The Right Places (6 page)

Adding to their woes, the farmers have lost control of the California Assembly and state Senate. The large landholders used to have great power in both, but under the one-man-one-vote system, their voice is much less effective. Now, though the Valley ranchers remain resolutely Republican, the Valley counties usually go Democratic.

And, needless to say, Valley ranchers had few kind words to say for Mr. Cesar Chavez and his striking table-grape pickers, whose headquarters were in Delano, some seventy-five miles south of Fresno. “We weren't
about
to have some labor organizer tell us what to do,” one rancher says. “Why, California pays the number one farm wage in the country, and the grape pickers are paid the best! Why couldn't he pick on states that were behind?” Mrs. William Harkey, the wife of a wealthy peach rancher in the little town of Gridley, says, “Of course I bought grapes all through that whole darned thing. I didn't buy them to eat, of course, because they're terribly fattening, but I fed them to my pet raccoon.” Of Senator Edward M. Kennedy's support of the table-grape boycott, the slightly sick Valley joke quickly became, “Confucius say, ‘Man who boycott grapes should not play in Martha's Vineyard.'”

Valley ranchers are endlessly gloomy about their labor problems, and some insist that there can be no solutions. “The only people making money here are the developers,” one rancher claims. “They're buying land at three thousand dollars an acre and selling it for housing at three thousand dollars a lot. Twenty-five years from now, this whole Valley will be nothing but houses, and all our fruits and vegetables will be coming from Africa.” Still, despite the cities' sprawl, California's harvested acreage continues to increase. Another rancher says, “When they took away the
braceros
, they forced us to use the winos. Those decent hard-working Mexicans have been replaced by the dregs of society.” It is true, during the harvest seasons, that trucks gathering up
winos from the slums and backwaters of Valley towns for work in the fields make the image of “urine-smelling buses” an apt one. At the same time, the labor shortage has forced the farmers to increase the mechanization of their farms. More and more, computers are feeding cattle and machines are shaking peaches out of trees, replacing human hands. This has meant that, though the California farmer may not have been able to raise his prices by much, and though his machines are expensive, they have enabled him to increase his yields enormously. California farmland grows increasingly valuable. The average California farm, of 617 acres, is today worth $325,000. The national average is 389 acres—worth only $69,000. It seems likely that California farmers will continue to be able to afford their air-conditioned cars, their heated pools, their private planes, and their wives' seasonal forays into I. Magnin's, for some time to come.

One of the most difficult things, perhaps, for a Valley farmer to understand is why the average laborer is unwilling to work as hard as he, the farmer, does. During the harvest season, the farmer rolls up his sleeves and goes into the fields where he will work for fifteen or twenty hours a day, seven days a week. His wife, meanwhile, will put her Magnin's dresses aside and put on dungarees to work as a weighing master, while the rancher's sons and daughters are stooping and picking in the hot sun, side by side the winos. Why—the ranchers ask—aren't farm laborers happy to do the same?

The economic rule of the Valley is: the cheaper the water, the higher the value of the land. In the northern part of the Valley, where water is much more plentiful and thus cheaper, a farmer can operate quite profitably on a smaller acreage. The northern Valley is blessed with a larger river, the Sacramento, with more rainfall, and with the precious boon of a vast underground lake, called Lake Lassen, which makes irrigation possible through the use of wells. This means that the northern part of the Valley, from Sacramento north, is also the prettiest part. There are more and bigger trees, and there is a leafy shade in the northern towns that is not possible in the hotter, dryer south. Modesto—with its welcoming archway proclaiming, as one enters the town, “
WATER, WEALTH, CONTENTMENT, HEALTH
—
MODESTO
”—is a town of peach orchards and vineyards. Stockton and Sacramento
concentrate on tomatoes. Further north, in Colusa and Chico, there is an emphasis on almonds and walnuts, whose larger and deeper root systems require a larger water supply.

When water first came to these towns, in some cases as recently as a generation ago, schoolchildren turned out in their Sunday best to plant seedlings of trees along the streets and highways, and today these have become tall stands of eucalyptus, sycamore, live oak, and pistachio trees (these turn a brilliant red in autumn). Sacramento is a particularly leafy city, with trees along both sides of most of the older streets, trees whose branches meet to form a solid canopy overhead, and a large central park, where the state capitol stands and where thousands of camellias burst into violent bloom in early spring.

Chico is another green place, and many of its streets are appropriately named after trees. At the heart of Chico is an extraordinary twenty-four-hundred-acre natural park where the original wilderness of the early Valley is carefully preserved. The park was donated by General John Bidwell, who founded the city. “He was mixed up with Sutter and all the rest,” one local resident explains, “and his wife was big on Christianizing the Indians.” Bidwell Park was the setting of the original
Robin Hood
film, with Errol Flynn, because its thickly clustered live oaks, festooned with grapevines, were considered the closest thing to Sherwood Forest. Hidden in Bidwell Park are two natural lakes and what Chico used to boast was “the World's Largest Oak.” In 1963, the World's Largest Oak was split by a lightning bolt, and so now the Chamber of Commerce of Chico advertises that it has “Half of the World's Largest Oak.” Chico's tree-lined Esplanade, with its handsome houses, provides one of the prettiest city entrances in America.

