Modesto: Home Town Memories

Modesto is just an average place located in the geographic center of California sixty miles east of San Francisco and 90 miles south of the capital Sacramento. People who come there for a stay or a long visit seem to get sucked in for the long haul unable to leave. Not that it is a bad place; it is just sort of a non-place. The motto of the city is “On the way to everywhere.” That is because it is on the way to Yosemite, the mountains to ski, north or south in the valley, to the bay area… on the way to everywhere. So where does that put the town? Not quite there, but on the way with a lot of people whose cars broke down or who ran out of money, or just got sick of traveling.

Back in the day, Modesto was an excellent farming town with actual farmers, and the people who support the farmers and that was about all. The city grew to about 20,000 in 1920 and stayed about that sized until about the 1950’s. Modesto had the same families and farmers and church goers for decades and decades. Everyone knew everyone in the town. This was the center of the live in the whole county. Everything a farmer could need was found in the town of Modesto. Its motto back then was different and was written on an illuminated archway that spanned the two lanes of the main street: “Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health.” The pure water from the mountains in the cannels, the river and the ground water pumped up in wells provided the source of the wealth of the farmers, which gave the city the contentment of life at a farmer’s pace and the health of good living in a beautiful setting. The water was so pure in the canals that everyone swam in them like they were mountain streams brought to hot the valley for our cooling off in the summer. The well water was so pure that it was some of the finest in the world and eventually brought wet industry to the area. Kids swam and played in the rivers and old men fished. It’s not that way now. Canals are a swill of fertilizer and farm runoff. The ground water is polluted with pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals from decades of abuse of the land trying to make more money off an acre to avoid having to sell out to the developers. The rivers have been dammed and used as wasted disposal conduits so people don’t go near the water now and there aren’t many fish left to catch anymore. Time changes things. It happened in my life time.

Modesto is far better than Turlock the competition in the valley just south about 12 miles down highway 99. Turlock has no river or water except that which is pumped up from deep wells or the water that flows through canals that come from the reservoirs in the hills and are used to irrigate the farmland that surrounds the town. Actually the water in the canals comes from the Modesto Reservoir so Turlock gets most of its agricultural water from its nemesis and has to pay for it in taxes to the larger town. Modesto does have water (the canals and well water as does Turlock) and two “rivers” that cross the town: the Tuolumne River and “Dry Creek” a small river that isn’t really dry and in fact floods the town occasionally. Places with water have power and what is needed to keep things alive like ground water close to the surface so the trees don’t die and the people can access water easily and cheaply. Turlock only has dirt (rich prime agricultural farm land dirt) and canals. Deep down surrounding Turlock one can find ground water which has to be poured on any trees the town has to keep them alive since the roots of the trees can’t reach the ground water and it is just too hot and dry for trees to grow there.

Turlock does have a train track and it does have turkeys. It is the turkey capital of the world where more turkeys are processed than any place in the world. The state university located there is nick named, “Turkey Tech” because of the turkey connection of the town. Turlock is full of red necks, turkey ranchers, and people who like to beat their wives or children for sport; well, maybe that is a bit strong, there are only a few red necks there. Modesto got it all and Turlock got what was left over after all the good stuff was taken. And so the fight would go between the two towns of roughly equal size until the 1950’s when cheap water made Modesto more attractive to “wet” industry and allowed for the beginning of growth, lots of growth.

“Wet” industry is industry that requires a lot of water such as canneries and other food processing. These facilities use millions of gallons of water a day. Cheap water in the center of the food raising area allowed the country to enjoy cheap canned and processed food even today. With the expansion of the canneries came the workers who were not farmers, but sort of seasonal agriculturally related workers. These people had a connection with the land. Along with these people came grocery people, car salesmen, movie theater workers, and all the infrastructure of a bigger town. This made the Modesto more attractive to other businesses which brought more people which brought more people to service the people. Land was cheap, houses were cheap, water and taxes were cheap and suddenly that was noticed by people a long way a way in the Bay Area who could not afford to live there because of the cost of housing, taxes, and food. The people spilled over the hills and flooded Modesto in a quest to get a larger home, a better quality of life (along with a 4 hour round trip commute to work), better schools and all the things that the valley and Modesto offered. Modesto exploded with farmers selling out and orchards being pushed down to make room for more houses for people working someplace else. Suddenly Modesto was a bedroom community of the Bay Area and growth was unstoppable. The community did not have to support all the people moving in with the jobs in the area. Farming was not important anymore. People resented the stench of cows or the noise of the sprayers in the orchards.

