Where I Was From (16 page)

T
HAT
passage is from the last few pages of a novel,
Run River
, published in 1963. The author of the novel was me. The protagonist, the “she” of the passage, is Lily McClellan, born Lily Knight, the wife of a hop grower on the Sacramento River. As the novel opens, Lily’s husband, Everett McClellan, has just shot and killed the man with whom both Lily and his sister Martha have had affairs. This story, the “plot” of the novel, was imagined, but the impulse that initially led me to imagine this story and not another was real: I was a year or two out of Berkeley, working for
Vogue
in New York, and experiencing a yearning for California so raw that night after night, on copy paper filched from my office and the Olivetti Lettera 22 I had bought in high school with the money I made stringing for
The Sacramento Union
(“Big mistake buying Italian,” my father had advised, “as you’ll discover the first time you need a part replaced”), I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs and set the Olivetti on the other and wrote myself a California river.

The “stuff” of the novel, then, was the landscape and weather of the Sacramento Valley, the way the rivers crested and the way the tule fogs obscured the levees and the way the fallen camellias turned the sidewalks brown and slick during the Christmas rains. The stuff, too, was in the way those rains and those rivers had figured in the stories I had been told my entire life, stories predicated on the childhood memories of relatives (Kilgores and Reeses, Jerretts and Farnsworths, Magees and Cornwalls) who were by then long dead themselves, fragments of local oral history preserved by daughters and granddaughters on legal pads and the backs of envelopes:

That winter was a very wet winter, raining night and day for weeks. It was always called the winter of the Flood as the levee broke on the east side of Sacramento and the city was a lake of water, boats running up and down the streets and small houses floating around like dry goods boxes. This was in 1861 and 1862.

During the flood it was impossible to get any provisions out of Sacramento, only by boat, so three of our neighbors who were out of tobacco, Wm. Scholefield, Myron Smith and a man by the name of Sidell, built a boat out of rough boards and launched it in the creek on Scholefield’s place and went to Sacramento by water, two rowing and one bailing the water out. They made the round trip and brought home their tobacco and some provisions.

The downpour continued and the river swelled until the banks overflowed. The families were soon engulfed by the water. They gathered as much of their belongings as were salvageable and moved by rowboat to a two-story house on the Grape Vine Ranch, about one-half mile away.

The importance of recording these memories was unquestioned: the flood and the levees and the two-story house on the Grape Vine Ranch had become, like the potato masher that crossed the plains, like the books that did not get jettisoned on the Umpqua River, evidence of family endurance, proof of our worth, indistinguishable from the crossing story itself.

During this time Elizabeth became critically ill. It was typhoid. Allen and one of the Kilgore cousins rowed through the storm to Sacramento for necessary supplies. The current of the rampant river flood raged about them and it took two days and nights to reach the settlement city. The morning following Aliens return, Elizabeth died. Allen built a coffin for Elizabeth and the women dressed her in a garment of coarse white cotton. The coffin was rowed to hilly ground where there were already other graves. The ground was so full of water that the grave was like a well. Here Elizabeth was buried as there was no other place available.

“T
wo hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes, the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all.” This was the crossing story as origin myth, the official history as I had learned it. Although certain other lines in that passage from
Run River
suggest that I was beginning to entertain some doubt (“what had it all been about,” “a history of accidents: of moving on and of accidents”), the passage now raises questions that did not at the time occur to me. From what exactly was “the break” or “the void” or “the cutting clean” to have redeemed them? From their Scotch-Irish genes? From the idealization that had alchemized the luckless of Wales and Scotland and Ireland into classless western yeomen? From the confusions that led both Jack London and
The Valley of the Moons
Saxon Brown to claim the special rights they believed due them as “old American stock”? Or were they to have been redeemed from the break itself, the “cutting clean,” “the void”? And the related question: for
what
were they to have been redeemed? To make of their lives, as Nancy Hardin Cornwall was said to have made of hers, “one ceaseless round of activity”? To “live up to our heritage,” as I put it in my eighth-grade graduation speech, and “go on to better and greater things for California”? What exactly was our heritage?
Remember
, as Virginia Reed wrote to her cousin,
never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.

