Long Road to California Read online

  Chapter 14

  Nina’s Last Shots

  I’m driving at the pick up’s top speed, almost 75, along a seemingly endless stretch of Highway 40. Cars, even the occasional giant truck, pass as if we’re barely moving. The sun is still high above the horizon, though it’s afternoon and it feels like we’ve been on this road for days instead of hours. But good that the sun’s not lower – there would be nothing to shade it as we head west through the bright empty desert past the Granite mountains.

  Ahead, if you could call it a destination, is Barstow. A place to stop for gas anyway, maybe to switch drivers. Caleb is slouched toward the window in his seat, dark glasses covering his eyes. Dozing off, from the looks of it. He’d been trying to find something interesting on the radio and given up. We’re tired of our music that’s all been played multiple times. Tired of the road.

  I twist my head around, stretching out my neck. Reach for some lukewarm water, needing to stay hydrated, stay alert. Last thing we need is to get squished by a double rig truck this far along. There’s a sign for the town of Hinkley, famous for Erin Brockovich, its polluted environs. We had talked about stopping there just to take a look, but now that seems stupid. I’d rather push on to get somewhere nicer.

  Really, the place I would most like to be right now is at home. Nothing like weeks away to make you feel like Dorothy longing for Kansas. Only I’m longing for anything but – just a quiet night in Northern California. Some fog, some simple local food, and yes I’ll admit it, time alone surrounded by my stuff. Caleb and I haven’t driven each other completely nuts yet, and I guess that’s something. But we’re close to fully tuning each other out, I’m pretty sure. I’m focussed on my shots, he on whatever ball games he can wrap his head around. I don’t know that we’ve said it quite out loud, but I’ve been promising myself in a hundred ways to appreciate our dull normal life once we finally make our way back there.

  We’re aiming for Tehachapi tonight. I’ve never been there, but Caleb has pleasant memories of the place, and it’s halfway up a mountain at least. Out of this hostile climate. God, I can see how disheartening this would have been for Grandma Vera and her people. I mean, now that we’ve seen the old road out of Oatman, the famous “bloody 66,” I feel like I get it a little better. They could have died out there. They blew a tire on a steep and narrow road known for its brutal wrecks.

  But they survived it just fine, nothing more than a couple bruises and a dented fender. Visiting those places was a let down, honestly. The road unpleasant, and with no good place to stop. And we had no idea where they actually camped out, where Vera first set eyes on the Smith brothers. I took some pictures of a pretty but vacant river valley; hard to imagine it teeming with refugees. Anyway, they got the cars fixed up, got themselves all washed and everything to make a good impression at the check station – and then ended up here, a desert road as desolate as anything they’d already crossed.

  It’s a long, long stretch going 75, air conditioned, well fed, in the light of day. Hard to imagine bouncing along here in those old cars, driving nights to avoid the heat. The kids expecting fruit trees and seeing nothing but distant cactus. The adults, probably talking in hushed voices, worrying about running out of food, finding work. Driving on their last spare tire, no money for a replacement, barely enough to fill the tank. Faced with even having to pay for water. And instead of looking forward to their small but comfortable home, as I am, they had no set destination, they were living out of their cars.

  There were two comments I remember from Vera’s notes at this point in her collection: everyone was worried about running out of water, and that they were called “Okies” by the border agents. Her father and Uncle Stan had carefully explained, I imagine, that they were from Kansas. That mattered not a whit, according to Vera’s neat cursive note on the back of a photo of the younger children posed by a large dried out cactus plant. It seemed that anyone from anywhere coming into California was designated an Okie. And it didn’t sound so bad at first, though later, of course, they all understood it to be a derogatory term.

  Caleb bestirs himself when we finally make it to Barstow, raising his head to take in the bleak surroundings of the gas stations, mini-marts and fast food joints of the first exit. “I don’t think it gets better,” I tell him, and he nods, accepts the cheapest gas station of the quartet right on hand.

