIS PHOTOGRAPH, NEITHER WATER, TREE, NOR MAN EXISTED IN THIS PLACE, IMPERIAL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA.

The majority of the people of Northside no longer live by the land, so naturally they do not carry its quality in their manners and opinions. The rural population of California has decreased from seventy-nine percent in 1860 to five and a half percent in 2000.
³⁴
Surely the few who feed the rest of us are ultra-rich? As it happens, although some millionaires and corporations now own empires of acres there, Imperial County, in incongruous defiance of Smythe’s logic, is the poorest county in California; while Mexicali remains still wealthier in poverty. Imperial then, Imperial now—what has the Ministry of Capital accomplished? To be sure, we retain twenty degrees of latitude in which to choose a seat—which resembles an onion field less than a block of cheaply made houses in El Centro, a long low line of beige-roofed Sprawlsville with the sign:
VISIT ONE OF OUR NEW
HOME NEIGHBORHOODS
.
The great cities of the western valleys will not be cities in the old sense, but a long series of beautiful villages, connected by lines of electric motors, which will move their products and people from place to place.
In so many ways Imperial is as forlorn as the face of a motorist who’s just been pulled over by two Calexico policemen, one bending over either side of his car.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
, but Imperial is houses wide-spaced in sandy lots, some with palms around them, to be sure, but those palms are often dead; Imperial is two fan-palms struggling and dancing in the wind at Azure and North Marine, whose sign has been appropriately abbreviated NO MARINE, for we’re at Salton City.

Imperial is the long trains which run through every evening, bearing freight less often from Brawley’s cantaloupe fields (in 1905, wise townsmen are making a hundred dollars an acre from the fruit; in 1918
nearly 3000 carloads of this delicious table dessert are annually shipped from this point;
in 1926 we find Southern Pacific fabricating twenty thousand refrigerator cars and deploying them all around the Imperial Valley for
the largest season in the history of the cantaloupe industry
) than from some syndicate in Asia. What went wrong? Oh, yes, in 2002 there will still be Imperial cantaloupes, but two hundred thousand metric tons of that fruit will originate in Mexico, where labor is cheaper than in Brawley. A certain time-chiseled resident of Heber who declined to be quoted by name glared at me when I mentioned free trade, then said: In Mexico you rent land for half as much, you don’t have inspectors out in the fields, no bathrooms, no pesticide laws, and then they ship the stuff here and
all people look at is the price!
—(He himself was priceless, so in this book I’ll quote him again and again.) To be sure,
this marvelous Valley where the land valuations have increased from nothing in 1900 to $14,000,000 in 1912, and $20,000,000 to $40,000,000 now,
which is to say in 1918, still meets Emerson’s definition of an agricultural paradise; we know that it does for the
pollos
who make the snake over the border fence at night; I pick up today’s
Imperial Valley Press
and read that the corpse of Rogelio Contreras-Navarette, who was one of ten-odd “undocumented immigrants,” has been found near Signal Mountain, the cause of death being heat prostration; what could be a better testimony to Imperial’s cantaloupe-wealth, of which Señor Contreras-Navarette must have hoped to drink dribs and drabs at an hourly rate?

But the urbanites who now operate the machines of our various grand and local governments take 1918 land valuation figures with a grain of that salt which is ruining the farms around Mexicali. What quality do these worthy legislators of ours carry in their manners and opinions? The quality of
commerce,
I would say; the judge who exulted over “this marvelous Valley” in 1918 might have liked it just as well if its treasures were gold mines or taxpayer-subsidized penitentiary industries; perhaps even Emerson wasn’t an agricultural enthusiast out of pure principle. The night-smell of Imperial’s fields as rich as new tobacco, that’s the smell of money, really. In 2002, the El Centro City Council and Planning Commission numbers its priorities from one to fifteen.
The city’s No. 1 priority is that as growth occurs, public facilities and services must be in place to meet the needs of the community.
How reasonable!
Two principles at the bottom of the priority list—though still important, city officials said—are that the community’s rural character be preserved and enhanced by new development and that the vitality of the region’s agricultural base and prime agricultural lands are protected.
Well, at least one can still see palm trees reflected in the dark windows of City Hall.

