Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California's Great Central Valley

Rating:
Summary: Panoramic view of the Valley
Review: As a SF Bay Area resident, I thought I knew California. Not a chance. Highway 99 has always had a special allure for me - as I take it to go camping in the summer. The magical names of towns that linger on the fringes of recognition are compelling. As a private pilot I often fly over the great central valley, privileged to zoom overhead at 100mph. Now, having read the stories, the land is so much more alive, with textures and passions soft-spoken, waiting for the patient listener. I'm off to read Ernest Finney - Winterchill, having been totally captured by the snippet in this book.

Rating:
Summary: An eye-opening extravaganza of an oft-unknown California.
Review: As a SF Bay Area resident, I thought I knew California. Not a chance. Highway 99 has always had a special allure for me - as I take it to go camping in the summer. The magical names of towns that linger on the fringes of recognition are compelling. As a private pilot I often fly over the great central valley, privileged to zoom overhead at 100mph. Now, having read the stories, the land is so much more alive, with textures and passions soft-spoken, waiting for the patient listener. I'm off to read Ernest Finney - Winterchill, having been totally captured by the snippet in this book.

Rating:
Summary: Valley of the avenals
Review: Highway 99 in California, as the maps in the front of this book show, covers a lot of ground. It is, as Joan Didion describes in this volume, a highway in which the landscape never varies.

From Tehachapi to Tehama; from Lebec to Linden and beyond, one sees little mountain range, and what Didion refers to as the monochromatic flatness of the terrain through which the highway runs, to some (including some residents), symbolizes the monotony of life in the Central Valley.

You wouldn't expect it to be an inspiration for its own literary genre, and few of the works in this volume, prepared by editor Stan Yogi as a California Council of the Humanities project, could be classified as great literature. Two exceptions to that would be the contributions from Fresno native son, William Saroyan: "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse" and "Fresno", a story of how Fresno's economy rose and fell on one man's vision of making it the raisin capital of the country (it's noteworthy that this honor today belongs to neighboring Selma).

And there's a gritty working-class feel to some of the other stories in this collection that makes them worthwhile reading.

The collection contains a fairly even distribution of prose and poetry, and the poetry would probably be appreciated by someone a little more highbrow than myself, whose head spins when confronted with too much blank verse.

Most of the prose and poetry centers on the hardships of those in the Valley who work the land. It's often a very stark picture, and artists and government projects being what they are, it's no surprise that this collection would have its share of infantile leftist temper tantrums such as Luis Valdez's "Quinta Temporada" and Cherie Moraga's "Heroes and Saints".

And isn't Catherine Webster a caution? Her poem "Child of Highway 99" seems intended as some sort of protest over the paving of Highway 99 but it comes out as a touchy-feely gush of female empathy, in which she mentions her own name twice. "I hear in ten-thousand sweet rye heads rubbing a song that I Catherine am Holy/I'm the Kingdom of HEAVEN", she informs us, and I have no doubt that she believes it, though it is the land she purports to identify with that is attempting to crown itself with glory. The poem is ostensibly intended as a glorification of the farmers who work the land. But it does make one wonder how the loonies managed to steal the conservation movement from conservatives.

The most horrific description of life on the farm is a Depression-era piece from John Steinbeck called "The Harvest Gypsies". Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel's "Picking Grapes 1937"about a "magic seventeen" girl working in "bursting sweet vineyards" and fantasizing about becoming Jean Harlow, following immediately after the Steinbeck piece provides a welcome upbeat contrast to it. There are other contributions in this volume which demonstrate Yogi's attempt to balance a harsh portrayal of life in the valley with a dignity often possessed by those who work in it.

One of the other poems that registered with me was Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's "Yuba City School" about a young Indian boy, persecuted at school by children and teachers alike, attempting to tunnel his way back to Punjab to "his grandfather's mango orchard, his grandmother's songs lighting on his head, the old words glowing like summer fireflies".

Art Coelho's "Papa's Naturalization", situated on a dairy farm in King's County, provides a more positive view of the immigrant experience. Franz Weischenk's Jewish family finds refuge from Hitler's Germany amidst the honest toil in the city of Madera, and Alan Chong Lau's early 20th century Chinese village in Lodi turns out for a visit from Sun Yat Sen. "Never having learnt the language I just have to go by hearsay," Lau says, explaining his own inability to read an old Chinese newspaper clipping describing the visit, possibly intending to hint at a generation gap familiar enough to this reviewer, who himself has learned only a few words of Yiddish.

Thiphavanh Louangrath's attempt to capture her experience as a Laotian girl in contemporary Fresno ("Old Maid") seems rather pointless, and it's hard to see what benefit is derived by her decision to substitute one extreme mode of behavior for another. Surely, it should have been possible for her to balance a normal social life with care for her grandmother.

