Coral has finished reading Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck in preparation for 11th grade Honors English.
A few years ago, during the 100th anniversary year of Steinbeck's birth, I read a number of his works and spent some time learning about the places and issues relevant to his writing. At the time I was living in the Central Valley of CA and had the opportunity to see and be aware of the vast agricultural system there. I drove by fields and orchards while following trucks laden with tomatoes and onions. I saw newly flooded rice fields that had been planted from the air. I saw giant fields of sunflowers all facing one direction on the way to the beach and misty lettuce fields in the Salinas valley on the way to Monterey. As I drove with my family to Disneyland, we passed cotton fields, citrus and nut orchards and fields of vegetables not recognizable from the car.
I saw news stories about the competition for water rights between farm concerns, urban centers and environmentalists. I read of crops being ruined by unseasonable rainstorms. I watched live footage of a levy break flooding field after field with salt water siphoned up the Sacramento River Delta from the San Francisco Bay.
I also drove on streets named after Cesar Chavez while regularly hearing reports of the difficult circumstances and sometimes exploitation of immigrant farm laborers, especially illegal laborers. I saw workers in the fields, bent over in the sun. I watched shoppers at a local discount grocer late in the evening whom I suspected were immigrant laborers. They came in family groups at the beginning of the month to spend their food stamps stocking up on basic groceries. I also saw single workers at a taqueria and wondered if they send their wages back to their families in Mexico.
As Coral and I talked about Grapes of Wrath, I tried to explain to her that for all its natural splendor and resources, California is still, as it was when Steinbeck wrote about it, a complicated place where some people live very well while many others come from far away places to labor in difficult circumstances for a much less comfortable lifestyle.