Golden states

Images of California

by Josh Kun

Dave Alvin

Two weeks after I moved back to California last month, I heard Dave Alvin sing "California Snow" for the first time. The song, which is on Alvin's most recent album, Blackjack David (Hightone), is told through the eyes of a 39-year-old border-patrol agent who's left his ex-wife and two kids and is spending his days looking for illegals in "the mountains east of El Cajon/North of the Tecate line." His own unhappiness gets projected onto the nameless Mexicans he chases after. Don't they know, as he does, that there's no such thing as the California Dream? Don't they know that "the California summer sun can burn right through your soul," that "in the winter you can freeze to death in the California snow"?

By the song's end, he finds a man and woman frozen in a ditch below the highway. They become two of many "ghosts that haunt the California snow" and he knows that, in a different way, he's one too, that there's always the chance that any of us who live here, any of us who mistake the reality for the dream, the payoff for the promise, might also become one. This has long been the risk of living in a state built on myth and boosterism and invented through the sale of hope, optimism, and health.

Alvin wrote the song with Tom Russell, who on a 1994 tribute to Merle Haggard sang another ode to California ghosts, "Tulare Dust," Haggard's chronicle of a struggling farmworker family living with dust and sand from the dried-up bed of Tulare Lake caked into their noses. The decimated lakes of the San Joaquin Valley and the labor camps that sprinkled the surrounding plains of dwindling agricultural grace were prime Haggard territory in the '70s. The son of westward Okie dreamers, Haggard grew up in a railroad car in Oildale, a one-time oil boom town near Bakersfield.

As seen in Robert Dawson's 1991 aerial shot that crops up halfway through Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream (UC Press) -- the new words-and-images document of Golden State eco-unraveling from Dawson and writer Gray Brechin -- Haggard's home town is a desolate, zigzag plane of diagonal dirt roads lined with abandoned oil derricks, refineries, and electric poles. The Tulare dust he sang about is also captured in one of the book's most unforgettable images: a lone billboard promoting the benefits of farm water in the middle of the parched Tulare lake bed. For Dawson and Brechin, Tulare, Oildale, and Alvin's Inland Empire turf are California's true capitals, environmentally wasted monuments to spoiled human wishes that offer prophetic glimpses of the state's true unsustainable future.

Like Alvin's border drifter looking for ghosts that the rest of the world chooses not to see, Dawson's photographs are meant to capture histories of vanishing and emptiness that so many of us have closed our eyes to -- images of absence and disappearance that make us visualize what is no longer there. Instead of the jungles, lagoons, fish, wildlife, and Indians that he wants us to see, Dawson shows us what has wiped them all out: a devastating and depressing post-Gold Rush parade of new housing subdivisions, steamrolling smog clouds, population explosions, toxified neighborhoods, and coyotes skewered by barbed-wire fences that mince public lands into private commodities. Brechin agrees with Alvin about the ghosts (though he focuses more on slaughtered Yahi and Pomo Indians than on undocumented Mexican workers) but believes that all of California is haunted. "Some places have drunk up so much pain," he writes, "that they never give it up."

The pain produces telling visual juxtapositions. A vintage San Jose farmhouse has a freeway running through its backyard. A monument to a Mojave mining mule team blocks the view of a KFC. A Father Junipero Serra statue points down on evening traffic clogging Highway 280. Like Alvin and Haggard, Brechin and Dawson won't let us forget the price of promised-land ideology. Contaminated fish, refinery backyards, and earthquakes don't stop settlements of pool-and-lawn homes from being pasted into a rolling hillside of nothingness. That is, for every age of destruction, there is another age of development, and California keeps advertising the sunshine-and-oranges beauty it never could actually afford.

I used to listen to Lyle Lovett's "LA County" whenever I flew into Los Angeles. "The lights of LA County," he'd sing as I looked out the window at the sprawling, luminescent grid of flashing green and white lights, "shone like diamonds in the sky." After experiencing Farewell, Promised Land, I wonder whether those jewels of megawatt light, that "electrified paradise" as imagineer Henry Edwards Huntington boasted of it at the turn of the century, will ever look the same to me again. Now that I know how much darkness -- and how much dust and how many ghosts -- the light can bring.