Discovering my Roots along Highway 99.

Living halfway between some of America's great cities has the advantages that some folks can miss! Not only can I drive to either Los Angeles or San Francisco in less than half a day, the scenery and the life along the way to either destination is extraordinary! Heading out of Fresno to the 99 Freeway and heading south is a great reminder that the "real "California is NOT Hollywood, and the plastic glitz and glamour, but, rather the miles and miles of orchards, vineyards, fields and farms--teaming with farm workers, brimming with cattle, and burgeoning with the fruits, nuts and vegetables that literally feed the world. Selma, Kingsburg, Visalia, Tulare, Dinuba, Pixley, Bakersfield, and others less notable, all remind me of my South Carolina roots, and the south Georgia roots of my parents and their parents. Even though it takes some tugging, I eventually admit that I am a child of the South-- the rural south, the grandson of share-croppers, who tended someone else's fields, and who lived lives that barely scraped by and yet took care of their families, were faithful to their churches, and lived through an America that was just begining to feel like a land of promise. The windmills and irrigation ditches, though not MY experience personally, but the experience of my mother and father, and of my entire lineage-- seem to have a calming, relaxing impact on me. As I fly by, I understand the symbolism of "driving on cruise control." I want to stop. I want to walk into one of the feed and seed stores and sit and talk, and maybe even whittle for a bit. I want to talk about farming, and hunting and fishing and children and trucks and love gone bad. I want to talk about the church and the new little preacher. I want to glad hand, slap backs and barely remember names--just like my father, my grandfather and their fathers. I want to connect to my heritage- simple, country, and rich. BUT, I don't stop. I am aware that I do not live in that rural world, though Fresno has deep and rich agricultural roots, I live in the heart of Downtown. It is not the experience of my parents, or my extended family. I did not grow up in the country, though we made frequent Sunday and holiday visits to my paternal grandparens and assorted aunts and uncled IN the country (I have spent time in an outhouse, used the soft end of a corn cob, chased turkeys, cows and roosters, gathered eggs, climbed pecan trees, stood over a barbeque pit with the whole hog, gigged a frog, eaten a rabbit and a squirrel, and peed in the woods-- I grew up in the suburbs of a then-small town, Aiken, South Carolina. Tarnished and polluted by the Savannah River Plant, which made the key chemical elements of the atomic bomb, idyllically referred to as "the plant," Aiken yielded it's heritage of "heroes, horses and High Society," as the winter home of the Vanderbilts, Pinkertons and Towler's to the putrid stench of nuclear waste, and so sold out it's health and it's people to a new suburban sprawl and geographic racism that still confounds it's municipal soul today. Growing up in the years after Wold War 2, and during the Vietnam fiasco, Aiken was often shielded from the notice of the world, somewhat protected, by the ignoble senators who had sold out the little town (actually having a neighbor town, Ellington, destroyed and replaced by "New Ellington>" THAT is my heritage, that is my geography. Pat Conroy writes in the first sentence of "The Prince of Tides" that "we are defined by our geography..." then, a pristine though polluted, suburban, conservative, benignly racist geography is my definition. Perhaps that is why I see the 99 corridor as hopeful- as a place of my new destiny. Perhaps I view those dusty fields and orchards as places that are planted with the promise of a new land-- a new way of living-- a new breed of people, perhaps even a new way of looking at FAITH and HOPE. Yes, along the 99 freeway, I recognize myself-the South Carolina/Georgia boy who has now chosen to place his own roots firmly INSIDE the city limits-rooted, but with an eye to the farms, fields and orchards nearby.