Imperial (10 page)

I think of Pedro, who employed no coyote, just swam the river to Texas, asked somebody what to do, figured out how to hop a train, and got all the way to Houston.

I remember Christofer, the slender, gentle, sad-eyed one with the cross around his neck and the New Testament in Spanish under his arm. His six-day deportation process from Los Angeles had concluded just yesterday, and already he was waiting at the fence on that cool fragrant dusk of flowers, considering whether to jump the fence in the place where I knew from Officer Murray that the video camera in the water tower was already watching us both, or else essay a ride on top of a railroad car—a more dangerous spot, to be sure, but he believed that the Border Patrol never checked it. Maybe he was correct there; I fear not. Fat Carlos had crossed six times on the train, but unfailingly found himself invited into a holding cell. (Last time I almost got by, he told me, but there was this big old rattlesnake on the road and it scared the shit out of me, man.) Christofer smiled quietly and told me that he had a feeling he would get through. His girlfriend, whose flesh was comprised of illegality equal to his, lived in Echo Park. He craved to return to her; he said that there was “no life” in Mexico (although it seemed to me that everything in Mexico was lower, dirtier, truer and above all more alive). We talked for perhaps half an hour, until it was dusk. I went back Northside, a journey accomplished in about ten minutes thanks to my United States passport, walked four blocks to my hotel, gathered up the tripod and eight by ten camera, and took a portrait of Christofer through the rusty bars where we had arranged a meeting. Day and night on the American side one can usually see somebody speaking softly and earnestly through these bars to another human being on the Mexican side. When it is very late, someone often wades through the humid night shadows to stand there looking across the border at the wide yellow lines of Mexicali. Here it was that I made my photograph. I offered to mail a copy to Christofer’s girlfriend, but he knew her address only in a descriptive fashion; he could tell me which alleys to employ (none of them by name, only by topography); he related vividly every turn were I to walk from the Greyhound station all the way to his girlfriend’s place in Echo Park; he could see the American streets swarming gloriously before him but could not name them because he was illiterate. That New Testament he carried upon his person thus proved to be no reference, but an icon. He could not read it, but believed in it. He trusted that the girl he loved would wait for him in Echo Park until he found his way back. He would cross the border again and again.

I think of the man who proudly boasted of having entered Northside illegally more than seventy-five times.
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Above all, I think of the brown people I saw picking lettuce outside Salinas on a foggy June day as a loudspeaker shouted at them in Spanish. They worked like devils. A melody began to shriek and blare on the loudspeaker, and they all sang along. Who would pick lettuce without them?

Across the three lines of shiny cars going to the U.S.A., a man stood among the flowerbushes, still on the Mexican side, but pacing. He waited in the middle of the street, leaning against one of the yellow concrete barriers. He was longhaired, greasy, sunburned. He was rich with the fecal stink of the New River. He prowled and paced. He stared hungrily into America. He bore the immense burden of the heat.

Oh, he’s waitin’, Officer Dan Murray was most likely saying wisely, looking through the fence. He and his
amigos,
maybe they have plans. The way you’re lookin’ right now, if you look southwest, that’s where you’re gonna see him come through . . .

Chapter 2

DELINEATIONS (2000)

Our eyes scan only a small angle of view at any moment; as we move our direction of sight, our visual memory holds and builds impressions of larger and larger areas, while bringing each point concentrated upon into clarity and detail that only a very long-focus lens can approximate.

