Where I Was From

1

“What had it all been about: all the manqué promises, the failures of love and faith and honor; Martha buried out there by the levee in a $250 dress from Magnin’s with river silt in the seams; Sarah in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; her father, who had not much cared, the easy loser (He never could have been, her mother had said and still loved him); her mother sitting alone this afternoon in the big house upriver writing out invitations for the Admission Day Fiesta and watching Dick Clark’s American Bandstand because the Dodgers were rained out; Everett down there on the dock with his father’s.38. She, her mother, Everett, Martha, the whole family gallery: they carried the same blood, come down through twelve generations of circuit riders, county sheriffs, Indian fighters, country lawyers, Bible readers, one obscure United States senator from a frontier state a long time ago; two 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. They had been a particular kind of people, their particular virtues called up by a particular situation, their particular flaws waiting there through all those years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only cloudily by one or two in each generation, by a wife whose bewildered eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon her mothers dogwood, by a blue-eyed boy who was at sixteen the best shot in the county and who when there was nothing left to shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident. It had been above all a history of accidents: of moving on and of accidents. What is it you want, she had asked Everett tonight. It was a question she might have asked them all.”

THAT 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.

“Two 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.

Much 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.

All this was true, and yet there was in Run River something that was not true, a warp, a persistent suggestion that these changes brought about by World War Two had in some way been resisted by “true” Californians. Had not any such resistance been confined to the retrospect? Were not “changes” and “boom years” what the California experience had been about since the first American settlement? Were we not still willing to traffic our own history to get what the railroad could bring us?

Take for example this business of laying the iconic camellias in Marthas grave: in point of fact the whole notion of planting camellias for the pioneers — there was in the park across from the state capitol building in Sacramento a “Camellia Grove” set aside for this purpose — had originated with my father’s stepmother, Genevieve Didion, who was for many years the president of the Sacramento City Board of Education and was said by the rest of the family, not entirely approvingly, to be “political.” All association of camellias with pioneers, in other words, derived from the same spirit of civic boosterism that would later turn Front Street, along the river, into the entirely ersatz “redevelopment” known as “Old Sacramento,” twenty-eight riverfront acres of shops selling trinkets and souvenirs and popcorn. “The pioneers,” in other words, had become a promotional tool, Sacramento’s own unique selling proposition, a way of attracting tourists, conventions, a new kind of cash that did not depend on crops: one more version of the weakness for the speculative venture that Charles Nordhoff had noted in 1874.

“The pool kills me,” Everett McClellan’s sister Sarah says, in Run River, when she visits the ranch on which he and Lily live. “It looks like Pickfair.”

The year Sarah says this is 1959. Although swimming pools were fairly general throughout California by 1959, this Pool on the ranch represents, as presented, Everett’s first concession to the postwar mood, and so cues the reader to yet another sign of decline. This did not exactly reflect any attitude toward pools with which I was familiar.

In 1948, when my mother and father and brother and I were living on some acreage outside Sacramento on which my father had built a house until the time seemed right to subdivide the property, my brother and I wanted a pool. We could have a pool, my father said, but only if we ourselves dug it. Every morning all that hot summer my brother, Jim, who was eight, took a shovel out to the middle of the field in front of the house and chipped in vain at the hardpan that underlay the inch or two of topsoil.

Five years older than Jim, doubtful that either he or I could dig a twenty-by-forty-foot hole eight feet deep, equally doubtful that our father — were such a hole to miraculously materialize — had any intention of following through (as I saw it, he might string a hose out there and turn on the tap, but no gunite, no filter, no tile coping), I declined to dig. Instead I spent the summer reading the plays of Eugene O’Neill and dreamed of escaping to Bennington, where I would prepare myself for a New York life in the theater by sitting in a tree in a leotard and listening to Francis Fergusson explain the difference between drama and melodrama. This was the year, 1948, when, already plotting my departure, I delivered the eighth-grade graduation speech on “Our California Heritage.” This was also the year, 1948, when the Sacramento City Parks Department awarded, as prizes in its annual Easter egg hunt, what The Sacramento Bee described as “live bunnies named after pioneers,” a teaching tool, it occurs to me now, that had “Genevieve Didion” written all over it. Ten years later I did have a New York life, although not in the theater, and I was writing the novel that would put such a protective distance between me and the place I came from.

