Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  “How many Sikhs are there in the area?” I asked.

  “Well, let me see. About six or seven thousand?” Bengal replied. Sometimes he tilted his head at an angle when he spoke and put an index finger to his chin, as if he were going to recite some verse.

  He took me to visit the temple, leading me into a simply furnished bedroom and instructing me to remove my shoes. I prayed that my socks would be clean, and the prayer was answered. Next, I had to wash my hands at a sink. I held them under the tap for a minute or so and dried them on a towel that dangled from a child’s pegboard, where the hooks for clothing were little plastic ducks.

  “Ducks,” I said, amused that they’d been incorporated so easily into an ancient ritual.

  Bengal seemed to get a kick out of this. His eyes burned and flashed. “Yes, ducks!” he repeated with a laugh. “Really! They are ducks!”

  “Is the weather here in the valley like the weather in the Punjab?” I asked.

  “Yes!” he cried. “Exactly the same!” And did the Sikhs grow the same crops here? “Yes, yes! Same everything!”

  At the temple door, a carton spilled over with orange kerchiefs.

  “Cover your head, please,” Bengal instructed, but he didn’t show me how to wear the kerchief, whether to tie it like a babushka or fashion it into a turban, which I couldn’t have done, anyway. So I just let it rest lightly on my head, rearranging it now and then to keep it from falling off. The kerchief smelled of incense.

  Bengal pushed open the door, and we entered a large space that was like a high-school gym without the athletic gear. Tinsel and ornaments hung from the ceiling, but they had no special meaning. There were no chairs. During the prayer services, the congregation sat on the brown carpeting. Men and women were always kept apart. A throw rug was spread out before the altar, and a holy book was on it.

  With a respectful gesture, Bengal directed my attention to the pictures of gurus on the walls. They came in neon colors, as if they’d been electrified from within, pierced by divine light. Their expressions were intimidating, and their features seemed exaggerated—ears, noses, and hunks of flesh. Bengal counted them off as we passed them.

  “Number One, Number Two, et cetera,” he said.

  I ran the gauntlet of gurus holding the orange kerchief on my head. I had done stranger things in California, many times.

  For a moment, Bengal turned serious and impressed on me that the temple and all its facilities were available to any person, Sikh or not. Any person could come to Bogue Road and be housed and fed for seven days, as long as he or she refrained from tobacco and alcohol. That was the only point that Bengal felt compelled to stress—not a religious point, surely, or an item of dogma. He had none of the zealot’s urge to convert.

  For emphasis, he said again, “Any person!”

  The old men were still in the tearoom when we returned. I was curious about when the Sikh migration to Yuba City had begun, so Bengal put the question to the eldest of the elders, who was about one hundred and twenty. The man’s skin was as dark as a filbert and some of his teeth had gone to heaven. He had accessorized his turban with a brown Harris tweed sport coat.

  “Ah, ah, 1906,” he responded, though not with much conviction.

  I was struck by how uninterested the old men were that a stranger was around. The way they sat and conversed, the subtle chatter and argument, the tea and the rice cakes—it was as if their sole mission in life were to perpetuate the texture and the traditions of a Punjab village in the new freedom of California, far from Hindu threats.

  The old men slurped their tea. Not a head lifted as I put on my shoes. I considered staying on to talk some more, but Bengal seemed to be getting impatient, so I thanked him instead.

  “I won’t keep you any longer,” I said.

  Such bliss! Sublime! A transcendent grin! Bengal was glowing like one of the gurus.

  THE SMALLEST MOUNTAIN RANGE IN ALL CREATION, the Sutter Buttes are the most significant landmark around Marysville and Yuba City. Although they rise to jagged peaks of only about two thousand feet, they dominate the level fields and farms of the Sacramento Valley.

  In a Maidu myth, the buttes were said to be the result of an accident, dropped by the Great Spirit in his haste to build the Coast Range of mountains as a bulwark against the stormy Pacific Ocean. The Maidu believed that the souls of the dead came back to dwell here, at Histum Yani, and they revered it as a holy place.