—Ansel Adams, 1983

T
he fact that the perimeter of Imperial County resembles a distracted child’s attempt to draw a square scarcely distinguishes it, since many other counties in America, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains states, were likewise enacted as defectively wearisome rectangles. Still, we need to start somewhere. It may well be that since this southeast corner of California is so peculiar, enigmatic, sad, beautiful and perfect as it stands, delineation of any sort should be forgone in favor of the recording of “pure” perceptions, for instance by means of a camera alone; or, failing that, by reliance upon word-pictures: a cityscape of withered palms, white tiles, glaring parking lots, and portico-shaded loungers who watch the boxcars groan by; a cropscape of a rich green basil field, whose fragrance rises up as massively resonant as an organ-chord. But I have seen so many old photographs in attics and archives, uncaptioned images of nameless California beauty queens, of lost canals and of obscure professional men in high white collars, all of them pinkening into specters even as the blank desert skies which frame them develop spots of “weather” (brown fixer stains), and maybe one of those professional men, whose hair was carefully sidecombed and whose moustachios tamed in order for him to best resemble the man he wanted to be by the time that photographer emerged from under the focusing cloth, withdrew the dark slide from the film and threw open the shutter on that long ago day before Imperial was a county and the Salton Sea was even born, maybe he, our professional man, deserves to be thanked or cursed for something important; maybe that pretty high school girl in the bathing suit who stands gripping a ship’s wheel in her white, white fingers as she stands by the Salton Sea would mean more to me if I knew the extent to which her grandchildren mourned at her funeral and whether she ever once swam there, whether in her time it stank half as much as it does in mine with half-mummified birds and fishes crunching underfoot, which latter point would interest me extremely because some folks have told me that the Salton Sea is poisonous while others insist that there’s nothing wrong except an extra pinch of salt perhaps. And what should we do about the Salton Sea, which is to say what should we think, and on what basis, not to mention how should we live? Without a past, no matter how controvertible, the present cannot be anything other than a tumble through darkness towards the darkness which neither past nor present can illuminate. Because I’d rather fall through patches of illuminated air, no documentary caption can possibly contain overmany facts to please me. Let the reader beware. At least the following attempts at delineation may entertain you by proving how badly I draw squares.

THE OFFICIAL LINE

Starting, then, at the county’s southwest corner, where map-marks for Smugglers’ Cave and Elliot Mine squat below the authoritative red downsnake of Interstate 8, we find the straight line of the Mexican border sloping slightly northeastward, prying apart those kissing cousins, Mexicali and Calexico, and from their severed embrace, memorialized by a sign which advises that WE PAY CASH FOR SCRAP METAL, the line continues to shoot alongside rusty segments of American wall, with Mexico dim on our right, the music from the stripshows fading now, shrill and distorted. A century earlier, it had been like this:
A step over the ditch, and I was in Mexican territory. The contrast was noticeable. North of this imaginary line were modern structures, stores, shops and the commodious offices of the Imperial Water company, with vegetation on all sides, while on the south of it the eye rested upon a few Indian brush teepees scattered among the mesquite bushes that spread over a vast desert beyond.
And before that, of course, all this had been Mexico. The line hugs a dark road, then seals off a forest of lights along the edge of a richly sexually smelling kingdom of hay, reenters the desert and inscribes itself all the way to the Colorado River just north of Algodones. Here where California gives way to Arizona, the Colorado has bitten a ragged arc from Imperial County’s southeast corner. It was within three miles of this spot that in 1904 a gambler’s cut, made by American engineers without undue regard for Mexican sovereignty, gave the thirsty settlers of the Imperial Valley all the water they’d demanded, and more—and more, until flood-waves opened their fingers all the way from the Imperial Canal up to the New River, and an entire painfully shimmering whiteness of saline flats which had just begun to turn a profit for the New Liverpool Salt Company and then also for the Standard Salt Company was drowned by the county’s new centerpiece, that Salton Sea. Well, well, what could be more imperial than the purplish darkness of winter over water, the broken line of lights of some town along its far side (did I mention that either side is the far side?), some lonely town, decrepit town, ghost town whose beach adorns itself with salt-baked strata of carcasses? To close their breach, the saviors of what would soon be Imperial County had to throw in not only railroad cars full of gravel, rocks, boulders and clay, but the very railroad cars themselves. In 1907 that forfeit was paid and accepted. The farming could go on (hay brought in a decent ten dollars per ton in those days, and California’s yields per acre exceeded the national average although Arizona’s were twice as good), the sea subsided a trifle, and we pretended that our accident had been nature’s. Appropriately enough, from this corner northward the county line is the Colorado River itself, which as it separates from Mexico slopes upstream widely southeast and then northeast around the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation to meet its next vampire, the All-American Canal; and then, looping and wriggling northeast to northwest against the Arizona counties of Yuma and La Paz, that aquatic boundary ropes in Imperial’s mountains, railroad tracks and vandalized graves. Running past the Indian Pass National Wilderness, it nears, then veers from the Palo Verde Mountains, snaps northeastward one last time, and at the site of the old Taylor Ferry makes its third corner. Now at last we have an almost level line between Imperial and Riverside counties, as if the child-draftsman got sedated with a lollipop and settled down, allowing us to jog undeviatingly across Highway 78 and the live bombing area in the Chocolate Mountains. A dozen miles south of it as the crow flies, the gentle, wrinkled old prophet Leonard Knight lives alone at the base of a dry ridge whose terminus he has painted with an immense scarlet heart, a blue pond of Christian love, not to mention his slogans and multitudinous simple-styled birds and flowers. Soon it will be two decades that he’ll have been laboring there. He only gets more excited. I remember one year when I happened to visit Salvation Mountain just after a rain, and Leonard’s latest coat of oil paint was shiny and glowing like candy, brighter than ever before. Close up, the paint was still gooey, pleasantly reeking of newness. Leonard said: I believe someday you’ll be able to stand here and see the whole mountain reflected in that shiny oil paint! I can see it comin’.—And if I could somehow reflect all Imperiality in this brief gloss job which you’re now reading, I’d be much gratified. As it is, I’ll have to be content with varnishing reality as reflectively as I can. From the top of the mountain, standing beside the hay-and-adobe pedestal from which Leonard’s cross blooms, one looks down the great field of color-zones, lines and splotches (whose effect reminds me of a children’s board game such as Candy Land) to find Leonard’s mailbox, rows of paint buckets, then his two immensely decorated trailers, on both of whose roofs is spelled out (to me incongruously, since he’s not stern or even monitory) REPENT, and then a flatness of tan scrubby desert where Leonard may sometimes be spied on his bicycle slowly pedaling around there way below; and beyond him, beyond that narrow dark straight road which leads from Salvation Mountain to Niland to the west and Slab City to the east, lies more desert, marked not randomly but mysteriously by dirt roads and a lone power pole, after which, far and far away, the low horizon, whose bright dry glory almost never gets impeded in this direction, halts both gaze and retrospection, being burdened by a dark ribbon: the Salton Sea. Leonard hasn’t been there for years, he says. He just never seems to get the time, what with all he’s got to do, embellishing and cherishing his mountain. The sea tapers northwest beyond our seeing until it gets sliced through by the Imperial County line just south of Bat Caves Buttes. Imagine that! People say it was miraculous that Christ walked across the water, and yet they don’t think twice when the same is performed by this entity invisible everywhere except in its representations, whose substance is comprised of equal parts imagination, measurement, memory, authority and jurisdiction! Delineation is the merest, absurdest fiction, yet delineation engenders
control.
Crossing Highway 86, which hugs the southwest shore of the sea more than capriciously, the line runs a due and sober south, keeping the badlands of Anza Borrego State Park in San Diego County for no good reason, crossing Highway 78 again (somewhat south of the counterpart crossing on the east side), and then it lapses into squarish serrations around the perimeter of the ominously named Carrizo Impact Area. In the badlands by the Coyote Mountains, it resumes its straightness all the way back to Mexico.

