Where I Was From

by Joan Didion

  There is also the man Everett will eventually shoot, Ryder Channing. Ryder Channing is the only character in the novel not “from” California, in other words one of the “new people.” He first meets Martha in 1944, when he is stationed at Mather Field in Sacramento, and his appearances on the ranch to see her, which continue, inexplicably to Everett, after the war has ended and this person not from California should have gone home to wherever he came from, are presented as troubling elements. He has no intention of leaving, he tells Everett, because California is where the future is being made:

  Starting now. Channing had the hunch they were in on the ground floor of the biggest boom this country had ever seen. Talk about your gold rush. And he wasn’t the only one who believed in Northern California. Just one example, the Keller Brothers believed in Northern California to the tune of five million berries.

  “The Keller Brothers,” Everett said. “I don’t believe I know them.”

  The Keller Brothers, Channing explained patiently, were developers. Los Angeles developers who believed in Northern California, in the Valley specifically, to the tune of five million smackeroos. Which they were putting into the Natomas District.

  “I never heard of any Kellers in the Natomas,” Everett said.

  With what appeared to be infinite restraint, Channing inspected and crumpled three empty cigarette packages before answering. “They aren’t in the Natomas right now. They want to develop the Natomas.”

  “Who’s putting up the money? How can they raise five million dollars on land they haven’t got?”

  “Those sweethearts could raise five million dollars with a plot plan on the back of a goddamn napkin. Anyway,” Channing added, apparently abandoning his effort to justify the Kellers’ ways to Everett, “that’s just one example. The point is we’re sitting right here on the ground floor with the button pushed go.”

  Ryder, who because he has no California heritage is incapable of betraying it, not only sees the future but seizes it: he abandons Martha in 1948 to marry the daughter of a recently rich developer. (“Construction money, Everett believed. Wartime. It was all mixed up in his mind with Henry Kaiser.”) Martha, about whom there have been previous suggestions of histrionic instability (at parties the year she was sixteen “it had been impossible not to notice her, as it might have been impossible not to notice someone running a high fever, or wearing a cellophane dress”), spends the winter between Ryder’s marriage and her own death trying in vain to embrace this New California from which Ryder had come and to which she has now lost him: “She went everywhere, met everyone. She met builders, promoters, people looking for factory sites and talking about a deep-water channel and lobbying for federal dams; people neither Everett nor Lily would have known existed had she not told them. She went to large parties at new country clubs, went to small parties at new apartment houses, and went, almost every afternoon, to inspect subdivisions opened by one or another of the boys she knew who were going into the real estate business.”

  This is a not inaccurate characterization of the way Sacramento, or for that matter California itself, felt to a child growing up during the postwar boom years, the late 1940s and early 1950s; sometimes, say when I hear about what the Alameda Corridor will bring us, I still catch the echo of those years. It was true that it was suddenly possible, as if overnight, to buy paperback books at Levinson’s bookstore downtown. It was true that it was suddenly possible, as if overnight, to see foreign movies—Open City, The Bicycle Thief, a lachrymose Swedish young-love picture called One Summer of Happiness—at the Guild Theater in Oak Park, although the only member of my family to regularly see them was a half-deaf great-aunt for whom subtitles offered the novel possibility of actually following the action onscreen. It was true that the habits and customs of “old Sacramento” (the school-vacation jobs on the ranches and at the canneries, the swimming in the rivers and wading in the ditches, the dutiful study of the agricultural exhibits at the California State Fair) were giving way to a more urban, or suburban, life, in which children swam in clear water in backyard pools lined with gunite and bought Italian typewriters and ate pears bought in supermarkets rather than dropped off in lugs by the relatives who grew them.

  All this was true, and yet there was in Run River something that was not true, a warp, a persistent suggestion that these changes brought about by World War Two had in some way been resisted by “true” Californians. Had not any such resistance been confined to the retrospect? Were not “changes” and “boom years” what the California experience had been about since the first American settlement? Were we not still willing to traffic our own history to get what the railroad could bring us?

  Take for example this business of laying the iconic camellias in Marthas grave: in point of fact the whole notion of planting camellias for the pioneers—there was in the park across from the state capitol building in Sacramento a “Camellia Grove” set aside for this purpose—had originated with my father’s stepmother, Genevieve Didion, who was for many years the president of the Sacramento City Board of Education and was said by the rest of the family, not entirely approvingly, to be “political.” All association of camellias with pioneers, in other words, derived from the same spirit of civic boosterism that would later turn Front Street, along the river, into the entirely ersatz “redevelopment” known as “Old Sacramento,” twenty-eight riverfront acres of shops selling trinkets and souvenirs and popcorn. “The pioneers,” in other words, had become a promotional tool, Sacramento’s own unique selling proposition, a way of attracting tourists, conventions, a new kind of cash that did not depend on crops: one more version of the weakness for the speculative venture that Charles Nordhoff had noted in 1874.

  “The pool kills me,” Everett McClellan’s sister Sarah says, in Run River, when she visits the ranch on which he and Lily live. “It looks like Pickfair.”