M
uch in
Run River
, as I believed when I was writing it and as I read it now, some four decades later, has to do with the ways California was or is “changing,” the detailing of which permeates the novel with a tenacious (and, as I see it now, pernicious) mood of nostalgia. The current action (much of the novel is past action) takes place in August 1959. Everett McClellan’s sister Martha has been dead more than ten years, drowned when she took a boat onto the river in flood stage. On the March morning after Martha’s death, as Everett and the ranch foreman dig the grave by the levee in which they will bury her, Lily concentrates on the river, on where and when the levee will go, on the “file of information, gathered and classified every year there was high water.… At what point had they opened the Colusa Weir. How many gates were open at the Sacramento Weir. When would the Bypass reach capacity. What was the flood stage at Wilkins Slough. At Rough and Ready Bend. Fremont Weir. Rio Vista.”

As presented, Martha McClellan’s burial on the ranch, with the river still rising and talk confined to speculation about whether the Army Engineers will dynamite an upstream levee, would seem to represent an idea of traditional, or “old,” California. We are told that Martha herself, as a child, invented a game called “Donner Party,” in which she herself starred as Tamsen Donner, and hung on the walls of her room “neither Degas ballet dancers nor scenes from
Alice in Wonderland
but a framed deed signed by John Sutter in 1847, a matted list of the provisions carried on an obscure crossing in 1852, a detailed relief map of the Humboldt Sink, and a large lithograph of Donner Pass on which Martha had printed, in two neat columns, the names of the casualties and survivors of the Donner-Reed crossing.” To a similar point, Martha is buried in the sea chest in which her mother, long dead, had kept her linens, along with “ends of lace, a box of jet beading from a dress, and the ivory fan carried by Martha’s great-great-grandmother Currier at Governor Leland Stanford’s Inaugural Ball in 1862.” To lay in the grave, Everett has torn down “whole branches” of camellias, which are presented in the novel as having, since they were planted locally in memory of the pioneers, a totemic significance. If the grave washes out, which it surely will if the river continues rising, Martha (and the totemic camellias) will be “free again in the water,” at one with the river, a prospect that seems to deter, as “true” Californians, neither her brother nor her sister-in-law.

The year Martha dies is 1949. By 1959, as presented in
Run River
, this “true” California has been largely obliterated. The pear orchards on which Lily herself grew up are being relentlessly uprooted: her mother is selling off the acreage for development as fast as the bank will allow her to subordinate it. The ranches immediately upriver and downriver from the McClellan ranch are already subdivisions, Rancho Del Rio No. 1 and Rancho Del Rio No. 3. This is unsettling to Everett but not so to his and Lily’s son, Knight. “They’re just biding their time,” Knight says. “Waiting it out for Rancho Del Rio No. 2.” Knight is about to go east to college, to Princeton, a “new” kind of choice (the “traditional” choice would have been Berkeley or Stanford) and so, again, unsettling. Knight is full of himself, and lectures his mother, who has asked him, since he is driving to Berkeley, to pick up some new paperback books on Telegraph Avenue. From Knight’s point of view:

She did not seem to realize that there were now paperback bookstores in Sacramento. She and his father would never seem to get it through their heads that things were changing in Sacramento, that Aerojet General and Douglas Aircraft and even the State College were bringing in a whole new class of people, people who had lived back East, people who read things. She and his father were going to be pretty surprised if and when they ever woke up to the fact that nobody in Sacramento any more had even heard of the McClellans. Or the Knights. Not that he thought they ever would wake up. They’d just go right along dedicating their grubby goddamn camellia trees in Capitol Park to the memory of their grubby goddamn pioneers.

