Imperial (130 page)

No doubt that describes the New River. Edith Karpen told me that when she first arrived in the Imperial Valley in 1933,
at that time, the growers would bring workers from the New River gorge.

How was the smell in the thirties?

When I first got there, it wasn’t too bad. It got worse all the time. I had a friend who was very outspoken. And when I was there, he was lobbying, I would say, to build a dam, so that the water couldn’t come from Mexico!

(Richard Brogan told me, not without grim pride: You know what the U.S. Department of Health has rated our river? One of the worst in the world! All of mankind’s diseases. Polio, tuberculosis.)

In the spring of 1950,
Fortune
magazine asserts:
Chemicals must now be considered the premier industry of the U.S.
And in 1954, Mr. Gifford Price, a corn farmer up in Mecca, informs a marketing order hearing that DDT costs him a hundred and twenty pounds per acre.
You can usually double crop.

In 1966, the Lockheed Aircraft Company expresses readiness for self-improvement, because
wastes from certain processes, such as degreasing and chemical milling, are being conducted to disposal systems in a manner not considered acceptable engineering practice. The uncontrolled discharge of many of the untreated toxic wastes into the storm sewer produces some extremely hazardous, if not deadly fumes such as cyanide gas . . .
That very year, we are informed that almost seventy percent of southern California’s wastes still go home to the Pacific.
About half of the wastes are industrial, many of them being dumped from barges several miles offshore.

By 1985, California’s groundwater contains pesticides from Aldicarb to Zytron—two thousand nine hundred and sixty-three verified incidents; but how serious are they really? Perhaps less than one percent of the aquifer is contaminated; surely our testing has been insufficient; certainly some poison levels will keep rising over the decades. For instance, the nematicide 1,2-dibromo-3-chloropropane (DBCP), employed for twenty years (more than fifty million pounds’ worth), then banned in 1977, has now been found in two thousand five hundred and twenty-two wells,
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a situation which affects seven hundred thousand Californians; over half these contaminated wells have dangerous concentrations. In 1984, DBCP concentrations in some wells are higher than when first measured in 1979. DBCP boasts a half-life of over a century. In Riverside County, a hundred and ninety-five thousand people, thirteen wells and three towns are contaminated. Imperial County escapes mention, although in a map of DBCP applications from 1972 to 1977 inclusive, I see quite a few thousand tons deployed in Imperial; it’s tricky to determine how many, since the map key is so poor; Coachella looks pretty clean, as does the Imperial portion of San Diego; the Central Valley is a black nightmare . . .

How could Imperial be any less poisoned than her neighboring agribusiness Rothkoscapes? As with nematicides, so with pesticides: Data on the map of verified incidents of groundwater contamination from pesticides stains both Riverside and San Diego counties a threatening grey, but Imperial County remains snow white! Why? Is it because almost all the county’s water comes from the Colorado River, so that there is no groundwater of relevance? (Never mind the long-gone artesian wells of Holtville.) Could it be that Imperial is simply too poor to warrant detailed study? I won’t believe that; I can’t help believing in people.

By the way, respiratory disease is three times more prevalent in the Imperial Valley than the national average; the reason, explains Dr. Thomas H. Horiagon, is
probably a combination of factors, culture, genetics and environment.

You’ll be relieved to know that on the other side of the ditch, everything remains as clean as a fifteen-year-old prostitute. A private detective in Tijuana said to me: The Mexican government received a report from these investigators to find out the ecological status of the province. And after they read it, they threw it away. If you use it, you never got it from me.

He let me glimpse the report, but would not let me copy it. In a word, the ecological status of the province was horrible.

Imperial is Mexico; Imperial is California; Imperial is cool clean Southwestern fun! And so in 1985, the State Water Resources Control Board, now coming into its forty-first year of existence, declares:
We are approaching the point where toxic pollution is beginning to affect the overall availability of water in California.
That doesn’t count; that’s after the happily ever after.

BY THE WAY

So W. H. Shebley saved our rivers forever and ever. What about dirt contaminated with cyanide, thallium and benzo(a)anthracene? I fear that that lay literally beneath, but not under, his jurisdiction.