  Itinerant painters used to travel through the valley to do portraits of homesteads, and farmers almost invariably insisted that the Sutter Buttes be incorporated into the scenery, even if the mountains were not technically anywhere nearby.

  A sink of twenty thousand acres fell along the northern and western fringes of the buttes. Waterfowl had always wintered in its permanent and seasonal marshes. The sludgy, poorly drained soil of Butte Sink made it worthless for farming, so the Department of Fish and Game managed it as an artificial wetland, filling it with well water and the water that ran off from the rice fields. That made for superior duck hunting, and the private hunting clubs of the valley were indebted. A proprietary membership at the most exclusive one could cost a million dollars.

  I had hoped to hike around the Sutter Buttes, but a barbed-wire fence kept out people and cattle. I tried to imagine what the buttes would look like with a subdivision at their base. A proposal would soon go before the voters in Sutter County that would permit construction, if approved, of 625 houses on 1,172 acres. Cal-Ontario, the developer, had already started on a golf course. Its master plan called for a second course and also a resort hotel.

  AS I WAS LEAVING TOWN ON HIGHWAY 99, I noticed a little farm stand by the road that looked so pure and unspoiled that I had to stop and restore my faith that all of rural California had not yet lost its flavor.

  A woman was selling baskets of pretty strawberries that she had grown herself on a small plot of ground. For twenty years, she had been growing her special berries, she said, tending them with what I assumed to be a gardener’s love of the earth instead of a craven agribusiness person’s desire for profit, and with that belief in my heart I paid for a basket and buried my nose in the rich, up-floating scent of ripening fruit.

  And the taste? Cardboard mixed with sawdust.

  CHAPTER 8

  WHAT A SWEET LITTLE TOWN Colusa was, all red-brick storefronts and creaky wood-frame houses with porches, a farming town still intact. Everybody was riding out a storm on the afternoon I drove through, waiting for the mottled thunderheads in the big sky above to break apart and deliver their blessing. A strong breeze had the leaves of the oaks and the black walnut trees along River Road rattling like castanets. The road was an old route to the gold mines and ran clear to Mount Shasta.

  Down Main Street, ever Main Street, came a farmer crawling home on his tractor, its wheels caked with mud from the fields. Nobody pushed to pass him or gave him the finger. Colusa had good manners. There was a good quiet in town, too, a peaceful feeling that seemed to obtain in farming communities that hadn’t yet lost their traditions.

  Behind a supermarket, a Chinese man sat on an inverted blue-plastic, milk-carton box and blew smoke rings, perfect ovals, while the young woman beside him busied herself with her hair, rearranging her new permanent every time the wind undid a few strands. All the stools inside the Sportsman’s Club were occupied by sports who could be counted on to peek out at the purplish sky and decide that another round was in order, yes, indeed.

  At the center of Colusa was a courthouse square, the kind of formal public space that you saw in Frank Capra films, those crazy American movies in which justice was always triumphant. The courthouse had been built between 1860 and 1861 in a deliberately antebellum style, with a portico held up by columns. So many of the town’s early settlers had come from the southern states and had expressed such earnest, pro-Confederate sentiments during the Civil War that Colusa had earned a nickname, “the Little South.”

  Just as the thunder started crackling, a m
other raced by with her baby swaddled in a blanket. She looked like a running back headed for the end zone and trying hard not to fumble. I took shelter in a gazebo where an old man was sitting with his two granddaughters. The girls had on light cotton dresses and were at an age when they seemed to be composed entirely of elbows and knees.

  The wind was really whipping. It snatched the old man’s Stetson from his head and threw it down, but he was on it in an instant and snatched it back.

  “Funny how you can smell rain,” he said, and it was true. I could smell the rain, an odor like no other.

  The first drops fell then, and the sky burst open and dumped a ton of rain all at once, fat, nickle-sized drops falling down in a tumble. The girls were shy and giggly and didn’t know for sure what came next, if the storm would end soon or whether it might never end and we would all be trapped in the gazebo forever.

  The sensation was bracing. It made me remember thunderstorms out of the past, in other places, drenching downpours in the Tuscan countryside and incredible gulley washers banging on the tin roof of my Peace Corps house in the Nigerian bush.

