Big Dreams (35 page)

For a moment, I considered leaving, but the beer looked awfully tempting, so I fell to a stool between the bikers and ordered a Bud from the bartender, who was bald and wrinkled like a sun-dried apricot and spoke in a twangy voice that was as flat and dry as the surrounding plain.

The silence in the roadhouse was immense. Tiny things stood out—flies buzzing, a spider climbing a wall, a big beetle crawling across the floor. It seemed to be a place where nothing had ever happened, where nothing ever
would
happen, but then, out of the men’s room, a third customer emerged and changed all that.

He stepped to the bar and ordered a glass of rosé wine, a wimp’s brew to any biker. The bartender tapped a spigot on a cardboard box to release a stream of pinkish liquid.

“Here you go, Baker,” I heard him say.

Baker, if that was truly his name, had a beard and wore a white painter’s cap. His bare feet poked out of sandals. A white T-shirt, faded jeans—Baker was more hipster than biker. Wine in hand, he shuffled to an upright piano that was pushed against a wall, seated himself without ceremony, and commenced to play.

From the very first notes, we were transported. It was as though the soul of Arthur Rubinstein had been planted in Baker and miraculously instructed in the entire canon of stride and boogie-woogie. He was a virtuoso, a stone genius. In seconds, he was putting out so much energy, physical and mental, that the joint was literally rocking. When he stamped his sandals, I could feel tremors coursing up the metal legs of my stool.

Baker, Baker. His body swayed from side to side as he snatched melodies from the ozone. You could hear familiar things here and there, a bit of Jerry Lee Lewis or a riff from an old Fats Waller tune, but Baker was quick to embroider whatever popped into his mind and make it his own. He hammered at the keys, hammered at them, hammered. Incredible sounds gushed from the battered piano, arpeggios followed by guttural rumbles evocative of a fat man
ascending a flight of stairs, then instances of lyric grace, a slowing of the tempo to embrace possibilities far beyond the scope of a rough-and-tumble barroom.

The only clue to Baker’s roots was that glass of rosé wine. It suggested ties to a city somewhere, to civilization and an educated past. Maybe our boy was a lost prodigy, an angel with dirty wings, the black sheep of a prominent family who’d veered from the demanding path to Juilliard to pound the ivories in the dust and torpor of the San Joaquin.

We were in awe of the flaming music. It came as a great gift and bound us together as friends.

“Go, Baker!” cried the tattooed man. It was too preposterous, really, to be treated to an epic concert, and all for free. Call the newspapers, I thought. Somebody in California is actually giving it away!

The mood in the Twenty-two Mile Roadhouse was so mellow that Buffalo Bill leaned across to introduce himself. He was Wade from Bakersfield.

“Where’re you from?” Wade asked.

“San Francisco.”

“Are you gay?”

“No.”

Such were the assumptions in certain parts of the San Joaquin Valley, agribusiness cradle, a raw-boned land of oil fields and cotton fields, of profitable farms and ranches and the poor migrants who worked them. It had lots in common with Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas—the heat and the dirt, the pickers in the fields, the honky-tonks and the banjo pluckers, a gumbo of influences from the American South and Southwest. The San Joaquin was huge, as big as all of Denmark. It stretched from Lodi near the Sacramento River Delta to the Tejon Pass north of Los Angeles.

I heard a phone ring in a room behind the bar. The bartender picked it up and shouted over the music, “It’s for you, Baker.”

Baker quit playing. He grabbed his wine, went into the room,
and closed the door behind him. We never saw him again. O, mysterious prodigy! We could hear his muffled conversation, knew him to be present still, but the spell that he’d cast was broken. It was as if a giddy, collective hit of nitrous oxide had worn off, and we were turning back into mere mortals.

Wade challenged me to a game of eight ball, and I felt compelled to accept but also to throw the game, assuming that he would stomp me if I beat him. Bent over the table and ready to miscue, I was interrupted by a skinny, ragged, feral man who bumped into me as he entered. He was a Dust Bowl vision incarnate and carried a dented can of Pennzoil, grinning in the fatuous way of a person who has been forced to make a fool of himself in order to get his wish.

To the bartender, he said, “I’d like to make a trade with you, sir. I’ll give you this oil plus sixty cents for a pack of cigarettes.”

“I’m not in the automotive business,” the bartender cautioned him, although we could tell that he was amused. “What I sell here is beer and wine.”

“Listen, I’m not trying to joke you.” The penitent’s grin got broader and dopier. “They say this is real good oil.”

“All right. All right. What kind of cigarettes is it that you want, anyway?”

“Camels. Luckies. Any old kind.” There was a time-warp quality to his choices, as though he had been spared the last forty years of medical research and had no notion that a filter tip might lower his chances of lung cancer. He was chasing after a strong hit of tobacco, pure and simple.

“Is Marlboros all right?”

“Marlboros is just fine.”

The deal was done. Out the door he blew, a dust devil spinning, and Wade racked up another set of balls. The bartender held aloft the Pennzoil, narrowed his eyes to inspect it, laughed, and said, “You know this here can’s bound to contain water.”

Welcome to the San Joaquin.

B
EFORE THE GOLD RUSH
, the San Joaquin Valley was untouched by farmers and ranchers. Indian tribes of the Yokuts family had lived there in wigwams made from tule reeds and arranged in neat rows. According to Stephen Powers, they had a political solidarity that was unusual among California Indians. They crafted their sandals from elk hide, tanning them in water infused with powdered deer brains. They had no cedar, so they bought their bows from mountaineers.

