Free Imperial by William T. Vollmann Page A

the wide yellow lines of Mexicali. Here it was that I made my photograph. I offered to mail a copy to Christofer’s girlfriend, but he knew her address only in a descriptive fashion; he could tell me which alleys to employ (none of them by name, only by topography); he related vividly every turn were I to walk from the Greyhound station all the way to his girlfriend’s place in Echo Park; he could see the American streets swarming gloriously before him but could not name them because he was illiterate. That New Testament he carried upon his person thus proved to be no reference, but an icon. He could not read it, but believed in it. He trusted that the girl he loved would wait for him in Echo Park until he found his way back. He would cross the border again and again.
    I think of the man who proudly boasted of having entered Northside illegally more than seventy-five times. 10
    Above all, I think of the brown people I saw picking lettuce outside Salinas on a foggy June day as a loudspeaker shouted at them in Spanish. They worked like devils. A melody began to shriek and blare on the loudspeaker, and they all sang along. Who would pick lettuce without them?
    Across the three lines of shiny cars going to the U.S.A., a man stood among the flowerbushes, still on the Mexican side, but pacing. He waited in the middle of the street, leaning against one of the yellow concrete barriers. He was longhaired, greasy, sunburned. He was rich with the fecal stink of the New River. He prowled and paced. He stared hungrily into America. He bore the immense burden of the heat.
    Oh, he’s waitin’, Officer Dan Murray was most likely saying wisely, looking through the fence. He and his amigos, maybe they have plans. The way you’re lookin’ right now, if you look southwest, that’s where you’re gonna see him come through . . .

Chapter 2
    DELINEATIONS (2000)
Our eyes scan only a small angle of view at any moment; as we move our direction of sight, our visual memory holds and builds impressions of larger and larger areas, while bringing each point concentrated upon into clarity and detail that only a very long-focus lens can approximate.
    —Ansel Adams, 1983
     
     
     
     
    T he fact that the perimeter of Imperial County resembles a distracted child’s attempt to draw a square scarcely distinguishes it, since many other counties in America, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains states, were likewise enacted as defectively wearisome rectangles. Still, we need to start somewhere. It may well be that since this southeast corner of California is so peculiar, enigmatic, sad, beautiful and perfect as it stands, delineation of any sort should be forgone in favor of the recording of “pure” perceptions, for instance by means of a camera alone; or, failing that, by reliance upon word-pictures: a cityscape of withered palms, white tiles, glaring parking lots, and portico-shaded loungers who watch the boxcars groan by; a cropscape of a rich green basil field, whose fragrance rises up as massively resonant as an organ-chord. But I have seen so many old photographs in attics and archives, uncaptioned images of nameless California beauty queens, of lost canals and of obscure professional men in high white collars, all of them pinkening into specters even as the blank desert skies which frame them develop spots of “weather” (brown fixer stains), and maybe one of those professional men, whose hair was carefully sidecombed and whose moustachios tamed in order for him to best resemble the man he wanted to be by the time that photographer emerged from under the focusing cloth, withdrew the dark slide from the film and threw open the shutter on that long ago day before Imperial was a county and the Salton Sea was even born, maybe he, our professional man, deserves to be thanked or cursed for something important; maybe that pretty high school girl in the bathing suit who stands gripping a ship’s wheel in her white, white fingers as she stands