Short for the “Imperial Valley,” the northernmost section of the Gulf of California cut off from the sea by the delta of the Colorado River. But I’m always on the prowl for books about Southern California away from the glitter of the coast & this one, Inlandia, looks interesting, though it appears to concern itself mostly with areas north of the Salton Sink, another name for the Imperial Valley. The “Inlandia” of the title (I’d never heard the term before — we just called it “the valley” — is where my family originates. My mother’s family. Never knew my father. I didn’t live in “Inl;andia” for long, though — only for a few years in Eastern San Diego County before my mother married my step-father & we moved to Santa Cruz, then to suburban San Jose, still inland, but much more Mediterranean in climate. My family was one of the millions that moved to San Jose at the time — it was the fastest growing city in the country for a while & we lived in subdivisions bulldozed from citrus orchards.

For many summers during my childhood, I would return to my grandfather’s place south of Brawley & north of Calexico, outside Holtville. There were still quite a few small farms like my grandfather’s, something that has changed radically over the course of my lifetime in the shift to giant agribusiness concerns. That was during a time when the desert was being irrigated to grow vegetables for the post-war economic boom, but before farming had become completely industrialized. Actually, I may own about a quarter of an acre out near Holtville, unless my cousins have let it go for back taxes, which is more likely. My mother left her 1/5th of the old homestead to me when she died in 1986, the rest belonging to her four siblings, all but one of who are now dead. I haven’t talked to any of those cousins in twenty-five years, though I exchanged a few emails with one of their children. And I did call up my aunt Carmen when my uncle Joe died. I was named after my uncle Joe & saw him last at my mother’s funeral. I didn’t really know him, but I like the fact that he kept bees & coon hounds. You wouldn’t say we’re a close family. In my retirement, I would like to keep bees.

Three or four years ago I was in San Diego for the MLA Conference & decided to rent a car so I could drive over to the desert. The car was a bit of an extravagance, but I’m glad I went. It was exactly this time of year, warm during the day but cold at night. I drove around for two days, ate in taco stands & slept in a cheap motel built right after WWII. I didn’t look up any of my cousins. I was always the outlier. Of twenty-five or so cousins I may have been the only one to finish college. Like their parents, they are small businessmen & laborers. I’m curious as to whether any of them kept up the nasty, narrow Protestantism of their parents, but I don’t know, except for Joe’s kids because Joe married a Catholic & his kids went to mass, not Sunday school, at least while they were young, much to the consternation of the rest of the family. “Why do you want to send those girls to hell?” one aunt asked him at a family reunion when I was ten or eleven.

I love the landscape, though, even the industrialized flatlands of the Imperial Valley, but especially the desert at the foot of the San Diego Mountains. As you drive east from San Diego, the lush coastal plain gives way to stony mountains covered with pines that are surprisingly lush until you pass the summit, where there is an Indian casino, where they become stunted & scrubby. The winds pick up & have been known to flip semi-trailers on their sides. As you descend, the vegetation thins to scrub & then to nothing. It is that nothing my mother fled in the 1940s; it is that same nothing I can imagine returning to in retirement. Dry, broken, clean. I can imagine becoming a leathery old man.

Notes: This post from 2004 feels related to the forgoing; other posts on Lou Duemer; Imperial Valley links.