Long Way Home (23 page)

“In Hood River, Oregon,” he said, “you can't juggle without a license. In Memphis, you can't share your pie or take it away. In Las Vegas, you can't hock your dentures. In Alabama, you can't wear a fake mustache to church. In Alaska, you can't give any alcohol to a moose. In Minnesota, you're not allowed to tease a skunk. And in Chicago, you can't fish in your pajamas.”

The routine sparked as much laughter as might be permissible during a religious ceremony. Father Urnick had done an excellent job of softening us up for his brief sermon. His message was simple and succinct—no fire-and-brimstone. The love of God is never outdated, he reminded us, and if we paid attention to that love, we'd be rewarded, although not necessarily in material terms.

That was a fine Mass, I thought afterward as I walked by the Colorado again. The pope might not approve of Father Urnick's casual style, but his upbeat, tenderhearted manner worked for me. I was far too aware of my own sins and shortcomings to enjoy being chastised for them. If I had to do some penance in the afterlife, should there be one, I'd rather not know in advance. You can't go wrong, really, with a service devoted to love and laughter.

I
N CALIFORNIA, YOU
learn to expect the unexpected. No sooner had I crossed over from Nevada than two high-pocket cowboys on horseback rode out of a cloud of dust near Needles. They were dressed like movie extras in their chaps and spurs, and when they held up a hand to stop traffic and slipped between cars to a ramshackle bikers' tavern, the younger one smiled and tipped his hat as gracefully as Gene Autry. The time was ten-thirty-eight
A.M
, and the temperature was ninety-six degrees.

Nobody in Needles bellyached about the heat. You might as well complain about having fingers and toes. People just shrugged and dealt with it as usual. The air conditioners and swamp coolers were already cranked up to the max, issuing a faintly audible hum like a new species of desert insect. The town was notorious as a blast furnace. On TV, the weather forecasters often invoked it as a symbol of the inferno.

“Think it's been hot in Van Nuys?” they'd ask. “Try Needles, where the mercury hit a hundred and twelve degrees today!”

I drove by fruit stands stacked with juicy Valencia oranges from local orchards and listened to a Bob Wills CD appropriate to the terrain. Across the Colorado, the spiky rocks called “needles” stood out against a soiled-looking sky. Cotton grew in tufted patches near irrigation ditches. Nothing much was going on that quiet Monday, so I saw no reason to linger.

Before leaving Laughlin, I'd mapped out a route for my last week. It led across the Mojave to Barstow, then through the San Joaquin Valley and over the Cholame Hills to Paso Robles, where I'd follow Highway 101 north along the Coast Range into the heart of Steinbeck country and go on from there to my own home ground in the San Francisco Bay Area.

John Steinbeck knew the Mojave well. In his youth, the crossing could be so terrifying, he recalled in
Travels
, that one whispered a prayer on departing. There were no gas stations and certainly no cell phones, and if your car broke down, you were out of luck unless an angel of mercy came along.

The desert “tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California”—the very test Steinbeck inflicted on the Joads of Oklahoma.

Interstate 40 slashes through the desert now, so I highballed it to Barstow. Along the way I saw boxcars, tumbleweeds, creosote, mesquite, sagebrush, a junked fridge, cattle bones, and enough roadkill to feed a family of eight. I stopped just once at a rest area, where some Native Americans—Mojaves, I believe—were selling bracelets and necklaces of semiprecious stones.

These Native Americans were the most blasé merchants I'd ever met. Half asleep, really, with their eyelids drooping. They didn't seem to care if they sold a single piece of jewelry. Even a compliment elicited no more than a grunt, and when anybody tried to haggle, they merely caved in. Maybe this was just a kind of fatalism, an attitude of resignation that the implacable desert demands.

Barstow was a poor, tired, beaten-down place. Drifters had been filtering into it ever since the railroad first arrived. The streets teemed with lost souls. There were homeless men carrying their possessions in plastic garbage bags, scavengers pushing shopping carts filled with recyclables, drug dealers openly peddling, and winos huddled in alleys. The shame of it could make you weep.

I continued on to Victorville, the hub of the Mojave and the first real city after the 143-mile run from Needles to Barstow. Victorville occupies a minor niche in Hollywood history, having played the fictitious Sand City, Arizona, in
It Came from Outer Space
, a 3-D extravaganza I watched as a boy in 1953, relieved to discover the aliens did not intend to destroy planet Earth. They only wanted to pick up some spare parts for their spaceship.

