THE BLESSING OF ARIDITY
WHEN Rickard left the main line at Imperial Junction the next
afternoon, his eyes followed the train he was deserting rather than the
one that was to carry him to his new labors. He felt again the thrill
of detachment that invariably preceded his entrance into a new country.
With the pulling up of the porter’s green-carpeted stool, the slamming
of the train gates, the curtain fell on the Tucson set scene.
The long line of cars was pushing off with its linen-covered Pullmans
and diners, steaming down-grade toward the Sink, the depression which
had been primeval sea, and then desert, and was now sea again. Old
Beach, rechristened Imperial Junction for railroad convenience, was
itself lower than the ancient sea-line where once the gulf had reached.
Rickard knew he could find shells at that desert station should he look
for them. He picked up his bag that the porter had thrown on the ground
and faced the rung-down curtain.
Its painted scene was a yellow station-house broiling under a desert
sun; a large water-tank beyond, and in the distance the inevitable
cardboard mountains, like property scene-shifts, flat and thin in their
unreal hues of burnished pink and purple. A dusty accommodation train
was backing and switching, picking up the empty refrigerator cars to
carry into the valley for the early melon growers.
Already, the valley had asserted its industrial importance; the late
rampage of the Colorado had made it spectacular. Those who would pay
little attention to the opening of a new agricultural district in the
heart of a dreaded desert opened their ears to the vagary of the river
which had sportively made of a part of that desert an inland sea.
Scientists were rushing their speculations into print; would the sea
dwindle, by evaporation, as it had done before? Or would the overflow
maintain the paradoxical sea?
The flood signs were apparent. There, cracks had split the desert
sand; here, water fissures had menaced the track; and to the south, a
fringe of young willows hid the path of the Colorado’s debouch. The
burning desert sands cried out a sharp antithesis. The yellow railway
house bore all the parched signs of a desert station. Even the women,
with children in their arms, did not attempt to sit in the stifling
waiting-room; they preferred to stand in the glare.
The men crowding the platform wore the motley of a new country. In
Tucson, the uniform of the male citizens, with the exception of those
reckless ones who found inevitably that lotus is a liquid, was the
wilted pretense of a gentle civilization; despondent ducks and khakis
and limp collars. Imperial Junction marked the downfall of the collar.
The rest of the composite costume was irregular, badly laundered and
torn, faded and sunburned; the clothes of the desert soldier. Rickard
saw buttonless shirts, faded overalls, shabby hats--the sombrero
of Mexico. The faces under the broad-brimmed hats made a leaping
impression upon him of youth and eagerness. He noted a significant
average of intelligence and alertness. This was not the indolent group
of men which makes a pretense of occupation whenever a train comes in!
“Going in?” asked a voice at his ear. A pair of faded eyes set in a
young-old face, whether early withered or well-preserved he had not
time to determine, was staring at him.
He assured his interlocutor that he was going in. His mood isolated the
phrase; its significance vastly different from “going on.”
“Buying?”
“I think not.”
“It is a good time to buy.” Rickard suspected a real-estate agent. “For
land is low, rock-bottom prices on account of the uneasiness about the
river. People are afraid. They want to see the company redeem some of
its promises before they come in; and the company isn’t in much of a
hurry.”
Rickard raised his chin that his collar might bind his suffering neck
in a different place, and then asked what company he referred to.
The young-old face with the faded eyes looked at him in surprise. “The
D. R. Company, Desert Reclamation, which brought us all here.”
“Scamps?” The newcomer’s survey of the long line of naked mountains and
lean lands that formed the neck of the valley gave a snub of casualness
to the question.
“No. Fools!” The answer was as swift as a bullet. “Though some people
think them worse than that. I don’t go so far, I’m willing to say
they’ve tried. I’ll say that much. But they haven’t the know-how.”
“I’d rather be a scamp than a fool,” ventured Rickard. “It’s more
progressive.” He drew a look of amused recognition from the faded
valley man.
“Newspaper man? No? They are always coming in now since the break. I’m
usually able to spot them.”
“You’ve spotted wrong once,” smiled Rickard, picking up his bag. The
engine was backing the made-up train toward the station.
