Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  He paused to glance at Jim. This routine had been playing for a long time. “Jeanne’s next in line. She’s married and lives with an oil driller in Bakersfield. Shirley’s in Texas, where her husband—he’s Jim’s wife’s brother—leases geothermal rights for a Kuwaiti company. Carolyn lives around here and runs the farm office. She does our accounting. Claudette’s the baby. She lives in Bakersfield, too. Our mom is in Wasco. She and Art are divorced.”

  Things had changed among farmers since the days of “Little House on the Prairie,” I thought. I couldn’t imagine Michael Landon getting a divorce, even if his crops failed and his wife put on eighty pounds and began savaging the dog.

  “Hey, would you like some garlic to take with you?” Jim asked, so I said good-bye to Dick Bassett and got into Jim’s truck, which was outfitted with a lot of high-tech gear—a thermometer for tracking soil temperatures, a company radio, a calculator, and a cellular telephone.

  We drove by an alfalfa field and stopped at a field where de-hydrator onions were being grown as a contract crop. They were a hybrid and had much less water in them than normal onions did. Spice manufacturers bought dehydrators to use in onion salt and flakes, chipping and shredding them.

  Jim grabbed an onion stalk and jerked it up. He brushed off the dirt, peeled away the crinkly outer skin, cut the onion into rough halves with a jackknife, and sliced a thin piece for me to sample.

  “That’ll put a heat on your tongue,” he warned with a smile, and it did—a raw, dense, superoniony taste as sharp as a chile pepper.

  Across from the onions were sugar beets, their cabbagey leaves wilted and yellowing. Jim repeated the tasting procedure, serving me a beet sliver on the tip of his knife.

  “It’ll be sweet, then bitter,” he cautioned me again, proceeding to a garlic field and bending to harvest several bulbs. Fresh out of the ground, the bulbs had an odd look of surprise, as though they’d been disturbed at sleep. You could smell them fifty feet away.

  Jim handed over the garlic. He told me to cure it for a couple of weeks in the basement of my house. He knew San Francisco a little from his trips there to lobby for lower water rates before the Public Utility Commission. The city was nice, he said, but he was always happy to get back to Wasco. The farm, his family, some dirt beneath his fingernails—that was California to Jim Crettol.

  THE CRETTOLS HAD ABOUT TEN STEADY HANDS, and Sam Cravens was among the most valued. He’d been with the family since 1952. He was a product of the Dust Bowl. An uncle of his had blown into Arvin during the 1930s, and when Cravens turned sixteen he had migrated to his uncle’s place and had picked squash for six months before deciding to retrace his steps. It wasn’t the hard work that had put him off. It was the girls.

  “Damn California girls just didn’t suit me,” he explained to me one afternoon, while I was hanging around the machine shop. “So I had to go on home and get me an Oklahoma one.”

  Cravens returned with his bride, settled in Wasco, and worked for several farmers in the area before hiring on with Art Crettol. He was an expert at holding a grudge, and he liked to point to the other outfits where he’d been and say, “I used to work for that son-of-a-bitch over there, and the son-of-a-bitch next to him, and the son-of-a-bitch over yonder.…

  Sam Cravens did look like a farmer. What hair he had he kept hidden beneath a tractor cap. He wore overalls and workboots and blew his nose in a bandanna. He served the Crettol boys as a general factotum and would-be majordomo. They had known him since they were little kids and sometimes deferred to him even when they thought he was wrong, out of respect and because of his temper.

  Although Cravens couldn’t read or write with any proficiency, he had learned to sign his name over the years and was proud of the fact. His lack of a formal education had not affected his command of cuss words, though. He swore with brilliance and ingenuity. I listened in awe one day as he spent half an hour berating the Texas rod weeders attached to his cultivator. Made of spring steel, the rods were gentle enough to brush against mature cotton plants and yet tough enough to tear up the weeds between rows.

  Cravens fiddled and fiddled with the rods, studying them from various angles, but they still refused to adjust to the proper height. He stomped around, kicked at the dust, and stooped a last time for a microscopic inspection of the problem, which continued to resist all solutions. Then he rose to his feet and let those goldarn, son-of-a-bitching, good-for-nothing Texas rod weeders have it.

