San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Fresno native traces Central Valley’s tangled history
Even now, when you’re stuck in Interstate 80 headingbackfromTahoe traffic, your first view of the Central Valley from the Sierra is a stunner: the wide valley with its Thiebaud quadrangles of vineyards, orchards and alfalfa fields. If it’s a clear day, and the sun has arced to a favorable angle, you might catch the glint of one of the channeled rivers that feed this engineered Eden.
The Central Valley and its waters form the heart of Mark Arax’s sprawling “The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California,” which charts the valley’s metamorphosis from brushy habitat for tule elk to one of the most productive and aggressively managed agricultural regions on Earth. Few writers are better equipped to tell the story than Arax. A Fresno native, he reported on the valley and its water for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote, with Rick Wartzman, “The King of California,” the biography of valley ag tycoon J.G. Boswell that reads like a lost Upton Sinclair novel.
Covering two centuries and the entire Central Valley — actually two linked valleys, the Sacramento in the north and the San Joaquin in the south — from Redding to Weedpatch (Kern County), “The Dreamt Land” has a broader focus than did “King of California.” Think of it as “The Right Stuff ” with almond growers and hydrologists in place of astronauts. The title comes from a Richard Wilbur poem but also recalls Kevin Starr’s “Americans and the California Dream” and its sequels. “The Dreamt Land” is equally ambitious.
In the beginning, at least in the beginning of American settlement of California, the valley mattered less than the nearby Sierra Nevada foothills, because that was where the gold was. Likewise the snowfed rivers — the American, the San Joaquin, the Kern — tumbling from the mountains were deemed most useful for supplying water for hydraulic mining. But, as the gold played out, land speculators realized the valley’s rich soils and mild climate made it a more profitable place to raise wheat than the winterridden Midwest. Thus began the California wheat boom of the 1870s and 1880s. When that boom went bust, a new realization: The valley was even better suited for citrus, stone fruits, tomatoes, more. Those crops required irrigation. Water would have to be moved from where it was — beneath the ground, in the Sierra rivers — to where farmers wanted it.
The modern valley was born. Valley farmers formed small irrigation districts. Then came the mammoth 20th century state and federal water initiatives: the Central Valley Project, the State Water Project. And the giant dams — Shasta, Orovile, New Melones — that are California’s pyramids. And the concrete waterways — the California Aqueduct, the FriantKern canal — that are our Tigris and Euphrates. None of this came easy. There were decades of lawsuits, and political doublecrosses, and the occasional dynamiting of pipelines.
Arax narrates this tumultuous history skillfully, and if he isn’t completely successful in explicating the byzantine tangle of California water law, maybe it’s because nobody could be. He shines in profiling the gamblers, grifters and irrigation proselytizers who battled to make the valley their own. There’s strange, crabbed Germanborn cattle baron Henry Miller, and his TurkishKentuckian nemesis, James Ben Ali Haggin, “The Grand Khan of the Kern.” There’s Arax’s own family, led by grandfather Aram, who after escaping the Armenian genocide had the option of fleeing to Paris or to Fresno and chose the latter, to his lifelong regret.
The most vivid portrait is contemporary: Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the prince and princess of pomegranates, the Beverly Hills power couple who gave the world the purple antioxidant drink Pom Wonderful, and who farm tens of thousands of particularly arid valley acres near a Kern County town called Lost Hills. Try as he might, Arax can’t dislike them: the tough but selfdeprecating Stewart, the glamorous Lynda, who has made Lost Hills and its farmworkers her philanthropic mission, spending millions on parks and housing and schools, winning the title Lady Lynda. (Oh, you find yourself wishing, if only Lady Lynda could meet up with the Grand Khan of the Kern.) There’s only one question that nags Arax. Stewart Resnick is the biggest irrigated farmer in the world. But where does his water come from? No one will say.
That is the valley quandary.
Book event:
Author Mark Arax appears at 7 p.m. July 18 at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. www. bookpassage.com “The Dreamt Land’s” big dreams have almost always required more water than actually exists. Today, by some measures, the valley and its farmers are doing better than ever. California is the nation’s No. 1 agricultural state; Kern, Tulare and Fresno are America’s top three agricultural counties. Yet valley agriculture remains utterly dependent on farmworkers who share little of the growers’ success. And the one element essential to keeping the whole mountaintorivertodamtoreservoirtoaqueducttoorchard water system going, the Sierra Nevada winter snowpack, is profoundly vulnerable in a California sweating through climate change.
“Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive,” Joan Didion writes in “The White Album.” The line is both astute and illustrative of the way water, land and the conjunction of the two have inspired some of California’s most powerful writing: Didion, Mary Austin’s lyrical “The Land of Little Rain,” Norris Hundley’s authoritative “The Great Thirst,” William Kahrl’s gorgeous, shamefully outofprint “The California Water Atlas,” and, jumping genres, “Chinatown,” with its watercrazed Mephistopheles, Noah Cross. “The Dreamt Land” earns its place alongside them.
Peter Fish is a San Francisco writer and editor, specializing in California and the American West. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com