The Birth of the Raisin

After a loud, bumpy, prayer-inducing, foul-weather flight across the Rockies, the small Canadian regional jet lands in Fresno, the birthplace of the raisin. The Engineer frees his crumpled hand from my sweaty clutches and smiles. I would not trade this man for all the medjool dates in Morocco. Thanks to The Firm, the entire trip to California’s legendary Central Valley is gratis, and so, like celebrities, we deplane glamorously onto the tarmac.

Having both never seen Yosemite blanketed in snow, on Thursday we drive up high into the Sierras passing gnarled, naked live oaks along the way. It was here, in this country, that John Muir climbed giant ponderosa pines in the heart of a storm and found ecstasy in its non-capsule form. The Valley is pleasantly silent without the swarm of summer tourists, and on our walk through the forest we savor its understated scents. A web of neon green moss embraces a fallen redwood, and the contrast stops us in our tracks. It is easy to see how nature can bring a man to his knees and learn to love God as if for the first time.

On Friday, we join highway 99 and travel the San Joaquin Valley toward Los Angeles. Historian Kevin Starr famously described this area as the “most productive unnatural environment on Earth.” Once a semi-arid desert, 25% of the nation’s produce now grows here with H2O that was slated for the shrinking Sacramento delta. We gas up at a crumbling old station in McFarlane, smack dab in the middle of the nation’s salad bowl, home to a prison and a passel of feedlots and shanties. The gas station features dusty wine bottles that sit untouched on the shelves, aging gracelessly, their colors altered by the summer sun. Stockton. Modesto. Bakersfield. Visalia. Fresno. This is California’s Appalachia, where ancestors of Tom Joad harvest grapes they’ll never drink. One county actually pays impoverished families to leave the Central Valley, a kind of Dust Bowl migration in reverse.
Later that day, Los Angeles greets us with tanned open arms and no apologies and is quickly forgiven its excesses. We greedily grab giant slabs of chocolate from the shelves of Trader Joes, and later that night, dine on spiced aloo choley and fava beans at R and G's hilltop villa in Thousand Oaks.

Tomorrow we will dance and eat flourless chocolate cake at a decadent party where wine will flow like the mighty Yosemite Falls in spring. And, because of the mental hazards of my job, I will curse those damn animated California raisins who danced and sang while the immigrants toiled the fields by day.