Where I Was From (6 page)

Just by adding water.

This vale of sterility would bloom as the nation’s garden.

A fairly simple procedure for those brief periods when man and nature are in harmony.

The San Luis Dam, at the time it was completed in 1968, cost three billion dollars. What this taxpayerfinanced investment meant to the San Joaquin’s Westlands Water District was that several hundred growers, most of them corporate, would have the assurance of water, ditches, big automated Rain Birds moving all day with the sun. These growers would also have the assurance of “irrigation subsidies,” which by 1987, according to Gerald Haslam’s
The Great Central Valley
, amounted to twenty-seven million dollars, eleven million of which went to the Southern Pacific Land Company. “You can’t buck the railroad” was a common phrase in my childhood, but I never ventured into its local application.

6

H
OLLISTER
, the San Benito County town near which Frank Norris spent the summer of 1899 researching
The Octopus
, was named for, and built on land at that time only recently owned by, an emigrant from Ohio named William Welles Hollister. In 1852, William Welles Hollister had driven some three hundred head of cattle from Ohio to California, sold them, and returned home. In 1853, he again made the crossing, this time driving not cattle but sheep, five thousand head. This time he stayed, and over the next twenty years he and two partners, Albert and Thomas Dibblee, accumulated some two hundred thousand acres of ranch land ranging from Monterey and San Benito Counties south to Santa Barbara. William Welles Hollister was the sole owner of thirty-nine thousand acres in Santa Barbara County alone, the several ranches collectively referred to as “the Hollister ranch,” which at the time of its sale in the late 1960s incorporated the twenty miles of coastline running south from Point Conception and constituted one of the last intact coastal properties of its size between the Oregon and Mexican borders.

Such extensive holdings, typically acquired on very little equity, were not, at the time of their acquisition, entirely unusual, nor did William Welles Hollister and the Dibblee brothers even count among the largest private owners. In 1882, Richard O’Neill and James Flood together bought more than two hundred thousand acres straddling the line between Orange and San Diego Counties, a holding undivided until 1940, when the Flood heirs took the San Diego acreage and the O’Neill heirs took the Orange. Further north in Orange County, the heirs of James Irvine held the ninety-three thousand acres he had acquired in the 1870s by combining acreage originally granted to the Sepulveda and Yorba families, a property that stretched from the mountains to the sea and covered one-fifth of the county. By the time James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis consolidated their properties in 1890 as the Kern County Land Company, they had acquired, throughout the Southwest, almost a million and a half acres, roughly a third of them in the San Joaquin Valley. Henry Miller, another big holder, who once said that he could drive his cattle from Oregon to the Mexican border and sleep them every night on his own land, had arrived in San Francisco in 1850 with six dollars in his pocket and gone to work as a butcher. Within twenty years, he and his partner, Charles Lux, also a butcher in San Francisco, had gained control of ten to twelve million acres in California, a million and a half owned outright and grazing rights on the rest, vast tracts largely acquired through imaginative interpretation of the small print in federal legislation.

Miller, for example, made deals with cash-hungry veterans, buying up, at a discount, the land options to which they were entitled as a service benefit. He also made deft use of the federal Reclamation Act of 1850, which had granted California’s “swamp and overflowed” land to the state, which in turn sold it (the “virtual gift” noted by Charles Nordhoff in 1874) for $1.15 to $1.25 an acre, an amount returned to any buyer who could demonstrate use of the land. Henry Miller was instrumental in getting large parts of California classified as swamp, in one favored telling by hooking up a team of horses to tow a rowboat over the land in question. Nor, at the time, was this even an obscure angle:
Power and Land in California
, the 1971 report prepared by the Ralph Nader Task Force and later published as
Politics of Land
, noted that two of the state surveyors responsible for classifying land as “swamp and overflowed” each left office with three hundred thousand acres.