2

THIS question of “changes,” involving as it does some reflexive suggestion of a birthright squandered, a paradise lost, is a vexed issue. I was many times told as a child that the grass in the Sacramento Valley had at the time the American settlers arrived in the 1840s grown so high that it could be tied over a saddle, the point being that it did no more. California, in this telling, had even then been “spoiled.” The logical extension of this thought, that we were the people who had spoiled it, remained unexplored. Nor would it be explored in Run River, the inchoate intent of which was to return me to a California I wished had been there to keep me. “Everything changes, everything changed,” one passage, obviously acutely felt at the time I wrote it, begins. “Summer evenings driving downriver to auctions, past the green hops in leaf, blackbirds flying up from the brush in the dry twilight air, red Christmas-tree balls glittering in the firelight, a rush of autumn Sundays, all gone, when you drove through the rain to visit the great-aunts.” The “change,” the “all gone” part, is seen in Run River to have come only with the postwar boom years, the prosperous years when California “as it was” got bulldozed out of existence either for better (as Ben Weingart and Louis Boyar and Mark Taper saw it when they conceived Lakewood) or (as I then wished to see it) for worse.

Californians of more programmatic mind for many years presented these postwar changes as positive, the very genius of the place: it was conventional to mention the freeway system, the aerospace industry, the University of California Master Plan, Silicon Valley, the massive rearrangement of the water that got funded when Pat Brown was governor, the entire famous package, the celebrated promise that California was committed to creating and educating an apparently infinitely expandable middle class. The more recent programmatic attitude was to construe the same changes as negative, false promises: the freeways had encouraged sprawl, the aerospace industry had gone away, the University of California had lost faculty and classrooms to budget cuts, Silicon Valley had put housing beyond the means of non-tech California, and most of the state was still short water.

In a book of readings for students in freshman composition classes at California colleges, the editors and contributors speak of “the threats to the California dream,” of the need to keep “the California dream in sight,” of “the fashionable new mythology emerging nationwide in which California is being recast as a nightmare rather than a dream,” and of which O. J. Simpson — O. J. Simpson as “the self-invented celebrity who climbed from poverty to the summit of fame and fortune” or O. J. Simpson in the white Bronco—“better reflects the truth about the California dream.” In either case, genius of the place or its dystopian blight, the postwar changes that transformed California were understood to have been brought about by what was popularly seen as an unprecedented influx of population, what Pat Brown, in a 1962 issue of Look, called “the greatest mass migration in the history of the world” and George B. Leonard, in the same issue of Look, called “the migrating millions who vote with their wheels for California.” During World War Two and the immediate postwar years, 1940 to 1950, the population of California did in fact increase 53 percent. During the next ten years, 1950 to 1960, the population of California did in fact increase 49 percent.

Yet such growth was in no way unprecedented. Nor, in a state that had seen its population increase in the first ten years of statehood by 245 percent, was it even remarkable. The decade between 1860 and 1870 brought a population increase to California of 47 percent, the decade that followed an increase of 54 percent. The years between 1900 and 1910 brought another 60 percent. Those were the years during which Faulkner’s Ira Ewing, in “Golden Land,” would have fled Nebraska on the night train to end up twenty-five years later sleepless in Beverly Hills. The years between 1910 and 1920 brought 44 percent. Those were the years when it came to the attention of Saxon Brown and Billy Roberts in The Valley of the Moon that “it looks like the free-born American ain’t got no room left in his own land”—two babes convinced that they had been deprived of their Eden by industrialization, by immigration, by whatever it was that they could not name. The ten years that followed, between 1920 and 1930, when only shallowly settled arrivals were to find themselves further marginalized by the onset of the Depression, brought 66 percent. There had been, then, from the beginning, these obliterating increases, rates of growth that systematically erased freshly laid traces of custom and community, and it was from such erasures that many California confusions would derive.

There used to be on the main street through Gilroy, a farm town in Santa Clara County that billed itself as “The Garlic Capital of the World,” a two- or three-story hotel, the Milias, where the dining room off the lobby had a black-and-white tiled floor and fans and potted palm trees and, in the opinion of my father, short ribs so succulent that they were worth a stop on any drive between Sacramento and the Monterey Peninsula. I remember sitting with him in the comparative cool of the Milias dining room (any claim of “cool” was at that time comparative, air conditioning not yet having taken widespread hold in Santa Clara County), eating short ribs and the cherries from his old-fashioned bourbon cocktail, the singular musky smell of garlic being grown and picked and processed permeating even the heavy linen napkins.