If Yogi includes a variety of ethnic experiences in this volume, the employment experience is not so heterogeneous, centering mainly on life on the farm. But James Houston and William Rintoul provide an interesting look at life on the oil rigs of southern Kern County and in the communities centered around those rigs. Bill Barisch's offbeat social commentary, "Prison Valley", describes the city of Avenal`s attempt (and the attempt of other cities in the Valley) to use the prison situated locally as a cash-generating industry. "Avenal", Barisch remarks at one point, "made Coalinga look like a cultural mecca". Now THAT has to hurt.

All in all, a creditable collection - and perfect for reading on the Amtrak as the unbroken plane of the great valley whizzes by outside your window.

Rating:
Summary: Valley of the avenals
Review: Highway 99 in California, as the maps in the front of this book show, covers a lot of ground. It is, as Joan Didion describes in this volume, a highway in which the landscape never varies.

From Tehachapi to Tehama; from Lebec to Linden and beyond, one sees little mountain range, and what Didion refers to as the monochromatic flatness of the terrain through which the highway runs, to some (including some residents), symbolizes the monotony of life in the Central Valley.

You wouldn't expect it to be an inspiration for its own literary genre, and few of the works in this volume, prepared by editor Stan Yogi as a California Council of the Humanities project, could be classified as great literature. Two exceptions to that would be the contributions from Fresno native son, William Saroyan: "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse" and "Fresno", a story of how Fresno's economy rose and fell on one man's vision of making it the raisin capital of the country (it's noteworthy that this honor today belongs to neighboring Selma).

And there's a gritty working-class feel to some of the other stories in this collection that makes them worthwhile reading.

The collection contains a fairly even distribution of prose and poetry, and the poetry would probably be appreciated by someone a little more highbrow than myself, whose head spins when confronted with too much blank verse.

Most of the prose and poetry centers on the hardships of those in the Valley who work the land. It's often a very stark picture, and artists and government projects being what they are, it's no surprise that this collection would have its share of infantile leftist temper tantrums such as Luis Valdez's "Quinta Temporada" and Cherie Moraga's "Heroes and Saints".

And isn't Catherine Webster a caution? Her poem "Child of Highway 99" seems intended as some sort of protest over the paving of Highway 99 but it comes out as a touchy-feely gush of female empathy, in which she mentions her own name twice. "I hear in ten-thousand sweet rye heads rubbing a song that I Catherine am Holy/I'm the Kingdom of HEAVEN", she informs us, and I have no doubt that she believes it, though it is the land she purports to identify with that is attempting to crown itself with glory. The poem is ostensibly intended as a glorification of the farmers who work the land. But it does make one wonder how the loonies managed to steal the conservation movement from conservatives.

The most horrific description of life on the farm is a Depression-era piece from John Steinbeck called "The Harvest Gypsies". Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel's "Picking Grapes 1937"about a "magic seventeen" girl working in "bursting sweet vineyards" and fantasizing about becoming Jean Harlow, following immediately after the Steinbeck piece provides a welcome upbeat contrast to it. There are other contributions in this volume which demonstrate Yogi's attempt to balance a harsh portrayal of life in the valley with a dignity often possessed by those who work in it.

One of the other poems that registered with me was Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's "Yuba City School" about a young Indian boy, persecuted at school by children and teachers alike, attempting to tunnel his way back to Punjab to "his grandfather's mango orchard, his grandmother's songs lighting on his head, the old words glowing like summer fireflies".

Art Coelho's "Papa's Naturalization", situated on a dairy farm in King's County, provides a more positive view of the immigrant experience. Franz Weischenk's Jewish family finds refuge from Hitler's Germany amidst the honest toil in the city of Madera, and Alan Chong Lau's early 20th century Chinese village in Lodi turns out for a visit from Sun Yat Sen. "Never having learnt the language I just have to go by hearsay," Lau says, explaining his own inability to read an old Chinese newspaper clipping describing the visit, possibly intending to hint at a generation gap familiar enough to this reviewer, who himself has learned only a few words of Yiddish.

Thiphavanh Louangrath's attempt to capture her experience as a Laotian girl in contemporary Fresno ("Old Maid") seems rather pointless, and it's hard to see what benefit is derived by her decision to substitute one extreme mode of behavior for another. Surely, it should have been possible for her to balance a normal social life with care for her grandmother.

If Yogi includes a variety of ethnic experiences in this volume, the employment experience is not so heterogeneous, centering mainly on life on the farm. But James Houston and William Rintoul provide an interesting look at life on the oil rigs of southern Kern County and in the communities centered around those rigs. Bill Barisch's offbeat social commentary, "Prison Valley", describes the city of Avenal's attempt (and the attempt of other cities in the Valley) to use the prison situated locally as a cash-generating industry. "Avenal", Barisch remarks at one point, "made Coalinga look like a cultural mecca". Now THAT has to hurt.

All in all, a creditable collection - and perfect for reading on the Amtrak as the unbroken plane of the great valley whizzes by outside your window.

Rating:
Summary: Panoramic view of the Valley
Review: This book was my text in a university class about the life and literature of the Great Central Valley of California. It was the perfect companion piece to the course, deepening my understanding of writers who came from the Valley, and of the immigrant groups that settled there.