  The year Sarah says this is 1959. Although swimming pools were fairly general throughout California by 1959, this Pool on the ranch represents, as presented, Everett’s first concession to the postwar mood, and so cues the reader to yet another sign of decline. This did not exactly reflect any attitude toward pools with which I was familiar.

  In 1948, when my mother and father and brother and I were living on some acreage outside Sacramento on which my father had built a house until the time seemed right to subdivide the property, my brother and I wanted a pool. We could have a pool, my father said, but only if we ourselves dug it. Every morning all that hot summer my brother, Jim, who was eight, took a shovel out to the middle of the field in front of the house and chipped in vain at the hardpan that underlay the inch or two of topsoil.

  Five years older than Jim, doubtful that either he or I could dig a twenty-by-forty-foot hole eight feet deep, equally doubtful that our father—were such a hole to miraculously materialize—had any intention of following through (as I saw it, he might string a hose out there and turn on the tap, but no gunite, no filter, no tile coping), I declined to dig. Instead I spent the summer reading the plays of Eugene O’Neill and dreamed of escaping to Bennington, where I would prepare myself for a New York life in the theater by sitting in a tree in a leotard and listening to Francis Fergusson explain the difference between drama and melodrama. This was the year, 1948, when, already plotting my departure, I delivered the eighth-grade graduation speech on “Our California Heritage.” This was also the year, 1948, when the Sacramento City Parks Department awarded, as prizes in its annual Easter egg hunt, what The Sacramento Bee described as “live bunnies named after pioneers,” a teaching tool, it occurs to me now, that had “Genevieve Didion” written all over it. Ten years later I did have a New York life, although not in the theater, and I was writing the novel that would put such a protective distance between me and the place I came from.

  2

  THIS question of “changes,” involving as it does some reflexive suggestion of a birthright squandered, a paradise lost, is a vexed issue. I was many times told as a child that the grass
in the Sacramento Valley had at the time the American settlers arrived in the 1840s grown so high that it could be tied over a saddle, the point being that it did no more. California, in this telling, had even then been “spoiled.” The logical extension of this thought, that we were the people who had spoiled it, remained unexplored. Nor would it be explored in Run River, the inchoate intent of which was to return me to a California I wished had been there to keep me. “Everything changes, everything changed,” one passage, obviously acutely felt at the time I wrote it, begins. “Summer evenings driving downriver to auctions, past the green hops in leaf, blackbirds flying up from the brush in the dry twilight air, red Christmas-tree balls glittering in the firelight, a rush of autumn Sundays, all gone, when you drove through the rain to visit the great-aunts.” The “change,” the “all gone” part, is seen in Run River to have come only with the postwar boom years, the prosperous years when California “as it was” got bulldozed out of existence either for better (as Ben Weingart and Louis Boyar and Mark Taper saw it when they conceived Lakewood) or (as I then wished to see it) for worse.

  Californians of more programmatic mind for many years presented these postwar changes as positive, the very genius of the place: it was conventional to mention the freeway system, the aerospace industry, the University of California Master Plan, Silicon Valley, the massive rearrangement of the water that got funded when Pat Brown was governor, the entire famous package, the celebrated promise that California was committed to creating and educating an apparently infinitely expandable middle class. The more recent programmatic attitude was to construe the same changes as negative, false promises: the freeways had encouraged sprawl, the aerospace industry had gone away, the University of California had lost faculty and classrooms to budget cuts, Silicon Valley had put housing beyond the means of non-tech California, and most of the state was still short water.

  In a book of readings for students in freshman composition classes at California colleges, the editors and contributors speak of “the threats to the California dream,” of the need to keep “the California dream in sight,” of “the fashionable new mythology emerging nationwide in which California is being recast as a nightmare rather than a dream,” and of which O. J. Simpson—O. J. Simpson as “the self-invented celebrity who climbed from poverty to the summit of fame and fortune” or O. J. Simpson in the white Bronco—“better reflects the truth about the California dream.” In either case, genius of the place or its dystopian blight, the postwar changes that transformed California were understood to have been brought about by what was popularly seen as an unprecedented influx of population, what Pat Brown, in a 1962 issue of Look, called “the greatest mass migration in the history of the world” and George B. Leonard, in the same issue of Look, called “the migrating millions who vote with their wheels for California.” During World War Two and the immediate postwar years, 1940 to 1950, the population of California did in fact increase 53 percent. During the next ten years, 1950 to 1960, the population of California did in fact increase 49 percent.

  Yet such growth was in no way unprecedented. Nor, in a state that had seen its population increase in the first ten years of statehood by 245 percent, was it even remarkable. The decade between 1860 and 1870 brought a population increase to California of 47 percent, the decade that followed an increase of 54 percent. The years between 1900 and 1910 brought another 60 percent. Those were the years during which Faulkner’s Ira Ewing, in “Golden Land,” would have fled Nebraska on the night train to end up twenty-five years later sleepless in Beverly Hills. The years between 1910 and 1920 brought 44 percent. Those were the years when it came to the attention of Saxon Brown and Billy Roberts in The Valley of the Moon that “it looks like the free-born American ain’t got no room left in his own land”—two babes convinced that they had been deprived of their Eden by industrialization, by immigration, by whatever it was that they could not name. The ten years that followed, between 1920 and 1930, when only shallowly settled arrivals were to find themselves further marginalized by the onset of the Depression, brought 66 percent. There had been, then, from the beginning, these obliterating increases, rates of growth that systematically erased freshly laid traces of custom and community, and it was from such erasures that many California confusions would derive.

