Imperial (31 page)

PREFACE (2002-2003)

The concept of metadata—or data about data—which describes source, method, and appropriate uses . . . is a growing priority.

—Salton Sea Atlas, 2002

A
ll these delineations and subdelineations had persuaded me that if I were going to write
Imperial,
that book should probably investigate what used to be called “the American dream,” along with some border strips of its Mexican counterpart. Holt and Heber, George Chaffey and Judge Farr, Wilber Clark together with his wife and sister, they all must have sincerely believed, and in their own time proved, that upon the almost unregulated, practically infinite, fertile potentiality called “America,” we may each of us delineate a principality, maybe even an Inland Empire, and then set about “improving” it with sweat, imagination, and, when appropriate, with commercial prayers asked of and answered by the Ministry of Capital whose Old Testament was (if one didn’t care to go as far back as Emerson, Lincoln, Jefferson, Roger Williams) William E. Smythe’s
The Conquest of Arid America
and whose New Testament was
The Winning of Barbara Worth
(imitated and in proportion to his literary capability extended by Otis B. Tout)—a realm whose county seal was and is—I’m doublechecking this on the death certificate of another unknown Mexican—a crown which hovers over irrigated fields, with Signal Mountain on the horizon. Who but the faithful would have named their baby Imperial Hazel Deed? And what if their faith actually justified itself by truth? For they succeeded, didn’t they? They died richer and, in their own and their posterity’s eyes, more blessed than they had begun. Imperial was going green on both sides of the line;
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
. Do you remember what Smythe wrote?
The essence of the industrial life which springs from irrigation is its democracy.
No matter that nine out of every ten people in the democracy of Athens lived unenfranchised; American Imperial’s democracy for its part sometimes proved less than democratic to Mexicans, Chinese, women; Mexican Imperial too often lacked rest from poverty’s violence; nonetheless, within the strictures of its epoch, Imperial was giving and welcoming. Assemblyman Victor V. Vesey remembers that there was no higher education in Imperial County in 1949; the school districts refused to unify because
they opted for independence and local control.
I admire the principle if not its result.

He sold out at a fancy price.
I don’t glory in that sentiment at all; in fact, I suspect that it’s the root of our American boorishness; nonetheless, in this world of peonage and poverty, it’s nice to suppose, with how much justification it will be my task to determine, that those words could apply to almost anyone.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
“W. F. Holt Looks into the Future with the Direct Gaze of the Confident Man.”

And now, as you know, Imperial County is the poorest county in California and its water is being robbed away by state threat and federal intimidation, not to mention private greed, and
the sheriff’s department believes the deaths could outpace last year’s record of 95.
So what went wrong? Or does Imperial in fact continue on course? Would Mr. Holt, were he alive today, feel pleased and proud about the housing subdivisions of El Centro? Is the county’s high poverty rate simply an aspect of its transition from an agricultural to a commercial utopia? (Holt was, after all, a banker.) Would he and his fellow pioneers consider the deaths of illegal Mexicans to be no more consequential than the Athenians must have judged the deaths of a few slaves? In short, is the Imperial on the north side of the international line American or un-American, and what does the answer to that question say about what Americans profess?

Meanwhile, what Chinese tunnels or other secrets can I discover on the other side of the ditch?
Imperial is the continuum between Mexico and America.
What has the Ministry of Capital accomplished in Southside? I hope to investigate these questions in my book called
Imperial.

Chapter 11

SUBDELINEATIONS: BOOKSCAPES (1850-2003)

Perhaps you think I will tell you everything, so that you may be able to understand my story. I will begin to tell the story.

—Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, eighteenth century

I
mperial is whatever we want it to be, unless we’re businessmen, in which case imagination requires capital. I have none; mirages satisfy me; I don’t expect this book to achieve the fame of
Silt
by Otis B. Tout. Imperial has acres and acres of alluvium left; Imperial can find room even for me. I see a reddish-orange vastness below me, with Mexicali far, far away across the Laguna Salada, and Signal Mountain a broad half-oval like the sail of a dinosaur on this cool, cool evening, which has been graced with winds and clouds, everything fading into sandy dreams just as my youth did; this landscape reminds me of Afghanistan to the south of Jalalabad. I was young then and sure of what I could do; I was writing my own story. Soon it will be dark, and then to find a restaurant one must drive all the way to Tecate. Back to the car. Here come the first green trees at Arroyo de la Gloria; there stand more crosses and shrines for this road’s dead; Imperial vanishes behind me as I ascend into this dimming coolness whose fruits are jigsaw rock-breasts with erect rock nipples.
The part of 1850 San Diego County that would later become Imperial County in 1907 was a mere thoroughfare for the adventurers, gold miners and settlers coming to California . . . There were no ranchos and no towns.
Thus runs the already-quoted encomium of a county-by-county guide to the California of a century and a half ago. Well-meaning sidebars and itineraries stud that book, like the tawny canvas bags which are hung in date trees to protect the fruit from birds and rain. But for Imperial there’s only the following boldface marginal note, whose time-saving words have been as emphatically capitalized as those of an ancient washroom sign:
There are no 1850 Sites to Visit in Imperial County.
Imperial is (have you ever heard this before?) a blank page. What shall we inscribe on it?

THE PLEASURES OF BARBARA WORTH

Not long before 1911, when the Imperial Valley gave birth to one million, one hundred and twenty thousand pounds of cabbage and an almost equal quantity of grapeweight, Mr. Harold Bell Wright, who in his photographs looks nearly as gaunt as Abraham Lincoln, sat down in Holtville in an arrow-weed house he’d built with his own hands (how Imperial of him!), wrote out eight manuscript drafts whose internal organs he reshuffled through a system of hanging pockets, and reified Imperial into somebody he could adore:
To look at Barbara Worth was a pleasure; to be near her was a delight.
So what if to me his novel seems absurd? In the Flamingo Club in Mexicali
⁴⁶
men drink their beers in rapture while a queenly, magnificently-buttocked woman unhooks her bra, undoes her hair, launches her panties in a slow slide to her ankles. Let an agronomist continue the story:
Sugar beets grew admirably. It was never my privilege to see finer cauliflower than was exhibited at Imperial. Eggplants and melons of mammoth proportions were shown.
The Flamingo Club is out of business now; a sports bar stands there now, but why not live in the past? Meanwhile, other ladies, ladies in fancy frilly clothes, ladies with long, long hair, invite themselves next to the men, whisperingly begging for four hundred pesos for six beers. Caressing all takers, they eschew underwear, as each man discovers when pretty fingers guide his hand into the darkness beneath a skirt; in short, they’re fully prepared to illustrate the motto of the California Water and Forest Association:
“ Moisture Means Millions”
; to look at them’s a pleasure, to be near them a delight.
The dark-faced old plainsman . . . turned often to look at her now while his keen eyes, dark still under their grizzly brows, were soft with fond regard.
Yes, search into those men’s eyes! Lust shines sweetly and sincerely there. For all we know, affection does, too. They sit in their Imperial; after six beers they will enter Paradise.
As she passed, the people turned to follow her with their eyes—the “old-timers” with smiles of recognition and picturesque words of admiring comment,
because Barbara Worth, who’s so chaste that even come the happily-ever-after, she hasn’t quite been kissed, was
so good to look at.

