Another uplifting post about people and money

The New York Times makes great slide shows to accompany their articles which, incidentally, are wonderful ways to spend ungodly amounts of time lost in your computer screen. The front page (or rather, main page in these times of the widely-promised newspaper death) had an article on California's drought-economy 1-2 punch. It included a series of pictures in scenic Mendota and Firebaugh. Mendota, the famous terminus of the Delta-Mendota Canal, and Firebaugh, the famous suburb of Mendota.

I had to cut across the valley from 5 to 99 once, racing a van full of new student orientation counselors to a Berkeley informational meeting in Fresno. My boss was my navigator so I didn't think twice when he directed me onto the highway that DIDN'T go through Fresno. In his defense he kept me amply amused and didn't verbalize his understandable discomfort as we attempted to make up time and passed onion-filled trucks, doing 90 into on-coming traffic.

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Back to my vague point. The photos that accompanied this article could have been taken by a less careful student of Dorothea Lange. They were in color, seemed markedly less dusty and clearly lacked Lange's attempts at empathetic intimacy; but, the subjects seemed so familiar. People in a food line, people in front of a church (albeit a domed kilo-church), people in the stylistic-utilitarian dress of the human labor that makes California agri-business possible.

People. That's what it was. "Economy" and "business" lack people. Silver-gelatin print or not, a picture of a child in a food line in a church parking lot doesn't seem too different from a world inhabited by those facing away from the lens in "Migrant Mother." It shouldn't, considering the photos were taken less than 120 miles apart in a place where there is still money to be had from the labor of migrant mothers.

I wonder if it's the hoodies and plastic crates that make the two photos feel so distant despite the continuities. Perhaps they'd seem more akin if they had been taken in black and white. Maybe it's just that the people in the Times photo are Latin@s. It's probably because many Americans living in places unlike Firebaugh lack close family members or friends who have been forced to try and make ends meet in the thousands of American towns which are just like it.

Nonetheless, they're still fascinating photos. This is happening, and it's just off in the haze someplace West of 5 and East of 99.

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These are two great posts to start off a blog with, aren't they? And I didn't even get to the parts of the article in which the federal government announced that they're expecting "zero [water] allocation" from the Central Valley Project (CVP) this year and that the state is drastically limiting the water to be drawn from their canals (the State Water Project, or SWP).

Don't worry, I'm sure I'll get around to extolling the surprisingly lively color of golden poppies soon enough.