Introduction to Inlandia: A Literary Journey through Californias Inland Empire By Susan Straight We had forests. As a child, I read of Sherwood Forest in England, where men could be lost to sight for years; of haunted woods in Europe, like those where my mother was born, where wolves and witches and darkness reigned amid the huge firs; of rain forests in South America where birds and monkeys screamed amid the dripping branches; of the chestnut and hickory and dogwood of Appalachia and the wilderness of trees in the great eastern forests of America. And though no one knew it, in my part of Southern California, the inland reaches of terrain where most of us see only smog-shrouded hills and dried wild oats and mazes of freeway, we had magical, mythical woods as wellthousands and thousands of acres planted in orange and lemon and grapefruit trees that covered much of Riverside and San Bernardino and Redlands. Apricots and olive groves in Hemet, the date palm groves in Mecca and Indio, walnut trees in Elsinore, and cherries and apples in Cherry Valley and Oak Glen. Between them, in the wild San Gorgonio and San Jacinto Mountains, on the rolling hills of Temecula, we had pines and oaks that had lived for centuries. Along the riverbeds were cottonwoods and willows, and in the desert Joshua trees made their own eerie forests, and smoke trees rose from the sand. All my life, here in this place, we have had our own myths and legends and stories, but they were not heard very often outside in the world. I live in a house three blocks from Riverside Community Hospital, where I was born, where my brothers, my ex-husband, and his siblings were born, and most of our friends and all of our children. I have always lived here, except for my college years, and I have seen nearly every mile of land in the region which this new anthology calls Inlandia. When I was a child and people from elsewhere asked adults about where we lived, I remember hearing again and again that we were an hour from the mountains, an hour from the desert, an hour from the ocean, and an hour from Los Angeles. And I always thought, when I was a child, But why would we want to leave? We had everything, in my eyes. The endless forests of cultivation, the lush wildowers of the desert in spring, the date groves and pine forests. Trout from mountain lakes, lemons and oranges and avocados all winter, and as children we didnt care when smog veiled the hills in the summer. We mined the foothills near our house for fools gold and rose quartz, and then we lay panting in an orange grove, and swam in the swift waters of the canal, where grass waved on the bottom as though in a true stream. In fact, I realized as I grew older, everyone wanted to come here, to the inland region. Everyones parents had come from somewhere else. My own mother was from Switzerland; her parents had moved from their small valley to seek their fortunes. They did not nd them in Ontario, Canada, or northern Florida, but then they saw the ultimate pictures of prosperity and success, the land of milk and honey as represented in decades past: the postcards of purpled, snow-covered mountains in the distance, and orange trees in the foreground, all golden in the sun. That is truly what we saw, growing up here, all winter. It was paradise, though I have since learned that the rest of the world might not recognize it. In elementary school and junior high, I found that nearly everyones parents had immigrated herefrom Louisiana and Oklahoma and Mississippi, from Michoacn and Zacatecas and Guanajuato, from the Philippines and Germany and Japan. I had friends whose fathers were military men and whose mothers were immigrant brides from those countries. I had other friends whose fathers were military men and whod returned to the South and vowed never to live in poverty and segregation again. All settled in Riverside, in San Bernardino, in Victorvillewherever there were military bases. And their children grew up in the Inland Empirea new people. They played with the children of the Okies whod broken down here, with my mother-in-laws people, whod broken down in Calexico and whose sons became some of the rst black Border Patrol agents. I lived in a neighborhood called Okietown for the rst three years of my life, and then my mother married my stepfather, who had also found his promised land here, having left New Brunswick, Canada. We moved to Riverside, and they have never left. We ran freely as children, to the foothills and groves and river, and my parents, who loved this landscape with the passion of those raised in snow, took us camping everywhere. We knew every mile of Inlandia. The dinosaurs of Cabazon, where people could eat hamburgers inside the head of a brontosaurus. The date palm groves in Mecca and Oasis and Indio, where even the names were exotic, and where I stood under the gray-green fronds arching above me, touching the etched trunks and the golden sprays of dates cascading overhead, and knew it was really a cathedral. The heat was so intense, and the cicadas song lled my forehead, and the smell of water in the irrigation furrows was silver. On the way home, we got date shakes in Indio and watched the famous movieThe Sex Life of the Date. I love every mile of my homeland. The fields of watermelon and cantaloupe in Blythe and Ripley, where my foster brothers and sisters came from. The savanna-like golden grasses in the Temecula Valley, with the oaks gathered like black clouds in the distance. The steep entrance of