“We’re going to California tomorrow, Albie,” I said. He cocked his head slightly. I knew it meant nothing in particular to him, but I liked talking to him anyway. “Let’s get some sleep.”
* A play on Grand Canyon Suite by American composer Ferde Grofé, composed between 1929 and 1931.
THIRTEEN
California Dreamin’
Why do some towns, such as Okemah, Oklahoma, and Pampa, Texas, die or become shells of their former selves, while others, seemingly in the absolute middle of nowhere, grow and prosper? The answer is probably as varied as the towns themselves.
On our way south along Arizona Route 95 toward Needles we made a slight detour and drove across a bridge spanning the Colorado River into Laughlin, the town at the pointed southern tip of Nevada. And if you stood at the very southern tip of Laughlin you could easily throw one baseball into Arizona and another into California.
I’d never heard of Laughlin, and it took me by surprise. It’s a tiny version of Las Vegas, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with large casinos, riverboats sitting in the Colorado, brand-new manicured parks filled with flowers, and a modern pedestrian bridge, part of the Colorado River Heritage Greenway and Trails, that offers views of the river and Laughlin’s sister city on the other side, Bullhead City, Arizona. Everything looked brand new, as if it had been laid down in the last couple of years. As we walked, a Suncoast 737 glided past on approach to the Laughlin airport. This rapidly growing city at the edge of the Mojave is a destination.
Here in the middle of the desert, a place as unlike home in New England as one could imagine, reality interrupted when Judy called me about a billing problem with our health insurance. When Judy and I are home together, there isn’t a phone call, text, or tweet that doesn’t seem to demand her immediate attention, whether we’re driving somewhere, having dinner, or taking a walk. Yet, when I’m traveling, and it was true thus far on our trip, when I call I’m lucky if she answers. Usually I talk to voice mail. And when I do get through I’m most likely to hear, “I’m just walking into my mother’s, can I call you later?” or “I’m just getting the dogs out, can I call you later?” or “I’m just going out to meet [fill in name of any one of Judy’s several hundred close friends], can I call you later?” There had, on this trip, been no conversations that began, “I just wanted to hear your voice” or “I miss you” or “Just checking in to make sure you guys are OK.” I might be driving through a barren stretch of desert feeling slightly homesick when I’d get a text that read, “Did you move the baking pans?” or “Where is Salina’s medication?” or “Jamba hasn’t pooped in two days.” Not even an opening salutation! Maybe it’s a sign of a mature marriage—like our agreement that this year’s anniversary gift to each other would be new gutters for the house—that our communication was mostly transactional, such as this one about the health insurance bill. Don’t get me wrong, Judy is a caring, generous (to a fault), and sentimental person, a good wife and mother, and I love her very much, but it would be an understatement to say she doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve (as I often do), and she certainly doesn’t put it in writing, not even into a text, and rarely into a phone call.
In any event, since I was the primary policy holder on our health insurance (I’m on Medicare now), they insisted on talking with me. It was odd, to say the least, to be standing in Laughlin, Nevada, in the desert, Albie by my side, trying to unravel a mundane billing issue back in Massachusetts, and it reminded me of how nice it was to be divorced from all of the day-to-day tasks that demand attention at home.
With the health insurance issue resolved (we owed them $32), we crossed back into Arizona and continued down Highway 95 toward Needles. There was construction everywhere. New houses and strip malls were going up for miles and miles around, joining others recently built. We passed a brand-new hospital and new schools and new parks. The place was booming. Not that I’ve ever been there, but it seemed like an American version of Dubai. There was even a boat dealer with gleaming white boats and yachts for sale, boats that would have looked at home in Nantucket Harbor, but odd here in the middle of the desert even if the Colorado River was nearby. The sprawl continued all the way to Needles some thirty miles south of Laughlin.
I thought back to towns such as Okemah and Pampa, towns on the decline, and marveled that here in the middle of the desert a new metropolis was being born. This wasn’t an area reinventing itself. It was being invented.
As we approached Needles, I was quite aware of the absurdity of my determination to track the Joad family route here and across the Mojave. Our circumstances could not have been more different from those faced by the Joads, and the countless thousands they represented in Steinbeck’s novel. They were driving for their lives, broke and desperate, in a jalopy barely up to the journey. We were on a pleasure trip in a BMW convertible and I had three credit cards with generous credit limits in my wallet. No one was looking to exploit us, run us off their land, or treat us like vermin. Still, I wanted to see the landscape they did and summon Steinbeck’s unforgettably heartbreaking account.
Needles is a small place and we were through it in just a few unremarkable minutes. Tomorrow the heat would descend and stay for a week or more. We’d made more haste than we’d planned across the Southwest to beat that heat and as we drove the one hundred thirty miles across the Mojave I wasn’t sorry. The land was devoid of trees and almost any sign of human life, save for the passing cars and trains. The land rises and falls gently so that in some places you can see the traffic, like a marching army of ants, making its way along Interstate 40 for miles off in the distance. And you can see the freight trains snaking their way across the desert, too. It was as if we had entered a world in miniature, all human presence dwarfed by the vastness of it all. What a journey it must have been in an old jalopy with no money and all your belongings piled high and strapped on back, barely clinging to your humanity and your hope.