Supposedly, Victorville has a downtown, but I couldn't find it in the familiar maze of malls and subdivisions, where foreclosures were again common. In one neighborhood, vandals had broken into a vacant house and trashed it, while squatters were living in another. Skateboarders hunted for empty swimming pools, drained by their owners for issues of liability, and used them as skate parks.

All I asked of Victorville in the end was a good night's sleep. The motel clerk assured it by upgrading me to a “junior suite” when she noticed my Dublin address. She was a charming young Latina studying at the local college. Fully a third of the city's occupants are Hispanic, in fact, as are 40 percent of all Californians.

If you wanted a glimpse of America's future, you needed to look no farther than California, where so-called minorities constitute 57 percent of the population. Indeed, one third of all U.S. minorities live in the state, with Asians the largest contingent after Hispanics. According to the projections of the Census Bureau, the country as a whole mimics this trend, so that by 2042, with 1.3 million new immigrants arriving each year, the minorities will become the majority.

The solicitous clerk sent me to Johnny Reb's for dinner, where I tucked into a plate of ribs. The food was okay, but I craved a taste of California, not Alabama—the archetypal California of palm trees and balmy beaches—before I faced the dusty San Joaquin, so I deviated from my recently formulated plan and headed south the next morning to visit a writer pal on the ocean in San Clemente.

I thought of this as a day off—a break from being a stranger. I'd be as lavishly welcomed as Steinbeck and his wife in Texas toward the conclusion of his journey. I kept telling myself this in order to tolerate the sort of ridiculously stressful freeway trip that promotes road rage and random acts of aggression. It was in California, after all, where Jack Nicholson smashed another guy's windshield with a two-iron.

At Corona, I scuttled the freeway for a side road that climbed into Cleveland National Forest, looking out over tinder-dry canyons hungry for the first autumn rain to douse the chance of fires. The air was cooler now and not so heavy with exhaust fumes, and there was a good smell of sun-warmed firs and pines. In ten minutes I'd gone from the clotted suburbs to the habitat of bobcats and mountain lions, another of California's miraculous transformations.

I gradually descended from the heights, rolling through Mission Viejo with its horse ranches and golf courses to San Juan Capistrano, where the cliff swallows, as regular as clockwork, had already flown. Late October marked the conclusion of their tenancy, I heard at a gift shop, but the birds would be back from Argentina on St. Joseph's Day in March. This was said with grave conviction. My leg, I suspect, was being pulled.

The basilica from the old Franciscan mission, built in 1776, is still intact, and so are some adobes of the period. Here the friars planted the state's first vineyard and later added a winery. The Spanish influence was everywhere apparent in the town's architecture, and the same was true in San Clemente, originally a resort modeled on those in coastal Spain, with an identical procession of red tile roofs.

That afternoon, the Pacific was a shimmery blue dream. Even a veteran Californian was inclined to swoon. San Clemente's serious money gravitated to the bluffs above the water, where Richard Nixon used to lift a glass with Bebe Rebozo at La Casa Pacifica, the Western White House. My friend Kem owned a more modest bungalow at Forester Ranch that afforded him a peek at—if not a million-dollar view of—the ocean.

A high-pitched yipping announced my arrival. This was the celebrated Beanie, the canine I'd rejected as Charley's body double. Uli, Kem's partner and Beanie's most ardent admirer, had dressed her little terrier in a fetching camouflage outfit, and I must admit the dog looked fit and ready to join Vin Diesel on a commando raid.

Kem, a native Californian, had grown up in Orange County when it still deserved the name. He remembered the acres of citrus groves, and an ocean so lightly surfed that nobody fought over a wave. He'd bought his place to be close to such surfing hot spots as Trestles and San Onofre Beach, ready to grab his board the instant a southwest swell came up, but on weekends the crowds took over. The water was clean, at least, compared to Malibu and Santa Monica, he said.

He gave me a quick tour of the grounds. His fellow occupants, some retired, were great believers in recreation. They swam in an indoor pool, worked out at a gym, and played shuffleboard, golf, and tennis. When we ran into Hal Book, the ranch foreman, who was supervising a Mexican scouring some grease stains from the concrete in a barbecue area, Kem let it drop that I'd been living in Dublin for a while.

“I was married to an Irish lady for forty-nine years!” Hal piped, embracing me as a kindred spirit. On the odd chance I might be considering a move, he listed the stellar attributes of Forester Ranch. “What do you think, Kem?” he asked. “Isn't this a nice place to live?”

“Yes, it is, Hal,” Kem dutifully replied.

“Once a month, we have a pancake breakfast at the community center. Do you like pancakes, Bill?”

