Joan Didion - Where I Was From

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 consecutive 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.”

Hanson lives on the family farm, but no longer actually farms it. “When we all went to the universities, when we abandoned what made us good and embraced what made us comfortable and secure, we lost something essential, knew we lost it and yet chose to lose,” he writes. “Material bounty and freedom are so much stronger incentives than sacrifice and character.” What was lost by the “we” of this passage, and in Hansons view by America itself, was the pure hardship of the agrarian life, the yeoman ideal that constituted the country’s “last link with the founding fathers of our political and spiritual past,” its last line of defense against “market capitalism and entitlement democracy, the final stage of Western culture that is beyond good and evil.”

This gets tricky. Notice the way in which the author implicitly frames his indictment of himself and his family for turning away from the pure agrarian life as an indictment of the rest of us, for failing to support that life. Notice, too, that the “destruction” of the San Joaquin Valley, as he sees it, began at the point when the small family farms on the east side of the Valley (the arid west side of the Valley, the part described by William Henry Brewer in the 1860s as a “plain of absolute desolation,” belonged to the corporate growers) began giving way first to industrial parks and subdivisions and then to strip malls and meth labs. “Its Golden Age was therefore brief, no more than the beautiful century between 1870 and 1970, when gravity-fed irrigation in hand-dug ditches from the Sierra first turned a weed-infested desert into an oasis of small tree and vine farms and their quiet satellite communities.”

This “Golden Age,” in other words, began with the arrival of Hansons own family, and ended with his own adolescence. “Times have changed,” as the similarly focused Saxon Brown complained to Billy Roberts in The Valley of the Moon. “They’ve changed even since I was a little girl.” There is a further possible mirage here: the San Joaquin Valley’s “beautiful century” could have seemed, to those who were actually living it, perhaps not entirely golden: “Here, in this corner of a great nation, here, on the edge of the continent, here, in this valley of the West, far from the great centers, isolated, remote, lost, the great iron hand crushes life from us, crushes liberty and the pursuit of happiness from us…. Tell them, five years from now, the story of the fight between the League of the San Joaquin and the railroad and it will not be believed.” That was Frank Norris, writing in The Octopus , on the slaughter that took place in 1880 at Mussel Slough, now Lucerne, now and then just fifteen miles from Selma, the site of the farmhouse in which six generations of Victor Davis Hanson’s family have lived.