  A good, hard rain stopped the world for a while. Somehow it put tender emotions into the heart, maybe because it scared us a bit and trimmed back our wishes to the basics—shelter, warmth, food, and human company. Storms were sexy, too, galvanizing the nerves and setting a kinetic energy to roaring through the vitals. The rain made you want to connect, to be joined to another as you were joined to the furies.

  A taste of rain. Now I understood. After only a week in the heat and the torpor of the Sacramento Valley, I had a craving for something liquid, for the ocean and the coast.

  THE RAIN SLOWED ME DOWN ON MY WAY TO MENDOCINO. Highway 20 was not a road to make any time on, not during a storm. Twilight found me unhappily holed up in Clearlake Oaks, in Lake County, in a cottage on Clear Lake. The towns on the lakeshore could be as isolated and depressing as any in the Far North. Work was just as scarce. Apple and pear orchards, some vineyards, a handful of cattle ranches, downtrodden resorts—that was Clear Lake.

  Like the rain, Clear Lake held memories for me. Somebody had told me long ago, when I was an infant Californian, that the bass fishing at the lake was unbeatable, so my brother and I once made an excursion to it in a 1951 Hudson that he’d just bought. The car was the color of a dill pickle and had enough room inside for the Brady Bunch. The woman who’d sold it to him phoned every month to be certain that it still ran. The Hudson had belonged to her grandfather, and she seemed to feel that his soul had transmigrated to it.

  How California, we thought.

  Later, a robber in the Haight-Ashbury stole the seats from the Hudson, and we would drive it around sitting in armchairs. The slipping and sliding could be entertaining, but that was another story. As for the bass in Clear Lake, we never caught any, hooking instead such slum-dwelling species as carp and catfish.

  The decline of Clear Lake was another chapter in the ongoing saga of California’s fall from its princely place in nature. In the 1920s, the lake gained popularity as a family resort, but overfishing killed off many of the bass. Others were killed by the chemicals that were sprayed to control festering clouds of gnats. The water needed for households left the lake choked with weeds and deteriorating from the effects of a sewage system that was built as an afterthought. By July, Clear Lake was often awash with algae blooms.

  Trailer homes were concentrated in the lakeside towns now, and that was the first thing you noticed—trailers everywhere, some dandy ones and some gross ones, their yards patrolled by an army of ceramic jockeys, gnomes, trolls, and sleepy Mexicans astride their predictable burros.

  Retired people owned many of the trailers. They moved to Clear Lake because the living was cheap and the climate was fairly mild, but the isolation often drove them away. They left the care of their trailers to local realtors, who rented them to tenants on welfare or with substance-abuse problems, or those who were hiding out from a bad marriage, a bounced check, or the law. Bikers also favored the trailers and operated a prosperous methamphetamine trade out of labs in the woods.

  In California, someone was always getting rich, even Hell’s Angels and Satan’s Slaves.

  My cottage at Clearlake Oaks was a masterpiece of its kind, the 1950s preserved. It had knotty-pine walls decorated with framed, paint-by-number canvases of boats, kittens, and flowers. The kitties made you want to reach for your .357 magnum. The refrigerator was a Kelvinator. In the living room, a wicker couch was arranged invitingly next to an endtable scarred with cigarette burns. Two ashtrays appropriated from Harrah’s Casino in Reno were set on it, along with a box of matches.

  Relax, pal, the cottage seemed to say. Take off your shoes and light up a Chesterfield. Do a crossword puzzle, scratch yourself idly, or flip through the evening paper—but the paper only made me more tense. The lead articles were devoted to a teenager who’d been assaulted, illegal sewage spills into the Lakeport water system, and some lawsuits that had been settled on behalf of thirteen diners who’d contracted hepatitis at a Wendy’s.

  The log of the Clear Lake Sheriff’s Department was mere lagniappe.

  7:20 P.M. Lucerne woman reports a subject has been shot and is bleeding badly. Sergeant reports subject is en route to Lakeside Community Hospital.

  7:28 P.M. Lakeport caller on 911 reports a possible suicide attempt using razor blades.

  10:57 P.M. Clearlake 911 caller reports hearing what he thinks are gunshots fired next door.

