Imperial (241 page)
Authors: William T. Vollmann
In his memoirs, a certain “border mountain man” describes a journey to San Diego undertaken in 1845: “From Fort Yuma, we started again, going by way of New River and having to pass through a desert of sand sixty miles across, with water only at one place, and that a small pool hardly fit to drink . . . We travelled that day and night, and the next forenoon arrived at a small lake at the head of New River”—probably Blue Lake. Since Fort Yuma lies on the Colorado, his New River travelogue bears out the Imperial County residents.
Here is a revealing excerpt from a California Environmental Protection Agency report. An EPA delegation crossed the border for a conference with Victor Hermosilio, the Mayor of Mexicali, specifically “to discuss New River issues.” One of those issues was “monitoring of underground storm drains entering the New River concrete encasement project—prior verification of sewage spills into the New River from these storm drains was possible visually,
but can no longer be accomplished since the entire system is underground
” (my italics).
According to a 1910 American history of the Imperial Valley, Cerro Prieto divides into two a certain Volcano Lake, one outflow of which is the New River, going north, and the other is the Río Hardy, or Hardy Colorado, which flows south to the Sea of Cortés.
One derivation for this term: In old Spain, when a mill ground corn for someone, the miller kept part of the flour for his fee, his
maquila.
The
maquiladoras
get their own chapter further on in this book.
In the reports reproduced here (I have omitted pages whose only result is “non-detect”), sample one corresponds to subsamples A, B, C and E; sample two includes subsamples E, F, G and H.
Zinc is sometimes employed to reduce scaling in wastewater pipes.
In the words of Eugenia McNaughton, the EPA scientist, “California has to start reducing its take of Colorado River water. Agriculture’s going to change in the valley. Either people will go out of business or they’ll change their ways of husbanding their fields. It all points toward less water for the Salton Sea. It’s not going to get a bucket unless some really powerful people sit on the heads of some other really powerful people.”
“Such simple ‘sand maps’ were frequently observed by early white travelers who were crossing territory unknown to them and who were asking Indians for directions. It is probably no accident that these records were made in the desert areas where Indians moved about a great deal . . . Among the more settled tribes of California, who traveled only within their own restricted territory, such maps would have been unnecessary.”
It might seem strange that I keep saying “she left me” when in fact I was the one who asked her please not to contact me in any way until (if there ever was an until) I felt ready to call her; but the reason was simple: After first trying to humor her when she proposed that we now become simply very, very good friends, I realized, and in our final conversation expressed to her, that I did not feel able to accept such a diminishment, for it would be agony for me not to be able to address her by our old endearments every minute, or to hold her tight. I see now that in telling her this I was already beginning to lay degrading hints: Maybe someday she might permit me to do those things again? Her gently definitive reply was that if she or I did slip up at first and call each other darling once in awhile, none of the people who’d known us from
before
would blame us.—She became, in fact, quite bitter about my change of heart. I had agreed to stay friends, and now I was reneging. She might now be compelled to “reassess” the value of the years we’d spent together. I replied that I needed to wait until a certain zone of my heart (which I did not delineate) died before I could endure to be her friend; in other words, I remained unable to see her until finding myself prepared to make her that promise which my never having made had caused her to leave me; or else until that place in my heart that was “our place” had died. This logic was absolutely correct, and I thought at the time that it bore no grovelling connotations of take-me-back, but I now see quite well through my photographer’s loupe what I was hoping. Unfortunately, she carefully said, referring to the necessity for killing off that zone in my heart: Well, that makes psychological sense.—I told her that of course she could get in touch with me if it was an emergency. For weeks afterward, I couldn’t understand why she never called me. Whenever the telephone rang, my heart vomited with crazy joy; but it was never the person I expected. Was she all right? I should really telephone her and see what the matter was, because it made no sense that she hadn’t called me.
At the end of the first month I began to dream that the phone would ring and then a female voice I didn’t recognize would say her name. I knew it was she. That was all. I’d awake instantly in intense pain.
This must be related to the fact that I badly endure separation of any kind. It is almost impossible for me to leave anyone I’ve loved, for I never stop loving her. At great cost I did leave someone for the woman about whom I’ve been writing, and for months was half crazy with guilt. I could not talk about it with the one I loved best, for fear that she might interpret my expressions of pain as resentment against her. I left that one woman for her, and after that I was too weak or kindly-cowardly to do more. Separation is death. And after the one I loved so much left me, my friends and hers insisted it was necessary, which might have been fair and true; but I was being slowly executed by isolation, suffocation and darkness (say, by immersion in a drowning-chamber) while all witnesses and chaplains promised this to be the best medicine both for me and for my executioner. So I rejected them, raging against them like a little child; I hated the truth which, as the saying goes, had set me free, letting me fall into the drowning-chamber whose fluid was really a dark mixture of my needs, greeds and lies. God forgive me.
A man who was there informs us that “Calexico, which derives its name from a combination of California and Mexico, simply happened.” Mexicali’s name comes from the same two sources.
Imperial County itself now encloses a rural population of only 14.8%.
Señor José López of Jalisco, who in his thirty-eight years has so far made sixteen successful illegal crossings of the international line, informs me: “The work I made the most money in was picking melons and the lettuce. They used to pay us piece rate. Back in the eighties and nineties, that’s where the money was at, in the lettuce and in the cantaloupes. It used to be better when it was piece rate. The lettuce, Monday to Saturday you would get sometimes to take home four or five hundred dollars, sometimes three hundred. There’s also been some bad times when it was only a hundred and fifty.” Most of his cantaloupe-picking was done in the Central Valley near Fresno, in the towns of Mendota and Firebaugh. This surprised me in view of the Imperial Valley’s reputation as “the winter garden of America,” but José insisted that in the latter places the season went from July to October, whereas in Brawley and thereabouts the growing season was a mere six weeks.