Too bad, too bad; for some Emersonian entrants in Judge Farr’s biographical directory of 1918 are not unattractive—for instance Wilber Clark, who worked in the raw new towns until he had enough money to buy his acres and improve them with water. Mr. Clark
is a book-worm, and possesses a library of several thousand volumes, containing some rare “Americana” and first editions, as well as books relating to the Southwest.
Meanwhile, he’s already experimented with fifty different kinds of grapes. He reads, so possibly he wonders; perhaps at night he gazes at the stars. I hope he did, for in my day the sky is smog-stained and glary with the lights of El Centro. Year by year, my hair grows grey like the ribbons of salt in the dirt of Imperial. Imperial was dry before; someday Imperial will be dry again.

But for now, Imperial runs over with Colorado River nectar, infinitely. (The most lucrative crop as I write this book is winter lettuce.)
³⁵
Water is life; Imperial is, among other things, water; we are Americans, so water must be infinite. If it isn’t, what will happen to Brawley’s cantaloupes? Brawley gets, on the average, two point three inches of rain per year. (The northwest corner of our state receives almost a hundred.) Let us now enter into the heaven of infinite water.

In no section of Arid America can there be found so large a tract of so fertile soil, capable of being furnished with a water supply so abundant at so low a price for the water right and with so cheap water for all time to come.

Being inclined to acknowledge Imperial’s finitude, which cannot betray my own, I find myself nonetheless overruled by Mr. E. J. Swayne, who in a front page article entitled “E.J. Swayne Talks of the Imperial Country and Its Wonderful Possibilities”—and wonderful possibilities were all that they were in 1901—informs us:
It is simply needless to question the supply of water.

Did we say needless? I mean blasphemous! In those days, our stockholders paid fifty cents per acre-foot for water, which is to say two cents per trickling inch per twenty-four hours, plus operational and maintenance expenses. Nowhere in California was cheaper. In Riverside, for instance, water cost fifteen cents per inch. A century later, it would still be cheap. Here’s an article from 1902 entitled “Water Wasting,” which invites us
to stand on the margin of the Colorado River and view the immense flow of water in that stream now passing to the sea, and then turn and scan the horizon east or westward.
We
will thus realize the fearful loss to humanity in allowing the waters to thus enter the fathomless sea.
Fortunately, Imperial is getting reclaimed at this very second; humanity can see profit coming, and quite soon the Colorado
will be utilized
so that
thousands of homes
will
dot the land where solitude now reigns supreme.
³⁶

Imperial is a dream and a lie; Imperial is a six-room suite in Providence, Rhode Island, back in 1894, where a certain promoter’s display cases impress us with
oranges, lemons, bananas, figs, apricots, all products of the Colorado Desert, which, at that time, was producing nothing but a few horned toads and once in awhile a coyote.
And why not? This fortune-teller sees a green field-horizon with palm-silhouettes. A century later, I’ve found them and touched them. (Imperial is a truck for sale near Mexicali;
has been fingerpainted most hopefully in its windshield-dust.) In 1915 the U.S. Customs Service will still be passing on rumors of a possible bridge at Algodones to connect with a hypothetical Colorado River Ferry. In 1918, Judge Farr slides his spectacles back up his nose and pronounces a verdict for the ages:
It is therefore apparent that the water supply in this vast area is inexhaustible.

Contemplating the progress of Boulder and Parker dams, an Angeleno concludes:
The water problem seems to be solved for all time.
From 1931 on, the Colorado will be, in an engineer’s appealing words, “smoothed out.” And in 1934, construction of the All-American Canal begins, for the overt purpose of keeping Mexico’s hydra-mouths out of our water. (President Herbert Hoover, on Mexicans’ rights to the river:
We do not believe they ever had any rights.
) By 1942, ranchers in the Mexicali Valley are irrigating more than a quarter of a million acres. By 1975, the Mexicans and the Imperial Irrigation District will be irrigating half a million acres each.