It was 2006, and I found myself a freshly minted MFA graduate, having spent the previous three years studying fiction in an intense program. I had just signed a two-book contract with a New York publishing house that paid me enough to live comfortably for some time without having to find a job if I chose not to. My partner and I rented a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Riverside, California. Our building was surrounded by eucalyptus trees with menthol-scented branches. We hiked along the narrow footpaths threading through the brown hills behind our complex and had regular encounters with jackrabbits, road runners, and elusive coyotes that would stare at us through small glassy eyes from their posts atop boulders or old tree trunks tagged with graffiti. There were parks and pools nearby. We enjoyed backyard barbecues with friends. We paid little in rent. We drank stout beer from chilled glasses, listened to music, and slept with the windows wide open, the air carrying an intoxicating aroma of night jasmine mixed with shorn grass.
I was unhappy, though. There was something off, and anxiety kept me awake at night, tossing and turning in bed. It took me a while to realize that I missed having a purpose. I missed having a direction. I needed something to do.
I needed a job.
My mother lived nearby, in a house with my older sister. My mother had lived a long life that had often been complicated, especially in her childhood; she was raised on a rancho in a remote region of Michoacán, Mexico. She talked very little about her youth; I only knew that she was very poor, my grandfather was domineering and abusive, and she was pulled out of school at age six to help her parents tend to the livestock that my grandfather raised.
“I watched a flock of sheep,” she once told me. “I must have been about seven or eight, and my parents would send me off in the morning to follow them all day. I spent hours alone by myself. In the middle of nowhere, scared. Can you imagine?”
I recall being frightened and sad for her when she told this story. The feeling was only exacerbated when I visited that location with her as an adult. It was remote, foreboding. There were vast acres of abandoned fields with overgrown grass and tall trees that blocked out the light. It threatened to rain the day we ventured forth; the clouds hung low in the sky, veiling the mountains that rose above us. It was cold and damp, a dampness that seeped into my bones.
How could anyone possibly live here, I remember thinking.
In 2006, my mother’s hard life of tending livestock, of washing clothes, of cooking and cleaning, of backbreaking work, of rearing her younger siblings before going on to birth thirteen of her own when she married my father — that life of pain and exhaustion, hunger and anguish, finally caught up to her. Her health began to fail. She began to disintegrate right before my very eyes. And I, the youngest of her children, the one she loved and cared for most, did the unthinkable during this time when she desperately needed me: I left her.
I moved four hundred miles north to the Central Valley.
I moved for the worst possible reason: a job.
•
Let me tell you a little something about my family: we’re totally fucked up. I know most families can say the same thing. All families are dysfunctional is a refrain I’ve heard many times. And there’s truth to that. But my family takes it to a whole new level. I could tell you stories about drug addiction and alcoholism, sexual abuse, mental breakdowns, violent fistfights, restraining orders, suicides, and alleged murders.
Instead I’ll tell you about my domineering, unhinged sister, a spinster who, out of anger and jealousy, alienated every other member of our large family. When my mother became ill, it was my sister who found herself the main caregiver, a responsibility she did not want. She complained to me. She wanted help. And when I tried, it was never enough. And even though we had several other siblings who were more than ready and able to offer assistance, to lessen the burden, she refused to accept their aid. Instead she griped endlessly. My phone never stopped ringing. Our mother frequently slipped and fell. She grew increasingly addled and forgetful. She accidentally cut her arm with a kitchen knife, so my sister had to hide all sharp objects. Another day, she forgot to turn off the oven when she left the house. And despite the heavy cocktail of antidepressants and sedatives the doctor prescribed, it was hard to get her to sleep solidly throughout the night; she’d wake up several times, wander around the house in her robe, turn the lights on and off, rousing my sister who would be irritable the next day for lack of sleep.
It was an endless, frustrating cycle. I struggled in the middle of it, tried helping my sister care for our mother while still spending time with my partner and updating the rest of my siblings on her condition. It was mentally exhausting. I likewise couldn’t sleep. I lost my appetite. Everything felt hopeless. In order to save my relationship and establish some distance between me and my family, I went on the job market, found a teaching position, and in the summer of 2007, as my mother’s health increasingly worsened, we packed up our things and moved to the Central Valley.
Because I feared it would break her, I never told her I moved.