  You could usually find a few other people hanging around the machine shop with Cravens when there wasn’t much else to do—Jim and Louie and often Tommy Dunlap, a big man who handled the welding chores and cared for the various motors and engines, his T-shirts oil-spotted and seldom quite reaching to his jeans. Tommy’s brother, Jimmy, liked to hang around, too, and he was just as big and showed more flesh between the garments meant to clothe him. The Dunlaps had been with the Crettols for more than thirty years.

  Then there was Preston McCurdy, a lanky, red-skinned fellow who did odd jobs and tended to some irrigation. He kept to the fringe while I was at the shop and seemed bashful and quiet. He spoke so seldom that I couldn’t understand exactly what he was up to, so I asked Louie about it once.

  Louie shouted over the roar of Tommy Dunlap fixing something, “Hey, Preston! What is it you do for us?”

  “Little as possible,” was Preston’s droll reply.

  One morning, Randy Priest stopped by the shop. He had the solid build of a bronc rider, somebody you’d mess with only if your life depended on it. Randy was younger than the others, a valley bon vivant. He had a neat beard and lustrous cowboy boots. He worked as a salesman for Pioneer Equipment, but he was new to the job and seemed exasperated by its demands.

  “Where’s your territory?” I asked him.

  “Oh, hell!” he exclaimed, as though he were overwhelmed by the notion of such scale. “It’s every damn where. Yesterday, I was in Pixley. Today, I had to go all the way down to Buttonwillow.”

  Priest and some of his pals were about to go across the border for a two-week vacation. They’d rented a motor home and had chipped in a hundred dollars apiece to stock it to the gills with Tecate beer.

  “That’s the Budweiser of Mexico,” he informed us.

  “You heard any good jokes lately, Randy?” Louie asked.

  Priest looked sheepish and pawed at the ground with a boot. “Well, I have, but I don’t think I ought to tell them while B.J.’s around.”

  B.J. was Jim’s boy, Brian. He had just finished seventh grade in Wasco and hadn’t figured out what to do with his summer yet, so he came to the machine shop to hang around, too. He was a wholesome, bright-eyed kid who ached to be more grown up and able to take a bigger bite out of the world.

  Louie and Jim had four children between them, two each, but B.J. was the only male. He was aware of certain pressures, however indirect. He would inherit a farm someday, and a son’s place at the center of it, but did he have farming in his blood? He didn’t know. He couldn’t even test things by riding around on a tractor as his father and his uncle had done in their youth, because of safety issues and liability insurance. California farmers were drowning in paperwork and government regulations, Jim complained to me once.

  B.J. was a bit car-crazy. Cars were potent symbols for him of everywhere he wanted to go. His father used to own and drive a pair of speedballs, but they were stored in the machine shop now. One was a yellow 1970 Mustang Mach 1 made for burning up the roads. B.J. showed it to me one day, lifting aside a tarp as if to reveal a treasure.

  “All right!” he said, whistling in admiration. “It’s sooo bad.”

  The doors of the Mustang opened onto a scene of devastation. The bucket seats were eaten through and covered with mouse turds. There was a stink of rot and decay.

  “Phew, rat piss!” B.J. fanned a hand in front of his nose as he slid into the driver’s seat. “This would still be a pretty good first car, though, wouldn’t it?”

  The other car was a
dragster that Jim and Louie had built from scrap. They had called themselves the Alpine Okies, playing on their Swiss ancestry, and had competed at drag races in Bakersfield and Hemet and at the sand drags in Salt Lake City, at tracks all across the West.

  The dragster rested in neglect on a catwalk under the eaves of the shop. Again, B.J. had to lift away a tarp and broach a swirl of dust and odors. He touched a finger to the script, Alpine Okies, stenciled on a door.

  “Well?” he asked eagerly, traveling in his mind at great speeds. “What do you think?”