ANNEXATIONS

Loyalty to literalism would have constrained me entirely within the perimeter of this desert polyhedron. But Imperial County’s attributes overwash its borders on every side, as if they were squint-wrinkles extending like sun-rays from its inhabitants’ eyes.
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Spillovers are easy from a place where everything is long and low, even the mountains. From the levee in Bombay Beach one can see across rooftops, trailertops and treetops all the way to the arid mottlings of the Chocolate Range, which runs beyond the county line without indication of any official or approved transubstantiation. In Brawley and in Calipatria, lines of hay bales lead the eye to infinity. Let’s therefore call Imperial County the center of the world, for so it is to anyone who pauses to stand within it, making it
here.
Having thus recognized its rightful place (meaning no disrespect to any other place), let’s illuminate it with all the resources of eyesight, persuasion, bribery, book-study, the mystical “access” available for use and abuse by the holder of a press card, imagination again, secondhand experience, curiosity, romanticism, patience and chance, not to mention the pallid quadruple searchlights of the casino in Coachella where Jose the taxi driver sometimes parks at two in the morning, hoping for rich fares. When no rich fares come, he plays the keno machines. (He said to me: I like to play, but I never win.) This Imperial region about which I want to write and into which I’ve peeped for years without filling my understanding even halfway as much as wind-sand has lined the rusty cyanide vats of the Tumco Mine spreads itself into a number of overlapping, useless and sometimes superseded names: the Great Basin, the Open Basin, the Colorado Desert, the Desert Lower Sonoran Life Zone (which covers the lower righthand quadrant of the entire state), the Mojave-Sonoran ecotone, “the southwest,” California incognita. Let’s call it simply
Imperial.
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