Wednesday, 21 Jul 1999
BAKERSFIELD, Calif.
"People come to Bakersfield to work, in the oilfields and on the farms, because that's just about all there is."
-- Roger Neal, quoted in The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland
Old Bakersfield, Calif.
The trucks aren't letting up. Only the air conditioner can drown out their roar as they take turns shaking the walls, a gentle reminder that I've crossed back over the Sierras and landed along the outskirts of Bakersfield on Highway 99. Which wasn't my plan -- to be on the outskirts, that is. I'm a sucker for downtowns and old hotels, and had my hopes up when enormous building-top art deco letters promised the "Padre Hotel" as I entered the city center this evening. The hostelry, advertised as "the finest hotel west of the Rockies" soon after its completion in 1928, was nonetheless closed for business, unless I felt like grabbing a cocktail in a darkened corner of the ground floor "Town Casino." In keeping with tradition, though, the "Vacancy" sign was still lit up on not one but two sides of the hotel's fading Spanish Revival exterior. A little further up H St., the grand old Fox Theatre had just fired up its Las Vegas-style neon marquee, promising fame and fortune for the children descending on the venue en masse in their shiny green unitards, butterfly wings, and mouse ears, preparing to perform "A Tribute to Disney," no doubt to the delight of countless parents.
Tempting though it was, I opted out. It just didn't seem like something one does alone. Unlike eating, of course, which is something I had managed to accomplish alone routinely without any trouble -- until tonight. "Just one?" inquired the waitress. "Not waitin' for someone else?" No, no, "just me," I explained, almost apologizing, as I slid into an oversized booth. She smiled. "Just passin' through, are you?"
New Bakersfield, Calif.
Which, of course, was a fair comment. People have been passing through here for years. The Okies were by far the most famous, but the Chinese, Koreans, Swedes, Salvadorans, Hmong, Mexicans, Germans, and even the Basques came too. Today Bakersfield is one quarter Latino, a percentage that is expected to increase dramatically, as is the city's population overall. But it seems that its many residents, at least tonight, aren't wandering the streets downtown. Indeed, I can't get over the absence of this city in its historic core. It's been surgically removed, more so than in any other urban area I've seen in California.
Combine this with my drive into town through Oildale ("more derricks than you can shake a stick at" I'm guessing was a close runner up in the city slogan contest), and I started thinking that the San Francisco snobs -- so famous elsewhere in the state for liberally applying phrases like "the armpit of California" to just about anywhere that doesn't feature the phrase baby greens on menus -- might just have a point. There are those up in the freezing city by the bay that would be equally dismissive of all the towns up and down the Central Valley. Exactly the reason they fascinate me so.
"This is what California is," explains geographer John Crow, "a long central valley encircled by mountains ... it is a single, mountain-walled prairie." Minus, of course, the prairie part. When some of the first whites spilled into the valley through the Sierra Nevada mountains, they described an "American Serengeti" where marshes and rivers ruled, elk roamed, and the afternoon sky could grow dark with hundreds of thousands of birds. Yet, as is the case with the eastern Sierras, the landscape of the Central Valley has been radically transformed by the manipulation of water. Rivers dammed, lakes vanished, earth buckling under years of groundwater removal, the Valley has suffered hyper-irrigation and as a result become one of the most productive farming regions in the world. The value of all the agricultural produce grown in just one year in California's Central Valley is worth more than all the gold extracted statewide since all the mining hysteria began way back in 1848.
Yet the Valley also has more than its fair share of problems: Witness the great labor struggles and the Herculean efforts of Cesar Chavez; poverty that consistently ranks five or six of its cities in the top ten for people receiving the most public assistance; and more recently an explosion in narcotics production along the hidden dirt roads and in remote fields that by some accounts may top the state's entire net agricultural worth. And then there's the question of what will happen to all this agriculture once the Valley's population triples over the next few decades, as it's expected to do. By far the most profitable things to grow these days on Valley farms, some say, are houses.
Suffice it to say there's more than first meets the eye in Bakersfield, as well as communities throughout the Central Valley. Don't let a desolate downtown fool you. An evening here isn't even scratching the surface -- perhaps you've got to dig a little deeper than in some other places, but it may indeed be well worth the effort. After all, I've learned rather quickly that Bakersfield has views, southern accents, tree-lined streets, a working Woolworth's lunch counter, ballparks brimming with curse words in at least four languages, country music the way country music is supposed to be, and -- much to the delight of this particular breakfast connoisseur -- Bakersfield has grits.
Learn more about the Central Valley by visiting http://www.greatvalley.org.
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