“NO TRACE REMAINS”

In 1925 the citrus growers of California are advised that they can save themselves from dwarfs and culls with
“Black Leaf 40” the Old Reliable nicotine spray,
made in Kentucky. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few tons of that improved the orangescapes of Imperial. In 1950, potassium cyanate liberates us from weeds on fifteen hundred acres of Imperial Valley onions. At the same period, Coachella Valley dates are being fumigated with menthyl bromide,
a very poisonous gas
which
should be handled with extreme caution and only by responsible persons . . . This warning is given only to handlers, not the consumers of the fruit, as no trace of such gas remains on the date . . .

Maybe that’s true, and if I were going to write a book entitled
Imperial,
and if I were to do it with extreme caution and in a responsible manner, I would need to educate myself, and you, about the half-life and effects of each poison in Imperial.
The flow model indicates constituents of the soil contaminants first reached groundwater no later than the 1930s.
But for all I know,
no trace of such gas remains.
(César Chávez considered methyl bromide sufficiently dangerous to be banned.) Isn’t it more relaxing just to throw up my hands and decide that a stream is like a woman?

By 1948, Imperial County was spraying 2,4-D on mesquite, although that
failed to give other than fair control. Check plots using arsenicals in jars with individual plant treatment proved more satisfactory and will be used in this program as well as treatment of Camel Thorn.
Ten years earlier, the California Board of Agriculture had warned:
Cattle like the salt and somewhat sweetish taste of sodium arsenite or sodium chlorate weed killer and will lick it up from the bare ground. Arsenate of lead can find its way onto strawberries . . .
By then, lead and arsenic trioxide had put in appearances in produce sampled in Los Angeles; Angelenos were ingesting harmful spray residues in cabbages, cauliflowers, celery, tomatoes and especially cherries . . . I for one prefer to imagine that
no trace of such gas remains.
Don’t you? Back to 1948. Imperial County’s mission continues:
Chlorate has been used to clean up scattered infestations of Johnson Grass.

In 1949, nearly three million pounds of insecticides were applied in Imperial County—not quite five pounds per irrigated acre. (Wherever these poisons were actually used, of course, the proportionate poundage would have been higher.) We doubled that in 1950. Chlordane for grasshoppers and crickets, oil emulsion spray for red scale, why not? In Imperial County we trap coyotes in the spring, and then we kill bugs. By 1951, we applied chlordane, oil and flake bran by air at ten pounds per acre. In 1954 the Agricultural Commissioner noted that
cotton, sugar beets and fall vegetable crops required almost continual application of insecticides.

By now the Imperial Idea was getting discomfited by rumors that growers might need permission from their county agricultural commissions before spraying with parathion, lead arsenate, Paris green, etcetera. A grower in Merced assured the State Bureau of Chemistry that
he’d
never had any problems with his animals! Moreover, insecticides had cut his costs by 60 to 75 percent!
E. F. Kirkpatrick, entomologist of the American Cyanamid Company, stated that the use of parathion dusts containing less than 2 per cent is not particularly dangerous, provided, of course, that . . . the instructions are followed.
But by 1975, Northside had so far decayed that warning notices compulsorily arose for parathion and its kin; moreover, the user could no longer be under eighteen years old.—Do you suppose that some of those chemicals might be bad for us? Boysie Day of the University of California helped us keep our sense of proportion:
Commercial 2,4,5-T is about as toxic as kerosene or aspirin, and neither of these are to be taken in large doses.

At the century’s end, the quantity of insect poisons employed in Imperial County was said to be eight million pounds. Why worry? Very likely
no trace of such gas remains.

Chapter 143

THE SALTON SEA (1944-1986)

... it seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.

—T. H. White, 1940

A
s late as 1968, Sand Point Marina and Lido Palms, Inc, both with post office boxes in Salton City, get together to invest in a lovely color photograph, full page, of speedboats and waders crowding the clear and shallow blue-brown waters of the Salton Sea, with mobile homes crowded on a sandy spit and flat desert, then a line of palms, then blue desert mountains in the background. As we moderns love to say:
Bucolic.

That year a million freshwater gallons per minute flow into the Salton Sea.
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It must be pretty pure, then!

Some of that sweet water originates in Mexico. I once asked Mrs. Finnell, the retired Agricultural Commissioner’s wife, how the New River had been in the fifties, and she said: It was pretty bad then. It was terrible. Well, you know, they’ve built some sewage plants down in Mexicali.

