Mary Panttaja

Saturday April 28th

Driving across the central valley on our way to the desert:

• As we come down the hill from Altamont pass, the flatness of the land before you is abrubt. Out of the winding curving coastal range—the horizontalness impresses itself upon you.
• 92 degreees
• The western reaches of the San Joaquin valley are so desperately dry. It’s only the end of May and I am very sure that no grass has grown here this year. It must be last year’s scrapings —brown and gray and dusty. The rolling hills are shorn close like old grey stubble.
• 94 degrees
• A small stand of young steers stare up from their fence line at the hill before them. They are sure they are lost for in the heat there is no shade, no visible water, and nothing possible for them to eat. A forlorn mystery hangs about them. What are they doing here?
• 96 degrees
• The vineyards and the almond orchards are startling in this dessert, verdant green, water oozing from the pipes that drain the giant canal along which the highway runs.
• 98 degrees
• A black and dead almond orchard of formerly full-grown trees— thousands of trees—despair, all hope lost—clearly someone has just shut off the valve of their artificial life’s blood and they are not fit to live in the place without it.
• 10 miles down the road someone is planting new baby almond trees; the meaninglessness of pipes and ownership and regulations.
• The aqueduct has little roaps with buoys across as it passes beneath the freeway: don’t swim beyond this point. Could you float it into Los Angeles. Though the turbines, of course.
• A mirage appears to the east—a vast lake of water and rushes.
• 100 degrees—only April 28th
• Someone is planting nopales along the fence—they, at least, look like they belong here.
• Kern County Line: chamisa (a desert shrub) appears along the roadside; dust devils stack up on the horizon— or maybe a line of tractors plowing five mile long waterlesss rows of dust.

Good news. It’s a beautiful, organized dustdevel swirled into a lean tower…not a truck or a tractor or a car.

The is such a strange place. If you brought immigrants from the east coast here instead of to Palo Alto or Monterey or San Diego, they would never dream of moving to California. No wonder Jim’s family kept moving west until they hit the ocean. �