Imperial (26 page)

Sources:
Mary Montgomery (1943); The California Water Atlas (1979).

In 1775, the de Anza Expedition forded the Colorado near its confluence with the Gila and assessed its width
at some three or four hundred yards, and this at a time when the water is at its lowest, for when the river rises it is leagues wide.
³⁸
On their return in the following spring, they crossed at a different spot a few leagues away and estimated a width of about a hundred yards. In 1796, Governor Arrillaga found the Colorado unimpressive,
but this was undoubtedly due to its being the dry season . . . From the mouth until it enters full sea, it has considerable breadth.
In 1845, Colonel Cave Johnson Couts arrived in Yuma, where he discovered the river to be
about 200 yards wide but full of little sand islands
c.
In 1925 a traveller very appropriately named Frank Waters took the steamer from El Mayor, whose location I found marked by a trailer park, but whose steamers, landings, indeed whose
river
seemed just about bygone on the day in 2002 when I took the highway south from Mexicali, down past another lost town called La Bomba,
³⁹
and into the Gulf. Frank Waters details the surprisingly swift current of the Río Colorado, the willows, lagoons and herons, the chocolate-colored water-windings which enter the Sea of Cortés, he claims at two hundred thousand feet per second. (A man who’d worked for the Bureau of Reclamation from 1948 to 1950 told me: It’s all spread out at the Gulf, and it’s kinda uninteresting. Swamp.)

Waters’s memoir was reprinted in 1984, at which time he added a preface remarking (in exaggeration, but not by far) that ever since 1961, “not one drop” of the Colorado has reached the Gulf.

I stare from the little bridge in San Luis.—Is this really the Colorado?

Shrugging, a man assures me that it is.

And the retired Reclamation man said: There was more water once, yeah.

Here’s another road to the Gulf. This one starts in the center of downtown and boasts a larger sign. Therefore the road will be better. My landmarks: goats, flatlands, tire-fences and unlined canals. An orchard of palm so thick and low it’s really a thicket beguiles me; I’ve never seen any such thing on the American side. But this corroded schoolbus with the lean-to atached could be in Slab City. Someone has written
$ $
and
FOR SALE
on a wall next to the Bar Monalisa. Time to bisect another cement-lined canal. (James O. Pattie, 1827:
We continued to float slowly downwards, trapping beavers on our way almost as fast as we could wish . . . The river at this point is remarkably circuitous, and has a great number of islands . . .
) Finally I see a pencil-line, brighter and whiter than sky-blue, divorcing me from the west’s blue mountains.
That
must be the Colorado. The green-pocked sand-plain, which in Frank Waters’s time was a tule marsh screeching with birds, begins to tilt just slightly downward, and the mountains take on the hazy look of a coast observed from the sea. A white plain bearing that widening web of water, well, it doesn’t seem so bad; as far as I can tell, several drops of the Colorado are still reaching the sea. (John C. Van Dyke, 1903:
After the river crosses the border-line of Mexico it grows broader and flatter than ever. And still the color seems to deepen. For all its suggestion of blood it is not an unlovely color . . . And now at the full and the change of the moon, when the Gulf waters come in like a tidal wave, and the waters of the north meet the waters of the south, there is a mighty conflict of opposing forces . . . The red river rushes under, the blue tide rushes over.
) Oh, no, now I see; that’s Santa Clara Slough, where Arizona’s lethal brine comes to rest. (John Wesley Powell, 1895:
A million cascade brooks unite to form half a hundred rivers beset with cataracts; half a hundred roaring rivers unite to form the Colorado, which rolls, a mad, turbid stream, into the Gulf of California.
Philip L. Fradkin, 1981:
To follow the river from Morelos Dam to the gulf is a tricky business. First it is there, then it isn’t, then it is, then it isn’t. Its presence depends on when the toilet is being flushed.
) A woman and child sit silently by their overheated car, whose hood is open; steam comes out. Ahead I see a widening delta braided with ankle-deep streams, and then the Sea of Cortés itself, reddish-grey and thick; much of it is actually mud; the tide must be out.

The town of Golfo Santa Clara was literally built on sand. White-blossoming trees, palms and sea-coolness soften everything. It must be at least fifteen degrees colder here than San Luis Rey. Mexican and American families sit happily together on the beach, calling to their children who are splashing in the sea. As for the Colorado, it’s lost in the mud, like the fish-heads and stingray skins, the rotting jellyfishes, the truckloads of teenagers speeding, splashing and exulting in the ooze. Water is infinite. Water is here.

