Imperial (184 page)

Chapter 206

HOLTVILLE (1914)

Alittle boy in a cowboy hat squints out from the Model T; his sister in boots and a white dress is older, and almost doesn’t squint; there’s flat dirt all around . . .

In about but not exactly 1858, in a place called
California
and without any recorded subsequent baptism, a child named Miguel came into the world. His father’s name and his mother’s remain illegible; he had no surname; all we know of him is that he
resided Los Angeles City; Indian in William Wolfskill household.

And now he’s gone, not that he was ever more than half a name with no face; and that little boy from Holtville has been buried with equal finality; of him we have a face with no name; the Holtville of 1914, onetime emblem of the reclamation of Arid America, and therefore of America itself, empire of ingenuity, progress, equality, enrichment and self-sufficiency and now a wavering half-symbol of imperiled decrepitude, has grown as mysterious and wonderful to me as Indian California . . .

Chapter 207

IMPERIAL REPRISE (1901-2004)

Then they talked of the Seer’s new expedition that would start south at daybreak, and it seemed to Barbara that the very air was electric with the coming of a mighty age when the race would direct its strength to the turning of millions of acres of desolate, barren waste into productive farms and beautiful homes for the people.

—Harold Bell Wright, 1911

1

I can’t help believing in people . . . I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
WATER IS HERE
.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by. Stories of a polluted Salton Sea are greatly exaggerated.
Q.
Do you have any problems with the smell? Does it ever make you sick?
A.
We’re used to it.

Sign of Slow Growth Sends Stocks Lower.
He sold out at a fancy price.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.
“ Moisture Means Millions.”
WATER IS HERE
.
It is simply needless to question the supply of water. The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.
It’s good, more or less.
And in material advantages they are already well supplied.
Q.
How about the fish, Ray?
A.
I’ve been eatin’ ’em since 1955, and I’m still here, so there’s nothin’ wrong with ’em.
The sheriff’s department believes the deaths could outpace last year’s record of 95.
It’s just another die-off. It’s natural.
WATER IS HERE
.
WATER IS HERE
. I think we all feel sorry for ’em.

2

Suddenly, as a beast checked in its spring, they were still and motionless. By the side of the old frontiersman on the platform under the light stood Barbara.
THE AZTECS ARE BACK
.
They live together like cigarettes. They came out like ants.
We need to get these criminals behind bars where they can’t harm anyone.

Get out!
an officer yelled at them. They turned and slowly, slowly walked back into Mexico across the humming throbbing bridge.
What a Great Choice!

I think we all feel sorry for ’em.
³⁵²
The sheriff’s department believes the deaths could outpace last year’s record of 95.
They’ll pop their heads up in a minute.

3

“Our primary mission is to prevent terrorism and terrorist weapons from entering our country,” El Centro Chief Border Patrol Agent Michael McClafferty said.
Tamerlane’s warriors gallop into the square. The club motto is, “The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”

4

UNLESS YOU TAKE ACTION TO PROTECT YOUR PROPERTY, IT MAY BE SOLD AT A PUBLIC SALE. It would be so convenient to carry on a farm . . . when all the hard and dirty work is performed by apprentices.
Of course in the classroom my kids didn’t talk about it.
You can’t produce things the way you used to.
He sold out at a fancy price. Yes, just such a man you will see, a hundred times every day in Imperial Valley—the laborer.
I think we all feel sorry for ’em.
Imperial.
This bargain reduced for quick sale.

5

The essence of the industrial life which springs from irrigation is its democracy.
The club motto is, “The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”
We are praying for rain this winter, because if we do not get it I do not know where we will be. I think we all feel sorry for ’em.

6

A lot of movie stars came there.
The pictures are the result of an Imperial mirage.
I can’t see my mountains anymore. I can get across whenever I want. It’s the most productive fishery in the world. So, sign the coupon and send it in
today.

7

WATER IS HERE
.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.
Tamerlane’s warriors gallop into the square.

8

That’s nothing new. They find ’em every week. That’s just accidents. They’re just tryin’ to get across illegally.
The club motto is, “The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”

9

The club motto is, “The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”
God, so that’s my life.

10

Standing today by the grave of that infant civilization which blossomed, amidst such hardships, upon a desert, we would fain lift the veil and see the unthought-of transformation which fifty years will bring.
It’s progressing along real nice. I think we all feel sorry for ’em.

Chapter 208

THE CONQUEST OF ARID AMERICA (1905)

Accordin’ to my notion hit’s this here same financierin’ game that’s a-ruinin’ the West. The cattle range is about all gone now. If they keeps it up we won’t be no better out here than some o’ them places I’ve heard about back East.

—Harold Bell Wright, 1911

I
n the earlier edition of this work, written in 1899, I spoke of this locality as follows:

It is popularly regarded as an empire of hopeless sterility, the silence of which will never be broken by the voices of men . . . Neither animal life nor human habitation breaks its level monotony. It stretches from mountain-range to mountain-range, a brown waste of dry and barren soil. And yet it only awaits the touch of water . . . It is more like Syria than any other part of the United States, and the daring imagination may readily conceive that here a new Damascus will arise more beautiful than that of old.

Six short years have passed, yet the dream has already come true. The very name of “The Colorado Desert” has vanished from the minds of men, and in its place we have . . . “The Imperial Valley.”

. . . There could be no more wonderful example of the miracle of irrigation.

CONCERNING THE MAPS

These five maps comprise an attempt in progress to define the borders of the imaginary entity called Imperial.

