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Shahdol It was a short drive from Vegas to the California border. We had done it – we had driven New York to California, from Pizza Box on Bleecker Street to the Giant Sequoias in five days. We ate our lunch in a diner in Barstow, right on Route 66. Barstow could have been any of the bland desert towns between Bakersfield and El Paso, and in particular it looked like Truth or Consequences New Mexico – concrete boxes choked in diesel and dust. It was a town that had an unfortunate finishing energy – just fifty miles from the Cajon Pass, where the San Gabriel mountains separate the yucca deserts of the Mohave from the orange groves of California. There was no stopping here except to quickly start again. All the pleasures were ahead.

http://ashmann.uk/weekly-post/400-words-012-change-your-tools We took 66 out of town and then turned off onto a little two-lane highway headed northwest for the Tehachapi Pass, across a desert landscape so barren it had been turned into an air force base. We went through the town of Boron, where borax has been mined for decades – one of the major ingredients of cleaning products from laundry detergent to toothpaste. We went up the Tehachapis and down into the Central Valley of California.

The Central Valley is an easy place to dislike. It is a vast smog-bowl, where the air is so thick you cannot even tell it is a valley – the mountains merely vanish into the corrupted air (and these fourteen-thousand-foot Sierras, no less), and all you see are crops, produced on farms so vast you would almost imagine they were simply the effortless creations of nature – where are the houses? Where are the farmers? This too is an illusion of corruption. From time to time along the fields you see little knots of parked cars, where the migrant workers are working for the day. The farms are so large there are no buildings within walking distance of where they harvest.

It is a feudal society, where the lords own the land and the serfs work it. It is considered an improvement on feudalism – at least from our perspective – because we, that is to say myself and my readers and American citizens generally, are the beneficiaries. The workers were all Mexican without exception. It is nice to think that these are merely entry-level jobs in the land of opportunity – but that is of course precisely the question. If the migrant workers graduate to other work, then someone else must do this work. And they will not graduate to other work if they are not allowed in as full members of our society – as citizens. And in my heart I don’t even really believe in “entry-level jobs” – I think we should work to create a society where every job has human dignity. All around me in the Hudson Valley my friends were doing more or less the same work that these migrant workers were – landscaping and planting and harvesting. But we had employers that treated us as equals, did much of the work themselves, and tried to make our lives decent. These workers were not so honored. And we of course were just playing around in the dirt – these people, in this one valley, were feeding the entire country. And a BLT at Wendy’s would cost ten dollars if these people were given a decent life – a price we are told no one wants to pay for food. In fact, the trend is still in the opposite direction. Much American food production is moving to Mexico – where the same labor can be had for an even lower wage.

Steinbeck wrote about all this. It was then less about race, but equally about money. It fascinates me – it has all the repulsiveness of something human and real. I know the Central Valley is one of the key places for understanding what America really is. The question for America – as it perennially is for all those who wield power – is whether power can be handled without slowly and inexorably destroying the character of the handler. Here the problem is obvious. The foundation of all economy is food, and all the ways we produce our food are problematic: in the Mississippi basin where we grow our staples our machines are removing the topsoil that was the accumulation of millions of years, in California we rely on exploitation of a class of people we do not wish to have the human rights enshrined in our Constitution, and of course the oceans since they belong to nobody we are destroying outright. Almost everything else in American food production is gentleman farming and a kind of pleasant fiction. It will not feed three hundred million. I like the Union Square Farmers’ Market, but imagine if it were the only food source for the city.

A man loses a great deal by this alienation from the land – most notably, a spiritual life (atheism will always be an urban feeling) – which you feel as soon as you come back to it. Despite all the problems of the Central Valley there is something amazingly beautiful about standing in the midst of a working, producing farm – we stopped the car and I ran out into the orange groves in sheer delight to be there.  It goes through all your bones.

We headed for Visalia, through thick California traffic on fast roads. We asked around for a supermarket and found one, a vast one, Californian in size, where the food was dirt cheap and we bought the rest of everything we would need for the next ten days. Getting out of the car, however, I had an odd numbness in both my arms – it remained with me for days. I suppose it was due to five days in a tiny Volkswagen, but at the time it was just another reason to be apprehensive about the difficulties ahead.

We then headed up into the mountains. I remembered that it was a long and winding road up to the sequoias, but memory had failed to record just how long and how winding it was. This road is much of the reason why Giant Sequoia National Park is so little visited – it’s not close to anything. It’s a long drive even for Californians.

But as we drove up higher and higher and saw more and more beautiful plants and mountain views, we got excited. We entered the Giant Forest at dusk, and there they were, the incredible trees, right by the road, eight and ten and twenty feet in diameter. It was a miracle, a remnant of an ancient world that was more beautiful, so beautiful not even nineteenth century Americans could destroy it into something useful.  They tried of course, but the trees were so big they couldn’t conveniently be turned into board feet, the way a mile-long pig couldn’t be driven to the slaughterhouse no matter how much bacon he had in him.  Now we had this forest, this miracle, standing on the mountain’s edge and watching the smogs try to climb the mountainsides.  I felt like I was home – the life of the sequoias was as close as I could get to an image of own soul.

Still we kept driving the long road to our campsite. We set up in the darkness, and found that it was freezing cold – I’m sure it was in the forties and it might have been in the thirties that night. We were camping around seven thousand feet. As I watched our little fire start to die, I was hoping we’d be all right when we got up to fourteen thousand.