As we approached Barstow I wondered when the Dust Bowl refugees first glimpsed the rich, verdant fields and valleys of their imaginations, the Land of Plenty they had heard rumors about. We saw some irrigated and cultivated fields starting about fifteen miles east of Barstow, but Barstow is still very much a desert town. We’d have to wait.
A short way beyond Barstow we passed an exit sign for Twenty Mule Team Road. Now, if you’re about my age, that almost certainly will ring a bell. It rang my bell, but I couldn’t quite remember why, and for Albie, of course, it rang no bell at all. I know because I looked over my right shoulder and asked him. He was lying with his front legs stretched out in front of him with his head in between. He raised his eyebrows ever so slightly as if to say, “Can’t you see I’m resting here? When do we eat?”
Then we passed another sign, for the town of Boron, and it hit me: “20 Mule Team Borax.” But what the heck was 20 Mule Team Borax and what did it have to do with Boron? I couldn’t recall. So, I pulled over and looked it up on my phone.
From 1952 to 1970 there was a popular television show called Death Valley Days, sponsored by a brand of laundry cleaner, still made today by Dial, called 20 Mule Team Borax. Indeed, just beyond the exit for Boron was another exit for Borax Road. Borax, or sodium borate, is a compound of the chemical element boron, and it won’t surprise you to learn that near the town of Boron is a large boron mine where they harvest the raw material for 20 Mule Team Borax. It was all quite bemusing; a little boron blast from the past.
A few days earlier, as I was plotting out our travels ahead, I decided we would stay in Tehachapi our first night in California. Neither Barstow nor Bakersfield appealed. All I knew of Tehachapi, located between the two, was the lyric from the Little Feat song, “Willin’”:
I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonopah
Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made
Driven the back roads
So I wouldn’t get weighed
And if you give me weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I’ll be willin’ . . . to be movin’
Tehachapi turned out to be a very nice surprise. No weed, whites, or wine for us, but it had perfectly manicured parks with thick green lawns, cozy cottages on flowered lots, and a pleasant downtown. The main park was a perfect place for Albie and me to stretch our legs and make some friends; it was filled with families scampering on playground equipment or sitting at picnic tables. A little towheaded five-year-old with hazel eyes named Kylee was the first of many to stroke Albie’s head; within five minutes he was basking in the attention of a gaggle of young girls who were utterly taken by his good looks and gentle manner. Goodness, he was being so much calmer and approachable on our trip than at home and I was again truly grateful for that. He might not have been able to appreciate the Grand Canyon in the same way I did, but he was definitely making the most of this adventure in his own way, even if the end result was just more belly rubs.
A young couple in clothes that would have been in place at the turn of the 20th century stood on the grass next to a portable stand with some religious literature. We passed them twice walking the footpath around the park and simply nodded at one other. Thankfully, they didn’t try to rope me in to a discussion of theology. Thus assured that they weren’t aggressive proselytizers I said hello on our third pass. They were warm and friendly, and as we talked they made no attempt to turn Albie and me into Jehovah’s Witnesses. They seemed astonished we’d driven all the way from Boston and told us they liked living in Tehachapi, which they described as “quiet and churchy.” Apparently so, since about a half hour later as I sat on a bench with Albie next to me on the grass, we were approached by a second couple who were also spreading the Word, but with a little more determination. The young man was dressed in a dark suit with a black shirt and a white tie. I told him he looked like he’d walked off the set of The Sopranos. He laughed, but when I asked, he admitted he had no idea what I was talking about. Wanting to be polite, I accepted the pamphlet his companion offered, but I also knew I’d be tossing it at the first opportunity.
Just off the main street Albie and I found a decent looking “Mediterranean deli,” as it described itself, with an outdoor patio and took a table outside. It was a perfect evening, warm but not hot, with a cloudless sky and a dry gentle breeze.
So many of our conversations, long or short, with people on this trip started with one of four questions, all related to Albie. May I pet him? What’s his name? What kind of dog is he? And, finally, how old is he? I never quite understood why people were so curious to know his age. So, it was a bit novel when the man at the next table, dining alone, simply said, “That’s a nice-looking dog.”
His name was Shady (pronounced “Shad,” he told me) and he hailed from southern Egypt. I was surprised to meet someone from southern Egypt in this small California town, and over our respective meals we talked. Thirty-six years old, he had recently finished training to be a pharmacist in Los Angeles. He’d been in the United States for four years with his green card and had taken a job a few months earlier at a pharmacy in Tehachapi, a town where he knew absolutely no one, though his brother lives in Bakersfield, about forty-five minutes away. His mother and sister are still in Egypt. He lives in a house he found on Craigslist with three other guys he doesn’t know and though he said he’d met a few people in town I had the sense it was a pretty lonely existence for him in this small California town.
He always wanted to come to America, he told me, because there is very little opportunity in Egypt. Like so many people, born here and not, Shady was pursuing his own American dream.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “are you Muslim?” I was curious to know what it might be like for a Muslim in this “churchy” town.