I am unsure at what point the Milias Hotel vanished (probably about the time Santa Clara County started being called Silicon Valley), but it did, and the “farm town” vanished too, Gilroy having reinvented itself as a sprawl of commuter subdivisions for San Jose and the tech industry. In the summer of 2001, a local resident named Michael Bonfante opened a ninety-million-dollar theme park in Gilroy, “Bonfante Gardens,” the attractions of which were designed to suggest the agricultural: stage shows with singing tomatoes, rides offering the possibility of being spun in a giant garlic bulb or swung from a thirty-nine-foot-high mushroom. The intention behind Bonfante Gardens, according to its creator, was “to show how the county was in the 1950s and 1960s.” The owner of a neighboring property was interviewed by The New York Times on the subject of Bonfante Gardens. “If it gets to be Disneyland, I am going to hate it,” she said. “Right now it is pretty and beautiful. But who knows? Someone who has been here as long as I have has mixed feelings.”

This interviewee, according to the Times, had been a resident of Gilroy, in other words “been here,” for fifteen years. If fifteen years seems somewhat short of the longtime settlement suggested by “someone who has been here as long as I have,” consider this: when my brother and I applied to change the zoning from agricultural to residential on a ranch we owned east of Sacramento, one of the most active opponents to the change, a man who spoke passionately to the folly of so altering the nature of the area, had moved to California only six months before, which suggested that he was living on a street that existed only because somebody else had developed a ranch. Discussion of how California has “changed,” then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.

Victor Davis Hanson is a professor of classics on the Fresno campus of California State University, a contributor of occasional opinion pieces to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and the author of a number of books, including The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer, an impassioned polemic modeled on and informed by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Farmer. Hanson has in fact for most of his life thought of himself as a farmer, either active or failed (he rejects the word “grower,” more common in California, as “a term of self-approbation, used by those in California who often do not themselves grow anything”), with his brother and cousins a cultivator of grapevines and fruit trees on the same San Joaquin Valley land, fewer than two hundred acres, that their great-great-grandfather homesteaded in the 1870s. He sees himself as heir to the freeholding yeomen farmers who, in Crèvecoeur’s and his own view, “created the American republican spirit.” He tells us that his children are the sixth consecutive generation to live in the same house. The single photograph I have seen of him shows a man in his forties, wearing khakis and a T-shirt, his features and general stance so characteristic of the Central Valley (a good deal of sun exposure goes into this look, and a certain wary defiance) that the photograph could seem indistinguishable from snapshots of my father and cousins.

There is much in The Land Was Everything that catches exactly this Valley note. There is the smell of insecticides, fungicides, the toxic mists that constitute the smell of the place. (“What they’re trying to do is generate a new fear of the word ‘carcinogen,’” the corporate counsel for the J. G. Boswell Company, which operates fifty thousand acres in the Tulare Basin, famously said in response to certain restrictions placed during the mid-1980s on the use of toxic chemicals. “Chemicals are absolutely necessary for everyday life.”) There is the sense of walking the ditches in an orchard, losing oneself among the propped limbs of the overburdened fruit trees. There is the visceral pleasure of cold Sierra water as it comes from the flume. There is the monosyllabic speech pattern, the directness to the point of rudeness, the abrupt way of launching and ending telephone calls with no niceties, no identification, no salutation, no goodbye, just a hangup. I never once heard my father’s father, the grandfather who remained “Mr. Didion” to me, identify himself on the telephone. My mother frequently hung up without saying goodbye, sometimes in midsentence. “I do not think I shall leave the San Joaquin Valley of California,” Hanson writes. “Courage, a friend tells me, requires me to grow up and leave, to get a better job elsewhere; cowardice, he says, is to stay put, possumlike, as the world goes on by. But at least my credentials as a San Joaquin Valley loyalist are unimpeachable, and thus my lament over its destruction is genuine.”

Hanson lives on the family farm, but no longer actually farms it. “When we all went to the universities, when we abandoned what made us good and embraced what made us comfortable and secure, we lost something essential, knew we lost it and yet chose to lose,” he writes. “Material bounty and freedom are so much stronger incentives than sacrifice and character.” What was lost by the “we” of this passage, and in Hansons view by America itself, was the pure hardship of the agrarian life, the yeoman ideal that constituted the country’s “last link with the founding fathers of our political and spiritual past,” its last line of defense against “market capitalism and entitlement democracy, the final stage of Western culture that is beyond good and evil.”

This gets tricky. Notice the way in which the author implicitly frames his indictment of himself and his family for turning away from the pure agrarian life as an indictment of the rest of us, for failing to support that life. Notice, too, that the “destruction” of the San Joaquin Valley, as he sees it, began at the point when the small family farms on the east side of the Valley (the arid west side of the Valley, the part described by William Henry Brewer in the 1860s as a “plain of absolute desolation,” belonged to the corporate growers) began giving way first to industrial parks and subdivisions and then to strip malls and meth labs. “Its Golden Age was therefore brief, no more than the beautiful century between 1870 and 1970, when gravity-fed irrigation in hand-dug ditches from the Sierra first turned a weed-infested desert into an oasis of small tree and vine farms and their quiet satellite communities.”