  THE UNITED FARM WORKERS OF AMERICA were in their sixth year of a boycott against nonunion table grapes, so I decided to go to Delano, where the UFW had an office, for a look around. When Jim Crettol heard about this, he phoned a farmer friend there and arranged for me to attend a special banquet that was held twice a month at the Slavonian Hall.

  “You’re a Yugoslav, you’ll enjoy it,” Jim said, patting me on the back.

  I appreciated the gesture, but my feelings about the banquet were mixed because Yugoslav grape growers in Delano and elsewhere in the San Joaquin had been the archenemies of Cesar Chavez, the UFW’s president during the great farm-labor strikes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the Armenians had done in Fresno, the Slavs had pooled their capital to buy land cheaply in the valley, often for as little as $125 an acre, starting right after the Depression. They were industrious and ambitous, plowing their money back into the ground and creating an iron-fisted fiefdom.

  Delano was about fifteen miles north of Wasco on the Southern Pacific line. It had vineyards on its east side and cotton fields on the west.

  The streets in town were crowded with retired farmworkers going about their daily chores. Some of them walked with the help of canes, while others had a peculiar, stiff-legged gait that came from eons of bending over crops. Their skin looked burnished and leathery. In their ranks, I could see each successive wave of immigrant labor that had washed over California to tend the farms.

  A young Hispanic woman at the Delano Chamber of Commerce was puzzled when I inquired about the UFW and its office, asking after Cesar Chavez, who was still alive then, and his associate, Dolores Huerta.

  “Cesar? Cesar?” she wondered aloud, trying to place him.

  Had so much time gone by? I spoke of the grape boycott next, and that seemed to stir her. From a phonebook, she pulled an address for the UFW on Garces Highway and also gave me a statistical abstract of Delano that had been printed for visitors. There was a handwritten addendum on the last page: “250 new homes,” it said. “More being constructed, 2 large shopping centers.”

  I drove out on Garces Highway through vineyard land, where the earth was again caked and powdery and created a misleading impression of being inimical to growing things. The grapes dozed on the vines. They were becoming sweeter and fleshier and taking on a hint of color now that August was almost here. Soon they would weigh heavily on the trellises and droop in ripening bunches in the heavy air of the San Joaquin, that familiar moil of dust and chemical fumes.

  Pesticides and their application, their impact on the health of farmworkers—those were major issues in the current UFW boycott. Cesar Chavez contended that workers and their families were regularly exposed to herbicides and fungicides without adequate supervision or advice about how to handle them. The union claimed to have found a cancer cluster among children in Earlimart, between Delano and Pixley. There were five afflicted boys and girls under the age of fifteen.

  A specialist in occupational medicine had been hired by the UFW to examine the evidence. Afterward, she told reporters, “These people live in a soup of chemicals. It’s in the air, it’s in the soil, it’s in the water. It’s everywhere.”

  The parents of the children, all Hispanic, did not speak. They had no English.

  Grape growers in the valley felt that they were being unfairly singled out. They were no better or worse than other farmers, they said. The California Table Grape Commission, a trade group, was threatening to sue the UFW over what it believed to be false statements about the safety of eating grapes treated with pesticides. They accused Chavez of fomenting the boycott to prop up a union whose influence had dwindled.

  As an outsider, I found it impossible to untangle the arguments, but I knew for sure that the price for wanton use of agricultural chemicals in California had yet to be extracted. The poisoned wells in Fresno, the tainted wells in Shafter, the wildlife refuge at Kesterson swimming in selenium, the deformed embryos of birds, and the teratogenic effect all through the chain of life—we were only beginning to admit to the damage. On farms, toxins were clinging to each bud and leaf.

  The UFW office on Garces Highway was across from a Voice of America transmitter that broadcast propaganda to the assumedly benighted of other countries. I realized that I was at Cuarenta Acres, a forty-acre plot that had once been crucial to the union’s mythology. Chavez had talked of his dreams for it—a cooperative farm for cattle and vegetables, inexpensive housing for seniors—but Cuarenta Acres had not flowered. There were weeds, beer cans, bottles, and pariah dogs.

  Inside the office, the receptionist smiled brightly and said, “Cesar and Dolores are at our headquarters in Keene, out Tehachapi way.” She gave me the phone number.