“AND IN MATERIAL ADVANTAGES THEY ARE ALREADY VERY WELL SUPPLIED”

WATER IS HERE
.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.
And now it’s just like the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk! Plant the seed, and Imperial bursts out of the cracked desert, shoots upward with an audible whirr, and explodes into greenness! On the outskirts of Indio,
where two years ago not a living sprig could be found, ripe Thompson’s seedless grapes are now being gathered and shipped to Los Angeles.
Everything and everyone comes to life in Imperial! Mrs. Leroy Holt is one of that zone’s very first white women; she arrives by stagecoach to find a postal service already in operation; delivery means hanging up the mailbag at Fifteen Mile Tree. Sometimes dust storms blow so hard that no one can eat.
I had kept the children in bed fully dressed so if the tent-house should blow down they would be properly clothed . . . Why did we stay? We loved the days that were not windy and dusty; we loved the bigness of our surroundings.
In other words, her Imperial was infinite.—The lead story for Saturday, August 2, 1902, reports (with prudent belatedness, given the infant mortality rate of those days), that Miss Ruth Reed, the first child to be born in Imperial city, came into the world last September.
A half-tone portrait of Miss Reed,
who looks plump, adorable, etcetera, as she gazes out at us from a creased black lozenge,
is herewith presented to the readers of the Press. It shows a healthy child. In fact, it is well known that climates similar to that found in Imperial always develop very healthy children, who rarely need the services of the physician.
In 1904 they stake out Holtville, and water arrives in Brawley. El Centro will be founded next year. In 1905 there are close to ten thousand people in the Imperial Valley; by 1910 there will be twice that many. In 2000, Imperial County alone will contain more than a hundred and forty-two thousand souls.

“
And in material advantages they are already well supplied. Here,” said Mr. Atwood, as he pulled a crisp five-dollar note from his purse, “is a bill issued by the First National Bank of Imperial—a national bank away out in the center of the Colorado desert.”

IRRELEVANT!

1902 was the year when Mr. Atwood pulled that crisp five-dollar note from his purse. The engineer who was bringing the water to Imperial later recalled:
We started out then, about the first of March 1902, with our bonds all gone, our mortgages depleted, not a dollar in the treasury, and individually so deeply in debt . . . that it was exceedingly doubtful whether we would ever be able to pull out.
Irrelevant!
WATER IS HERE
. By 1904 so were seven thousand people.

Then what? Imperial County tears itself out of San Diego’s womb; tent cities become brick towns with churches and libraries; railroad tracks and electric lines come, then telephones; emerald alfalfa-squares (not to mention barley and corn) push back the desert; El Centro beats out Imperial to become the county seat. (What about our new Salton Sea? Irrelevant! An expert named Mr. Grunsky testifies to the Senate that it will be gone in twelve to fifteen years
if there were no resupply.
)
WATER IS HERE
. In 1910 parts of the Yuma Indian Reservation get opened up to white settlement.

Do you want to know how the American Imperial of those days portrayed itself? Those of you in so great a rush to get back to irrigating your fields that you have no time to read
The Winning of Barbara Worth
may now take heart: In this year of grace 1915, the grand Barbara Worth Hotel has just opened, with every important character painted in oils on the walls of the lobby. I now telegraph you the highlights, as abstracted from a newspaper article by Otis B. Tout:
Trade is leading Culture, a beautiful young woman . . . Miss Sawyer, a school teacher of Meloland, represents Culture . . . In the next “pendant” picture primitive life of the first inhabitants is described. The faithful Mexican Pablo and Jose, the Indian, are the chief characters in this sketch. To get the correct expression on their faces the artists made a trip of several days’ duration into Mexico to see exactly how these same Mexicans and Indians live today . . .
And how
do
they live today? Not like the folks in Barbara Worth’s circle, it would seem.
The first picture on the south wall of the lobby will be that of the “Financial Genius,” without which the Valley would have remained the land of nothing. Here W. F. Holt is shown as the Jefferson Worth of the story.
Oh, yes, and
merged into the green luxury of developed plenty there stands the maiden of the story, Barbara Worth. Miss Marjorie Paris, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Paris of El Centro, posed for this scene. She is garbed in simple white. She rests against a bale of cotton.