the Cajon Pass, where the mountains are purple in winter dusk and the wind is so erce it will throw trucks like toys. The dunes outside Palm Springs and Whitewater, where the sand is white and soft as cake flour, and the smoke trees rise like ghosts in the distance. (My ex-husband once worked at a juvenile correction facility in Whitewater, and when Los Angeles boys tried to run away, he followed them in that desert, as they trudged with suitcases and radios through the creosote and rabbitbrush and hot sand, until they gave up in what they considered a particularly impersonal hell.) I love the tiny communities that only we in this place knowRubidoux, named for a pioneer of the area, and Belltown, where our cousins live near the Santa Ana River; Agua Mansa and La Placita, where New Mexicans came to grow grapes along that river and build adobe houses, marked now only by a cemetery and a few scattered homes; the old Cucamonga, where vineyards flourished and my parents bought wine; and Muscoy, on the outskirts of San Bernardino, where my brother liked to check out fighting roosters. For twenty-five years I have written about this region and tried to infuse my work with love and desire and the fierceness we retain in these small places where people loved their own with the vehemence, the stubborn and suspicious and inventive qualities required to survive in this part of Southern California. It was a place where the land and sun and smog and violence and people could be forbidding, but the same land and sun and people offered survival and love and tungsten-hard loyalty to each other. And for all these years, I have wanted to see my place represented in literature, in a wide-ranging collection of all the communities and voices and landscapes Ive known. Here it is. The oranges, the Washington navel and Valencias Ive tasted all my life, the ones my brother grew for many years, descendants of the tree which I drive past often and always nod to in obeisance. They are here, in John Jakess excerpt and in the narratives by Harry Lawton and Mary Paik Lee of those Chinese and Korean men and women who harvested the fruit. The legends of Tahquitz, the angry god whose stories I heard as a child when I was afraid to hike in his canyon above Palm Springs, and the stories of Mukat and his children, who lived in the desert. Malcolm Margolins account of the expulsion of the Cupa people from Warner Springs, less known than the famous tale of Ramona, but sadder to me because I knew Gordon Johnson, a descendant of one of the women wailing as she left her home. Johnsons stories of humor and heartbreak on Pala, where his ancestors persevered, bring the story full circle. The forbidding, alluring desert is here, in Erle Stanley Gardners excerpt: I went to sleep with the sand making little whispering noises that sounded more and more like words. I have heard so many times those whispers, in Cabazon and Palm Desert, and have been trapped in a truck while the raging winter sandstorms blasted the paint off the hood. Erle Stanley Gardner wrote in the inland area, sometimes at the Mission Inn, where Carrie Jacobs-Bond wrote her poem included here, and where I wrote parts of all my novels. Sometimes I believe we have an advantage here in our land, because even the very words used to describe us are lovely: pomegranate and pyracantha, bougainvillea and jacaranda, granite and ghostly coyotes and eucalyptus. Even our smog makes the sunset vivid as dangerous passion. The writers I read for inspiration as a young author are here. I always admired Laura Kalpakians fictional St. Elmo, her creation of a place much like San Bernardino, and how, as the excerpt in this anthology shows, she knew the people here so well. Route 66 was a mythical place in our history, and no one wrote about it like John Steinbeck; not until I read The Grapes of Wrath did I understand the refusal of many of my elderly neighbors to get rid of a carburetor or radiator or even an old tire. Recent statistics reveal, several years in a row, that the many disparate communities of my city, my region, my landscapeonce fairly small in populationhave been transformed into the fastest-growing counties in America. Hundreds of thousands of people, drawn by affordable housing, have left Los Angeles and Orange and San Diego Counties to move to this area. The new voices in Inlandia represent the best of my hopes and dreams and literary desires, the eloquent renderings of how the old worlds and new have collided and melded in this place like no other. Alex Espinoza has made his native Colton into Agua Mansa, a tender and heartbreaking and hopeful place. The Riverside landscape of Michael David Egelin, the Highland of Keenan Norris, the Blythe of E. J. Jones, and the Salton Sea of Gayle Brandeis are all places I have always wanted to see in print, the mirages and neighborhoods and voices I missed before. When I left Riverside to attend university in Los Angeles, I was already fully formed, stubborn and fierce and suspicious as my inland compatriots. As Id expected, my universe was ridiculed. Youre from Riverside? The Inland Empire? What do you have out there? Cows? Oranges, right? To answer the people from Pasadena and Los Angeles and Orange County and San Francisco, I had many responses. My land has had the distinction of being the capital of many things in the pastarson, smog, urban sprawl, methamphetamine, biker gangs, and yes, citrus and dairy. We have always been a rural place where people grow things to make