California dreaming

One of the books that has accompanied me so far on this trip is Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’. I must have read this before, in the dim and distant past, as I have an old paperback copy that I found on our shelves. But I don’t remember much about it and I haven’t seen the film, so it was good to come to it nearly as new. It also meant a lot more than it would have done, as we have been travelling some of the way the ‘Okies’ went, as they struggled their way west from Oklahoma, through the deserts and mountains of Arizona and Nevada, to California. On several occasions we have touched on the '66, the road they all took. Ousted from their homelands, they rested their hopes on California providing them with a means of making a living; that it would be the land of promise . . . but their dreams were shattered as soon as they arrived.

Today we have been travelling north through California and have been amazed by the extent of the agriculture we have passed – huge plantations of fruit trees, nuts, olives – massive areas of cereals and rice. The same in many ways as it was in the 1930s, when so many people relied on work picking crops, in order to get what they wanted most of all - a little land to cultivate for themselves.
 
So many issues that resonate today – despair of the dispossessed, negative attitudes towards migrants, exploitation of workers, capitalism out of control, profit before people. But then the dignity of hard work, the care for one another and the resilience of humans in the face of adversity.
   
We are now at Red Bluff – not a place known for anything, but it is a stopover – and tomorrow we drive towards some big trees and the sea.


California Dreaming