  Gas, bathroom break, and we decide to treat ourselves to ice cream bars – even those look like they’ve been sitting around past their prime. We restock the cooler with ice, and Caleb gets an iced coffee too, promising he’s fully awake to drive the next 90 or so miles out of the desert and up into the mountains. Then no driving for at least a couple days, we agree, enough time to get the kinks out. I’ll look for the place they stopped and took one last picture of their poor beat up cars with the vast Mohave below and behind them. We’ll find Caleb’s childhood swimming hole, or something like it. Cast off the grime of our own road.

  Starting out a couple days later, we are at least somewhat refreshed. Days with no driving, lounging by a pretty pond, out of the desert heat and resting up where a sweater feels okay in the evening’s shade – all good. Caleb and I caught up on local news, managed a couple conversations not about highway signs or baseball games. The talking heads keep saying the recession is easing. We’ll see.

  We get moving early, just after the sun gets past that point of lovely morning light. Very pretty landscapes up here, as well as back where we drove up. I got some amazing sunrise shots looking to the east from the summit, easily the best from the whole trip. The one with the two of us, posed by the truck with the desert behind us, offers a fine parallel to the original. Uncle Stan’s shot captured what seems to me the essence of their whole journey – they look hot, dried out, tired, but also full of hope. Something about the way they’re all standing, Vera and her brothers and even the little kids, you can just feel their optimism. There, away from the dust storms, on the other side of the biggest desert crossing of the whole trip, in one shot they’re waving goodbye and in the next, grinning, arms outstretched, looking ahead for what comes next.

  And I guess Caleb and I can offer both a contrast and a matching shot. Contrast, because our crossing was so relatively easy. The food we’ve run out of is fresh coffee, or artisan cuisine, nothing more. The truck hums along just fine – whatever Caleb fixed back in Arizona has held. But at the same time, I, and I imagine Caleb too, have a sense of moving past the worst of our bad years. We’re more optimistic about our return, I am anyway. I have to be.

  I’m proud of the photos; I think they’re among the best I’ve taken in years. I’m looking forward to putting them all together, to finishing up this project. To have done it, even if nobody outside the family spends the time to see the whole thing. That’s the reality, I know that. As Vera herself has said, the magic is in the journey more than in its end.

  It’s a straight shot down to Bakersfield and then up toward Visalia. We have a few more sites to locate. Caleb has no interest in visiting his early hometown; it’s only the coincidence that Vera’s family worked on farms in the area that he’s okay with taking Highway 99 north instead of the interstate. At least he’s come around to the Monterey detour, even been scouting out the best route there and found a free campground for us to use as a base in the area. I’m not sure what changed his mind, maybe the thought of me searching out his pre-school or something. He doesn’t even want to stop in Visalia, just make the turn and get out as fast as his mom must have back after her divorce.

  Caleb puts on an oldies station and we hum along, goofy and unselfconscious. He snacks on trail mix though we barely finished breakfast – he just likes something to do, I think. He’s partly tossing nuts in the air, missing as often as catching them. I’m trying to recall and forgetting the mileage to our next stopping place. They’re all blurring to me. We’ll need to stop, we should switch drivers and I can ch
eck my notes.

  We’re moving pretty fast but languid, all downhill. The pretty mountain scenery is soon left behind, the flat oil rigs and giant billboards heralding fast food and cheap motels of Bakersfield ahead. I ease over to the slow lane, and the amount of traffic is startling. Bakersfield outskirts seem a booming metropolis compared to where we’ve been, and the local drivers pushy and rude.

  After a gas stop, we head away as fast as we can, and shortly the worst of the traffic is behind us. Caleb grouses about what’s left though, and the frequent exits and entrances on 99. I try to get him talking about baseball, the ups and downs of last night’s game. Anything to pass the long slow miles.

  Out the window I can see the flatness of farmland, but not what they’re growing. We need to leave the highway. Vera tends not to say much about their first months around here in California, just that the work was hard when they had it, but worse when they didn’t. Uncle Stan’s pictures end here too. The rest of her collection is articles, clippings, and then later photos from when the families were more settled farther north, gatherings for birthdays and that sort of thing.

