Imperial (61 page)

AROUND THE WORLD

May I lay out for you the
ejidos
of the Mexicali Valley?

Due east of Mexicali, some
ejidos
are very green, thanks to seepage from the All-American Canal. (Well, as you’ll read later in this book, that will soon be over. I’ve never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.) This is the mesa where they grow green onions. There are also many fields of squash and watermelons.

Irrigation ditch, Mexicali Valley, 2004

East-southeast of Mexicali, Plácido’s Cucapah, vendor of herbicides and insecticides, is surrounded by
ejidos,
with factory smokestacks across the street; and in the mud yards and the dust yards of the
colonias
people sometimes vend their old clothes by hanging them on a fence; and in the
ejidos,
some people sit all day beneath their shade trees, and some work the fields. In one of these
colonias
I once sought out the mother of the street prostitute Karla, Karla whose singing voice bore all the cracked brilliancies of salt on the southeastern end of Laguna Salada and whose skin was a reddish-brown overlay in the salt. The mother was not kind. So I passed on to the
ejidos,
where no one turned me away; I could knock on any door I liked and someone would spend an hour or an afternoon with me, offering me water, telling me stories, inviting me to his daughter’s
quinceañera
or her family’s Christmas. They’d been everywhere, even past Mexicali. I’d ask them how life was here and they’d slowly fan a child’s sweaty face and say: I like it, because things are tranquil.

Keep going that way, all the way to San Luis Río Colorado, and
ejidos
will accompany you.
⁹⁷
It will get hotter and humider and there will be many small cemeteries but there will also be green
ejidos
just off the road.

West of Mexicali, after the half-hearted green fields, there comes a dip, and we are practically out of the
ejidos,
passing through low plains, greenish shrubs, tan sand, then the dry greenish ovoid of Laguna Salada, meaning “salty lagoon,” and a whitewashed roadside restaurant with an immense painted Christ on a crucifix, peacocks in a cage, proud fat chickens strutting on the sand. There is also a café with hubcaps strung like trophies on barbed wire, many painted boasts of COCOS HELADOS, a truckload of greenish-yellow hay bales parked in front. Weeds like upturned golden candelabra drink light instead of giving it. As we begin to ascend beyond the Colorado’s bygone reach, we see the desert as it always must have been, and Imperial becomes once again the old Valley of Death.

South of Mexicali, near the volcano called Cerro Prieto, grey-green little smoke trees survive in the pale wastes, and there are scattered tires, the occasional dead dog at roadside, the Sierra Cucapá mountains ahead. Even here there are
ejidos,
the fields not so green as Northside’s, of course, and always smaller, less regular, bordered with mesquite and smoke trees, the Sierra Cucapá over everything, everything shaggier. Here I have seen fields of corn and alfalfa and sometimes specialty crops such as garlic.

Southeast of Mexicali, even in the reddish foothills of the Sierra el Mayor you may find a homestead. I asked one leathery old couple why they had built their shack away from other human beings, and the woman glared at me in hatred of my presence while the man replied with a proud uplifting of the corners of his mouth: We prefer to be free.

The junked cars in the sand along Mexican Route 2, the haystack pyramid under palm trees in somebody’s front yard in the
ejidos,
it’s all of a piece with that clothing of grey-green on the desert beneath the dry mountains; humanity’s artifacts line the dry land thinly and unevenly; call it paltry and trashy and you will be, as we say in Northside, on the money. But in the
ejidos
they’re off the money.

I never would have believed it if I had merely read about it in a book like this. It took me years of seeing and asking before I finally believed.
They harvested cotton, melons and tomatoes. There were many of them; they did nothing else; they lived well.

This book investigates many secrets, from the Chinese tunnels to the
maquiladoras
to the New River. But the deepest of them all, and the best, is the secret that in the
ejidos
they live well. I do not want that life and could not live it happily. They might get dangerously drunk and their daughters sometimes run away to be prostitutes and they read very little and lose their teeth early. Many of them work very hard beneath Imperial’s sun.
I like it, because things are tranquil.

Chapter 52

IMPERIAL REPRISE (1901—2006)

1

It is almost unbelievable how fast apricot trees grow in this Valley. Calipatria will grow, and grow fast.

It is almost unbelievable how fast apricot trees grow in this Valley. The date trees are the only crop that looks like you could win with, but even they, you can’t grow anything without water.

2

James Greenfield served Capital; Jefferson Worth sought to make Capital serve the race.
Isn’t everyone tempted to double down at blackjack when the opportunity arises? But even they, you can’t grow anything without water.

WATER IS HERE
.

3

I like it, because things are tranquil.
There is no escaping the stereotype of an ideal agrarian world. For orchards, ten hectares, a family would live well.
Of great interest to Mr. Clark is the six-acre date orchard . . .
What the hell can I do with ten acres?

My father’s sister had six hectares and seven children, and they lived perfectly well.
I don’t think that a small operator can farm less than seven hundred or a thousand acres.

