A Rare Look at Heart of California

California has its own “fly-over country”--the vast stretches of farmland and the isolated towns of the Central Valley, which most of us see only from the window seat of an airliner at 30,000 feet or the air-conditioned confines of a car speeding along the interstate.

Gerald W. Haslam, who deserves to be called the poet laureate of the Central Valley, invites us to slow down, draw close, and listen to what it’s like to live and die in what he calls “the Other California.” That’s where we find Leroy Upton, the man whose life is the focal point of Haslam’s latest and, arguably, his greatest book, “Straight White Male” (University of Nevada Press, $17, 274 pages.)

The heart-rending and soul-shaking problem that afflicts Leroy and drives the plot of “Straight White Male” is a rite of passage common to baby boomers all over America. He’s middle-aged, tortured with “antique rage” over the sexual adventures and mysteries in his wife’s far-distant past, and his parents are old and feeble and failing: “Seems like there isn’t a whole lot of Pop left,” he shrugs. The novel arcs between these two flash points and illuminates a midlife crisis that cannot be resolved by running out and buying a red sports car.

“I can’t seem to understand or accept that my life has reached this point,” muses Leroy as he nurses a hangover with ibuprofen tablets and a glass of milk at 5:30 a.m. “And my belly is frequently eerie.”

But, significantly, Leroy Upton is a man with roots in a place that is rarely honored in American letters--the oil patch around Bakersfield and “what used to be the Kern River.” Haslam owes more to John Steinbeck than John Updike or, for that matter, Joan Didion, a Sacramento native who long ago shook off the dust of the Central Valley. For Haslam, however, the heartland of California is “the real deal.”

Thus, for example, a woman who meets Leroy at a party in Bakersfield prattles on about the “Harmonic Convergence” at Mount Tamalpais and the “death-and-dying workshop” she has just attended at Esalen, mouthing all the platitudes that seem to be the lingua franca of life in California.

“Was your family dysfunctional?” she asks Leroy.”It was imperfect,” he replies, thus revealing the home truth that is the essential message of “Straight White Male,” “but it worked fine.”

Leroy’s friends and family do not much resemble the folks we find in Marin County or Malibu. He has a cousin whose real name is “Booger.” A high-school friend once had an erotic encounter with a heifer. Adolescent mating rituals take the form of “clutch-’n’-hug dancin’ ” to a country-western band called Kousin Ken’s Kern Kowboys. Intermarriage is when a “high-class Okie kid” marries “a nice Mexican gal.”

“My family is English, Scots-Irish, and Cherokee,” Leroy explains to his children in words that describe Haslam, too. “Mom’s is Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German, with maybe a little Mexican Indian--Yaquis and Mayos, I think.”

As vivid as any of the characters in Haslam’s multigenerational novel is the landscape in which they live out their lives. But the Central Valley, as Haslam and his characters experience it, is not always--and not only--a pastoral scene. At moments it is an almost hellish place where men and women slave away in packing sheds and on oil rigs and out in the cotton fields in 120-degree heat.

“The land itself appears to sweat--hot, so hot,” Leroy muses. “Those brown California hills, creased and rounded like supine hips, sprout not trees but wealth: oil pipes, oil pumps, oil wells, and strands of metallic pipes like luminous linguine. Plumes of steam erupt over there as though hell has sprung a leak . . . a simmering, vaporous scene that appears unreal to non-natives. To me, however, born and blooded here, it is as genuine as breath.”

“Straight White Male” is clearly autobiographical--the clues can be detected in Haslam’s other distinguished writings, including “Coming of Age in California”--that’s why it is so vivid and visceral, and, at the same time, so earnest and sentimental. Above all, to borrow the author’s own phrase, it is as “genuine as breath.”

Among those who heeded the words made famous by 19th-century newspaper editor Horace Greeley--”Go West, young man, go West!”--was Bayard Taylor, a reporter for Greeley’s New York Tribune who was sent to California in 1849 to report on the Gold Rush.

Taylor was a poet and novelist as well as a newspaper correspondent--and his dispatches from California go far beyond journalism. Newly reissued as “Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire” (Santa Clara University/Heyday Books, $18.95, 440 pages), Taylor’s book is a tale of high adventure on land and sea, a firsthand account of life and death in the gold camps of California, and the strikingly modern memoir of a man who was an eyewitness to history.

“The story of a young man’s journey to what was then the farthest corner of the known word,” affirms James D. Houston in an authoritative and illuminating foreword to “Eldorado,” “it continues to shine light on the world we inhabit now.”

The real glory of “Eldorado” is Taylor’s eye for the telling detail. Thus, for example, he describes exactly how a prospector searched for a vein of gold in a mountainside of the Sierra: “Their only tools were the crow-bar, pick and knife, and many of them were obliged to work while lying flat on their backs in cramped and narrow holes, sometimes kept moist by springs.”

But he points out that panning for gold was “a lottery in which people grew rich only by accident or luck,” and the real fortunes were not made in gold mining: “A friend of mine who had shipped lumber from New York to the amount of $1,000 sold it for $14,000.” And fortunes were spent as quickly as they were made. A meal at a popular restaurant in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush--mock turtle soup, boiled salmon trout, ham and tongue, baked macaroni--could cost a princely five dollars.

As Houston points out, Taylor’s virtuosity is not limited to his prose; the book was written, printed and published within 11 months after he first left New York for the gold fields. “And this was long before the days of typewriters, tape recorders, copy machines, or laptops,” Houston reminds us. “There was no mouse to click if he happened to change his mind.”

Indeed, “Eldorado” allows us to see that Bayard Taylor did not need the safety net of a word processor. He was prescient enough to recognize that the Gold Rush was not merely a momentary example of the madness of crowds, but, as he put it, “a new order of things.”