San Joaquin Valley

There’s nothing good about eating your horse.  But the members of the Walker Expedition, high in the Sierras, cold and starving, out of provisions, horses dying anyway from want of pasture, had to do just that.  The meat of starving animals that had been climbing mountain ranges for weeks can scarcely have been palatable.  Zenas Leonard described the meat as “black, tough, [and] lean.”  And in addition, eating your horse meant shooting your faithful companion, a hardship to which even hardened mountain men like Leonard were not inured: “[i]t seemed to be the greatest cruelty,” he wrote, “to take your rifle, when your horse sinks to the ground from starvation, but still manifests a desire to follow you, to shoot him in the head and then cut him up & take such parts of their flesh as extreme hunger alone will render it possible for a human being to eat.”

So the members of the Walker Expedition were elated to reach the San Joaquin Valley, where grass grew tall and game abounded.  Their elation at having survived the crossing of cold, barren, unmapped mountains and finding food again is probably beyond modern American parallel, but might have resembled a very hungry hiker entering a supermarket or a student from a boys’ boarding school attending a party at the Playboy Mansion.  The men feasted on deer and bear, and were no doubt happy to have food again.  The horses cropped grass hungrily and were probably happy to have reached the valley for another reason besides.

The Merced River as it descends the Sierra Nevadas into the San Joaquin Valley.

Today, I found, the parts of the valley through which the expedition passed are not so prosperous.  There are expansive groves of almond and pistachio trees, stately in their symmetry, and broad green fields for cotton, impressive for their breadth.  But the region is poor.  In 2006, six of the San Joaquin Valley’s counties were among the 52 poorest in the United States.  Its soil seems to grow not only nuts and fibers, but also rusted cars.  A wheelless pickup with an undercoat of blue peeking through a peeling red; a Crown Victoria with the roof smashed in; an orange Datsun hurled onto an unpaved road along with some cinderblocks and a pile of dirt to serve as a roadblock.  Trailer parks in which close-packed residents have used now-sodden plywood to patch holes in their walls.  Sagging wooden barns, still in use but so precarious-looking that I’d be loath to sneeze inside them.  CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) in which hundreds of cattle are squeezed between metal fences to live in their own excrement while they provide milk or fatten up for the beef market.  The excrement the cows produce is considerable.  Especially since neighboring farmers sometimes purchase the manure as fertilizer, the dung contributes mightily to the valley’s fragrance.  In some cases, the manure has been so voluminous that farmhands have drowned in it.

After dark, I drove for the coast.  I wanted to make some miles, so I took the unusual step of stopping at a fast food joint.  Parked just beyond the drive-through of a Del Taco, I was unwrapping my burrito when I heard a rapping at my window.  It was a woman in her early twenties with two waist-tall sons.  They were climbing out of a shiny, new-looking PT Cruiser.  The woman’s hair was curled and her down jacket had imitation fur along the collar.  Her ears and neck glittered with jewelry.

“Excuse me sir, can you help me with something?” she asked when I rolled down the window.

“Sure,” I said.  I figured she needed jumper cables or to use a cell phone.

“If you could just spare a few dollars, like five or ten dollars, just so I can get some food for the kids.  Just for the kids.”

“Oh of course,” I said.  I reached for my back pocket.  I’d reached for my wallet without thinking – the kids had got me.  She kept talking as I pulled out my wallet and opened it, now a little ruefully.  “I’m not on drugs or a criminal or anything.  I’m just want to get some food, you know, for my kids.”  I realized, without looking back at her, that she was attired too opulently to be begging.  I was being suckered.  “Because it’s going to be awhile before I get my check,” she said.  She meant, I knew from my time in the public defender’s office, her welfare check.

I looked at her.  California’s welfare system is famously generous.  She was even overweight.  I eyed her necklace.  A big, glittering pot leaf suspended from a gold chain.

“What’s your necklace?” I asked.

She looked at it then back up to me without a trace of embarrassment.  “Oh, I just like the symbol.  I’m not on pot or marijuana or whatever.”

I already had two dollars in my hand, and I gave it to her.

“Is that all you can do?” she asked.

I looked at her as coldly as I could.  I closed my wallet.  “Yeah,” I said.  I wished I’d told her to pawn her pot leaf instead.

“Alright, thank you, God bless,” she said.  Then she took one of her sons by the hand and turned away.  “Come on, let’s go get some more dollars,” she said as she pulled him across the parking lot toward a minivan.

The kids followed.  It was, I guess, another unremarkable day outside a fast food restaurant for them.  Times have changed since Zenas’s day.