Dear William T. Vollmann: Give Us Imperial County Back

This is the second in a series of posts about Imperial County, CA.

Four cultural geographers conspire to write a book on Imperial County. They meet, at will, on a university campus emptied for the summer to discuss possible themes and create themselves some deadlines. They toss around the phrase “a new frontier” to describe the region where California desert merges into Arizona and Mexico, and flip through a few hundred images taken recently in the field. The catfish farm tour, the ventures to where the Colorado River is dammed, the encounters with US Border Patrol: all fodder for a potentially smart and pointed treatise on this region foreign to most but at the nexus of so many contemporary American issues. They thought they were rather avant-garde for picking a place so un-glamorous, so unheard of, so yet un-writ. A gold mine of a place, in academic currency. And active gold mines? Imperial has those too.

Too bad that sometime between our trip to the field and this research meeting, William T. Vollmann published an exalted and rambling 1,300 pages on Imperial County. Well gee Vollmann, thanks for leaving us some crumbs.

Or maybe he left us the cake?

Vollmann’s Imperial may not be the most highly-acclaimed book to be released this year — Amazon.com concludes its review, after all, with “Imperial County is a place that few will have the stomach to visit, and Imperial a book few will be willing to read.” I’m loathe to add my own sass here, if only because Sam Anderson’s in New York Magazine is better than any I could come up with. He almost makes you want to shell out $55 for the hardcover edition and breeze through all 200 chapters. Except that you won’t and I’m not even sure Anderson did either.

This tombstone of a book stared back at us from the middle of the table, flown in from New York’s Hunter College because our own UCLA library hadn’t bothered to buy a copy yet (blame the state budget cuts, we do). But its presence wasn’t mentioned until we were packing up to leave our meeting.

“It’s all Salvation Mountain, water rights, and Mexican migrants,” said one colleague, exasperated. “And he didn’t really say anything coherent about any of those things,” which are, arguably, the clichés of the county.

“I know, every time he starts a chapter with, like, a really interesting topic, the chapter just… ends abruptly.” I crinkled my nose.

“Well, he’s making an incredible statement about this place,” offered Timur, the most generous among us. “He almost single-handedly wrote more about a county that’s been literally and figuratively unwritten. So in that respect, it’s tremendous. But at the same time, if your subject has never been written, is the best solution to write more about it than anyone ever has?”

At least two of us in this research group have John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid on our nightstands. His succinct chronicling of the debates surrounding, and failures of, natural resource conservation from the 1970s are striking in their relevance today. And had McPhee written an Assembling California for every state, I’d have them all lined up on my shelf, in geographic order from west to east.

What is it about McPhee’s writing (and I believe also Rebecca Solnit’s, though perhaps you are thinking of others) that effectively invites us in to look more closely at messy landscapes, the ones that, like Imperial County, are accident-ridden, heavily politicized, and full of scars induced by humans? Few writers do this without argumentatively pointing fingers or suggesting a return to an edenic past. We’re still tethered, through so many environmental narratives, to Muir’s or Thoreau’s American romanticism and blind to the toxic earth on the fringes of awareness. Only a handful of writers have really crafted narratives about often undesirable cultural landscapes and left their readers feeling satisfyingly educated through to the end. It’s the latter which Vollmann unfortunately doesn’t seem to be doing for those who dare approach Imperial.

Vollmann may have left Imperial, the place, just a bit sexier than before Imperial, the book, was released — though I credit the reviews, not the text itself, for that. But Imperial County will surface again, next time in less than 1,300 pages.

Photo by Timur Hammond