At that point, she was too far gone to realize I lived hundreds of miles away. She was emaciated, brittle-boned with dried skin, her cheeks hollow, eyes sunken and dark. As she wasted away, as her mind unraveled, I left her.
I lied. She never knew the truth about where I’d gone.
•
In a 2012 article in the New York Times titled, “Everyone Eats There,” Mark Bittman writes, “The best way to enter the [Central Valley] … is from the south, through the Tehachapi Pass, west of the Mojave and Edwards Air Force Base. Although the land is scarred by roads and electric lines, it’s still easy to imagine what it looked like 150 years ago.”
This is the route my partner and I took, whizzing past long-haul semis and trailers, our dog in his lap, our car crammed with boxes. We descended into a vast, flat valley bordered by the Coast Ranges to the west and the Sierra Nevadas to the east. “The air, trapped between mountain ranges, stinks,” Bittman continues, “and the pollution is consistently ranked among the most severe in the country. Worse, there are so many cows nearby in megadairies and feedlots that the air contains microscopic particles of dried dung, enough so that you can taste it.”
I never tasted the dried dung Bittman mentions, but I could see the thick layer of smog — a combination of agricultural pesticides and automobile exhaust — veiling everything around us in a rusty, orange haze. “This, and not the verdant hills of a Green Giant commercial, is where our food comes from,” Bittman emphasizes.
And then there’s the heat. Our first summer in Fresno, we experienced thirty consecutive days in the triple digits. Luckily the house we were renting had a pool, so we spent the majority of our days swimming and sipping cold beers as we slowly unpacked. The distance. The relentless heat. The new job I’d have that fall. It was enough to distract me from the family drama. Miles of mountains and endless sprawl of wide, flat farmland separated me from them.
•
In the fall of that year, my first as an assistant professor, my mother was admitted to the hospital. She’d been eating and had choked on a piece of food. Her body too weak and frail, she was eventually intubated. A year before, in a moment of foresight, I had a long, heart-to-heart with her about the future and her ailing health.
“One of us is going to have to make medical decisions for you,” I explained.
She looked at me, puzzled.
My voice quivered.
“That should be you,” she replied. “Who else would I trust?”
And so it was. She got a form from her doctor. We signed it and had it notarized. I was suddenly the one responsible for making all medical decisions for her if her health ever deteriorated. It happened quickly. The phone calls from doctors. They breathed heavily through the receiver, spoke matter-of-factly.
Am I speaking to the individual responsible for medical decisions?
Do you want us to resuscitate in case her heart stops?
Have you made proper arrangements?
Where do you live? I highly recommend you come here. We don’t know how long she’ll last.
This continued for months. There were weeks when I’d make the drive down to Southern California three or four times. After classes. Before department meetings. In between working on my tenure file and meeting with my students. I drove up and down Highway 99 so many times that I now know every groove and pothole in that road. South from Fresno, down past the agricultural communities of Fowler and Selma, into Kingsburg with its water tower shaped like a Swedish coffee pot, past fields of grapevines, through the farming town of Tulare where I watched tractors hauling bales of hay across the freeway overpass into Tipton, Pixley, and Earlimart, down empty two-lane roads, past abandoned airfields and grain silos.
The freeway sent me back and forth between Fresno and Southern California. Through the notoriously thick Tule Fog, an impermeable layer that often descends after a hard rain, and is responsible for fatal pileups involving motorists and big rigs. Through snow and sleet on the Grapevine and across the sharp hairpin turns on Interstate 5 near Castaic, I got to know the land very well. All those alfalfa fields. The migrant farmworkers picking strawberries, their faces masked, preventing them from breathing in the noxious pesticides, hats protecting them from the relentless summer heat.
I held my mother in the nursing home on the afternoon that she died. She was still alive when my siblings arrived. I kissed her on the forehead and left for the day. I had to be back in Fresno the following morning. I was on a search committee and a finalist for the job opening was scheduled to visit us the next day. Rain slashed across the asphalt of the parking lot. I felt suddenly groggy and empty. I started my car and took the freeway onramp north. How would I focus on the road during such a torrential downpour? I had miles to go. An endless valley — desolate and damp — lay before me.
This one last time.
•••
Alex Espinoza is the author of Still Water Saints, The Five Acts of Diego León, and Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime. He’s written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, LitHub, and NPR‘s All Things Considered. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell, as well as an American Book Award, he lives in Los Angeles and is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside.