California Exposures by Richard White

Author:Richard White [Richard White]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393243079
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

COTTON

Cotton bales, Corcoran, California

The photograph is blues and whites with dark bands in the foreground and background; it is as much geometrical as representational. Fittingly for a photograph of cotton, it mixes the natural and the industrial. The plastic cylinders standing in ranks in a parking lot in Corcoran lack all appendages but still seem faintly human. They are cotton bales, each stamped with the B of the J. G. Boswell Company.1

For such a secretive company, J. G. Boswell does like to brand its products and its land. Stamping cotton with a name indicates who produced it. Stamping land—usually with “No Trespassing” signs—marks who owns it. The bales of cotton and the land mark a past more complicated than private enterprise.

Jesse took the photograph in 2015, which turned out to be the year California farmers planted the lowest amount of cotton since the 1920s. Shifting markets and nature—in the form of drought and whiteflies—dictated the switch.2 But cotton is hardly gone from Corcoran.

Three years later, in February 2018, we drove through the heart of the old lake bed, going from Lemoore to Corcoran. We traveled along 19th Avenue, a street with virtually no buildings, and eventually went east on Pueblo Avenue. Workers have reinforced some of the levees, which rise like medieval ramparts. The road ran atop the levees and then dropped back down into the old lake bed. Small drifts of cotton lay like a light snowfall on the sides of the roads.

The landscape looks like what it is—the remnants of a vast inland sea from which the water has vanished. The place is as spooky as it is private. It is as if the Red Sea has parted, but when Pharaoh’s army appears, the water will come back with a vengeance. Drilling rigs and pumps were bringing up water and depositing it in the ditches that ran by the road. Off in the distance, farm equipment moved through the fields looking like ships on a dirt sea. What appeared from miles away to be farms or ranches were field stations, collections of trailers, metal buildings, and fuel tanks. There was no doubt where we were. When a farm road turned west, we saw a sign that sums up much of the western Tulare Basin. “You are entering private property, turn back now.” This was followed by a series of prohibitions and threats so loved by property owners in the San Joaquin Valley and its delta. The symbol on the sign is the same B that marked the cotton bales.

We followed Whitely Avenue into Corcoran. On the outskirts of Corcoran, orchards have encroached on the lake bed, reminding me of bathers testing the waters. In the middle of town, a banner hung above the street. It said, “J. G. Boswell now hiring.” But compared to the thousands who worked these fields before the big machines, Boswell employs few.3

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