This “Golden Age,” in other words, began with the arrival of Hansons own family, and ended with his own adolescence. “Times have changed,” as the similarly focused Saxon Brown complained to Billy Roberts in The Valley of the Moon. “They’ve changed even since I was a little girl.” There is a further possible mirage here: the San Joaquin Valley’s “beautiful century” could have seemed, to those who were actually living it, perhaps not entirely golden: “Here, in this corner of a great nation, here, on the edge of the continent, here, in this valley of the West, far from the great centers, isolated, remote, lost, the great iron hand crushes life from us, crushes liberty and the pursuit of happiness from us…. Tell them, five years from now, the story of the fight between the League of the San Joaquin and the railroad and it will not be believed.” That was Frank Norris, writing in The Octopus, on the slaughter that took place in 1880 at Mussel Slough, now Lucerne, now and then just fifteen miles from Selma, the site of the farmhouse in which six generations of Victor Davis Hanson’s family have lived.

“There in my own small town,” Hanson tells us in The Land Was Everything, “we have torn up vineyards and now have planted the following crops: Wal-Mart, Burger King, Food-4-Less, Baskin-Robbins, Cinema 6, Denny’s, Wendy’s, Payless, Andersen’s Pea Soup, the Holiday Inn, McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr., Taco Bell, four gas stations, three shopping centers, two videotape stores, and a car wash.” In line with the thrust of his argument, Hanson offers this list as evidence of “change,” specifically of the moral or spiritual impoverishment to which he believes the loss of the yeoman ethic in the San Joaquin Valley has led. Some readers — those, say, who remain unconvinced that there was ever a yeoman ethic in the San Joaquin Valley to lose — might take from the list evidence of a less elusive impoverishment: the enterprises named are in the main national chains, or franchises, not the kinds of entrepreneurial activity calculated to return either money or opportunity to the community.

According to a study conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, the poverty rate in the San Joaquin Valley in the year 2000 was in fact twenty-two percent of the population, the highest in the state, which in turn had an overall poverty rate, when adjusted for cost of living, exceeded in the United States only by that of the District of Columbia. This overall California poverty rate began exceeding that of the rest of the nation only in the late 1980s, but being poor in the Central Valley was not a new condition. In 1980, of the ten American metropolitan areas most reliant on public assistance, six were in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, running south from Redding and Yuba City-Marysville and Stockton straight down through Modesto and Fresno and Visalia. Many assumed California’s rising poverty rate to be a function of immigration, and to some degree, in the short term, it was: the foreign-born, particularly those from Southeast Asia and Hispanic America, who did have the highest rate of poverty in the state.

In the Central Valley, however, immigration did not tell the whole story. In 1998, Tulare County began paying its welfare clients the cost of relocating in other states, providing an average of $2,300 a client to rent a U-Haul van and buy gas and stay in motels en route and pay first-and-last-month rent on a place to live once they get there. This policy, which also includes e-mailing job applications and mining the Internet for apartment rentals, has since been adopted by four other San Joaquin counties, Kings, Madera, Fresno, and Kern. In June 2001 and June 2002, reporters from first The New York Times and then The Washington Post interviewed samplings of these relocated clients. There were David Langley and his wife and child, who moved from Visalia to Colorado, as did Jackie and Michael Foster, “with their year-old red-haired son.” There was Lorrie Gedert, who moved with her two daughters from Ivanhoe, about ten miles outside Visalia, to Little Rock. There were Gloria and Nathan Dickerson, who moved with their two children, Emily and Drake, from Visalia to Ocala, Florida. There were Richard and Zena White, who moved from Fresno to Slidell, Louisiana, where, according to the Post, both are now working full-time, “Zena as an assistant manager at a Chevron gas station and Richard as a shift manager at McDonald’s.” What first strikes the reader of these reports is that the names of the former Californians interviewed do not uniformly suggest recent immigration from Southeast Asia or Hispanic America. What next strikes the reader is that even such marginal jobs as assistant manager at the Chevron station and shift manager at the McDonald’s appear to have been unobtainable in the San Joaquin Valley, here where the vineyards got torn up so the Wal-Marts and the Burger Kings and the Taco Bells could grow, here, as Frank Norris saw it in 1901, in this corner of a great nation, here, on the edge of the continent, here, in this valley of the West, far from the great centers, isolated, remote, lost.