The crowd pushed forward. “No offense, I hope,” called the sun-dried
face over the heads of the press. “I’ve done a little of it myself.”
The window seats, Rickard could see, were filled before the cars
halted, by the experienced ones who had not waited for the train to be
made up. In the scramble, he spied a vacant window on the sunny side,
and made for it. Seated, he looked for his talkative friend who was
already opening office farther down the car. A stranger dropped into
the seat beside him.
Every window in the car was open. Each red-velveted, dusty seat was
filled. A strong desert wind was blowing sand into their faces,
discoloring the seats and covering the floor.
The engineer turned to his companion who was coughing.
“Do you mind this window being open?”
“I’d mind if it were not. It’s always bad at the Junction. When we get
into the cultivated country, you will see what the valley will be like
when it is all planted. The wind is not bad when it blows over grain or
alfalfa. It is the desert dust that nags one.” He coughed again. “Going
in?”
Rickard said he was going in.
“Are you going to settle in the valley?” The inquisitor was a man of
about fifty, Rickard decided, with a desert tan of apparent health. His
face was clear-cut and intelligent.
“I don’t know.”
“Just looking the country over?”
“You might call it that.”
“Go slow,” admonished his companion. “Don’t let yourself be carried
away. It is a wonderful country. But go slow. It’s the ones who expect
to make millions the first year that become the worst knockers. Go
slow, I always tell them. Go slow.”
“It’s not a good time to buy then?”
“Not so good as it was ten years ago! But land is cheaper than it was a
year back. In some districts you can buy a good farm for a ticket back
home, the farmers are so discouraged. Cold feet.” The slang sounded
oddly, somehow. The man’s voice had the cultivated precision of the
purist. “Cold feet. The river’s chilled them. The valley’s losing faith
in the company.”
“What company?” inquired Rickard again.
“There’s but one company to the valley, the one that brought them here,
the D. R. They don’t call the railroad The Company. They have nothing
to do with that problem. They won’t recognize that problem! It’s had
hard luck from the first, the D. R. At the very start, the wrong man
got hold of it. Sather, the first promoter, was a faker; a pretty
thorough faker. The company reorganized, but it’s been in bad odor with
the public ever since.”
Rickard’s eyes left the deep cuts in the land made by the ravaging
waters, and looked at his companion.
“I thought Estrada was the original promoter?” he inquired.
“Estrada’s a recent comer--oh, you mean the general. He started
the ball rolling; that was all. Bad health, following the Bliss
complication, tied his hands. Did you ever hear the story of the way he
colonized his grant?”
Rickard shook his head.
“It is a good story. I wrote it once for the _Sun_. I was out here
then. That was before the doctors sent me, giving me a year if I
lived anywhere else. Reclamation was being talked even then. Estrada
picked up the enthusiasm, and got hold of a big slice of land. The
terms of his purchase were a few cents an acre, fifteen, if I remember
correctly, and a hundred colonists to be established the first year.
Estrada sent in his hundred families, and did not think it necessary to
mention to the government that he was paying the so-called colonists
a dollar a day. They earned their dollar--it was big money in those
days, two dollars Mexican--by digging a canal. When the inspector came
along--there were the hundred families. After he was safely out of the
country, Estrada paid and dismissed his colonists. He had the mile
or so of canal and his tract besides. What’s the difference between
fifteen cents and a hundred dollars? Multiply that by a million and a
half, and you can see what those colonists were to bring to Estrada.
Though they say he died poor.”
The man in the seat ahead was listening. His head was leonine, his body
shriveled. Rickard could see on the neck the ancient burns that had
spared the magnificent head. The rest of the man had been shriveled and
twisted into terrible deformity. Rickard found himself puzzling over
the accident with its accompanying miracle. There was not a scar on the
powerful face.
“Estrada’s business methods were then not different from Sather’s and
Hardin’s!” It was a deep rich organ.
“Oh, you can’t class Hardin with Sather,” protested Rickard’s
companion. “Sather _used_ Hardin. Hardin’s honesty can not be
questioned. It’s not money he’s after. His whole heart is in this
reclamation scheme.”