Her description was confirmed by Peggy Hudson’s 1958 high school yearbook,
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which I found in a coffee shop on Main Street in El Centro.
Peggy—When you read this I hope you remember a certain Saturday night and the New River—ummmm! Good luck with Calipatria. Love ya (Paxton), Pam Robertson.

The barnacles had arrived in 1944, probably from the pontoons of Navy sea-planes; by 1968 one beach is eleven feet thick in barnacles. Don’t worry about those. Water-skiers remain almost as thick as barnacles!

During World War II General Patton himself visited a resort at the sea. A Coachella girl met her future husband there, proving that barnacles are no imped iment to romance. A booster from 1948 assures us that
the public has been rather slow in adopting the area as a playground, but the day is rapidly approaching, when it will come into its own in a big way . . . Nine known species of edible fish inhabit its blue depths . . . Soon this entire area should become one of the most popular resort sections in the Southland.
In those days the sea was no more saline than ocean water.

Cigar-smoking M. Penn Philips, the W. F. Holt of the 1950s, had thrown all his weight behind
Salton Riviera,
which is to say
the most important development in our history.
He sold out at a fancy price—and he had nineteen thousand six hundred acres to sell. In came the Holly Corporation. In 1968 two hundred residences lord it over twenty-three thousand empty lots. Don’t worry about that, either; because in the Salton Sea we now have all the tilapia and corvina you could ever want to catch! The first official health advisory (no fish for children and pregnant women, no more than eight ounces a month for the rest of us) will not be posted until 1986, the very year that a Salton Sea angling map, laden with tips on hooking your corvina right and how to bait tilapia (coincidentally, this helpful document was published in Los Angeles) announces that
“Nature’s Magnificent Mistake” is rapidly making another name for itself—“A Fisherman’s Paradise.”

The green-winged teal and the ospreys, the cormorants, mallards, sandpipers and herring gulls, I suppose that they’ve been taking the waters for quite awhile now.

Opening up my special “Inland Empire” edition of the
Imperial Valley Press
in this year of grace 1974, when people have already begun talking about diking off part of the Salton Sea and letting the rest go hang (it approaches the salinity of the Arabian Gulf; by century’s end it will comfortably exceed it), I see another map, in fact my favorite old map of

—IMPERIAL VALLEY—
“The West’s Favorite Sun and Air”

How full of fun it all is, from the non-existent palm grove between Smugglers’ Cave and the Old Border Patrol Station all the way northeast to Palo Verde where an angler in a stylized Stetson hat braces his legs and bows his fishing rod against the giant fish beneath him in Oxbow Lagoon! There’s dear old Calipatria, whose flag-pole reaches all the way up to sea level! Just above the Ben Hulse Highway, a hunter in full outfit takes aim at a bird in flight toward the East Highline Canal. Above Superstition Mountain it says
SAND SCULPTURES
and
FOSSILS;
here comes an emblem of the Parachute Test Facility. Below, a stagecoach driver whips on his horses. I see Dixieland, although the Mobile of Wilber Clark is long gone. I find Date City, which still sold fresh dates at roadside stands as late as 1939; but there is no longer any Meloland. A cartoon carrot epitomizes Holtville. (The Carrot Carnival and Drag Races will run from 26 January to 3 February this year. The Carrot Carnival Parade will be 2 February.) El Centro offers us a smiling sun-face in sunglasses; the International Country Club must have withered by now. Calexico is represented by two flags and a handshake; Mexicali is a large black dot, because whatever that city has to sell, the Northside mapmakers can’t cash in on. Now, feeling hot and thirsty, I let my gaze fall back upon the Salton Sea, and am immediately refreshed by a longlegged, bikini’d nymph of a water-skier who raises her left hand at me! I see birds, great fishes, and the carbon copy of the angler from Oxbow Lagoon. (Imperial is the white mummies of fishes and birds; Imperial is people fishing for dinner in what others fear to be a poisoned sea.) In the map, Mullet Island lives on. A stylized girl in a two-piece black bathing suit folds her arms under her bust just west of Niland (the Tomato Festival will take place there in the first three days of February). And there are mountains and Western riders everywhere.