In 1911, the Imperial Irrigation District comes into being. In 1913, Mr. R. S. Smith of Silsbee wins first prize—a silver loving cup and forty dollars cash money—for his display of Hemskirk apricots. In 1918, Mr. John Baker advises us that
paved, well lighted streets will be the culmination of the Commercial Club’s dream and efforts in the very near future.
A photograph’s caption reads: “W. F. Holt Looks into the Future with the Direct Gaze of the Confident Man.” It is W. F. Holt who said:
I can’t help believing in people . . . I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life . . . I’ve found that the way to get your money is to give a man a chance to pay you.

ONE MORE ESSAY (A VERY SHORT ONE) ON THE INFINITE

Could it be that W. F. Holt is the American exemplar of this period? Ten years later, in the Soviet Union, our hero will be the Stakhanovite miner, farmer or factory worker who overfulfills his production quota by some superhuman multiple of your capacity and mine. Imperial smilingly murmurs that water and soil will do the same for us, and we can keep the gains for ourselves!
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
And I never will be, because Imperial’s promise is infinite.
WATER IS HERE
.
One of the local men,
continues John Baker,
claims to have made a thousand dollars an acre from the growing of cucumbers . . .
If you’re looked up to in Imperial, they’ll say of you:
His farm has been highly improved.
They’ll say:
He made a success through his own efforts.
They’ll say:
He sold out at a fancy price.

The entertainments of this epoch were in keeping with its aspirations. I read of Joseph Estudillo, who opened Calexico’s first drugstore; he
often entertained crowds by shooting dimes tossed in the air.
Here’s a caption in Otis B. Tout’s history:
A Ten Dollar Bill on the End of a Greased Pole That Hung Over a Canal Furnished Much Amusement
. Herein dangles Imperial’s ultimate metaphor.

Imperial is hot freeways and the snapped off stumps in the Salton Sea. Imperial is smoke trees between which stretch cradles of spiderwebs; Imperial’s nothing but that algae’d ditch, the Colorado River.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
Toss another dime in the air! And now a train comes humming through! I count four yellow locomotives, then container cars loaded with immense crates commercially colored and marked.
And in material advantages they are already well supplied. He sold out at a fancy price.

Chapter 7

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DITCH (1519-2005)

No two people will agree on what makes a perfect vacation, but it’s fun and helpful to know what others think.

—Fodor’s Mexico, 1992

T
he way that the man in the white, white dress shirt leads each stripper by the hand to gallantly escort her onto stage (the Chinese-pigtailed cocktail waitress, her white blouse glowing in the ultraviolet strobe, now sings happily along while the waiter catches our heroine’s clothes one by one as she dances them off, both he and the waitress clapping for her not only encouragingly but exuberantly); the way that the powerless, in-and-out-of-prison drunk in a Mexicali park sincerely, sweetly invites me: You ever have any problem, you ask for me! and the grand way that the roadmender in the desert flags down my car; the way that when I promptly submit he’s satisfied to wave me on with an ornately personal gesture; the old people who actually remember their muncipal history and are
proud
of it, the slogans of tire shops and restaurants painted in black or white letters on yellow- or blue-painted brick; the greater chaos and color of Southside, the multitudes on the sidewalks, the shoeshine boys and watermelon hawkers, the higher level of unevenness and humanness, the dirt, the formal Latin courtesy, the people peering out windows, the
life;
this is Mexico.
(The informal labor sector has grown nationwide,
writes Professor Ramón Eduardo Ruiz.
Child labor can be seen everywhere . . .
And in material advantages they are already well supplied.
Children of both sexes, no more than toddlers, drop out of school . . . and, when they reach adulthood, end up doing unskilled labor at low pay . . . American policy, as well as the exploding global economy, exacerbates these conditions.)
Far away across the twilit fields of San Luis Río Colorado there’s a line of white lights, a night of whirling rattles, chants and honking horns, all from pickup trucks; everyone’s so happy; their team’s won. In Calexico late at night one might see a handful of Mexican men running, pursued by the screaming white vehicles of the Border Patrol. More often there will be blankness. Yes, Southside’s where the life is; Northside’s where the money is; I’ve never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.