“Hardin’s a false alarm,” growled the owner of the massive head. “He
makes promises. He never keeps them.”
The older man’s smile was tolerant. “Barton,” he indicated, “is the
president of the water companies. And if you want to hear about a rogue
and a scoundrel, ask the water companies their opinion of Hardin.”
“Well, what sort of a hole has he got us into?” demanded the other with
heat.
“Hardin’s in a hole himself.”
Rickard found himself admiring the distinction in the face beside him.
The sharp-pointed beard in which the gray was appearing gave a dog-like
keenness to the well-modeled head, but the sharpness of the features,
of the long slender nose, the long chin and thin eyebrow lines were
offset, curiously, by the mildness, the resignation, in the steady gray
eyes. If fires had ever burned in them, there were but cold ashes left.
“No one seems to remember that he crucified himself to save the valley.
I’ve a great respect for Thomas Hardin.”
“Yes?” returned Rickard, whose liking had been captured by the speaker.
The impression of distinction sharpened. The stranger wore a laundered,
pongee silk shirt, open at the neck, but restricted by a brown silk
tie; and it was trimly belted. There were but two neckties in the
entire car, and they occupied, Rickard observed, the same seat.
“The beginning of the canal system.”
Rickard looked out upon a flat one-toned country, marked off in
rectangles by plows and scrapers. Farther south, those rectangles were
edged by young willows. He fancied he could see, even at that distance,
the gleam of water.
It was the passing of the desert. A few miles back, he had seen the
desert in its primitive nakedness which not even cactus relieved. He
was passing over the land which men and horses were preparing for
water. And he could see the land where water was.
“That was the way Riverside looked when I first saw it,” commented the
other man who wore a tie. “Come out on the rear platform. We can see
better.”
Rickard followed to the back of the dust-swept stifling car. The
glare on the platform was intense. He stood watching the newly made
checker-board of a country slip past him. Receding were the two lines
of gleaming steel rails which connected and separated him from the
world outside. He was “going in.” Not in Mexico even had he had such a
feeling of ultimate remoteness. The mountains, converging perspectively
toward the throat of the valley, looked elusive and unreal in their
gauze draperies of rose and violet. The tender hour of day was clothing
them with mystery, softening their sharp outlines. They curtained the
world beyond. Rickard felt the suspense of the next act.
It was a torpid imagination, he thought, which would not quicken
over this conquest of the desert. East of the tract, men and teams
were preparing the newly-furrowed ground for the seed. The curved
land-knives were breaking up the rich earth mold into ridges of soft
soil as uncohesive and feathery as pulverized chocolate. It was the
dark color of the chocolate of commerce, this silt which had been
pilfered from the states through which the vagrant river wandered. The
smell of the upturned earth, sweetly damp, struck against his nostrils.
Rickard indulged a minute of whimsical fancy; this was California
territory over which his train was passing, but the soil, that dark
earth those blades were crumbling, was it not the tribute of other
states, of despoiling Wyoming, of ravishing Colorado and Arizona?
To the west, new squares were being leveled and outlined. Shrubby
rectangles were being cleared of their creosote-bush and tough mesquit.
Compared with other countries, the preparation for planting was the
simplest. Horses were dragging over the ground a railroad rail bent
into a V angle which pulled the bushes by the roots and dragged them
out of the way. Beyond, farther west, could be seen the untouched
desert. The surface for many miles was cracked by water-lines, broken
and baked into irregular sand-cakes; the mark of sand which has been
imprisoned by water and branded by swift heat.
Close by, men were putting in with care the seed that was to quicken
the river silt. They were passing a square where the green tips of the
grain were piercing the ground. Now, they were abreast of a field of
matured alfalfa over which the wind raced gratefully. Desert and grain
field; death and life! The panorama embraced the whole cycle.
“Excuse me. I did not hear you.” His new acquaintance had been
endeavoring to get his attention.
The valley man tried to pitch his voice above the rattle of the train,
but the effort ended in spasmodic coughing. The attacks left him weak
and gasping.
“Better go back,” suggested Rickard. He followed the stranger who waved
him to the seat by the open window. He busied himself with the sliding
landscape, withholding his sympathy. He could hear the man drawing in
long deep breaths. “Poor devil! He’s had his sentence!” he gathered.
After a few minutes, the other leaned over his shoulder, his hand
waving toward the passing mountains. “Those are the Superstition
Mountains you can see over yonder. An unusually apt name.”
“Yes?”
“An accidental hit of some tired traveler,” hazarded the colorless
lips. “He had probably been listening to the legends of some unusually
garrulous Indian; could not find the germ of universal religion in the
simple creed, so he called it,--the nameless mountains--‘Superstition.’
I’ve always wished I knew his own name, that we might credit him, this
late, with the inspiration. Have you ever thought,” he deflected, “how
many familiar names are unsponsored? Take the Colorado, for instance.
Melchior Diaz called it the Rio del Tizon; Alarçon, for diplomatic
reasons, gave it Rio de la Buena Guia; Onate changed it to the Rio
Grande de Buena Esperanza, and it was Kino, the Jesuit padre, who
christened it in memory of the blessed martyrs Rio de los Martires. Who
called it first the Colorado? History shuts her lips. And who will ever
call it anything else?”
Rickard was attracted by the man’s educated inflection, as well as by
his musing. “Why Superstition?” he queried.
“Why is it good, you mean? That pile of dark rock stands as a monument
to an effete superstition. It is the gravestone for a gigantic mistake.
Why, it was only the grossest ignorance that gave to the desert the
label of ‘bad lands.’ The desert is a condition, not a fact. Here you
see the passing of the condition, the burial of the superstition. Are
you interested in irrigation?”
Rickard was not given to explain the degree of interest his profession
involved, for the stranger drew a painful breath, and went on.
“Of course you are, if you are a western man. You are, I think?”
The engineer said that he was, by choice.
“Irrigation is the creed of the West. Gold brought people to this
country; water, scientifically applied, will keep them here. Look at
this valley. What was it a few years ago? Look at Riverside. And we are
at the primer stage only. We are way behind the ancients in information
on that subject. I learned at school, so did you, that some of the
most glorious civilizations flourished _in spite of the desert_ which
surrounded them. That was only half a truth. They were great _because_
of it! Why did the Incas choose the desert when their strength gave
them the choice of the continent of South America? Why did the Aztecs
settle in the desert when they might easily have preempted the watered
regions? Then there are the Carthaginians, the Toltecs, the Moors. And
one never forgets Egypt!”
“For protection,” Rickard gave the slighted question an interested
recognition. “Was that not what we were taught at school? The forest
held foes, animal and human. Those nations grew to their strength and
power in the desert, by virtue of its isolation.”
“Superstition!” retorted the man with the pointed beard. “We are babes
at the breast measured by the wisdom of the men who settled Damascus,
or compared with the Toltecs, or those ancient tribes who settled in
Northern India. They recognized the value of aridity. They knew its
threefold worth.”
“An inherent value?” demanded the college-bred man, turning from the
window.
“An inherent value,” declared the exponent of aridity.
“Will you tell me just what you mean?”
“Not in one session! Look yonder. That’s Brawley. When I came through
here, ten years ago, I could have had my pick of this land at
twenty-five cents an acre. They were working at this scheme then--on
paper. I was not alive to the possibilities then; I had not yet lived
in Utah!”
The train was slowing up by a brand-new, yellow-painted station. There
were several dusty automobiles waiting by the track, a few faded
surreys, and the inevitable, country hotel bus. The platform was
swarming with alert vigorous faces, distinctly of the American type.
The man in the seat beside him asked Rickard if he observed the general
average of intelligence in the faces of the crowd below. Rickard
acknowledged that he had been struck by that, not only here, but at
Imperial Junction, where he had waited for the train.
“There is a club in the valley, lately started, a university club which
admits as members those who have had at least two years of college
training. The list numbers three hundred already. The first meeting was
held last week in an empty new store in Imperial. If it had not been
for the setting, we might have been at Ann Arbor or Palo Alto. The
costumes were a little motley, but the talk sounded like home.”