Modesto has sprawled into something it can't be because there are not the resources there to support it. Modesto can not and should not have as many people there as it does now. The land in and around Modesto is prime agricultural farm land. There is only about 3% of the land on the whole planet that is prime agricultural farm land. This land should be used to raise food. People should live where the food is not able to be raised. Most of Modesto was not there when I grew up. There were farms, orchards, crops, farmers and workers. In high school I could ride my bicycle around the whole town easily in a short afternoon. I swam in the canals and ate peaches, apricots, oranges, grapefruit, walnuts, almonds, nectarines, plums, off the trees in the orchards (and undoubtedly got poisoned from the pesticides and stuff, but didn’t care). I foraged in the vineyards eating grapes, picking cherries, eating boysenberries, strawberries, and other fruit without worrying if I would get caught or if it was stealing because I knew most of the people that owned the farms and they knew me and my family. A lot of the farmers sold out to make a quick profit selling their land to speculators. It is cheaper to raise a house and sell it for a profit than to raise peaches year after year. You get more per acre for a subdivision than for tomatoes in the short term. What is going to happen when the sprawl reaches from one end of the central valley to the other? At one point the California Central Valley raised half or more of all the food eaten in the US. Where will that food be raised? Excellent land, excellent water, excellent weather. Get rid of the people, they are ruining the place which could feed the world because the people who lived there loved to raise the food the world needed.

I guess that when we as a country or planet get to that point, the point where people need to think about where to raise food, when it becomes important to protect the agricultural land, the land will still be there under the streets, malls and houses of Modesto and now Turlock and the other sprawling towns of the Central Valley. I fought long and hard with Ecology Action and other groups to help make Modesto a sustainable community. It didn't work. It didn't even delay the importation of so many people to settle on the land that use to feed them, that food had to be imported to feed the people now living on prime agricultural farm land in a four bedroom house with a three car garage, a lawn and a fenced in back yard for Shep the dog. What do those people do that live in Modesto? They wash the pants of the people who own the stores, who sell things to the people who wash the pants. Some of them go off to other places to make money so they can afford to have their pants washed and buy the stuff in the stores. What do these people who live in Modesto eat? Food imported from Mexico, Chile, or other parts of the US. Does that seem dumb? It does to me.

A town that is supported by people who depend on the land for their life and survival is a place that people feel invested in. People who are so invested in a place think about the land as if it is the source of their life because it brings in their food, their income, and their livelihood. These are the people who will usually fight to keep the land as it is and allow it to be used in the way they understand and have been doing for a long time. The kind of a place where people feel a connection to the land is one that people take pride in and take care of because they see that it takes care of them. The land and the people sustain themselves if they work together. Everyone has a stake in it. The land around Modesto sustained not only the people who lived there, but also most of the rest of the country. This city was important to the rest of the world because it fed so many people and yet it was not even known by anyone 50 miles outside of the area. This town was a joke to most people from cities larger than this “hick town”. Modesto was not even on the radar of the rest of the country. We (the people of Modesto who lived her forever) raised so much of the food of the world that it was shocking to us to hear that the people who moved in and built houses on the farm land were shocked that the amount of food was reduced and had to be imported. Well, duhaaaaa. Think about it! People complaining about the cows making a stink because of a milking barn near them; people complaining about the noise of the machinery in the middle of the night. All of these people living in the middle of the agricultural area where cows that are milked and crops are sprayed in the night happen so that food can be grown and raised so they can eat.

We use to have these debates and discussions about land use as I remember when I was young. The people talking were the people who actually had a stake in the situation, not a commuter who worked in San Francisco or some other community. The situations were worked out to the satisfaction of the people who were discussing the problem and the problem was solved so the land could be maintained in the best use condition and provide for the most people without damaging the long term needs of a farming community. When there were only a few people who had a stake in the problem, they solved the problem. I remember my parents who were not farmers but a carpenter and a house wife, discussing these problems with the other peoples and coming up with solutions to the problems of land use in the town and those solutions were implemented. We were involved in all the politics of the community and it was just at the family table with my grandparents and relatives and my parents friends because they were the people who ran the city and the county. Then the sprawl started to happen and it started to move all over the valley and control of the land moved to the hands of people who cared about money now, not the long range vision.

Now Sacramento is merging into Stockton which is 50 miles south, and Stockton is merging into Modesto and so on down the valley until there is one big city from Bakersfield to Redding. Too many people living on the best land and no one respecting this land. Too many people living a frantic life to sustain a way of life that can not be sustained more than a few generations without someplace to raise food to feed them. What happens when energy becomes in short supply? Food from Mexico and South America will not be affordable because it will cost too much to ship. What happens when people in the US can not afford the food grown in California because there is so little land left to raise it? That is not a good scenario to think about. The valley can grow so much food because the land is so good.