S
uch landowners tended to have not much interest in presenting themselves as the proprietors of farms or estates on the eastern, which was to say the English, model. William Henry Brewer, when he came out from Pennsylvania in 1860 to assist Josiah Dwight Whitney in the first geological survey of California, complained that the owner of eighty thousand acres between Gaviota Pass and San Luis Obispo lived “about half as well as a man would at home who owned a hundred-acre farm paid for.” Almost a century later, Carey McWilliams, in
California: The Great Exception
, remarked on the almost total absence of conventional “rural” life in California, which would have been, were it a country, the world’s seventh-largest agricultural producer: “The large shipper-growers ‘farm by phone’ from headquarters in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Many of them travel, nowadays, exclusively by plane in visiting their various ‘operations.’ … Their relationship to the land is as casual as that of the migratory workers they employ.” To live as farmers would have been, for the acquisitors of these operations, a bewilderingly alien concept, since their holdings were about something else altogether: they were temporary chips in the greater game of capital formation.

This is well known, yet remains an elusive point for many Californians, particularly those with a psychic investment in one or another heightened version of the founding period. The heroine of Jack London’s
The Valley of the Moon
, Saxon Brown, when hard times and union troubles come to Oakland, finds herself “dreaming of the arcadian days of her people, when they had not lived in cities nor been vexed with labor unions and employers’ associations. She would remember the old people’s tales of self-sufficingness, when they shot or raised their own meat, grew their own vegetables, were their own blacksmiths and carpenters, made their own shoes—yes, and spun the cloth of the clothes they wore.… A farmer’s life must be fine, she thought. Why was it that people had to live in cities? Why had times changed?” In fact almost no one in California speaks of “farmers,” in the sense the word is used in the rest of the country, and yet this persistent suggestion of constructive husbandry continues to cloud the retrospect. What amounted to the subsidized monopolization of California tends to be reinvented either as “settlement” (the settlers came, the desert bloomed) or, even more ideally, as a kind of foresighted commitment on the part of the acquisitors, a dedication to living at one with both the elemental wilderness and an improved patrician past.

“We had all shared in the glamour of immense, privately owned land,” one of William Welles Hollister’s seven grandchildren, Jane Hollister Wheelwright, wrote in
The Ranch Papers: A California Memoir
, the book she published in 1988, some twenty years after the sale of the Hollister ranch. “We lived in a fantastic but real world of our own discovery: square miles of impassable terrain, wild cattle threatening on the trail, single coyotes caterwauling like a pack, pumas screaming, storms felling giant oaks, washouts that marooned us for days, wildfires that lasted weeks and scorched whole mountain ranges.” Her father, she tells us, “rarely wore his
chapaderos,”
and did not use his silver-inlaid saddle, “but our Mexican ranch hands knew him for what he was. They called him
‘El Patrón.’ ”
In 1961, after the death of the father, the daughter returns alone to the ranch, the point at which there appears in her memoir the first shadow on the glamour: “No one was there to meet me—not even the ranch hands,” she writes. “I had none of the honor and recognition given automatically to
El Patrón.
The ranch seemed deserted. I was being deliberately avoided. Wandering aimlessly, I found myself walking into the canyon that stretched in back of the old family home.… The disappointment at seeing no one quickly faded. At least the land was there to greet me.”

Jane Hollister Wheelwright’s sense of her entitlement seems, in
The Ranch Papers
, more layered than that of many inheritors, more complicated, even tortured. The Hollisters, she concludes, “had been given a chance to live a part of history, to experience an era virtually extinct elsewhere in California.” She remains reluctant to confront the contradictions in that history. Her idea of what the land meant remains heightened, and in the familiar way. She mentions in passing that the ranch supported “a large herd of white-faced Hereford cattle,” but offers no sense of a working cattle operation. She sees her father as “one of the last of the gentlemen cattlemen of the era of large family ranches in California.” She tells us that she and her twin brother “had grown up in a trance, like sleepwalkers, muffled by the land’s huge embrace,” and accompanies a photograph of herself at twenty with an apparently meaningful quotation from Aldo Leopold’s
A Sand County Almanac:
“There are two kinds of people: those who can live without wild things and those who cannot.”

Yet she seems to have quite deliberately chosen, at age twenty-four, to live without wild things: she married a psychiatrist, Joseph Wheelwright, was herself analyzed by Carl Jung, became a lay analyst, gave birth to a daughter in China and a son in London, and returned to California with her husband to found, in 1943 in San Francisco, the world’s first Jungian training center. The description she gives of her 1961 return to the ranch is suggestive. All such returns, she tells us, involved a learned process of “reaching into the mood of the place,” of shedding “city demands.” She had come to understand the necessity of cultivating “calming” through “the monotony of walking,” of encouraging the accelerated onset of what others might call by other names but she called “the big letdown”: “Our coast requires a descent always. For those new to the place the letdown is more often experienced as an unpleasant locked-in feeling, an immobilizing depression.”