THE ENTITY CALLED IMPERIAL

The first map (page xxiv) brings our attention to the southeastern corner of California, a state whose vastness is the bezel in which the jewel called Imperial has been set. By Greyhound bus it takes about fifteen hours to travel from Sacramento to Calexico
³⁵³
—not much longer than it takes to fly from Sacramento to Paris. In this depiction we also see the greater vastnesses of the Colorado River and of Northside’s formerly Mexican territories.

CLOSEUP OF IMPERIAL

Once upon a time, the second map (page xxv) overlay a reference grid of the relevant counties as they are currently defined:

First,
the pre-Conquest territorial boundaries of those Indian tribes in the general region of Imperial.

Second,
the landform called the Colorado Desert, whose boundaries of course vary according to the delineator.
³⁵⁴
(The
Imperial Press and Farmer
informs us that
in January, 1900, the Colorado Desert was one vast barren waste, more desolate and worthless than any other section of arid America that has ever been reclaimed. It was so barren that no human being had ever snatched an acre of it from the Public Domain.
Perhaps the Indians didn’t count.)

Third,
the simple biological construct, based on temperature differentials, called the Desert Lower Sonoran Life Zone,
³⁵⁵
which shows us that the forbidding heat of Imperial is not confined to the Colorado Desert.

Fourth,
the boundary, based on artifacts recovered from archaeological sites, between the material cultures of the Indian tribes whose territories existed more or less in the Desert Lower Sonoran Life Zone, and those tribes whose territories lay elsewhere. In the area of interest to us there were three: the Southern Culture along the southwest crescent of California, the Colorado River Culture to the east of it, and the Great Basin Culture to the north, in what are now Inyo and San Bernardino counties. The boundaries between these cultures were delineated in this map.

Fifth,
the perimeter of the style of Indian rock art, called “Great Basin,” which pervaded Imperial and many areas northward of it; and finally

Sixth,
the zone in which the Hokan family of Indian languages was spoken; this zone overlaps with all but the northern tip of Imperial. Other Hokan language islands appear on the map of Indian California; for the sake of completeness, those have been indicated here.

My assumption is that the lifeways of the Indian tribes along the western side of the Colorado River and the California-Mexico border were in their material respects sufficiently homogeneous to help define the Imperial area. I believe this because, as the second map shows, parts of those tribal territorial, linguistic and cultural boundaries are identical. Surely people who lived as “close to the land” as Indians did would be nourished and constrained by the characteristics of that land (for an obvious instance, the heat of it, as delineated by the “life zone” concept). Don’t the strictures of the Colorado Desert even now mold human life there sternly, inescapably? Therefore, if these native American material and linguistic cultures seemed to be mutually similar, and if their territories corresponded to such physically homogeneous areas as landforms, then why not define their borders as Imperial’s wherever I could?

To be sure, their so-called cultural group boundary extended considerably northward, incorporating all of Cahuilla and Serrano territory, where no Hokan language was spoken, then continuing through much or all of the counties of San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Kern. Obviously much of this land extends beyond the Imperial “life zone.” A good compromise seemed to be to extend Imperial north of the Hokan language line only where the Colorado Desert bulges into Cahuilla territory. This boundary corresponds more or less to the noticeable change in the landscape as one goes east on Highway 10 through Beaumont and Banning into what “feels like” Imperial.
³⁵⁶
This is also more or less the frontier between the Colorado River Culture and the Southern Culture. Accordingly, I expelled the Southern Culture from Imperial except as detailed in a sub-essay on Mexican considerations.

The rock art style called “Great Basin” was again far too inclusive, but the Californian portion of Imperial proved to be contained within it; that is, there is no rock art style other than “Great Basin” in Imperial north of the Mexican border. (To the south, the rock art style is unknown to me.)

In accordance with the “life zone” concept, my next step was to trim off the west coast of California except at the Mexican border itself.
³⁵⁷
Climatologically as well as culturally, this lush, foggy area hardly belongs to Imperial. Several islets of the Desert Lower Sonoran Life Zone do appear in this area, but I have excluded them for the sake of simplicity.

Now what about Mexican lifeway delineations? Early on in this book I decided that
Imperial is the continuum between Mexico and America.
Where does this continuum attenuate itself into a relatively pure Mexican-ness or American-ness?
³⁵⁸
Since we have been talking about Northside up to now, let’s continue to do so for the moment. The dominant culture of southern California is so obviously Hispanic nowadays that any hypothetical perimeter of Latino-ness obviously stretches far beyond the boundaries of Imperial in any direction. I have therefore focused my intuition on illegal immigration. The resulting boundary, which is highly speculative, centers on the international border, namely from
a point on the Colorado river 20 m[iles] below the mouth of the Gila river, thence northward to the mouth of the Gila, and thence, nearly due W., along the old line between Upper and Lower California to a point on the Pacific coast one marine league S. of the southernmost point of San Diego Bay.
Much of what used to be Diegueño territory has since been colonized by very un-Imperial urban entities, but every night illegal immigrants take some of it back. In short, Imperial pulsates between Mexicali and San Diego; it waxes and wanes. Here is one case where overmuch specificity would seem pedantically absurd. Accordingly, let’s represent the border ribbon from Arizona to the ocean as a geometer would any other ideal line, namely, as something to which the thickness of a pencil cannot really do justice. A wave-pattern to the north of the border would seem like a simple way to indicate Imperial’s temporal flows.