A ghost materialized in California’s Central Valley last winter. Its appearance in this vast farming district was reported by major news outlets around the country, with photojournalists trekking across fields and right up to the edge of a large body of water to take pictures. The images they published did not show a filmy creature rising out of the mist or a pale boat gliding across the lake. The ghost was the lake.
More than a dozen atmospheric rivers had dropped unprecedented amounts of rain over the entire length and breadth of California in the preceding months. Around the town of Corcoran, the ensuing floods refilled an ancient lakebed that had been drained by agricultural interests early in the 20th century. The inundation came to be known as “the ghost of Tulare Lake.”
By the time I arrived on the scene the rains had stopped, but a new threat had emerged: snowmelt. The Tule River drains snowpack from the Sierra Nevada mountains about 30 miles east of this area directly into the flood zone. Although this peaceful, muddy creek hardly looked like a threat while I was drawing, those of us who live in the American Southwest know how temperamental these waterways can be, and how fast their levels can rise, often to deadly effect. For millennia, it was these sources that fed the original Tulare Lake – the largest body of freshwater in the western United States. The lake teemed with life and sustained four tribes of Yokut Indians who called the place home. Members of the tribes who live nearby still memorialize Pa’ashi – their name for the lake – with song and ceremonial events.
White settlers systematically drained the lake and diverted the rivers that fed it into huge fields of cotton, wheat, alfalfa, row crops and orchards — like these almond groves I visited just as they were being irrigated. Sights like this drove home what a marvel of engineering the valley has become — and also how precarious that marvel has always been. The complex system of dams, canals, ditches and levees that make this land so productive has been fought over by growers, legislated by politicians, protested by environmentalists, and even, on occasion, blownup by saboteurs. These epic battles are a defining part of the Western mythos, and what happened here last winter has already added a memorable chapter to that story.
Nevertheless, when I drove three hours north from where I live in Los Angeles to the town of Corcoran, I assumed that referring to Tulare Lake as a “ghost” was just a colorful way of talking, shorthand for the reappearance of something that everyone thought was long gone. In the three days I spent in this small and historic town, though, the idea that this lake was a kind of ghost began to hit me much more personally, and that concept assumed forms I hadn’t counted on. This included, as one would expect of any ghost, the question of whether I’d be able to see it at all. Vast as it is, the flooding has all occurred on private property, and, since it’s a natural disaster, authorities have blocked all access routes precisely to keep people away.
Unlike credentialed journalists and their photographers — many of whom are equipped with drone technology — I didn’t have access to flooded farm buildings and expensive machinery submerged under 8 feet of water. I had to rely on word-of-mouth directions to furtive views of something I was not really allowed to see. Someone in town referred me to this location. In these outlying fields, I watched a frantic battalion of earthmoving equipment racing to raise a levee that separated the business and residential zone from the encroaching water.
But it wasn’t just the town residents who were at risk from the expanding flood. Corcoran is also home to a shadow population that no one really talks about, and no one ever sees. More than 9,000 inmates are incarcerated in a high-security state prison and an adjacent substance-abuse treatment facility. Many of the inmates are high-level offenders. The Tule River runs alongside the sprawling compound’s southern perimeter. If the levee that holds back that river were to fail, chaos would follow. By threatening this nerve center, it’s like the flood was casting light on a shameful family secret – some ugly thing that none of us wants to look at, but which always lurks in the background.
Social pressures – like the kind that prison embodies – define this region as much as the crops and canals. John Steinbeck dramatized them in his novel “The Grapes of Wrath” and Dorothea Lange visualized them in her classic Depression-era photographs. Artists like these had shaped my imagination, and they resurfaced now as spirit-guides leading me through this landscape. And not just artists: Cesar Chavez created the United Farm Workers of America not far from here, following the lead of earlier organizers who had led strikes in these fields against agribusiness. The migrant fieldworkers I watched one morning remain an under-acknowledged labor force to this day. Their plight still troubles the conscience of many people grappling with illegal immigration and the exploitation of a huge rural underclass.
I came into contact with that collective conscience once again at a town hall meeting one night. This time, the ghost was a restless spirit in the room, rousing the anxiety of residents and city managers who have to deal with a new set of ponderous riddles: Can people sell property while it’s underwater? Can government still collect taxes on it? Is it still “property” after it’s become a “lake”? Is a lake the same thing as a flood? The more logistical questions that people posed were no less elusive: If the water comes, will it rush in like a giant wave? Or will it accumulate like rainfall? How will we know if we need to evacuate? What if the roads are closed? What about people who can’t drive, or don’t have cars?
None of these concerns were unfounded. Much of the lake is as dangerous as any industrial waste site. Helicopters monitor it regularly. Airboats slash across its surface dismantling submerged electrical equipment or checking on tanks leaking fertilizer and pesticide into the water.
As twilight descended, though, I was surprised to watch that same scene become suffused with a haunting beauty. Returning wildlife invoked the Yokut tribes that subsisted on the original lake’s legendary bounty of clams, turtles, fish and fowl. It was easy to imagine the bordering fields of wheat turning back into the tule reeds that gave the place its name and that the Indians used to make boats. The tractors and combines of corporate agriculture were replaced by formations of waterfowl surveying the new terrain. Drowned barns and sheds began to look like the melancholy ruins of a lost civilization.
I thought I was going to Corcoran to observe a disaster that had destroyed property, wrecked livelihoods and threatened a major economy. But as I drove around the region and met the residents, I realized that what had also attracted me were the many myths being represented here. The myths appeared not just as the ghost of a lake, but as the ghosts of the Native Americans that had been dispossessed of that lake, the farmworkers whose strikes had been busted in these fields, the notorious criminals like Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan and Juan Corona who had all been imprisoned here, the bureaucrats and engineers who had redesigned an entire ecosystem, and the agricultural giants who had created some of the most productive farmland anywhere in the world. These last ones had bent nature to their will in this place, only to see nature unbend itself again, in ways that no one could stop and through intangible forces that, to me at least, felt more than a little super-natural.