I cannot think of this healthy, athletic horsewoman’s sickly creator without wishing him well. He truly does love Barbara, so he’s ahead of the game; isn’t every Pygmalion’s biography a success story? He also loves hard work, human bettermentand Imperial’s desertscapes. So do I. May he dwell with her always, right there in Holtville. (In 1915 he had to depart for Tucson, on account of illness. He died in 1944.)
She passed into the hotel, followed by the eyes of every man in sight including the engineer, who had noted with surprise the purity and richness of her voice.
Why shouldn’t we be able to form stories about and around ourselves? Or, as inclination invites us, why not follow in the wake of a story which writes itself? (Here’s a story for you:
Over the years . . . the flow of the river gradually lessened and the salt content gradually increased.
Thus the story of every life except for Barbara Worth’s.) In place of Harold Bell Wright’s heroine I see (I don’t need to imagine) that gorgeous reddish-brown fat girl at the taco stand in Mexicali; the grease from
carnitas
shines preciously between her vast breasts. Why not request permission to follow her for a day and write down everything she says and does, so that a thousand years from now we will still know her? Or why not mount a goal, any experiment or expedition, then go wherever it points us? In 1940, John Steinbeck and some comrades took a sail around most of the Baja Peninsula, which is to say (speaking approximately) a trip halfway around the perimeter of Imperial. He introduced his
Log from the
Sea of Cortez thus:
We have a book to write about the Gulf of California . . . We have decided to let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and a sea . . .

This book also forms itself as it goes. Fields, hay-walls, towns and fences comprise my thoroughfare; I have no sites to visit in Imperial County or out of it; I’m free to chase after white birds in green alfalfa fields as long as the heat fails to discourage me; I don’t care that I’ll never finish anything; my delineations and subdelineations resemble those severed palm-fronds bleaching in the white sand at the border wall. Imperial will scour them away with its dry winds and the brooms of its five-dollars-an-hour Mexican laborers. Then what? Imperial will continue on,
silent and hot and fierce in its desolation, holding its treasures under the seal of death against the coming of the strong ones,
which is to say the ones whom Harold Bell Wright idealized, the ones whose epoch was
the age of the Seer and his companions, . . . the days of my story, the days of Barbara and her friends.
The alluvial soils of Imperial can grow anything, not least Harold Bell Wright’s fields of purple-flowered prose.
To look at Barbara Worth was a pleasure; to be near her was a delight.
Why shouldn’t I bloom a bit, too?

My original intent was to write a novel about Imperial, a story which followed the lives of
pollos
from Southside all the way across wall and desert to, say, Yuma, where they labored for low wages until they got caught and deported. Here is how it would have begun (I now reclaim the desert of this book’s first chapter):  

IMPERIAL

by

WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

1

T
he man beside me now awoke, and turned toward the window like a plant toward the sun. Soon we would come to the sign which read IMPERIAL COUNTY LINE and a few minutes later we’d pass the Corvina Cafe, which would surely be as closed and dead as one of those corvina floating belly-up in the Salton Sea (to smell them was a pleasure; to eat them was a delight). The man sat gazing alertly eastward across the desert flats toward the long deep green stripe of date plantations and the dusty red and blue mountains beyond.

We all do it. We’re all novelists. In the Imperial County Pioneers Museum I see a photograph of Westmorland’s sixth-grade class in 1948. Bev Johnson, whom I presume to be the donor, has labeled only herself.

We all do it. Here’s the title of a quarter-column novel which appeared complete with photograph in the
Fresno Morning Republican:
Asked to Lead Evil Life, Girl Kills Sister.
That happened in 1920.

We all do it. We all want to win Barbara, be Barbara or stay in the Barbara Worth Hotel. A smoothskinned yet very, very Western glamour-girl in a soft white cowboy hat rests her chin on her fingers, clutching an elegant leather riding-glove. Is she alive or dead now? The photograph is yellow and undated. The caption reads:
Mrs. Bradshaw, contestant for lead, Barbara Worth film.

NOVELS OF IMMIGRATION MEN

Oh, yes, we all do it; that’s for sure. In the fall of 2002 I happened to be crossing the international line when the scraggly-bearded Immigration official, slowly, slowly turning the pages of my passport, discovered that my exit visa from Yemen was dated the day before yesterday. Yemen was where the USS
Cole
had been attacked in 2000; and this year, just two weeks earlier, which is to say while I had been in Yemen, several Yemenis were arrested in New York for possible links with the September 11 plot; my government announced that Special Forces operatives would be sent to Yemen to hunt down more terrorists; no doubt they succeeded for all time, like southern Californians with their aqueducts. And here I was.