The dust, blowing in through the car doors, brought on another fit of
strangling. Rickard turned again to the window, to the active scene
which denied the presence of desert beyond.
“The doctors say it will have to be the desert always for me.”
The stranger tapped his chest significantly. “But it is exile no
longer--not in an irrigated country. For the reason of irrigation! It
is the progressive man, the man with ideas, or the man who is willing
to take them, who comes into this desert country. If he has not had
education, it is forced upon him. I saw it worked out in Utah. I was
there several years. Irrigation means cooperation. That is, to me, the
chief value of aridity.”
The wind, though still blowing through the car and ruffling the train
dust, was carrying less of grit and sand. To the nostrils of Rickard
and his new acquaintance, it brought the pleasing suggestion of grassy
meadows, of willow-lined streams and fragrant fields.
“It is the accepted idea that this valley is attracting a superior
class of men because of its temperance stand. It is the other way
round. The valley stood for temperance because of the sort of men who
had settled here, the men of the irrigation type.”
The engineer’s ear criticized “irrigation type.” He began to suspect
that he had picked up a crank.
“The desert offers a man special advantages, social, industrial and
agricultural. (I would invert that arrangement if I made over that
sentence!) It is no accident that you find a certain sort of man here.”
“I suppose you mean that the struggle necessary to develop such a
country, under such stern conditions, develops of necessity, strong
men?” evolved Rickard. “Oh, yes, I believe that, too.”
“Oh, more than that. It is not so much the struggle, as the necessity
for cooperation. The mutual dependence is one of the blessings of
aridity.”
“One of the blessings of aridity!” echoed his listener. “You are a
philosopher.” He had not yet touched the other’s thought at the spring.
“You might as well call me a socialist because I praise irrigation in
that it stands for the small farm unit,” retorted the valley man. “That
is one of its fiats; the small unit. It is the small farm that pays.
That fact brings many advantages. What is the charm of Riverside? It
comes to me always like the unreal dream of the socialist come true.
It is a city of farms, of small farms, where a man may make his living
off his ten acres of oranges, or lemons; and with all the comforts and
conveniences of a city within reach, his neighbors not ten miles off!
A farmer in Riverside, or in any irrigated community, does not have to
postpone living for himself or his family, until he can sell the farm!
He can go to church, can walk there; the trolley car which passes his
door takes him to a public library, or the opera-house. His children
ride to school. His wife does not need to be a drudge. The bread wagon
and the steam-laundry wagon stop at her door.”
Rickard observed that perhaps he did not know anything about irrigation
after all! He had not thought of it before in its sociological
relation, but merely as it touched his profession.
“Not going into soil values, for that is a long story,” began the
older man, “irrigation is the answer which science gives to the
agriculturist who is impatient of haphazard methods. Irrigation is not
a compromise, as so many believe who know nothing about it. It is a
distinct advantage over old-fashioned methods.”
“I am one of those who always thought it a compromise,” admitted the
engineer.
“Better call rain a compromise,” retorted the irrigationist. “The
man who irrigates gives water to the tree which needs it; rain
nourishes one tree, and drowns out another. Irrigation is an insurance
policy against drought, a guarantee against floods. The farmer who
has once operated an irrigated farm would be as impatient were he
again subjected to the caprice of rain as a housewife would be were
she compelled to wait for rain to fill her wash-tub. There is no
irregularity or caprice about irrigation.”
“Wonder how the old fellow picked it all up?” mused Rickard with
disrespect. Aloud he said--“You were speaking of the value of the soil?”
“Look at the earth those plows are turning over. See how rich and
friable it is, how it crumbles? You can dig for hundreds of feet
and still find that sort of soil, eight hundred feet down! It is
disintegrated rock and leaf mold brought in here in the making of a
delta. Heavy rainfalls are rare here, though we have had them, in
spite of popular opinion. Were we to have frequent rains, the chemical
properties, which rain-farmers must buy to enrich their worn-out
soils, would be leached out, drained from the soil. I can’t make
this comprehensive, but I’ve a monograph on desert soil. If you are
interested, I’ll send it to you.”
“I should like it--immensely,” assented the engineer, still amused.