  11:07 P.M. Lakeport man reports two young abandoned children belonging to a known woman. Children placed with Child Protective Services.

  The cottage. A fishy odor and the sound of water slapping against a dock. I bolted my door and went to bed at nine o’clock.

  CHARLES STONE AND ANDY KELSEY were pioneer ranchers in Lake County. In 1847, they bought some land at the southwestern tip of the lake from General Mariano Vallejo, who controlled many big parcels in northern California and fathered sixteen children to help populate them. Stone and Kelsey hired some Pomo Indians to build them an adobe house and subsequently treated them like slaves.

  The Indians and their families were subjected to sadistic bullying. The men were beaten, whipped, tied up, and hung from trees. The women were raped. The Pomo slaves were often denied any food. About twenty of them starved to death in the winter of 1848.

  There was a tale about a young Indian whose starving mother had sent him to Stone’s house, where her sister worked, to get some wheat. The boy’s aunt gave him five cups wrapped in an apron, but Stone ran down the boy on horseback, took away the wheat, and shot him.

  The Pomo finally rose up in 1849. Five Indians went to the adobe house after the servants had secretly stripped it of weapons. They put an arrow through Stone’s gut and stabbed Kelsey in the heart with a spear.

  A party of soldiers from the federal government was sent to Clear Lake the following year to avenge the murders. The only Indians that they could find lived on some islands far from the site of the massacre, at the other end of the lake. The troops decimated them, anyway, using cannons, bayonets, and whaleboats. About a hundred Pomo died on Bloody Island.

  A few Pomo still lived on a small reservation by the lake. I toured it in the morning. They, too, had trailers, and their yards were piled with the junk that Indians seemed to collect everywhere in the state—old tires, rusty auto parts, batteries in need of juice, stove flues, broken TV sets, and so on.

  When I had first seen such yards up in Smith River and in Hoopa Valley, I had thought the Indians identified with the junk and viewed themselves as outcasts and castoffs. Now I believed that the Indians knew something that we didn’t—something about the white man’s world coming slowly undone—and that they also knew that the demand for, say, a 1952 Kelvinator refrigerator freezer coil might someday be worth its weight in gold.

  The most logical explanation, of course, was poverty. The lives of the poor were miserable, even in California.

  I left the Pomo and Cl
ear Lake and drove over the Mayacamas Mountains to Hopland. The fields along Highway 101 were once planted with hops that were sold to breweries, but the hops were gone now and vineyards had taken over. Hopland was in the throes of a wine-grape craze. It had fancy wineries, trendy shops, and effete bed-and-breakfast inns—California as interpreted by a set designer, precisely the sort of place that Bruce Anderson railed about in his Anderson Valley Advertiser, the most controversial little weekly around.

  BRUCE ANDERSON HAD NOTHING AGAINST GRAPEVINES, but he didn’t like what they stood for. They carried connotations about class and privilege that went against his proletarian grain. Anderson was a throwback to the Old Left. He joined hands across the centuries with such other fly-in-the-ointment California journalists as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce.

  Not for nothing did the Advertiser have a quote from Vladimir Lenin on its front page: “Be as radical as reality.” Lenin’s words were a bookend to a quote from Joseph Pulitzer on the other side of the page. “Newspapers should have no friends,” Pulitzer counseled.

  The AVA was widely read in Mendocino County and in hip enclaves around the state, but it also had subscribers in such far-flung liberal parishes as Greenwich Village, Minneapolis, and Madison, Wisconsin. Its approach to the news was literate, muck-raking, opinionated, and frequently off-the-wall, mixing high-school sports with gossip (“Shirley MacLaine’s Inner Workout videotape, the latest New Age rage, is a hot item locally”) and with slams at timber companies, politicians, and tourism.

  Anderson was not related to the Walter Anderson who’d settled the valley in 1851. He worked out of Boonville, on Highway 128. The town had been a way station for New Age dropouts since the 1960s, when marijuana growers, mid wives, dope casualties, psychics, artists in macramé, genuine organic back-to-the-landers, and others moved in and took the loggers, sheep ranchers, and apple farmers by surprise.