  Still, she had a specific flyer about a farm near the town of Poplar, and I’d like to at least have a look. If Caleb hasn’t stuffed himself maybe we can find a little café, pick up lunch.

  Miles pass, and then more miles. Even just sitting here is making me hungry – maybe it’s all the billboards for crappy food. I try to imagine being in an old slow car, the mild gnawing of hunger but no assurance of a decent meal ahead. Or being the parents, hungry kids in the back. Every look out the window would be about food or work, wondering, worrying about what lay ahead. Daunting indeed.

  Caleb says he doesn’t remember the area at all, but finds the turn off before I can point it out. Off the highway and down a two lane road, it at least feels like someplace they might have headed toward. I watch an old style tractor puttering up a dirt road we pass, dust in its wake, but we’re past it before I can raise a camera. The farmland is lush and green, though I can’t tell just what’s growing.

  Another mile in, and I can see almonds, neat rows of them extending out endlessly in either direction. Then some kind of berry maybe? Growth low to the ground. We pass a rickety little stand.

  “They’ll sell you stuff on the weekend, probably,” Caleb says. “Later in the season.”

  I can’t even think what day it is, Tuesday maybe? “The flyer said cotton field and to register in Poplar,” I tell him. “Do you know it?”

  He shrugs. “It’s not much of a town, just a couple roads crossing. We’ll be coming up to it in a couple miles. Want to get a shot here?”

  “Let’s see what’s there.” I don’t know, this looks too gentle somehow. Mild green sprouts and a distant curved irrigation thingee, that’s not what I imagined here. I know it there won’t be a Steinbeck-esque evil boss and bone thin stooped laborers toiling over low cotton fields anymore. But there’s nothing much at all.

  Shortly a small row of houses appears on either side of the street. Caleb slows almost to a crawl and I crane out the window. The places are modest, somewhat ramshackle, and no one’s around. We pass one small intersection, then another.

  “There’s a restaurant,” Caleb says, pointing to our left. “Looks like it’s the only one. Mexican – probably okay. I could eat some tacos.”

  I nod okay. Maybe I’ll get more of a sense of the place walking around.

  We pull in. It’s after one already, and no worries about it being crowded. An elderly couple sit at an outside table, plates empty but a few chips between them keeping them occupied.

  I gather my camera, step outside and do a couple full stretches. Caleb flexes too, and tests his knee.

  “Don’t worry, the food is right good,” the old man calls out to us. “You two and us may be the only white people in town, but don’t you mind. It’s all Mexicans now. But they‘ll go easy on you. They know to hold that hot salsa when they see me and my sister here coming.”

  I am, as usual, fully silenced by such outward racial or ethnic commentary, and I turn awkwardly toward the menu posted at the door. They are both white, which I guess I hardly took in, seeing as my immediate way of classifying them was simply as old. Guess I’ve got my issues too.

  “Thanks, we’ll keep that in mind,” Caleb says mildly.

  The woman, the sister, says nothing but watches us with interest, legs stretched comfortably out from her chair. She is wrinkled, looks almost as old as Grandma Vera, but probably isn’t – more likely she has just been outside a lot. Vera, up until her early 80s, was freely mobile like that, could come and go as she pleased. Keep that in mind when you’re counting your own blessings, I remind myself.

  The place is small inside. It smells great, and we order soft tacos. There are tables, but it’s kind of warm, with just a corner fan to stir the air around. “Might be nicer outside,” Caleb says. “And that dude probably has some stories.”

  He’s right. I suppose they’ve both seen a lot of changes, and he obviously feels free to comment on them. We nod to the woman at the counter and go back out to the other front table. She brings out a bowl of fresh chips and salsa that’s only mildly hot. Very tasty. The old man and woman are still seated, shaded under the awning and observing us in a friendly way.

  “So you’ve lived around here for awhile?” Caleb asks.

  “Longer than you two have been on this world, I’d say. Not as long as Sis here, though.” The man cackles toward his sister. She regards him coolly, and I can see this is not a fresh observation. “Porterville is home, just down the road a pace.”