3

FOR most of my life California felt rich to me: that was the point of it, that was the promise, the reward for having left the past on the Sweetwater, the very texture of the place. This was by no means to say that I believed all or even most Californians to be rich, only to suggest that the fact of having no money seemed to me to lack, in California, the immutable gravity that characterized the condition elsewhere. It was not designed to be a life sentence. You were meant, if you were a Californian, to know how to lash together a corral with bark, you were meant to know how to tent a raft and live on the river, you were meant to show spirit, kill the rattlesnake, keep moving. There were in California a lot of “dead brokes,” Henry George had pointed out in 1868, in a passage from “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” that got read to me (rather selectively, in retrospect) by my grandfather, “but there never was a better country to be ‘broken’ in, and where almost every man, even the most successful, had been in the same position, it did not involve the humiliation and loss of hope which attaches to utter poverty in older and more settled communities.”

That I should have continued, deep into adult life, to think of California as I was told as a child that it had been in 1868 suggests a confusion of some magnitude, but there it was. It’s not a word we use, my mother had said about class. It’s not the way we think. Only in the 1980s did certain facts — two of them, not unrelated — manage to penetrate what was clearly a fairly tenacious wish not to examine whatever it was I needed to believe. The first fact, which entered my attention as an almost personal affront, was that California no longer felt rich enough to adequately fund its education system. The second, or corollary, fact was that there seemed to be many towns in California — including towns I knew, towns I thought of as my own interior landscape, towns I had thought I understood, towns in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys — so impoverished in spirit as well as in fact that the only way their citizens could think to reverse their fortunes was by getting themselves a state prison. Since the building and staffing of new prisons were major reasons why California no longer felt rich enough to adequately fund its education system, this second fact initially presented itself as an even deeper affront than the first, evidence that a “new” California had finally and fatally sold out the old.

Then I remembered, then I realized.

We were seeing nothing “new” here.

We were seeing one more version of making our deal with the Southern Pacific.

We were seeing one more version of making our bed with the federal government.

We were seeing one more enthusiastic fall into a familiar California error, that of selling the future of the place we lived to the highest bidder, which was in this instance the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association is the prison guards’ union, a 29,000-member force that has maintained for some years now the most effective lobbying operation in Sacramento. In the 1998 election cycle, for example, the union funneled over two million dollars to Grey Davis’s gubernatorial campaign and another three million dollars to various other candidates and propositions. “All I’ve ever asked is that we get to play in the ballpark with all the big guys and gals out there,” Don Novey told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. Don Novey is the former guard at Folsom State Prison who became in 1980 the president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. “They call us the 800-pound gorilla. But we’re just taking care of our own like everybody else.” Don Novey refers to those who consider the need for new prisons an arguable proposition as “the other element.” He gave $75,000 to the opponent of a state senator who had once spoken against a prison bond issue. “If Don Novey ran the contractors’ union,” a Republican strategist told the Times, “there’d be a bridge over every puddle in the state.” The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the victims’ rights movement. The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the 1994 “three strikes” legislation and initiative, the act that mandated a sentence of twenty-five years to life for any third felony conviction, even for crimes as minor as growing a marijuana plant on a windowsill or shoplifting a bottle of Ripple. The prison guards were the political muscle that had by the year 2000 made the California corrections system, with thirty-three penitentiaries and 162,000 inmates, the largest in the western hemisphere.

Incarceration was not always a growth industry in California. In 1852 there was only San Quentin, by 1880 there was also Folsom. During the 104 years that followed, a century during which the population of California increased from 865,000 to 25,795,000 people, the state found need for only ten additional facilities, most of them low or medium security. It was only in 1984, four years after Don Novey took over the union, that the new max and supermax prisons began rolling online, Solano in 1984, “New Folsom” (a quarter mile removed from “Old Folsom”) in 1986, Avenal and lone and Stockton and San Diego in 1987, Corcoran and Blythe in 1988, Pelican Bay in 1989, Chowchilla in 1990, Wasco in 1991, Calipa-tria in 1992, Lancaster and Imperial and Centinela and Delano in 1993, Coalinga and a second prison at Blythe in 1994, second prisons at both Susanville and Chowchilla in 1995, Soledad in 1996, a second prison at Corcoran in 1997.

Delano, the town in the San Joaquin between Tulare and Bakersfield that became synonymous outside California with Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers’ union, still yearns for its own second prison, “New Delano,” to be built just across the road from what is already called “Old Delano,” the ten-year-old North Kern State Prison. Men-dota, west of Fresno and south of Chowchilla, still waits for what was to have been its privately built and operated prison, on which construction was begun and then postponed by the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, which had hit a snag trying to contract with the state for prisoners to fill the $100 million maximum-security prison it had already built in the Mojave desert. “They can build whatever prisons they want,” Don Novey had said to this point. “But the hell if they’re going to run them.”