There are other signs of change, which, in the construct of the novel, is understood to mean decline. There is Everett’s older sister, Sarah, who lives outside Philadelphia, another “new” kind of choice, with her third husband: again, a new kind of choice. Sarah has stopped by the ranch on her way to Maui (still another new choice, since the traditional Hawaiian destination would be Honolulu, on the
Lurline)
, apologized to her husband for the Valley heat (“true” children of the Valley are made uneasy by summer temperatures that do not reach three digits), and made it clear to Everett that she tolerates his wish to keep as ranches rather than subdivide their joint inheritance, seven thousand acres on the Sacramento and Cosumnes Rivers, only as a provisional indulgence. “Surely we’ve had offers,” Sarah suggests to Everett. Everett allows that interest has been expressed in the ranch on the Cosumnes. “I don’t
care
so much about the Cosumnes,” Sarah says. “The Cosumnes at least brings in a little cash.”

There is also the man Everett will eventually shoot, Ryder Channing. Ryder Channing is the only character in the novel not “from” California, in other words one of the “new people.” He first meets Martha in 1944, when he is stationed at Mather Field in Sacramento, and his appearances on the ranch to see her, which continue, inexplicably to Everett, after the war has ended and this person not from California should have gone home to wherever he came from, are presented as troubling elements. He has no intention of leaving, he tells Everett, because California is where the future is being made:

Starting now. Channing had the hunch they were in on the ground floor of the biggest boom this country had ever seen. Talk about your gold rush. And he wasn’t the only one who believed in Northern California. Just one example, the Keller Brothers believed in Northern California to the tune of five million berries.

“The Keller Brothers,” Everett said. “I don’t believe I know them.”

The Keller Brothers, Channing explained patiently, were developers. Los Angeles developers who believed in Northern California, in the Valley specifically, to the tune of five million smackeroos. Which they were putting into the Natomas District.

“I never heard of any Kellers in the Natomas,” Everett said.

With what appeared to be infinite restraint, Channing inspected and crumpled three empty cigarette packages before answering. “They aren’t in the Natomas right now. They want to develop the Natomas.”

“Who’s putting up the money? How can they raise five million dollars on land they haven’t got?”

“Those sweethearts could raise five million dollars with a plot plan on the back of a goddamn napkin. Anyway,” Channing added, apparently abandoning his effort to justify the Kellers’ ways to Everett, “that’s just one example. The point is we’re sitting right here on the ground floor with the button pushed go.”

Ryder, who because he has no California heritage is incapable of betraying it, not only sees the future but seizes it: he abandons Martha in 1948 to marry the daughter of a recently rich developer. (“Construction money, Everett believed. Wartime. It was all mixed up in his mind with Henry Kaiser.”) Martha, about whom there have been previous suggestions of histrionic instability (at parties the year she was sixteen “it had been impossible not to notice her, as it might have been impossible not to notice someone running a high fever, or wearing a cellophane dress”), spends the winter between Ryder’s marriage and her own death trying in vain to embrace this New California from which Ryder had come and to which she has now lost him: “She went everywhere, met everyone. She met builders, promoters, people looking for factory sites and talking about a deep-water channel and lobbying for federal dams; people neither Everett nor Lily would have known existed had she not told them. She went to large parties at new country clubs, went to small parties at new apartment houses, and went, almost every afternoon, to inspect subdivisions opened by one or another of the boys she knew who were going into the real estate business.”

This is a not inaccurate characterization of the way Sacramento, or for that matter California itself, felt to a child growing up during the postwar boom years, the late 1940s and early 1950s; sometimes, say when I hear about what the Alameda Corridor will bring us, I still catch the echo of those years. It was true that it was suddenly possible, as if overnight, to buy paperback books at Levinson’s bookstore downtown. It was true that it was suddenly possible, as if overnight, to see foreign movies—
Open City, The Bicycle Thief
, a lachrymose Swedish young-love picture called
One Summer of Happiness
—at the Guild Theater in Oak Park, although the only member of my family to regularly see them was a half-deaf great-aunt for whom subtitles offered the novel possibility of actually following the action onscreen. It was true that the habits and customs of “old Sacramento” (the school-vacation jobs on the ranches and at the canneries, the swimming in the rivers and wading in the ditches, the dutiful study of the agricultural exhibits at the California State Fair) were giving way to a more urban, or suburban, life, in which children swam in clear water in backyard pools lined with gunite and bought Italian typewriters and ate pears bought in supermarkets rather than dropped off in lugs by the relatives who grew them.