  I saw a single-story building that looked like an abandoned motel. It turned out to be Agbayani Retirement Community, another broken dream from more hopeful days.

  At the time of the first big grape boycott, Filipino activists had demanded a concession from the UFW. They wanted Agbayani as a pilot project, one that could be duplicated elsewhere to accommodate the rapidly aging Filipino workers in the San Joaquin, maybe as many as thirty thousand unmarried men over sixty whose adult lives had been spent in the fields.

  The Agbayani project had never been properly funded, though, and now there was just this one sorry, tile-roofed building, where a handful of old men were sitting out front. They were sitting very still and didn’t speak to each other or to visitors. I tried to talk to one of them, but he didn’t respond, and I looked more closely and saw that he was blind.

  The men lacked energy. They were old and tired and sick. They had done their laundry somewhere that morning and had draped their worn cotton shirts and their threadbare jeans over some bushes to dry.

  THE HISTORY OF FARM LABOR in California was a history of abuse. The Chinese were the first to suffer. When the Exclusions Acts of 1882, 1892, and 1902 banned immigration from China, their numbers were reduced significantly, and the Japanese, who had been forbidden by law from leaving their country until 1866, took their place, working for even less money, raising their own crops in the poorest soil, and demonstrating an acumen for business. They were despised for all those qualities.

  The United States government rewarded them with a fate similar to the Chinese by forging a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with Japan in 1907 to prevent such workers from entering the country. The Alien Land Law of 1913 barred the Japanese from owning any real estate, including farms, although they were sometimes able to circumvent the law. Antagonism against them peaked after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and they were rounded up and incarcerated in “relocation centers” for the duration of World War II.

  The Filipinos followed the Japanese. They were primarily young men from Hawaii, single and indentured, who were sent to the state en masse in the 1920s to harvest grapes, lettuce, and asparagus. They were belittled and called homosexuals because of the absence of women among them. Their willingness to work for rock-bottom wages caused them to be vilified in the same way as their predecessors. Attacks on them were common. They were set upon and randomly beaten in Exeter, Salinas, and Watsonville, often by unemployed white laborers. In 1935, state legislators passed a bill guaranteeing any Filipino a free trip home if he promised not to return. Many Filipino workers took advantage of the deal.

  Mexicans by the thousands filled their slots. They began sneaking across the border after the Mexican Revolution uprooted them. They had no legal standing, so they
had no recourse or defense when farmers exploited them.

  Okies and Arkies rode in on the last wave of farm labor, men and women already so bedraggled and sucked dry that they got the shabbiest treatment of all and rarely had the strength to protest.

  Other migrants came in smaller numbers—some Europeans, some Sikhs, some Armenians, and a few blacks from the South to pick cotton. They endured lives of great difficulty, as John Steinbeck, a native of Salinas, would document in his newspaper articles. In one report, Steinbeck described what a migrant could expect at a camp in the San Joaquin:

  The houses, one-room shacks usually about 10 by 12 feet, have no rug, no water, no bed. In one corner there is a little iron wood stove. Water must be carried from a faucet at the end of the street. Also at the head of the street there will be either a dug toilet or a toilet with a septic tank to serve 100 to 150 people. A fairly typical ranch in Kern County had one bathhouse with a single shower and no heated water for the use of the whole block of houses, which had a capacity of 400 people.…

  The attitude of the employer on the large ranch is one of hatred and suspicion, his method is the threat of deputies’ guns. The workers are herded about like animals. Every possible method is used to make them feel inferior and insecure. At the slightest suspicion that the men are organizing they are run from the ranch at points of guns. The large ranch owners know that if organization is ever effected [sic] there will be the expense of toilets, showers, decent living conditions and a raise in wages.

  Union organizers had been soliciting farmworkers for some time. The Wobblies (a nickname for Industrial Workers of the World) were active in Fresno as early as 1910. Their main organizer, Frank Little, whose life would end in Montana when vigilantes hung him from a bridge, held meetings on streetcorners to promote free speech. The tactic was designed to enhance the self-image of uneducated laborers and to teach them that they really could have a voice in things.