California Heartland: Voices from the Great Central Valley

G E R A L D H A S L A M California State University, Sonoma California Heartland: Voices from the Great Central Valley The Great Central Valley, a massive slash in the core of California, is over 400 miles long and 50-to-60 miles wide. It is a state within a state, or perhaps the heart of a misunderstood state, California’s Heart­ land. Because this state’s boundaries loom so clearly on a map, and because it is known by a single name, there is a tendency to think of California as a homogeneous unit. It is actually heterogeneous, a collec­ tion of varied people in disparate regions. Its heart, the Great Central Valley, shares much with the quintessential American West, as much in fact as it does with most other parts of California, for it is arid land in the rain shadows of mountains; in 1861, William Henry Brewer described the valley in part as he found it before rivers were damned and water distributed, calling it “a plain of absolute desolation.” In fact, the valley was far from totally desolate in those days. It had developed, in still another essential western pattern, what Walter Prescott Webb called an “oasis civilization,” settlements clustering around water. Reaching Fresno, Brewer found it “surrounded by swamps, now covered by rushes, the green of which was cheering to the eye after the desolation through which we had passed.” These observations symbolically illustrate that the Great Central Valley is more nearly an extension of the classic West than some culturally 202 Western American Literature poor cousin of the incongruent metropolises to the north and south. As Lawrence Clark Powell has observed, “. . . the central valley is pure Californian, ever powerful in its effects on life and literature.” Writing from the heartland is best understood in relation to Western American letters, because it closely reflects the themes and patterns that have emerged from western experiences — especially reverence for and reliance upon the land — though the valley has, of course, developed its own unique culture within more general patterns, its own rhythm, its own texture. Deep passion seems to stalk this place, passion of the soil, of the blood. On the valley’s vast plain feelings intensify and action is not scarce. Called the Sacramento Valley to the north, the San Joaquin Valley to the south, it is one long continuous prairie — much developed for agriculture today — veined by rivers and enclosed on all sides by moun­ tains. Within the valley three sub-regions exist. Near its center, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has produced a river port culture, while to the south and southwest near Bakersfield, Taft and Coalinga, oil fields have led to styles of life not unlike those found in parts of Texas and Oklahoma. Still, it is the agricultural prairie — a mini-Great Plains — that dominates. Writers blooded in the valley, no matter where they now dwell, have often been so shaped by their native place that they do not always distinguish personal traumas and tragedies, personal limitations, from those of the region. Writes Bakersfield’s Frank Bidart, now an award-winning poet living on the east coast: The brown house on the brown hill reminds me of my parents. Its memory is of poverty, not merely poverty of means, but poverty of history, of awareness of the ways men have found to live. How have people lived in the valley? How have writers recreated those lives? On the land, with it, mingling their dreams with tule fog, with searing sunlight, with the clear promise of Sierras looming always to their east. Richard Dokey, short story writer from Lodi, captures it: Gerald Haslam 203 . . . Forking hay in the stalls or washing the bam floor, the smell of dung, dust and dry wood as familiar as his own breath around him, he dreamed of the distant Sierra Nevada . . . He dreamed of travelling to places and meeting people and with these people he was alive, they drew close to him and wanted him close, and he dreamed of women. He loved them, took them, was swallowed by them, satisfied them and most of all gave them themselves because of his aliveness. Aliveness...