Highway 99 Revisited: A Notebook

As you leave the 99--

WHO LEAVES?

. . . who ever leaves the

Cold

ugly

dry

hot slippery

bloody

Dirty

foggy

sleek

powerful

Ninety nine?

NOT RAZA, Okies, Arkies,

Chapos, Armenians--not even

THE MCHIGGENBOTHOMS!

--From the poem “Gabby Took the 99,” by Jose Montoya, part of a new anthology of literature from the Central Valley entitled “Highway 99.”

*

At school the teachers always were trying to stuff Saroyan into our brains. It seemed that reading William Saroyan, native son and darling of these English teachers, was as much a matter of civic honor as it was education. Being kids, naturally we rebelled.

It seemed inconceivable that anyone could write anything worth reading about our hometown, our valley. This was a place for grapes and figs, not fiction. It would be many years before I started reading Saroyan. By then, I was living in San Francisco, working for the Examiner. He was back in Fresno, dying of cancer.

What I discovered, of course, was that the teachers had been right. Incredibly, Saroyan had created literature in our valley. He also had depicted with uncanny accuracy how it had felt--to me anyway--to grow up in a place that at once seemed both inescapable and anonymous. In an essay entitled simply “Fresno,” he described a boyhood epiphany. There was a world beyond those suffocating vineyards, and Fresno was somehow connected to it:

One Thursday evening I had a copy of the Saturday Evening Post spread before me on our living room table. . . . On one page I read the words, Have you had your iron today? It was a full-page advertisement of our Raisin Association. . . . At the bottom of the page was the name of our Association, its street address, and the name of our city. We were no longer lost in the wilderness, because the name of our city was printed in the Saturday Evening Post.

*

While in San Francisco a colleague told me about Joan Didion. A decade after she produced her breakthrough volume of essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” I still had not heard of her (another blotch on the literary resume). In any case, I was advised that I needed to read Didion, that here was a writer who truly captured the valley--right down to the roadside hot dog stands shaped like giant oranges. The mention of those all too familiar orange stands sold me.

In fact, I am sitting at one of the last of them right now, as I rough out this column. It is located about 20 miles north of Fresno on Highway 99, the artery that runs down the middle of the valley. Trucks roar by, empty grain trailers banging over the bumpy pavement. The woman inside the giant orange is busy swatting flies. Spread before me on the picnic table is a new book: “Highway 99, a literary journey through California’s Great Central Valley.” There are pieces by Saroyan, Steinbeck, Didion, William Everson, Philip Levine and the rest of the so-called Fresno poets. And this, from Didion:

Every so often along 99 between Bakersfield and Sacramento there is a town: Delano, Tulare, Fresno, Madera, Merced, Modesto, Stockton. Some of these towns are pretty big now, but they are all the same at heart, one- and two- and three-story buildings artlessly arranged, so that what appears to be the good dress shop stands beside a W.T. Grant store, so that the big Bank of America faces a Mexican movie house. Dos Peliculas, Bingo, Bingo, Bingo.

*

While the title refers to the highway, the anthology’s entries deal mainly with the people connected by it, then and now: Mexican field hands; cattle barons; Dust Bowl refugees; suburban children; immigrants, exiles. Valley people. Highway 99 people.

That they represent a California easily missed by outsiders is a theme both overworked and outdated. The valley is one of the fastest growing places in America. More and more, a valley person is simply one more Los Angeles evacuee. More and more, the San Joaquin Valley begins to resemble the San Fernando.

Still, it’s funny. I haven’t lived here since I was 17 years old. And yet, driving up that old highway--still divided by greasy oleanders, still offering an almost comical landscape of expansive farm wealth, mixed with ramshackle, low-down poverty, framed by stark natural beauty--I at once begin to feel a part of it all again. The answer to the poet’s question is obvious and, I imagine, universal. Who leaves? In the most important sense, nobody. We knew it all along.