Where I Was From. Joan Didion

serious ambiguities about even the climactic shootout, not the least of which are that the ranchers had never owned the land in dispute, had chosen to misread the lease agreements on the gamble that other growers would band together in such force as to render the papers useless (“Oh, rot!” one of them cries when warned to take a closer look at the leases. “Of course the railroad will sell at two-fifty. We’ve got the contracts”), and had taken up raising wheat on railroad land in the first place only because the railroad was there to transport the wheat. These wheat ranchers in The Octopus are in no sense simple farmers. They are farmers with tickers in their offices, connecting the San Joaquin by wire with San Francisco and Chicago and New York and finally with Liverpool, at that time the nerve center of the wheat market. “Fluctuations in the price of the world’s crop during and after the harvest,” Norris wrote, “thrilled straight to the office of Los Muertos, to that of the Quien Sabe, to Osterman’s, and to Broderson’s [the ranches in the novel]. During a flurry in the Chicago wheat pits in the August of that year, which had affected even the San Francisco market, Harran and Magnus had sat up nearly half of one night watching the strip of white tape jerking unsteadily from the reel.”

      Nor are Magnus Derrick and his son Harran and Osterman and Broderson and Annixter even “farmers” at all, in the conventional sense of the word: they had come to the San Joaquin as an entrepreneurial move, after other ventures (in mining, in politics, in whatever had presented itself) had failed or gone dry, and after, most significantly and most ambiguously, the railroad had opened the San Joaquin to profitable cultivation by offering, for the first time, a way to move its crops to market. The proprietor of Los Muertos, Magnus Derrick, the nearest the novel gets to a tragic hero, is nonetheless characterized by Norris as a high-stakes gambler, a miner at heart, come to the San Joaquin in search of the quick killing that had eluded him in the Comstock Lode:

      It was the true California spirit that found expression through him, the spirit of the West, unwilling to occupy itself with details, refusing to wait, to be patient, to achieve by legitimate plodding; the miner’s instinct of wealth acquired in a single night prevailed, in spite of all. It was in this frame of mind that Magnus and the multitude of other ranchers of whom he was a type, farmed their ranches. They had no love for their land. They were not attached to the soil. They worked their ranches as a quarter of a century before they had worked their mines.… To get all there was out of the land, to squeeze it dry, to exhaust it, seemed their policy. When, at last, the land worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then, they would all have made fortunes. They did not care.

      Norris’s San Joaquin wheat growers, then, were of a type common enough in California: the speculators noted by Charles Nordhoff in 1874, entrepreneurs in search of the shrewd venture, men who might themselves have been running the railroad had they seen the opportunity, held the right cards, been quicker players. Confronted with the demands of the railroad (which was pressing not only to evict the ranchers but to raise freight rates) and its bought members of the Railroad Commission, the first response of the ranchers in The Octopus is to buy a commissioner of their own. Even in this venture not quick enough players, they buy the wrong man: Magnus Derrick’s politically ambitious older son, who sells out to the railroad. That the only actual conflict in The Octopus turns out to be between successful and failed members of the same entrepreneurial class (members in some cases of the same families) creates a deep and troubled confusion in the novel, a dissonance its author grasped but failed to resolve. This dissonance, which had to do with the slippage between the way Californians perceived themselves and the way they were, between what they believed to be their unlimited possibilities and the limitations implicit in their own character and history, might have been Norris’s great subject, but he died, at thirty-two, of peritonitis, before he could work it through. The confusions here have not been mine alone.

      In the 1860s … William Henry Brewer [the chief assistant to Josiah Dwight Whitney in his 1860–64 geological survey of California] … described the southwestern San Joaquin Valley as a “plain of absolute desolation.” At the turn-of-the-century, the crusading novelist Frank Norris pictured the valley as “bone dry, parched, and baked and crisped” where the “day seemed always at noon.” But, a century after Brewer’s report, and less than half a century after Norris’s observations, it became clear that by just adding water, this vale of sterility would bloom as the nation’s garden.

      Just by adding water. The above appears on the United States Bureau of Reclamation’s web site, on the page prepared by the Bureau’s History Program to deal with the Central Valley Project’s San Luis Unit, West San Joaquin Division. We bad an irrigation problem, so we built the greatest dams the world has known, was my equally can-do approach to the subject in “Our California Heritage.” This, according to the same Bureau of Reclamation web page, is what it takes to “just add water” to the San Joaquin:

      Melting snow and runoff high in the mountains of Northern California are the first steps of a trek through the heart of the state. Once in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, water is released from storage and lifted 197 feet by the Tracy Pumping Plant. The flow is then conveyed about 70 miles south to the O’Neill Forebay via the California Aqueduct (a State Water Project, or SWP, feature) and the Federal Delta-Mendota Canal. Delta-Mendota carries water southeasterly from the Tracy Pumping Plant, eventually arriving at the O’Neill Pumping-Generating Plant. Running parallel to the Delta-Mendota Canal, the Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct travels directly into the O’Neill Forebay. The O’Neill Dam, Pumping-Generating Plant and Forebay are all a half mile from the San Luis Dam and Reservoir. Units of the William R. Gianelli Pumping-Generating Plant (formerly known as the San Luis Pumping-Generating Plant) raises water from O’Neill Forebay into San Luis Reservoir. Releases from San Luis Reservoir are directed into the 101.3-mile-long San Luis Canal. Seventeen miles south of San Luis Reservoir, the Dos Amigos Pumping Station lifts the water again, so the flow can continue another 85 miles across central California. Journey’s end for the San Luis Canal is the Federal terminus at Kettleman City. At Kettleman City, the SWP’s California Aqueduct carries on to service farms, recreational users and municipalities as far south as Los Angeles. When drought strikes California, and Delta flows cannot supply State and Federal water projects, water is released back into the O’Neill Forebay, coursing southward through the California Aqueduct. During irrigation season, water is released from the reservoir back through the pump-generator units of Gianelli to the O’Neill Forebay, generating electric power. Protecting the canal from streams crossing its path are the Los Banos and Little Panoche Detention Dams and Reservoirs. Other Unit features include the San Luis Drain, Pleasant Valley Pumping Plant, and the Coalinga Canal. The operation of the San Luis Unit is a fairly simple procedure for those brief periods when man and nature are in harmony, but both seldom have been in synchronization.

       Just by adding water.

       This vale of sterility would bloom as the nation’s garden.

       A fairly simple procedure for those brief periods when man and nature are in harmony.

      The San Luis Dam, at the time it was completed in 1968, cost three billion dollars. What this taxpayer-financed investment meant to the San Joaquin’s West-lands Water District was that several hundred growers, most of them corporate, would have the assurance of water, ditches, big automated Rain Birds moving all day with the sun. These growers would also have the assurance of “irrigation subsidies,” which by 1987, according to Gerald Haslam’s The Great Central Valley, amounted to twenty-seven million dollars, eleven million of which went to the Southern Pacific Land Company. “You can’t buck the railroad” was a common phrase in my childhood, but I never ventured into its local application.

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      HOLLISTER, the San Benito County town near which Frank Norris spent the summer of 1899 researching The Octopus, was named for, and built on land at that time only recently owned by, an emigrant from Ohio named William Welles Hollister. In 1852, William Welles Hollister had driven some three hundred head of cattle from Ohio to California, sold them, and returned home. In 1853, he again made the crossing,