their fortunes, and sometimes they grew hamburgers and Hells Angels, as in Eric Schlossers examination of the MacDonald brothers and San Bernardino. M. F. K. Fisher gave up on growing anything but haunting memories. People grew desire for gold, they grew insane. I knew the Harada house, where a Japanese American woman grew courage. Now many of the groveswalnuts and apricots and orangesare gone. Now people in this region grow houses, and mortgages, and more and more children. But in the past, sometimes people who came to inland Southern California grew nothing but false hope. In college, as a seventeen-year-old freshman, I was assigned to read Joan Didions essay Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream. Her depictions of inland life were stunning and at the same time painful to me. This is a story about love and death in the golden land, she begins, and describes what was to most people an alien placea harsher Californiathis ominous country. I had never read a phrase like talismanic fruit, and I stayed up all night with my ngers turning the pages, knowing she was exactly who I wanted to be, that I wanted to write like that. But I had never seen anyone examine my own world, the Santa Ana winds, the lemon groves bordered with river-rock walls, and it was through those words that I now learned how others saw us: the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all lifes promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers school ... Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. I lay awake all night, thinking of my friends and their parents. My future husbands parents, who fled Mississippi and Oklahoma but whod brought their cooking and voices and ways with them. My neighbors, born in Japan and the Philippines and Germany, now married to white and black and Mexican American servicemen, whose children I had always known. My own mother, who had left the cold behind and whose husband left her amid a dust storm in Glen Avon with me at three and a new baby, when the dirt sifted under the windowsill and covered everything. I went home the next day and tried to tell my mother about the piece, and about writing, and about how it made me feel. Didion had said, recalling one of our great scandals, Here is where they are trying to nd a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers. The case of Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller is a tabloid monument to that new life style. My mother frowned and said, Lucille Miller? Oh, your Aunt Beverly lived on her street. The one who killed her husband. Beverly always said that woman was capable of murder. I didnt know what to feel then. I was one of those people Joan Didion knew everything about. I drove to Ontario, the neighborhood in the essay, where my father and his siblings had struggled to survive when their parents, whod immigrated from Colorado, left them. To Fontana, where my grandmother worked at Kaiser, the now-closed steel plant which was our lifeline. To San Bernardino, where my mother had her rst job. To Muscoy, a tiny place of dirt roads and clapboard houses where my stepfather had bought a one-room shack with no bathroom. His rst property. I drove home to my neighborhood in Riverside, which made the places in Didions piece look good by comparison. I wanted to someday know the code of her elegance and precision and genius, the prose I admired so much, but I wanted to read about my dreamers in their smog-shrouded pale asphalt streets, in their orange groves where the white blossoms fell around us like stars when the sun was going down, in their canyons where the gods of the mountains, like Tahquitz, waited for revenge, in their silver-hot vineyards and the date groves of Mecca where dark men cut grapes and put paper bags around the date clusters. And now it is here. Inlandia. Excerpted with permission of the author and Heyday Books from Inlandia: A Literary Journey through Californias Inland Empire (2006). The writer: Susan Straight is a novelist and professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her books include A Million Nightingales (Pantheon Books) and Highwire Moon (Anchor Books), which won the Gold Medal for Fiction from the San Francisco-based Commonwealth Club. She received a Lannan Foundation Award in 1999 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997. The book: Inlandia is a collection of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry about San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Edited by Gail Wattawa, the anthology includes Susan Straights Introduction (above) and contributions from Mary Austin, Joan Baez, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Gayle Brandeis, Raymond Chander, Mike Davis, Joan Didion, Percival Everett, M.F.K. Fisher, Helen Hunt Jackson, Malcolm Margolin, Eric Schlosser, John Steinbeck, Calvin Trillin and many other writers. |
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David Ulin admits to a fascination with seismicity. Penelope Moffet shares memories of Dorland Arts Colony. Wil Wheaton feels the love at his first reading. Kat Meads finds she is a California author afterall. Dayna Dunbar on the road from screenwriting to novels. Pamela Ribon on an unexpected outpouring for Oakland libraries. Gayle Brandeis on the dreaded author photo. Mark Lee tells us what it was like to ride with the Pulpwood Queens. Aimee Liu on the renewed interest in the international novel. | ||
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