The valley is a very special place, but not a special place for the numbers of people who live there now. Most of them do not even understand where they live. When I was young we use to go visit my uncle in San Jose. We would stop along the way and buy fruit at the fruit stands. The bay area, San Jose area, now Silicon Valley, was mostly orchards, farms, fields, fruit, farmers... By the time I was in high school there were no more farms in San Jose just houses and people and factories and businesses of people washing the pants of the people who owned the stores who sold things to the people who washed the pants. Smog, crime, strangers, frantic life. People are not invested in the land or the environment except for their own little piece of turf. A bigger picture needs to happen in the minds of the ones who have power to change the future.

When I was seven years old Disneyland opened up. My dad did not want to go there the first year because he thought it would be too full and too crowed so he did not consider going there that first year 1956. We went there the second year. The park was surrounded by orange groves and patches of farms here and there and lots of new motels my dad was happy to see because they were competing with each other and keeping the price down. The only orange trees you see now are painted on cartons of orange juice imported from god knows where. A tree could not grow in that urban area that was taken over by the Disney corporation and eaten up by asphalt not food crops the world need.

Sprawl is greed: Immediate gratification with no vision of the future. One Native American leader once said that decisions should be made with the seventh generation in mind: How will this decision effect the seventh generation from now? We do not have that kind of vision now. We don’t seem to look five years down the road.

It hurts me to see Modesto now. The glaring sun off the rooftops, the asphalt, and off the cars that pass. Modesto once had a law that every lot had to have trees in them, big trees, and lots of trees. Modesto had more trees than people. I could cross the town in the summer in the shade, from Davis high school to the airport almost ten miles on a bike. Outside the town the land was covered with orchards of peach trees, further out walnuts, almonds and berry vines. Grapes were farther out. Only towards the foot hills of the coast range and up towards Oakdale were there fields of alfalfa and dairy farms with no trees because trees can't grow in the hardpan near the surface. In February the whole valley would smell of blossoms from the peaches and the almonds. When the almond blossoms fell the whole valley was white like a snowfall with mists of pink from the peach blossoms. As the spring time heat started to become the hot of summer, the leaves on the trees would come out providing shade wherever you were in town, providing the cooling that trees do from evaporating water. In heat of the summer the smell the ripening peaches in the orchards spread into the town and could be smelled when walking down the street in the evening, maybe even walking out to an orchard to pick a couple of the ripe freestone peaches. In the fall the leaves in the street would be so deep because there were so many big trees; kids could burrow through them like mice under a snowfall. When the city crews came around to pick up the leaves they would make piles as big a warehouse and the kids would go crazy playing in these much to the distress of the workers who had to make sure they got all the kids out before they scooped up the foliage and put it in trucks. In the fog of the fall and winter trees were there to keep the dense fog from taking over everything. The fog formed a canopy over the tops of the protective trees reaching down with fingers here and there all the way to the ground, but not able to push down and smother everything as it did outside the town. This was a time to play in the fog and live a life of imagination because anything could come out of the fog so dense the street was hidden from the front of the house.

Now people in the Modesto community are not invested in the land surrounding the town. Modesto has become a place to live not a way of life. It is sustainable like it is now only with extreme energy consumption at the expense of the whole environment. The easy energy is about to run out and then things will change. A lot of people will need to look at what they are doing and where they live. Most of the world is starving. They live on nothing. Here we are, fat cats, abusing what we have, flaunting it in their face by sitting on agricultural land and importing food from poor countries. We are saying that we will sustain our way of life at what ever it costs, even if it cost the poor people of the world their lives and the lives of their hungry children. It can’t go on like that. People in these poor countries will get pissed about this attitude. There are solutions and it is in sustainable living. We should be practicing sustainable living and learning how to sustain a way of life not use up ours and everyone else’s resources.

It is not venom that I am spouting. I am frustrated that I have not been able to direct a change towards a sustainable life in the place I lived for 45 years. The place my grandfather moved to in 1922 a young father working for the postal service. The place my mother was born and raised. My lifelong home has changed. I saw the agriculture leave what is now Silicon Valley and that only took about five years. It started to happen in Modesto and I tried to stop it and then tried to direct it. Nothing seemed to help stem the cycle of greed and immediate gratification. If you buy a house in Modesto at least plant a fruit tree and raise some tomatoes. If not you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Better yet, tear down your house and move out.