That these prisons should remain the objects of abject civic desire is curious, since they have not actually enriched the towns that got them. A new prison creates jobs, but few of those jobs go to local hires. The Department of Corrections allows that it imports half the “corrections workers” in any new prison, but “tries” to hire the rest from the community. Opponents to “New Delano” point out that only seven to nine percent of the jobs at these new prisons have typically been local hires, and that the local hires get the low-paid service jobs. Of the 1,600 projected jobs at “New Delano,” only 72 would be local hires. There are, moreover, costs, both economic and social: when the families of inmates move into a prison town, they not only strain the limited resources of local schools and social service agencies but bring emotionally stressed children into the community and school system. “The students are all very high risk,” a school official in Lassen County, where Susanville is located, told The Los Angeles Times. “They come from single-parent homes. They’re latchkey kids, often on AFDC. It’s very obvious they’re from a whole different area. It creates societal conflicts. The child does not fit in.”

It was 1993 when the California Department of Corrections activated its first “death fence,” at Calipatria. It was 1994 when the second “death fence” was activated, at Lancaster, carrying a charge of 650 milliamperes, almost ten times the voltage required to cause instant death. “What the fence does is take out the human-error part,” the warden at Lancaster was quoted as having said, explaining that the million-dollar fences would save money in the long run because armed officers could be removed from prison gun towers. “The fence never goes to sleep. It doesn’t go to the bathroom. It doesn’t do any of those things. It’s always working.” It was also 1994 when standardized testing of reading skills among California fourth-graders placed them last in the nation, below Mississippi, tied only with Louisiana. It was 1995 when, for the first time, California spent more on its prisons than on its two university systems, the ten campuses of the University of California and the twenty-four campuses of California State University.

Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had “changed.” Only recently did I come to see them as the opposite, evidence of how California had “not changed,” and to understand “change” itself as one of the cultures most enduring misunderstandings about itself.

4

JUST east of Sacramento, off Kilgore Road in what is now Rancho Cordova, a town with a population of almost fifty thousand that exists only because Aerojet General began manufacturing rockets there after World War Two, there is a three-acre family graveyard, the Matthew Kilgore Cemetery, its gates long gone, its two-hundred-some graves overgrown and many of its stone markers, a few of which are dated as recently as the 1970s, overturned. Two of my great-great-great-grandparents, Matthew Kilgore and his wife Massa McGuire Kilgore, were buried there, Massa Kilgore in 1876, Matthew Kilgore in 1882. When I was in high school and college and later I would sometimes drive out there, park the car and sit on the fender and read, but after the day I noticed, as I was turning off the ignition, a rattlesnake slide from a broken stone into the dry grass, I never again got out of the car.

In the 1980s, when the condition of the Kilgore Cemetery had become a matter of local concern (vandals had dug up a body and stolen its head), the president of the Rancho Cordova Chamber of Commerce appealed to “Cordovans” (residents of Rancho Cordova, in other words “new people”) to join a volunteer effort to clean up the beer bottles and debris left by trespassers. “There are a lot of residents who would like to see this historic site preserved as it deserves to be,” he was quoted as having said in the newspaper story my mother clipped and sent to me in Los Angeles.

I asked, when my mother and I next spoke, if the family — the seventy-some of my father’s cousins who annually attended the Kilgore Family Reunion in McKinley Park in East Sacramento, say — was joining the effort to clean up the Kilgore Cemetery.

The family, my mother said, did not own the Kilgore Cemetery.

It occurred to me that neither did the president of the Rancho Cordova Chamber of Commerce own the Kilgore Cemetery, but I opted to go in a different direction. I asked how exactly it had come to pass that the family did not own the Kilgore Cemetery.

“I presume somebody sold it,” my mother said.

I thought about this.

I also thought about having seen the rattlesnake slide from the broken stone into the grass.

I had seen the rattlesnake but I had failed to get out of the car and kill it, thereby violating, in full awareness that I was so doing, what my grandfather had told me was “the code of the West.”

If “not killing the rattlesnake” violated “the code of the West,” how about “selling the cemetery”? Would that qualify? Not surprisingly, the Kilgore Cemetery makes an appearance of a kind in Run River. Lily’s father, Walter Knight, after he misses a curve on the river road and drowns trapped in his car, is buried in what is described as a small family cemetery where the last previous burial had taken place in 1892. The burial is described from Lily’s point of view: “There was a certain comfort in the unkempt graveyard. Dried grass obscured the markers, and the wings had been broken years before from the stone angels guarding the rusted wire gate; there was about the place none of the respect for death implicit in a well-tended plot.”