  By rote, I explain our mission. And that we knew the family spent a couple months somewhere around here, picking cotton. After some extended calculations on the man’s behalf, he establishes that they are too young to have in fact known Grandma Vera, assuming she was here in 1938. He was two years old at that point, and his sister six.

  “But lord yes, they grew cotton here. This little town is Poplar-Cotton, isn’t it. Our folks came same as yours did, I’d say, to work the fields, just made it here a few years earlier. Got a head start, that’s what they used to say. We was lucky, weren’t we, that our folks had established a home for us?”

  The sister nods firmly. “It’s all been bought up long since though,” she says. “You won’t find the sorts of small places they had back then now. Not much cotton left, to think of it, either.”

  Our food arrives, quantities of it. “Well, we’d love to hear what you remember of those days,” I offer. “Even if we can’t find the exact location.”

  I expect a fast monologue from the old fellow, but he just sits there, thoughtful. Both of them, similar frowns on their leathered faces. “We were shielded from a good deal of it,” the sister says softly. “Twasn’t until I was much older that I learned about the less savory doings of the companies that ran the farms. We did used to see caravans of old cars moving along the roads, that I recall. Men asking for work.”

  “Our Ma would give folks some fruit or something if she had it,” the guy says. “They couldn’t offer a job but they could do that much.”

  “But they understood that the people coming around weren’t bad people, weren’t dangerous. Just out of work and hungry to find it. Or plain hungry.”

  “Not full of demands and rights like some of those that’d come later,” the old man adds.

  “His grandma says they all got called Okies,” I tell him, hoping to stave off a further tirade against the now majority population.

  “Law, yes,” the woman says, animated for the first time. “I used to feel so bad for the folks. We hadn’t much, but we had decent clothes at least. Roots in the town. Oh, some of the folks we’d see, the children, it’d break your heart. Families couldn’t stay put and then the town folk wouldn’t want those immigrant children in their schools. Raggedy little things, then they’d get called those n
ames.”

  “I do remember one family,” the man cuts in. “They had twin girls, is how I recall. Coulda been pretty if they’d had enough to eat, if they coulda smiled more. But just proud people. Somebody would call them a name and they would just stare back at you, pull themselves up tall and proud. I don’t know what happened to then, but I tell you, they were bound and determined to make their way, the whole family was.”

  Of course I picture Vera and her family. Guess they were just one family amongst many along here, though, too many people and too little work. I want to call her, hear her tell all her stories again. Whenever I tell her things we’ve heard, and ask her was that what it was like, she says, all that and more. I’ve got to get back there, it strikes me, and get her to tell me the whole thing again, start to finish.

  We inquire about where we might find a similar looking farm to the old cotton fields, but our new friends aren’t much help. So we finish up, and I take a few photos of what remains of central Poplar, buildings where they might possibly have lined up back then to get their picking jobs. Then we just head north on the country road we’d turned on.

  Just out of town, I spot a dusty truck pulled to the side with three guys squeezed into the cab. Mexican immigrants presumably, but not doing anything but sitting there. What am I going to do, ask then to pretend they’re farming for my modern day shot?

  Caleb points out houses where there used to be farms, and suggests we turn back toward the highway. We follow the sign toward Tulare. The landscape barely shifts – fields but no people. A few miles along, I can see some guys way out in a field. Adjusting the irrigation pumps maybe. I ask him to pull over.

  Without being too obvious, I hope, I twist on my telephoto. Get a nice sort of silhouette, the men and their machinery, dark against the bright distant afternoon sky. Caleb switches off the engine, and comes to stand nearby, both of us observing the men working in the distance.

  I feel melancholy. “Is this it? My last shot?”

  Caleb squeezes my shoulder. “It’s never your last shot, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, we can look for other farm shots. Or maybe a group of people on a porch, like for Vera’s brother’s birthday.”

  He’s right, I suppose. I climb back into the truck, though still with a feeling that we’re ending something. If we weren’t making the detour, we could have the truck to Clint by tonight.

  “Come on,” Caleb says. “Let’s go find Grandma’s boyfriend.”