Aaron Gilbreath - The Heart of California: Exploring the San Joaquin Valley

Aaron Gilbreath uses his keen eye and environmental consciousness, historical records, and the occasional imaginative flight to give us an invaluable portrait of an overlooked place.

Thomas Swick, author of A Way to See the World

The Heart of California is a quickly moving history with unexpected adventure. Theres a little Joan Didion, James D. Houston, Gerald Haslam, Kevin Starr, and Mark Arax in these pages. Aaron Gilbreaths observations are an extension of these writers and, I could argue, their equal.

Gary Soto, author of The Elements of San Joaquin

This is what the San Joaquin Valley looks and sounds like and how it feels.

Don Thompson, native Valley poet and author of Back Roads

Without question, riding downriver through the San Joaquin Valleys past and present with Aaron Gilbreath is one of the greatest and most unexpected journeys Ive taken in a long, long time.

Joe Donnelly, author of L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World

Aaron Gilbreath

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image: San Joaquin Valley Homebound No. 14 by Diane Varner.

Acknowledgments for the use of previously published material appear in , which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gilbreath, Aaron, author.

Title: The heart of California: exploring the San Joaquin Valley / Aaron Gilbreath.

Description: Lincoln, NE : University of Nebraska Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019054554

ISBN 9781496218636 (paperback)

ISBN 9781496223081 (epub)

ISBN 9781496223098 (mobi)

ISBN 9781496223104 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : San Joaquin Valley (Calif.)Description and travel. | Latta, Frank F., 18921983Travel. | San Joaquin Valley (Calif.)HistoryAnecdotes.

Classification: LCC F 868. S 173 G 45 2020 | DDC 979.4/8dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054554

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

This book is for Rebekah and Vivian, for giving me the time to write it, and for the deadline to finally sit down and finish. You are the honey, and I am the bee.

This is what California is: a long central valley encircled by mountains.

Geographer John A. Crow

The San Joaquin Valley is huge, and so is the list of people who made this book possible. First and foremost, my deepest thanks to Frank and Jeanette Latta for their lifelong dedication to interior Californias history and culture. A huge thanks to Bridget Barry at University of Nebraska Press for believing in this book and bringing it to the world, and never-ending thanks to Lucas Church, who took the time to share it with her.

I appreciate all the editors who published some of this material as stand-alone essays or dispatches at Harpers, The Threepenny Review, Columbia Journal, The Common, Hobart, Southwest Review, High Desert Journal, and The Rambler and who helped improve my text: Greg Brownerville, Aaron Burch, Hannah Gersen, Harrison Hill, Jeremy Keehn, Wendy Lesser, Jensen Whelan, Elizabeth Oliver, Thomas Osborne, and Elizabeth Quinn.

This book wouldnt be possible without William Vollmanns encouragement. When I got stuck and couldnt figure out how to break through the Latta story, I defied all common sense and sent a message to him, a perfect stranger, and his sage advice helped me see my errors and what I needed to do next. As he wrote in his letter, Have you yet made this trip? If much of it must now be [made by] car, how long would it take? If I were in your shoes, I would make this trip over and over (perhaps in the winter!) and do my best to follow my passion to educate myself for however long it took. If the book requires the rest of your life but will then be entirely yours, why not? So I bought a plane ticket, rented a car, and scheduled some appointments, and here we are. As my wife, Rebekah, said after we read Bills letter, I told you basically the same thing. She had. Apparently, I needed that advice in stereo.

This book is also dedicated to my friend Dean, who taught me a lot about camping in our wild youth and whom Ive been lucky to share so many road-tripping firsts with, including first experiencing the Valley.

My warm and personal thanks to Steven Church and Phyllis Brotherton, who offered, respectively, to let me crash at his house and to pick me up when I still planned to boat illegally on various canals. You are good souls. A special thanks to Eric Parker and Phyllis, who read early chapters and offered a lot of insights and spot-on suggestions. Thanks to everyone who took the time out of their busy lives to read the manuscript for a blurb, and especially to Joe Donnelly for his honest editorial inputtoo rare these days.

Thanks to poet Dana Koester for talking to me, and to her farming in-laws, Allen and Beverly Souza, who spoke with me about farming and fed me their crops. Their perfect persimmons inspired me to plant a Fuyu persimmon in my own backyard. Im sorry none of our conversations made it into this book.

Thanks to Jim Ruland and to the Circle Jerks Keith Morris for the Firebaugh info. Thanks to the passionate Beale Reference staff and to the folks at the Cal State Fresno, Fresno County Librarys San Joaquin Valley Heritage and Genealogy Center and at the Burlingame Public Library: Jacob Cairns, Nance Espinosa, Chris Her, Gregory Megee, Melissa Scroggins, Elaine Tai, and Gloria Washington. You not only helped me gather Lattas life work; you let me turn the microphone on you to help understand the passion some people thankfully have for this region. The Kern County Fire Department generously answered my weird questions about zip codes and the blurry town limits of Mettler, Lebec, Tejon Ranch, and Arvin. Thanks to Tom Griggs and Diane Mitchell for talking with me about early Valley conservationist Jack Zaninovich back before I knew how to interview people or had ever published an article. Thanks to Larry Swan and John Parsons for their help understanding the Buena Vista Aquatic Recreational Area.

I owe a great debt to Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, whose incredible research and expert reporting into Boswells farming of the Tulare Lake bed gathered details otherwise buried in the proverbial stacks or lost to time. I used certain facts and figures from their book The King of California liberally, and I am grateful. My debt to Gerald Haslam is equally great, not only for his passion but for his career honoring the region in literature and for all the details that he unearthed and that I utilized. William Preston did pioneering work in his canonical book Vanishing Landscape, piecing together the historical ecology and ethnography of a land that hadnt previously received that appreciative, academic treatment. Even though he told me not to lean too heavily on his research, I did anyway.

Thanks to Calexico for the music that put me in the right dusty frame of mind to write this. A special thanks to Carsten Baumann in Germany, friend in music, who kindly supplied the live recordings that conjured the memories and soaring, solitary feelings necessary to capture this places magic. Some songs, like live 1998 versions of Return of the Manta Ray and Opening Aunt Doras Box in 5/8, had to travel around the world to end up back with me, nearly twenty years after I first heard the band perform them.