Could this have been what I thought letting the Kilgore Cemetery go to ruin demonstrated? Some admirable wagons-west refusal to grant death its dominion? The idealization of the small family cemetery in Run River continues: “Once, a long time before, Walter Knight had brought Lily to see this graveyard. He had made her trace out with her finger the letters on the stones, the names and their dates, until she found the small, rough stone which marked the oldest grave.” This “oldest grave” was that of a child not yet two, the first family member to die in California. “I think nobody owns land until their dead are in it,” Walter Knight had said to Lily on this occasion. “Sometimes I think this whole valley belongs to me,” Lily had said, and her father had responded sharply: “It does, you hear me? We made it.”

Had I known when I was writing Run River that the Kilgore Cemetery had been or would be sold, was this the rationalization I would have worked out? Our dead were in it, so we owned it? Our deal, so we could sell it? Or would I have somehow managed to incorporate “selling the cemetery” into my bill of particulars against the “new people,” against the “changes”? At what point exactly might I have asked: was it new people who sold the cemetery? Was it new people who ploughed under and grazed out the grass that could be tied over the saddle? How would Josiah Royce have construed “selling the cemetery”? “Novel degree of carelessness”? “Previously unknown blindness to social duties”? Or “building a well-organized, permanent, and progressive State on the Pacific Coast”? Or was that the same thing?

From the 1870s to the 1920s, according to Richard W. Fox’s 1978 study So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California 1870–1930, California had a higher rate of commitment for insanity than any other state in the nation, a disproportion most reasonably explained, Fox suggests, “by the zeal with which California state officials sought to locate, detain, and treat not only those considered ‘mentally ill,’ but also a wide variety of other deviants — including, as state hospital physicians put it, ‘imbeciles, dotards, idiots, drunkards, simpletons, fools,’ and ‘the aged, the vagabond, the helpless.’” Not only did California have this notably higher rate of commitment but the institutions to which it committed its citizens differed fundamentally from those in the East, where the idea of how to deal with insanity had been from the beginning medicalized, based on regimes — however more honored in the breach — of treatment and therapy. The idea of how to deal with insanity in California began and ended with detention.

So broad were the standards for committal, and so general was the inclination to let the state take care of what might in another culture have been construed as a family burden, that even many of the doctors who ran the system were uneasy. As early as 1862, according to So Far Disordered in Mind, the resident physician at the Stockton State Asylum for the Insane complained of receiving patients “who, if affected in their minds at all, it is the weakness of old age, or intemperance, or perhaps most commonly both together.” In 1870, the federal census classified one in every 489 Californians as insane. By 1880, the rate had risen to one in 345. After 1903, when the rate had reached one in 260 and the asylums had passed capacity, the notion of sterilizing inmates gained currency, the idea being that a certain number could then be released without danger of reproducing. Sterilization, or “asexualization,” of inmates, which was legalized in some other states as early as 1907, was made legal in California in 1909. By 1917, the right of the state to sterilize had been extended twice, first to cases in which the patient did not agree to the procedure, then to cases in which the patient had not even been necessarily diagnosed with a hereditary or incurable disorder, but only with “perversion or marked departures from normal mentality.” By the end of 1920, of the 3,233 sterilizations for insanity or feeblemindedness performed to that date throughout the United States, 2,558, or seventy-nine percent, had taken place in California.

What was arresting in this pattern of commitment was the extent to which it diverged from the California sense of itself as loose, less socially rigid than the rest of the country, more adaptable, more tolerant of difference. When Fox analyzed the San Francisco commitment records for the years 1906 to 1929, he found that the majority of those hospitalized, fifty-nine percent, had been committed not because they were violent, not because they presented a threat to others or to themselves, but simply because they had been reported, sometimes by a police officer but often by a neighbor or relative, to exhibit “odd or peculiar behavior.” In 1914, for example, San Francisco medical examiners granted the wish of a woman to commit her thirty-seven-year-old unmarried sister, on the grounds that the sister, despite her “quiet and friendly” appearance during detention, had begun “to act silly, lost interest in all things which interest women, could no longer crochet correctly as formerly, takes no interest in anything at present.” In 1915, a forty-year-old clerk was committed because “for three weeks he has been annoying the City Registrar, calling every day and insisting that he is a Deputy.” In 1922, a twenty-three-year-old divorcée was committed after a neighbor reported that she was “lazy, slovenly, careless of personal appearance, stays away from home for days, neglecting self and consorting with men.” The same year, a forty-eight-year-old pianist was committed on the grounds that “she has been irresponsible for years; has been a source of great annoyance to many institutions such as Y.W.C.A. Association, churches, etc.”