They took trout, chubs, and suckers from streams, and snared rabbits and quail with milkweed cords. The women were fierce gamblers. Powers approved of their manzanita cider, which was better than “the wretched stuff seen among the Wintun.”

Rattlesnakes were sacred to the Yokuts, but the white men who began settling the valley in the 1850s shot them with impunity. Many of the men were failed miners. Some of them had purchased their small plots of land with the scrip that they’d earned by enlisting in the army.

Settlers without any money or scrip worked on the wheat farms that were taking over the San Joaquin. Wealthy businessmen, often absentee owners, availed themselves of the water in rivers and lakes. They didn’t need much because wheat wasn’t thirsty. It was easy to grow. New machinery—massive plows and harvesters, along with tractors—multiplied the yield.

In 1852, just over a hundred thousand bushels of wheat came out of San Joaquin and Tuolumne counties, but by the 1870s California was the principal wheat-growing region in the United States, exporting its crop to Europe and Russia.

The settlers also signed on as ranchhands at the enormous cattle spreads of the Miller and Lux empire. Henry Miller, a German émigré, had worked as a butcher after his arrival in California in 1850—he’d adopted his name from a nontransferable ship ticket that he had finagled—and later had superb success as a wholesaler of
beef. He teamed with Charles Lux, another German, to acquire land, concentrating on the San Joaquin.

Miller was a slick operator, who played the angles and was not above an occasional bribe. He and Lux manipulated state and federal laws to buy swamps, deserts, and mountains for a pittance. They convinced army vets to sell them their scrip for land options, sometimes paying as little as a dollar an acre. They also picked up parched and unpromising ranchos that had been deeded to their owners by the Mexican government in the days before statehood.

Ultimately, Miller and Lux amassed about 1.4 million acres. They owned a hundred miles of riverfront along the San Joaquin and fifty miles along the Kern. They had property in Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada, and held a million head of cattle and a hundred thousand sheep. Their enterprise, along with the vast wheat farms, marked the origins of corporate agriculture in California, the first “factories in the field.”

The Southern Pacific Railroad was also gobbling up the valley. Essentially a monopoly, the railroad was the largest landowner in the state. It had received a congressional grant in 1865 that awarded it ten square miles of land for every mile of track its workers laid. The railroad’s engineers had hoped to extend service south to Los Angeles by laying tracks along the coast, but so much of the coastal property was in private hands that the focus had shifted to the San Joaquin.

To keep down the tax bill on the real estate that it was acquiring, Southern Pacific offered parcels to settlers to farm or to ranch, guaranteeing them a chance to buy the land at a later date for not more than $2.50 an acre, or—the catch word—“upwards.”

Texans were among the first to respond. They were used to a hardscrabble life and collected at Mussel Slough, now Lucerne Valley, for its access to the Kings River. In 1876, as the rails drove south, Southern Pacific took possession of Mussel Slough and made good on its promise, but the asking price for the land was indeed “upwards,” between $17.00 and $40.00 an acre.

The Texans refused to pay. They waged a losing battle in court and subsequently turned into vigilantes, costuming themselves as Indians and going on a barn-burning rampage to intimidate anybody who had cooperated with the railroad.

In May of 1880, two Southern Pacific hirelings, Mills Hart and Walter Crow, were sent to the Henry Brewer ranch in Mussel Slough to pose as its new owners. Twenty armed settlers were waiting for them. Six of them died in a gun battle, and so did Mills Hart. Walter Crow disappeared into a wheat field, but the settlers found him and killed him, too.

The incident became the central episode in the first great California novel, Frank Norris’s
The Octopus
, Norris had moved from Chicago to San Francisco as a teenager and had fallen under the spell of Émile Zola while studying at Berkeley. He wanted to be a naturalistic novelist and in 1899 hit on an idea for a trilogy about wheat. For two months, he lived on a ranch in Hollister to gather material and actually worked the harvest as a sacker on a combine.

His description of spring in the San Joaquin:

Four hundred horses pulling plows, 40 million bushels of wheat harvested from the fields in 1889, and yet such farming would soon be relegated to a minor activity, done in not by the Southern Pacific but by a water war.

Miller and Lux were big users of the valley’s water. They had always maintained that the streams in California ought to be subject to the riparian laws of England. Water was strictly for a landowner and shouldn’t be diverted. It was a form of property.

The Kern River Land and Cattle Company, a competitor, tested them in 1875 by claiming a large section of the stream near Bakersfield and digging a canal to irrigate some of its ranches. Miller and Lux filed suit to stop the canal, asserting that their water was being stolen. They were victorious, but the Kern River group kept lobbying, and Congress appeased them at last by passing the Wright Act in a special session in 1887.

The Wright Act permitted fifty or more neighboring farmers and ranchers to come together as an irrigation district and divert water for such purposes as conservation and flood control. The new availability of irrigated water meant that growers could diversify into crops that were both thirstier and worth more than wheat, and soon the delicate rustling of a wheat field was a sound rarely heard in the San Joaquin.

A
FTER ESCAPING FROM TWENTY
-
TWO MILE ROADHOUSE
, I reached Fresno at last, where the tallest building around is the Security National Bank. That was how the town felt to me, secure somehow—deeply rooted, self-aware, and quietly prosperous. It seemed to be perfectly balanced on its fulcrum, far enough from San Francisco and Los Angeles to be impervious to their lures. It was a thing unto itself, with no sense of longing in the air, no big-time aspirations. Fresno was honest. What you saw was what you got.