The Old Man and the Valley

Ernest Kinney’s painting “Mulholland’s Harvest” is not a work of great mastery. Nor is it ever likely to spark a buzz in any art market. Yet it is one of many from Kinney’s hand that are, in a way, priceless, their value measured by historical purpose rather than artistic merit, for they illustrate what life was like in the Owens Valley before, and after, Los Angeles took away the water. * I first met Kinney last summer, when I drove into Bishop from the cracked, lunar-like beds of nearby Owens Lake, looking for anyone who might still remember the old days. “The city came in here like a plague; the officials lied and stole,” Kinney said, his soft, round face reddening slightly as he got going on the subject of Los Angeles.

“They devastated the country; they destroyed what the pioneers lived for.”

Over the years, the “old-timers,” as Kinney calls his Bishop friends, have spent hours recounting their childhood tales: How in the early 20th century L.A. officials bought up the parents’ spacious holdings for a song, and how they swaggered through town, insisting they wanted to buy land for new ranches, rather than for the water rights they contained. How their children all left town once the farms disappeared. How two women committed suicide when their husbands’ life savings vanished.

At 80, Kinney paints furiously, sometimes several works a week. He has never felt much need for fame and fortune. Leading me through the small bedrooms of his house on Central Avenue, his blue jeans and flannel shirt spattered with paint, he admits he has lost count of the paintings he has crammed under dressers, above closets or against the stovepipes that cut through the low ceilings. “Mulholland’s Harvest,” of an abandoned wooden silo in an unkempt field, is propped haphazardly against a wall in a dim corner, amid a pile of his work. It’s the grim harvest that has acted as Kinney’s watchful muse.

William Mulholland was no farmer. Rather, the painting pays ironic homage to the same man for whom the drive that twists along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains is named--Los Angeles’ pioneering water chief. In 1913, Mulholland’s aqueduct, an extraordinary engineering accomplishment, tapped into the ground 66 miles north of Owens Lake and diverted its water source, sending it hundreds of miles south to feed the L.A.’s burgeoning suburbs. For decades, people in the valley have complained of blinding dust storms that periodically send them fleeing behind their bolted windows and that still cake their living rooms with a fine, arsenic-tinged powder.

By the time I arrived in Bishop last June, years of grinding litigation had persuaded L.A. officials to cut a deal: The city is to spend about $120 million over seven years, planting seeds and laying an irrigation grid on what was once the lake’s bed, in an attempt to anchor the earth. It’s that land--or at least the way it once was--that appears in countless Kinney paintings. He made his first painting on canvas 38 years ago, of Mount Tom, simply to dissuade his wife Yan, from buying a similar one at a street market. “I said to her, ‘I can paint that a darn sight better myself,’ and she said, ‘You can not!’ ” Kinney says, with the rolling chuckle that punctuates his stories. “So I said, ‘I darn can’ and sat down and did it. And then we sold the thing for $500.”

As though desperate to re-create the valley’s history before the old-timers vanish, Kinney has since painted dozens of scenes from his boyhood, or from photographs left to him by his parents. His favorite theme: the teams of long-horned steer winding through Bishop’s Valley, with his father, George Spray Kinney, leading the herd around a pass. The Bishop branch of the Union Bank of California has commissioned a mural incorporating several of Kinney’s cattle paintings across its 120-foot wall on Main Street, to be painted next spring.

Dozens of Kinney’s cartoons depict saloon girls, card players and drunken cowboys on mules. But for some visitors to the little house on Central Avenue, the more remarkable items are a collection of 13 beaded leather cradle boards crafted by Indians to carry their babies, as well as heavily beaded Indian bags, moccasins and gloves. Kinney bought the cradle boards from Paiute artist Lily Baker and traded paintings for other items.

In 1976, Don Jacklin, a businessman from Post Falls, Idaho, arrived in Bishop for the town’s annual mule parade and visited Kinney to see his paintings. “I walk into his home and there’s this tremendous Indian collection,” Jacklin says. “It was awesome. I was blown away. I’ve been to a lot of museums and I’ve never seen a collection like his.” Two years later, Jacklin bought a collection of Nez Perce items in Idaho and traded several of them for Kinney’s work. He now has six of Kinney’s paintings hanging in his house. “Ernie has the feel for the air, the sky, the season. He’s got California history in his blood.”

But that history is disappearing beneath the shopping malls and Pizza Huts that now line the valley and with the passing of those who remember. Kinney buried yet one more childhood friend in November. Three days later, when I returned for a final visit, Kinney and another childhood friend, Ray “Fish” Milovich, 76, met at Fish’s Talespinner Coffee Bar on Main Street and swapped stories of the old days while the snow-capped Sierra turned pink in the setting sun. The town would soon fill with weekend-trippers from Los Angeles, heading to ski resorts. Valley property is in hot demand again, not by Mulholland’s envoys this time but by wealthy retirees charmed by the crisp desert air and towering mountains.

Milovich admits that even without Mulholland, Bishop’s farmers would have drained the lakes by now. But the old-timers are not quite ready to abandon a lifetime of enmity. “I say, if you’re going to go to hell, you ought to be able to get there your own way,” he says. And so, as long as Kinney and Milovich are around to recall the old days, L.A.’s water barons will not be fully forgiven. And Kinney will paint the Owens Valley with rivers running full and the long-horned steer pulling wagons over mountain passes.