“Sure!” I tried to sound punchy and enthusiastic.

“My son loves them. We always hold a contest to see who can eat the most!”

After some more pancake chat, Kem and I drove through rustling palm and eucalyptus trees to the beach, where we watched an incandescent sun sink slowly into the ocean as the gulls squawked and the surf pounded.

Here was a California even a rural Hoosier would recognize, an impossibly seductive land you only half trusted yourself to believe in. It seemed not so much real as invented, scarcely American in its devotion to the purely sensual, yet another country within a country.

FOR MY PLEASURES,
I paid a price. To get back on track for the San Joaquin, I faced a battle with Interstate 5 north toward Los Angeles, another freeway of the damned, where you're packed in so tightly among other drivers that you're compelled to eavesdrop on their arguments, often conducted at cross purposes in a fractured English spiced with expletives from many different languages.

Only a mile from San Clemente, I heard a brawny Spanish guy in a plumbing truck shout, “
¡Chinga tu madre!”
at a puzzled Sikh in a Toyota. Of the 37 million Californians, 8 million speak Spanish, 800,000 Chinese, 400,000 Vietnamese, 300,000 Korean, and 150,000 each Japanese, Armenian, and Persian. Add to that a smattering of French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Urdu, Navajo, and so on, and the chances of a misunderstanding are incalcuable.

For two hours, I inched forward until the freeway bypassed L.A. and began its climb into the Tehachapi Mountains through the rugged expanse of Los Padres and Angeles national forests. The dry brown foothills were studded with ravines and rocky outcrops, and as the traffic thinned, I reclaimed some of the calm I'd felt by the Pacific.

Cresting Tejon Pass at 4,183 feet, I could see the San Joaquin below me, partially hidden beneath a layer of smog. Along with the Sacramento Valley to the north, it forms the Central Valley, some four hundred miles long and the wealthiest, most productive agricultural region on earth.

California lends itself to statistical analysis, perhaps because of its mind-boggling size. The average U.S. farm or ranch earns about $137,000 in annual commodity sales, while the figure soars to $488,000 in the Central Valley. The state earned $36.6 billion on agriculture in 2008, roughly double the take for Texas and Iowa, the runners up, even though California's 75,000 farms and ranches account for just 4 percent of America's total.

California's farmers supply half the nation's fruits, nuts, and vegetables, and 22 percent of its milk and cream. Grapes are the next most profitable crop after dairying, followed by plants from nurseries and greenhouses, lettuce, and almonds. As amazing as it sounds, every commercially grown almond, artichoke, fig, olive, clingstone peach, persimmon, pomegranate, and walnut in this country has its origins in California

After reading those statistics, one imagines a San Joaquin of hanging gardens and Babylonian splendor, but it's often rawboned, hard-nosed, and just plain unattractive, especially in Kern County.

Oil companies have been tearing up the scrappy, windswept desert since 1864, and the pumpjacks called thirsty birds peck at the wells around the clock. The farm fields are big, broad, industrial-looking, and usually cloaked in a grayish pallor of bad air that's at its most oppressive in Arvin, the smoggiest city in the United States.

At Pumpkin Center, I started east toward Arvin on Route 223, trying to see the land through John Steinbeck's eyes. Some things were still the same—the vineyards and orchards, the cherries, oranges, almonds, carrots, and table grapes—but Arvin has a population of about fourteen thousand now, almost all Hispanic, with Weedpatch as its tiny satellite.

When Steinbeck paid his seminal visit in 1936, driving the old bakery truck that was a forerunner of Rocinante, he recognized a change in the labor force right away. Instead of the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino men he remembered from his childhood, the farmers were hiring and exploiting the Dust Bowl migrants known pejoratively as Okies, who—unlike their predecessors—brought their families with them and occupied filthy squatters' camps on irrigation ditches or the banks of rivers.

Short of food and lacking any sanitary facilities, the Okies were prey to malnutrition and contagious diseases, and dependent on their undependable jalopies and trucks to carry them from harvest to harvest, a gypsy routine that might last for nine months and win them $400.

Steinbeck, profoundly moved and offended, chronicled their mistreatment in seven articles for the
San Francisco News
in an unvarnished prose he'd later polish to a poetic intensity in
The Grapes of Wrath
.

“The three-year-old child has a gunny sack tied about his middle for clothing,” he wrote of one camp. “He has the swollen belly caused by malnutrition. He sits on the ground in the sun in front of the house, and the little black fruit flies buzz in circles and land on his closed eyes and crawl up his nose until he weakly brushes them away.