What we seem to have here, then, is a story of an acquisitive grandfather, a father who retreated into the huge holding that allowed him to play
El Patrón
(even the daughter who reveres him mentions, in the guise of a virtue, “his power of passivity”), and a daughter, Jane Hollister, who ran guiltily for daylight. It was nonetheless Jane Hollister Wheelwright, not her brothers or cousins, who inherited from the father in 1961 the power to vote more than half the shares in the ranches. “My father must have known that I was as stubborn as he and would try to tackle the problems; and as the only woman I would be outside male competition,” she wrote in
The Ranch Papers.
“But the outrage it caused only compounded the existing situation, and so the struggle began amongst the seven of us.” That the nature of this struggle is not described in
The Ranch Papers
is a telling lacuna. It would appear to have focused, since the need to sell was a given, on the terms of the sale: to whom, for how much, in return for what contingent agreements. One senses that the daughter may have favored, probably more than her brothers and cousins did, the ultimate buyer: a Los Angeles developer, described in
The Ranch Papers
, again ideally, as “an enterprising but environment-minded Los Angeles man,” whose plan was to rezone the property into hundred-acre parcels and present the whole as an exclusive planned retreat.

In California as elsewhere, a buyer with a plan for this kind of low-density development signifies something quite specific: this is a buyer who means to pay less for the land than one with a plan for more intensive development. During the same years when the Hollisters were falling out over this issue, James Irvine’s great-granddaughter, Joan Irvine Smith, someone else who had “shared in the glamour of immensely, privately owned land,” was fighting the same kind of family fight, but from a different angle: it was Joan Irvine who successfully insisted, against the opposition of some in her own family, that the eighty-eight thousand acres that remained of the Irvine ranch in Orange County be intensively developed. Whether Jane Hollister’s decision to divide her grandfather’s ranch into hundred-acre parcels was in the end more intrinsically tuned to the spirit of the place than Joan Irvine’s quite different decision remains an unresolved question. I recall in the early seventies seeing advertising for what came to be called “Hollister Ranch,” emphasizing how very few select achievers could hope to live there. As it happens my father had been at Berkeley with one of the Hollisters, someone of an age to have been one of Jane Hollisters brothers or cousins; I do not remember his name and my father is dead. I remember this at all only because, every time we drove south and again at the time the ranch was sold, my father mentioned that the effort to keep their holding intact had left the Hollisters unable to afford, in the early 1930s, during the Depression, to let one of their children finish Berkeley. This was offered as a lesson, I am unsure to what point.

T
he lesson Jane Hollister Wheelwright took from the sale of her family’s ranch, proceeding as she did from within what amounts to a fable of confusion, concerned what she called the “debatable” questions: “whether land can belong to anyone, or whether one belongs to the land.” She concluded, unsurprisingly, that land belonged to no one. Yet it did: at the time the Hollister ranch was sold, in the late 1960s, according to a Ralph Nader Study Group report on land use in California, roughly two and a half million acres of California still belonged to the Southern Pacific. Almost half a million acres belonged to the Shasta Forest Company. A third of a million acres belonged to Tenneco, another third of a million each to the Tejon Ranch Company, Standard Oil, and Boise Cascade. Two hundred seventy-eight thousand acres belonged to Georgia Pacific. Two hundred and fifty thousand belonged to Pacific Gas & Electric. Two hundred thousand belonged to Occidental Petroleum, 192,000 to Sunkist, 171,062 to Pacific Lumber, 155,000 to Fibreboard Incorporated, and 152,000 to the Newhall Land and Farming Company. Another 1,350,045 acres belonged to, among them, American Forest Products, Times Mirror, the Penn Central, Hammond Lumber, Kaiser Industries, the Masonite Corporation, J. G. Boswell, International Paper, Diamond International Corporation, Vail, Miller & Lux, and the Irvine Ranch Company. Some of these were California companies; some were not. All played a role in determining which of California’s possibilities would be realized and which limited. Most were diversified, no more interested in what grew or grazed on their land than Jane Hollister had been, to another point, in what grew or grazed on hers, but quicker players, all of them, than the Hollisters had proved to be.