Once that happened, the headlines remained eerily similar: “Feds get involved in state water issues: $10 million worth of water to flow into ocean.” But now the “fearful loss” was no longer the hypothetical one of unused potential; it had become the wastage of what Californians desperately needed.
“The baseball craze has reached the negro population of the South to such an extent that it seriously interferes with their value as laborers during the season of picking cotton.”
In 1827, James O. Pattie found that that “Red river . . . is between two and three hundred yards wide, a deep bold stream, and the water at this point,” where it meets the Gila, “entirely clear.”
In a guidebook from 1958, El Mayor still clings to life. From Mexicali to that hive is 42.2 miles; from Mexicali to La Bamba (alternate spelling) is 67.4 miles.
The beginning of the other side, I should say. About most of Mexico, including the Mayan woman of clay who gnawed at her knuckles eternally, the idol from Veracruz with the cone-shaped lower lip, this book remains as silent as a mop swimming across marble floors in Mexico City.
A migrant child of the 1950s, born in south Texas, tells us that “the dark-skinned daughter in a Mexican family was always ‘La Prieta.’ The nickname of ‘the black one’ was given in love.”
In all of these respects he resembled Cortés, who had four children by his first Spanish wife, a son by Doña Marina, another son “by a Spanish woman,” and three daughters by three other Indian women. Meanwhile he married another Spanish lady after the first one died. “He was much given to consorting with women,” writes his personal secretary, “and always gave himself to them.”
See “Subdelineations: Marsscapes,” p. 1023, for a complete explication of this vital scientific issue.
Negative MX-SP-ELV-97-06, which will be sent to Ohio State University in due course. The woman in this picture, Elvira, disappeared in 2001. The other street prostitutes who recognized her in the picture claimed that she had been murdered.
The New River’s course, by the way, was at this point in time a wide, shallow U dipping down into what is now left of Mexico and then back into California—well, well, in 1849 it was still Mexico; Imperial baked and basked in its last months of freedom from an international line. In 1850 we could coin the term “Arid America.” Forgive these complications; in reference to the New River forgive reality as do several twenty-first-century maps, not even excluding a certain glossy double-page spread in the supposedly “scientific”
Salton Sea Atlas,
which I discovered in a bookstore in El Centro last week. No Dren Ferrocarril, no Cerro Prieto, no Laguna Xochimilco—all those human-poisoned springheads! Oh, no, we’ll keep the New River simple; let’s keep everything simple, subdividing creation into watercourses and arid wastelands. So pardon my interruption; the New River’s an easily comprehensible twist of the Río Colorado; if you must enter the vicissitudes of Imperial, nourish yourself as best you can from that U-shaped umbilicus, and, God willing, you’ll be saved.
No disrespect to our United States is intended by this reference to a Mexican business establishment. Can’t we raise any crop that foreigners can? Indeed, as early as 1903 we find the various anti-liquor ordinances of American Imperial being disobeyed by “M. B. Davis, commonly known as Bob,” who “bought a lot near the railroad and opened a regular saloon. He was very defiant for a few days, and at last two women came to town to make their headquarters at his place.” Once the warrant had been issued, he fled across the border, and the prostitutes also apparently departed. And so vice ended in Imperial County forever.
Here is poor Harold Bell Wright’s best shot at creating an equivalent character:
“The Mexican prepared the horses as Texas had instructed and then took up his position by the front gate, proud and happy that they had so honored him—that they had trusted him to guard his employer’s daughter.”
In a similar vein, Helen Hunt Jackson’s
Ramona
offers a tale of nonwhite martyrdom on the boundary of Imperial itself. The heroine, half-Scottish, half-Indian, raised in a Mexican California hacienda as an unwanted niece, falls in love with a fullblooded Temecula Indian named Alessandro and runs away with him shortly after his home has been seized by white American settlers. Each time the young couple set up house, they prosper until the Americans take over their property again. Alessandro finally goes mad and gets murdered. Ramona is saved by her Mexican half-brother Felipe, whom she marries; they flee the Americans for Mexico just as she and Alessandro had fled the Americans for San Jacinto. Michael Dorris writes: “Ramona herself is lifeless, so uncomplex in her goodness, loyalty, piety and brave endurance that she exists more as a cipher than as flesh and blood.”
I found myself remembering its images while researching Imperial’s agricultural strikes of 1933-34.
Aside from its beautiful lament for the death of Ricketts,
The Log from the
Sea of Cortez is another “slight” book, in the
Russian Journal
category. Two things about it strike me. First of all, here is Steinbeck, living admirably, wanting to learn more about the world, to educate himself in a discipline which most people “have to” go to school to learn—marine biology—in hopes of applying what he has learned to the lives of human organisms; and he is throwing his own not-superabundant financial resources into the quest. I consider this noble. Secondly, on almost every page Steinbeck recounts or advises things which would now be considered unethical at the very least, and probably illegal—most often, the unsupervised gathering and pickling of sea creatures, many of whose corpses, thanks to the
Sea of Cortez
’s inadequate supply of storage vessels, ended up getting ruined in transit. His paean to the reproductive powers of Ed Ricketts falls in the same category. These frowned-upon activities may be victimless crimes, or worse. In any case, they are crimes of individualism and of individualism’s experiments and discoveries.