“It explains the choice of the Aztecs, of the Incas, of Carthaginians,
the Moors,” observed the stranger. “They chose the desert, not in
spite of the soil, but because of it. I doubt if they were awake to
the social advantages of the system, but it was their cooperative
brotherhood that helped them to their glory. We are centuries behind
them. Look what the acceptance of the superstition has already cost
California! The Mexican Boundary Survey Commission did its work pretty
thoroughly until familiarity with the bad lands they were plodding
through confirmed the old superstition. The international line was
to cut across at the mouth of Hardy’s Colorado. When the surveyors
struck the Gila, they assumed it was the river they wanted it to be;
anyway, it did not matter; it was ‘bad land,’ where even the Indians
were thinning, where only scorpions and rattlers could flourish. The
line was drawn there, and California lost all that area of desert land.
However, a lady got her silk gown!”
The last words were as spice to a tasteless pudding. “A silk gown!” It
sounded piquant.
“That’s a page of unwritten history,” said the stranger, rising. “I’m
getting out here; Imperial. If you come up to Imperial, look me up.
Brandon’s my name. I’ve no card these days!”
“There are several things I want to hear from you,” answered Rickard,
rising also, and following the pointed beard to the platform. “I’ll be
sure to look you up. Mine’s Rickard.”
“There’s my residence,” waved Brandon. “That tent over yonder?” All of
Imperial was easily seen from the car platform. “No, that is a canvas
house. There is a great difference,--in distinction!”
Rickard liked the nicety of speech which to the critical ear is as
pleasing as wit. He watched Brandon step off the car, saw him greeted
and surrounded by a knot of station watchers.
“Hello, Brandon,” Rickard could hear them hail him. “Back home,
Brandon?” “Treated you well at Palm Springs?”
“Poor devil,” he thought again. “Trying Palm Springs for his cough.
Wonder who the old duck is. Country newspaper, I fancy. He did say he
had reported for the _Sun_.”
The young-old man who had spoken to him at the Junction, pushed past
with some bundles. He stopped when he saw Rickard.
“I get out here. If you come to Imperial, hunt me up. I run the _Star_,
the only newspaper in the valley. Glad to meet you.”
“Disposing of my theory about Brandon,” smiled the engineer, going
back into the dusty car. He was interested enough to lean over and ask
Barton who was the man called Brandon. They could see him from the
windows, still surrounded, still smiling that sweet ascetic smile.
“Captain Brandon they call him. He’s one of the old settlers. Was with
Powell, on the second expedition down the river. Then was one of the
big men on the _Sun_.” He tapped his chest significantly. “Bad; came
West, folks thought to die. There’s lots of grit in the old fellow.
He’s written a history of the Colorado River that reads like a novel,
they say. I’ve never read it. I never read books. I’m lucky if I can
get time for a newspaper, and I don’t often get a newspaper.”
Rickard observed that “Captain Brandon” seemed to be well informed on
the subject of irrigation.
“That’s his hobby, that and desert soil. He’s writing a book on
irrigation, not half done yet, but it’s already sold. He’s published a
pamphlet on desert soil. Oh, he knows his subject.”
“College man?”
“Harvard, I think, and then either an English or German university.
I’ve heard, but I’ve forgotten by now. He’s lived in the West,
everywhere they’ve tried irrigation; in Utah, Colorado, California,
and he’s been to Egypt and Syria and all the classic places. Studying,
but he came back again, nearly dead. He goes up to Palm Springs every
little while to get toned up, taken care of. Poor devil!”
The breeze, which was now entering the car windows, had blown over
clover-leafed fields. Its message was sweet and fresh. Rickard could
see the canals leading off like silver threads to the homes and farms
of the future; “the socialists’ dream come true!” Willows of two or
three years’ growth outlined the banks. Here and there a tent, or a
ramada, set up a brave defiance against the hard conditions of the land
it was invading. Rickard leaned out of the window, and looked back, up
the valley which was dominated by the range now wrapping around itself
gauzy iridescent draperies.
“The monument to an effete superstition!” he repeated. “That wasn’t a
bad idea. I hope he won’t forget to send me his monograph.”