4

Over here the land is divided equally. Then it depends on how your harvest goes.
So when they get out to work they find the Holt fields are all plowed . . .
WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA.

He stood staunch as Mount Signal.
I can’t help believing in people.
It was his inspiration that turned the Imperial Valley from a desert into the truck garden of America.
It may be said that the Chandler interests are the largest cash customer the Imperial Irrigation District has.
The most valuable portion of the valley is on the Mexican side of the line, owned by the Otis-Chandler syndicate.
There is nothing more than Mr. Chandler, and he is the owner of everything.

5

It is almost unbelievable how fast apricot trees grow in this Valley.
Thus an effort was made to take it out of the power of capitalists and speculators in land to take selfish advantage of the beneficent work of a government of democracy . . .
I know enough to know that without money you can’t do anything.

PART FOUR

FOOTNOTES

Chapter 53

WHAT I WISH I KNEW ABOUT MELOLAND (1907—1998)

Half way between El Centro and Holtville Meloland is an important shipping center. Plans were made there in an early day for a town of considerable size.

—Otis B. Tout, 1931

T
his important shipping center did not quite live up to those plans.

Meloland’s efflorescence, such as it was, seems emblematic of Imperial itself. It was here, six miles east of El Centro, four and a half miles west of Holtville, that Harold Bell Wright wrote
The Winning of Barbara Worth
in that arrow-weed ramada of his. He also named the place, exclaiming: What a mellow land!

I am reliably informed that
the well-known Rancho Meloland of 280 acres
was begun in October 1907, so W. F. Holt must have introduced Mr. Wright to the place about then. His classic of world literature would be published four years later. Fifty thousand sour stock orange seeds were planted, among other varieties. The first child was born there in April 1909: the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Loftus. A month later, the boomers were already unloading fifty-by-a-hundred-and-forty-foot lots of Meloland Townsite at a hundred dollars each, ten dollars down and five dollars per month.

I know from the
Imperial Valley Business and Resident Directory
that in 1912 Walter E. Packard, whose name figures occasionally and forgettably in this book, on both sides of the international line, was in charge of the agricultural experimental station there. From the
Imperial Valley Press
(“Covers the Valley Like the Sunshine”) I’ve kept abreast of all
MELOLAND SOCIAL EVENTS OF THE WEEK
—for example, the May festival of 1926, a great success, which took place in the playground, adorned by
long strings of electric lights.

By then the Barbara Worth Hotel had opened. I’ve already quoted to you Otis B. Tout’s description of the mural:
Trade is leading Culture, a beautiful young woman . . . Miss Sawyer, a school teacher of Meloland, represents Culture . . .

Meloland remains on the 1916 California state road map; so does Hazelwood in the whiteness of the eastern desert of Imperial’s southeast corner; I never heard of Hazelwood until I saw it there. May I read off to you some of the other important shipping centers?

South of
la línea,
a railroad runs through Mexicali, continuing southeast to Packard, which may well be named after Walter; then to Pascuality, continuing to Seabania or Sesbania, not to mention Cocopah, after which it flattens out, and presently angles northeast up to Yuma. Well, Mexicali and Yuma remain, at least. In Coachella, Salton clings absurdly to the map; you’ll find it on the northeast shore of the Salton Sea. Mortmere, Dos Palmas and Caleb are all there, more or less in an east-west line below Mecca. Rest in peace, you mummified ghost towns and salted railroad sidings!

Now for the stunning alteration of Meloland into a metropolis: In 1910 the population was ten. By 1920 it had doubled; in 1930 it had achieved perfect stability (which means that it remained the same as in 1920); in 1940 it was only five persons less (several of them being schoolchildren brown, yellow, white and freckled); in 1950 it stayed proudly unaltered.

Meloland, so we’re informed, is
listed as rural from 1960,
which may be why we have no population figure for that year. At any rate, in 1965, the very next listing, Meloland reported a hectic population of fifty. The compilation I cite was published in 1998; nonetheless, after 1965 there is only Imperial blankness in the row of the chart devoted to Meloland. In other words, Meloland appears to be
actively developed, highly improved, and is becoming thickly settled.

I asked a veteran Imperialite about Harold Bell Wright’s ramada and she replied: There’s nothing there. I know where it was. It was there when I was younger. It was just to the west of the Barbara Worth Country Club. I think it fell down in the fifties, sixties, something like that.

Geologists have named a Meloland soil, not to mention an Imperial, a Superstition, a Holtville and a Gila. The County Recorder once believed in the existence of a Meloland Orange Tract, on which a breach of obligation of a certain Deed of Trust took place in 1924; another pioneer or speculator had defaulted on his mortgage. Lots eleven, twelve, twenty-three and twenty-four in Meloland, together with others on another page, would be sold in three months. So don’t tell me that Meloland did not exist, no matter that if I buttonhole somebody in El Centro and ask him how to get there, he’ll say he never heard of it. The canals and green fields of Meloland are jewel-like in the evening light. The hay bales like green bullion on the pool tables of alfalfa fields now turn golden-orange. They are
highly improved.