The northern Valley is full of surprises. “Down River” from Sacramento lies the rich and beautiful Delta region. Roads here wind narrowly along the tops of levees, across bridges, over sloughs and waterways that cross and split around islands in an endlessly complicated pattern. Boats have been known to lose themselves for days in these waters. Big, prosperous-looking farms, with handsome Victorian farmhouses, lie below the levees. (The roadways here are frequently at the level of a house's second-story windows, for many of these houses
stand on land that has been reclaimed from the riverbed and is actually lower than the water table.) Each farm has its dock and pier where crops can be loaded into river barges. One gets the feeling that these farms have been operating in much the same fashion for at least a century, which turns out to be just the case. One suddenly crosses a bridge and a sign proclaims, “Locke—pop. 1002, elev. 13 ft.” Locke is a Chinatown, a community of Chinese that was first established here when the railroads were being built and that has chosen to remain here. Above its Chinese lettering, one of Locke's shops proclaims itself to be a “Bakery and Lunch Parlor.” Another sign exhorts,
“DRINK! LIQUORS!”
Down below the levee is an eating establishment of unprepossessing appearance but of great local celebrity called Al the Wop's. Al the Wop's is famous for its steak sandwiches and French fries.

North of Sacramento is the pretty river town of Colusa. Not long ago, Colusa celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of its incorporation, and visitors at this event were taken on tours of California's second oldest court house (1861), and the Will S. Green mansion (1868). Will S. Green founded Colusa and is venerated as this part of the Valley's “Father of Irrigation,” since it was he who first surveyed the Grand Central Canal in 1860. Colusa also has a mini-mountain range all its own, the Sutter Buttes, which spring up surprisingly from the otherwise flat Valley floor to jagged peaks of over two thousand feet. With typical Valley pride and fondness for superlatives, the Sutter Buttes are promoted as “the World's Smallest Mountain Range.”

It used to be that the Central Valley floor had a panoramic view of the snow-capped Sierras to the east and the lower coastal range of mountains to the west. Wherever you went in the Valley, the old-timers say, the mountains hung on two horizons. Today, they rarely show themselves, and this is the price the Valley has had to pay for irrigation. The air is no longer as dry as it was, and a misty haze nearly always obscures the mountains. Irrigation has also subtly changed Valley weather. It used, literally, never to rain in summer, but in recent years there have been sudden flash summer storms. These can be disastrous to certain crops. Peaches, for example, if hit by rain must be harvested within exactly seventy-two hours. Otherwise, brown spots appear, the peaches will not pass inspection, and an entire year's crop
—and income—will be lost. This happened to the peach ranchers of Modesto in 1969. Now, in addition to labor and Washington, the farmers bemoan the uncertainty of the weather—which, ironically, their own irrigation brought them.

Continuing north, one begins to encounter around the town of Corning, low, rolling hills. Then, through Red Bluff and Redding—lumber towns—one enters the high hills and pines, and the Valley is over. The Sacramento River, wide and sleepy as it spreads across the Delta, is a racing torrent here, a mountain stream. Climbing still higher, along a winding road with an Alpine feel to its bends, one comes to the Shasta Dam, from which the Sacramento River now issues through giant penstocks. At Shasta Dam, the visitor is barraged with statistics—how many thousands of kilowatts the dam generates (enough to light half the world), how many miles of recreational lake-shore the dam created, how many billions of gallons the man-made lake can store (enough to cover the entire state of California to the depth of one inch). On the horizon stands the white and symmetrical silhouette of Mount Shasta, whose seasonally melting snows help fill up the enormous lake.

Meanwhile, back in the state capital, young C. K. McClatchy is the fourth generation of his family to operate the “Bee” chain of Valley newspapers. There are
Bee
s in Sacramento, Fresno, and Modesto, and Mr. McClatchy's wealthy maiden aunt, Miss Eleanor McClatchy, heads up McClatchy Enterprises, which includes radio and television stations. (A fifth generation of McClatchys is waiting eagerly in the wings.) C. K. McClatchy, typical of Valley men, has a special feeling about the place and what it means. “There is a sense, here,” McClatchy says, “of the continuation of history—of the Gold Rush, of the opening up of the West, of the growth of California from the earliest pioneer days to where it is now the most populous state in the union. And you get a sense here of how history has moved—swept, been carried, into the present, and how the present has maintained the integrity of the past. The Valley has
kept up
with its history like no other place I know of. Just go and stand on the rim of Shasta Dam”—called “the Keystone of the Central Valley Project”—“and see the thing that is the source of so much that has happened to the Valley
and beyond it, and you'll see what I mean, why I find this Valley, plain and flat and conservative as it is, one of the most thrilling places to be alive in that I know.”

And so this is one of the right places, too. Who needs Paris here, either?

Photo by Prowell. Courtesy of the Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce and Pier

The good life afloat—Pier 66, Fort Lauderdale

4

Fort Lauderdale: “How Big Is Your Boat?”

Many of the places where the money is new are affected to some degree by boosterism. But the point is, everybody knows this and nobody is ashamed of it. The new rich believe in living as they wish to live, not by any set of standards devised by a past generation. This is the way things are, and the devil take the hindmost.

For example, Mrs. Bernard Castro likes her champagne at room temperature. This is one of the social facts of life in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Guests who prefer it chilled may add ice cubes. Most of the winter the Castros (who are very big in sofas) keep their yacht, the
Southern Trail
, tied up at the dock of Le Club International, which is the newest (some say the only) swinging place in Fort Lauderdale, and friends are always dropping in on Theresa Castro for a glass of warm champagne and a plate of pasta. Mrs. Castro keeps a freezer full of pasta on the yacht. Eddie Arcaro might come by, or Susan Hayward, or June Taylor (of the June Taylor Dancers), a mixed bag. Joe Namath's houseboat is usually berthed just a couple of slips away from the
Southern Trail
(Namath's houseboat has little slitty windows so you can't look in and see Joe, but Joe can look out and see you), and he and his friends—he has a lot of these—might pop over. At night the parties in and around the Club's dock get very loud, waking the herd of squirrel monkeys that nests in the trees, and causing the parrots to scream and complain. It is considered poor taste for a neighbor to complain.