Since Euroamericans first descended the Sierra Nevada, California has cultivated a steady reputation for success despite countless undeniable failures. The present-day is no exception. The state birthed the green smoothie and poisoned the entire population of Chinook River salmon all in a single year. Fruits and nuts grow from the ground up as the ground itself sinks. When water runs dry, California turns on the sprinklers and churns out an ever-growing supply of nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Water is a finite resource that’s been treated like an infinite one. No wonder this contradiction of a state is hard to pin down.
But Mark Arax, California native and author of The Dreamt Land: Chasing Dust and Water Across California, does pin it down. It just takes him 577 pages to do so. In a vibrant and thorough tour up, down, across, above, and below the Central Valley, Arax dissects the agricultural history of the region from pre-colonial expansion to the present day. Holding water in one hand and a fistful of dust in the other, he’s our guide as we blaze through time and space, watching generations of Californians try to figure out how to make mud.
The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California
The Dreamt Land reads like it’s written in verse. “What is gold but a vein. What is water but the blood that runs inside a vein”, Arax writes of the water-hungry California gold rush. Every town and every timeframe is spun with eloquence, a hint of lyrical flair, and a whole lot of drama. The Central Valley Water Project, for example, is a government-funded system of dams and canals designed to funnel water from the mountains in the northeast to the cities in the southwest, but Arax has dramatically rebranded it as “The killing of the San Joaquin River.” In this way, the narrative is propelled along, knocking on the doors of gold rushers, wheat ranchers, small fruit farmers, and today’s menacing “Big Ag.” Each of these characters has played a key role in pushing the region’s water supply beyond its natural limit.
Arax is able to write with such spunk and passion because this is a deeply personal account. As the grandson of a raisin farmer, Arax is as much a product of the Central Valley as he is a journalist. He includes heart-wrenching anecdotes about the struggles of growing up as an Armenian American in the Fresno farming community, how the water crisis has affected his small family farm, and his father’s murder. He also includes some truly hilarious stories from his own days working on the farms. “I’ve done my time,” he writes of pulling weeds at a sugar beet farm as a teenager. “The weeder geese–a whole battalion of them– were our competition. Honking and hissing, the geese had no quit. Day after day, our defeat became a mockery… They were the perfect size to go right for our privates. When our 6 weeks of labor was finished, we’d been made better by the birds, or so we thought.”
Arax has taken the history of agriculture in California and turned it into a bildungsroman: A tender coming-of-age story for water and soil and the ego of man. As naive little California stands at the precipice of adulthood, only just now realizing its own limitations and stricken by an outlook that is “half-environmental nightmare, half remarkable success story”, Arax looks back and says, “This is how we got here.”
What is The Dreamt Land’s flaw? That he doesn’t leave anything out. To get to the point (something Arax did not), the book is too long. It’s a beautifully written, incredibly exhaustive account of everything that has ever happened in the history of Californian agriculture. It’s as if he took every source he ever read, every interview, every field note ever written, and somehow found a way to weave it into this book. He doesn’t write chronologically, and with such a broad focus and so much unfiltered information, the macroscopic organization quickly gets washed out by the abundance of microscopic details. As a result, The Dreamt Land lacks direction. At the end of the book, we have a close understanding of the seemingly infinite web of problems and contradictions that make up the California water crisis. But there is no real conclusion to be had, there is no call to action– only sprawling explanation.
Despite this, Arax has undeniably crafted a masterpiece. With the prose of Joan Didion and the symbolism of John Steinbeck, Arax earns himself a spot amongst the great Californians who wrote vividly and personally about California. What Didion, Steinbeck, and Arax have in common is that they understand and write California as it is. A state, a resource, or a society this beautifully expressive and heart-wrenchingly tragic can only be captured by writing that is equally so. Arax’s The Dreamt Land characterizes California as both the glorious culmination of westward expansion, as manifest destiny realized, and where the earth runs out– a miserable, limiting dead end. Even though we’re left exhausted, with an unclear picture of what to do about it, we understand something transcendent nonetheless– and Arax’s ability to convey this understanding is a feat in itself.