“No, I’m a Christian,” he told me. Given the anti-immigrant sentiment that has gripped America in the Trump era, I wondered if he’d encountered any of it. It was good to hear he had not.
After we’d wished each other good luck and gone our separate ways I thought about what it must be like to be so far from home, trying to make your way in a foreign land, and almost never seeing a face familiar from your past. His brother is the only person in America who knew him more than four years ago when he came to the United States, and no one he ever sees in Tehachapi has known him more than a few months. Though Albie and I were strangers here, too, we weren’t making a life here, and we’d seen people we’d known for years in New Orleans and would again, both family and friends, in a few days when we reached the Bay Area. We were traveling through here, not living here, and we would, in a few weeks, be back where everyone knows our names. That’s a much different kind of “alone” than Shady was experiencing. He was a man without context here, in a country not his own. What, then, does it mean for him to “be home?” Can a room in a house shared with three strangers met on Craigslist ever feel like home? How long, if ever, would it take for a man from Egypt to feel like this small town in California was his home?
Earlier in the day, as we drove past Barstow, my iPhone, which was playing songs from my music library randomly, alighted on Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood’s 2009 version of “Can’t Find My Way Home,” the one I added to my playlist when I had pre-trip dreams of being unable to get home. It must have been that and my conversation with Shady that worked their way into my subconscious that night. It was also our first night in California, which meant we had driven about as far from home as we could get and still be in the continental United States. Our sparse hotel room smelled strongly of disinfectant, nothing homey about it, adding to the sense of isolation.
First, I dreamt I was trying to drive home but couldn’t. No matter which way I turned we were unable to get closer. Then I dreamt we’d lost the car, parked it somewhere and couldn’t find it. I dreamt I wanted to go back to college, Amherst College where I went as an undergraduate, but realized I wouldn’t know anyone when I got there.
You can’t go home again. That’s what all those dreams seemed to be saying. And what if we couldn’t? What would life be like forever on the road trying, futilely, to get back home? It was terrifying.
In the middle of the night I awoke with a headache, the first of the trip. The overpowering odor of the disinfectant was the first thing I noticed, and I felt very, very far from home. When I was talking with Shady the previous evening and he asked me how old I was, I could hardly believe the words that came out of my mouth. “I’ll be sixty-five in November,” I said. Here, in the middle of the night with a splitting headache in an antiseptic motel room on the other side of the continent I wondered, “Why is a man my age driving across the country with his dog?” I was homesick.
When we had arrived in Tehachapi the day before, I e-mailed back and forth with an old friend and colleague, Bill Monning. Bill, a native Californian, was a lawyer with the legal department of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) in the 1970s and 1980s, working closely with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the cofounders of the UFW. He was later directing attorney with the legal aid organization California Rural Legal Assistance. One of Bill’s primary efforts was litigation to seek compensation for farmworkers for illness and deaths caused by exposure to pesticides in the fields. A little over a decade ago, Bill entered politics, first winning a seat in the California State Assembly, then in the state Senate, representing a coastal district that stretches from just south of San José all the way to just north of Santa Maria. He’s now the California Senate majority leader.
Bill and I were trying to work out the timing for Albie and me to spend the night with him in Sacramento. When I told him we were in Tehachapi he wrote that we should plan a stop just fifteen miles down the road in Keene, at the place Cesar Chavez called “La Paz” (or more fully, “Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz”), now the site of the Cesar Chavez National Monument, where Chavez and his wife, Helen, were laid to rest. This small national monument is a property with a Spanish-style building purchased by the UFW and became the political and spiritual
center of the farmworkers’ movement.
I had been looking for the place where the Joads might have finally glimpsed the green, fertile valleys of their dreams and, fittingly, it very well might have been in Keene, for it is here that State Highway 58 descends into California’s Central Valley, the richest farmland in the world. Just before the road reaches the valley floor, we turned off to visit La Paz, which Albie and I had to ourselves, save for a groundskeeper, that morning. It felt like a tiny Garden of Eden. Wisteria hung from trellises, the flower gardens were carefully curated, and the graves of the Chavezes were set in a small lawn bordered on one side by a granite wall with a fountain, above which was a frieze showing workers in the fields marching forward. It was profoundly peaceful. On the granite wall was a quote, in Spanish and English, from the American-born son of Mexican immigrants who dedicated his life to the farmworkers’ cause: “It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life.” It was all very moving. The bountiful fields of the Central Valley are where countless dreams have crashed and many have lost their lives.
As you drive the Central Valley, which runs for hundreds of miles, the basic, immutable and cruel laws of nature and economics stare you in the face, the very same laws that so daunted the Joads. It’s a place where water, earth, and a steady supply of hands have to cooperate to bring forth the bounty. For the migrant workers who toil under the hot sun harvesting grapes and lettuce, dates and oranges, pecans and pistachios, life is lived on the margins. For the growers, dependent on having enough hands at precisely the right time, life can be good. As we made our way up the eastern side of the valley there was the occasional McMansion, lavishly landscaped, sitting among the fields as if it had been dropped down, complete with a yard, from outer space. They looked preposterous here, these little estates that would have been more at home in the suburbs of Atlanta or Nashville or New York.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 18