The apparently pressing need to commit so many and in many cases such marginally troubled Californians to indefinite custodial detention seems not at the time to have struck their fellow citizens as an excessive lust for social control. Nor did these fellow citizens appear to see their readiness to slough off bothersome relatives and neighbors as a possible defect in their own socialization. Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of earthquakes. The first State Lunatic Asylum in California, that at Stockton, was established in 1853 specifically to treat those believed to have been driven mad by the goldfields. According to an 1873 State Board of Health report, this endemic madness had to do with “the speculative and gambling spirit” of the California settlement. It had to do with “heterogeneous elements,” it had to do with “change of climate, habits, and modes of life,” it had to do with being “isolated, without sympathy, and deprived of all home influences.” California itself, then, according to its own Board of Health, was “well-calculated to break some link in reason’s chain, and throw into confusion even the best balanced properties of mind.”

I have on my desk a copy of the 1895 California Blue Book, or State Roster, family detritus, salvaged from a Good Will box during a move of my mother’s. I assumed at the time I retrieved it that the roster had been my grandfather’s but I see now that the bookplate reads “Property of Chas. F. Johnson, Bakersfield, Calif., No. 230,” in other words the detritus of someone else’s family. The book is illustrated with etchings and photographs, a startling number of which feature what were in 1895 the state’s five asylums for the insane, huge Victorian structures that appear to have risen from the deserts and fields of California’s rural counties in a solitude more punitive than therapeutic. Among the illustrations are the facts, in neat columns: there were at the Napa State Asylum for the Insane thirty-five “Attendants,” each of whom received an annual salary of $540. All were identified by name. There were, listed under the “Attendants” and also identified by name, sixty “Assistant Attendants,” thirteen of whom received $480 a year and the rest $420. There were on the staff at the State Insane Asylum at Agnews, in Santa Clara County, more “Cooks” and “Assistant Cooks” and “Bakers” and “Assistant Bakers” than there appear to have been doctors (the only doctors listed are the “Medical Director,” at $3,500, and two “Assistant Physicians,” at $2,500 and $2,100 respectively), but the staff roster also includes — a note that chills by the dolorous entertainments it suggests — one “Musician, and Assistant Attendant,” budgeted at $60 a year more than the other, presumably unmusical, Assistant Attendants.

These places survived through my childhood and adolescence into my adult life, sources of a fear more potent even than that of drowning in the rivers (drowning meant you had misread the river, drowning made sense, drowning you could negotiate), the fear of being sent away — no, worse—“put away.” There was near Sacramento an asylum where I was periodically taken with my Girl Scout troop to exhibit for the inmates our determined cheerfulness while singing rounds, nine-year-olds with merit badges on our sleeves pressed into service as Musicians and Assistant Attendants. White coral bells upon a slender stalk, we sang in the sunroom, trying not to make eye contact, lilies of the valley line your garden walk. I could not have known at nine that my grandmother’s sister, who arrived lost in melancholia to live with us after her husband died, would herself die in the asylum at Napa, but the possibility that such a fate could strike at random was the air we breathed.

Oh don’t you wish that you could hear them ring, we sang, one by one faltering, only the strongest or most oblivious among us able to keep the round going in the presence of the put away, the now intractably lost, the abandoned, that will happen only when the angels sing. If it was going to be us or them, which of us in that sunroom would not have regressed in Royce’s view to that “novel degree of carelessness,” that “previously unknown blindness to social duties”? Which of us in that sunroom could not have abandoned the orphaned Miss Gilmore and her brother on the Little Sandy? Which of us in that sunroom did not at some level share in the shameful but entrenched conviction that to be weak or bothersome was to warrant abandonment? Which of us in that sunroom would not see the rattlesnake and fail to kill it? Which of us in that sunroom would not sell the cemetery? Were not such abandonments the very heart and soul of the crossing story? Jettison weight? Keep moving? Bury the dead in the trail and run the wagons over it? Never dwell on what got left behind, never look back at all? Remember, Virginia Reed had warned attentive California children, we who had been trained since virtual infancy in the horrors she had survived, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can. Once on a drive to Lake Tahoe I found myself impelled to instruct my brother’s small children in the dread lesson of the Donner Party, just in case he had thought to spare them. “Don’t worry about it,” another attentive California child, Patricia Hearst, recalled having told herself during the time she was locked in a closet by her kidnappers. “Don’t examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings — they’re no help at all.”