  There used to be on the main street through Gilroy, a farm town in Santa Clara County that billed itself as “The Garlic Capital of the World,” a two- or three-story hotel, the Milias, where the dining room off the lobby had a black-and-white tiled floor and fans and potted palm trees and, in the opinion of my father, short ribs so succulent that they were worth a stop on any drive between Sacramento and the Monterey Peninsula. I remember sitting with him in the comparative cool of the Milias dining room (any claim of “cool” was at that time comparative, air conditioning not yet having taken widespread hold in Santa Clara County), eating short ribs and the cherries from his old-fashioned bourbon cocktail, the singular musky smell of garlic being grown and picked and processed permeating even the heavy linen napkins.

  I am unsure at what point the Milias Hotel vanished (probably about the time Santa Clara County started being called Silicon Valley), but it did, and the “farm town” vanished too, Gilroy having reinvented itself as a sprawl of commuter subdivisions for San Jose and the tech industry. In the summer of 2001, a local resident named Michael Bonfante opened a ninety-million-dollar theme park in Gilroy, “Bonfante Gardens,” the attractions of which were designed to suggest the agricultural: stage shows with singing tomatoes, rides offering the possibility of being spun in a giant garlic bulb or swung from a thirty-nine-foot-high mushroom. The intention behind Bonfante Gardens, according to its creator, was “to show how the county was in the 1950s and 1960s.” The owner of a neighboring property was interviewed by The New York Times on the subject of Bonfante Gardens. “If it gets to be Disneyland, I am going to hate it,” she said. “Right now it is pretty and beautiful. But who knows? Someone who has been here as long as I have has mixed feelings.”

  This interviewee, according to the Times, had been a resident of Gilroy, in other words “been here,” for fifteen years. If fifteen years seems somewhat short of the longtime settlement suggested by “someone who has been here as long as I have,” consider this: when my brother and I applied to change the zoning from agricultural to residential on a ranch we owned east of Sacramento, one of the most active opponents to the change, a man who spoke passionately to the folly of so altering the nature of the area, had moved to California only six months before, which suggested that he was living on a street that existed only because somebody else had developed a ranch. Discussion of how California has “changed,” then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.

  Victor Davis Hanson is a professor of classics on the Fresno campus of California State University, a contributor of occasional opinion pieces to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and the author of a number of books, including The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer, an impassioned polemic modeled on and informed by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Farmer. Hanson has in fact for most of his life thought of himself as a farmer, either active or failed (he rejects the word “grower,” more common in California, as “a term of self-approbation, used by those in California who often do not themselves grow anything”), with his brother and cousins a cultivator of grapevines and fruit trees on the same San Joaquin Valley land, fewer than two hundred acres, that their great-great-grandfather homesteaded in the 1870s. He sees himself as heir to the freeholding yeomen farmers who, in Crèvecoeur’s and his own view, “created the American republican spirit.” He tells us that his children are the sixth consecu
tive generation to live in the same house. The single photograph I have seen of him shows a man in his forties, wearing khakis and a T-shirt, his features and general stance so characteristic of the Central Valley (a good deal of sun exposure goes into this look, and a certain wary defiance) that the photograph could seem indistinguishable from snapshots of my father and cousins.

  There is much in The Land Was Everything that catches exactly this Valley note. There is the smell of insecticides, fungicides, the toxic mists that constitute the smell of the place. (“What they’re trying to do is generate a new fear of the word ‘carcinogen,’” the corporate counsel for the J. G. Boswell Company, which operates fifty thousand acres in the Tulare Basin, famously said in response to certain restrictions placed during the mid-1980s on the use of toxic chemicals. “Chemicals are absolutely necessary for everyday life.”) There is the sense of walking the ditches in an orchard, losing oneself among the propped limbs of the overburdened fruit trees. There is the visceral pleasure of cold Sierra water as it comes from the flume. There is the monosyllabic speech pattern, the directness to the point of rudeness, the abrupt way of launching and ending telephone calls with no niceties, no identification, no salutation, no goodbye, just a hangup. I never once heard my father’s father, the grandfather who remained “Mr. Didion” to me, identify himself on the telephone. My mother frequently hung up without saying goodbye, sometimes in midsentence. “I do not think I shall leave the San Joaquin Valley of California,” Hanson writes. “Courage, a friend tells me, requires me to grow up and leave, to get a better job elsewhere; cowardice, he says, is to stay put, possumlike, as the world goes on by. But at least my credentials as a San Joaquin Valley loyalist are unimpeachable, and thus my lament over its destruction is genuine.”