Enter Desert: ‘Gold Fame Citrus’

The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one,” John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley. “It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.” By the time Steinbeck wrote this, man had long since gotten to California: The clue is in the desert’s name. Mojave Indians, who also go by the name Aha Macav, had been in the desert for thousands of years. White American settlers didn’t arrive until the early 1800s, displacing Mojave people from ancestral land along the Colorado River. Violent conflicts led to an incomplete peace treaty and, eventually, reservations.

Join us on May 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Watkins will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Karen Russell to discuss Gold Fame Citrus.
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As anguishing as this loss is, a bigger theft loomed. It would be decided years later, far away, in and around Los Angeles. At the turn of the 20th century, city planners made Southern California habitable by taking from the desert—draining water from the Owens Valley and its aquifer through William Mulholland’s vast, infamous aqueduct. “There it is,” the hydrologist said in 1913, when water first arrived through his pipes in the San Fernando Valley. “Take it.” Within a few decades, Los Angeles would grow from nearly 200,000 people to some 2 million. An arid city was harvesting citrus, and its studio lots were manufacturing fame.

A former gold prospector on the Colorado River, Mulholland lived out the principle that you took what you wanted, and if you got there first, you kept power—an idea followed as well, more recently, by an imperial, autocratic-leaning president. The Los Angeles Aqueduct may have allowed the city to grow, but it quickly sucked Owens Lake dry. Paiute people who had lived there for thousands of years were unable to support themselves on land they had been connected to for over a millennium. The desertification of the area created dust storms, the consequences of which were felt by people imprisoned in the Manzanar incarceration camp during World War II. Until recently, the Owens Valley was a major source of dust storms that reach Los Angeles and send its air-quality levels rocketing into unbreathable zones. And was it even necessary? “On top of all this,” Marc Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert, his classic book about California and water, “the Owens was a generous desert river.”

Claire Vaye Watkins grew up in the Mojave and has a desert dweller’s sense of how to accept what it gives. She also understands the steep consequences of taking what it does not. California has been rehearsing its destruction for decades in pop culture, but none of this phantasmagoria of guilt proceeds from a sense of the landscape and who has called it home as deeply as Watkins’s novel Gold Fame Citrus. In this trippy and grave book, a nuclear incident and drought have brought California to its knees, shattered public order, and left people living on cola rations in small pockets, trading for blueberries and raiding abandoned homes and stores like bands of survivors in The Walking Dead. The West has been cut off from the rest of America as it is slowly swallowed up by an enormously expanded Mojave called the Amargosa Dune Sea—the descriptions of which will ring true to anyone who has ever spent time in the Owens Valley area of today.

In the middle of this maelstrom is a family—a man, a woman, and a child, thrown together by circumstance, luck, and longing. Luz is an ex-model with Chicana roots who doesn’t speak Spanish; Ray is a soldier gone AWOL from the military who has the independence of a surfer and the kind of survival skills one needs in an apocalypse; and Ig is a child the two of them meet in a fire-dance ceremony at the beach (a way they blow off steam), a child they sense is being neglected at best. A group of bandits—picture the crowd Patrick Swayze’s crew hangs out with in Point Break—ditch Ig with them, so Luz and Ray are not necessarily taking her; they’re just not giving her back. They hustle the toddler, who swerves between preverbal sounds and complete sentences, back up into the hillside mansion of a departed starlet, where they’ve been crashing. Their new child poops into one of the actress’s abandoned Hermès scarves. It’s OK, Luz points out; there are millions of them.

Gold Fame Citrus is rich with this sense of useless former luxury. “LA gone reptilian,” Watkins writes, “primordial.” During the baking-hot days, Ray constructs a half-pipe from the cork that once lined the walls of the starlet’s she shed. If the world is over, why not skate? The city is full of dried-up swimming pools, but the bottom of the starlet’s long-drained box-shaped pool is full of river stones, not fit for Ray’s purposes. Cash is on its last legs, and Luz understands as a woman that there will be currencies after (and during) this transition that she’d rather not be a part of, but for the time being, there are goods to buy.

Enough money could get you fresh produce and meat and dairy, even if what they called cheese was Day-Glo and came in a jar, and the fish was mostly poisoned and reeking, the beef gray, the apples blighted even in what used to be apple season, pears grimy even when you paid extra for Bartletts from Amish orchards. Hard sour strawberries and blackberries filled with dust. Flaccid carrots, ashen spinach, cracked olives, bruised hundred-dollar mangos, all-pith oranges, shriveled lemons, boozy tangerines, raspberries with gassed aphids curled in their hearts, an avocado whose crumbling taupe innards once made you weep.

Watkins is an immensely stylish and canny writer, and she sculpts a sense of dread so palpable you can feel it drumming into Ray’s and Luz’s bones. Time is running out; they can’t stay holed up in the hills forever, however much it feels good to play house with Ig. Pretty soon, people will come for the child, or to see what treasures the house might still hold. So the three of them pile into the actress’s abandoned classic VW Karmann Ghia, packed to the gills with supplies and extra gas, and drive toward the last remaining complex of friends. They’d really like to escape from California without Ray winding up in jail. A friend named Lonnie might have a few insider tips. And thus they flee.

At this point, you’d think that Gold Fame Citrus would become your typical cli-fi disaster novel, wherein the destruction of the old way of life stokes the flames of the reader’s awareness. No, not the Hermès scarves! Keep consuming and you too will live like this! The novel feints in that direction and then bends toward something far more radical, montaged out of the many disasters that have befallen the West since colonial exploration began. The novel is not so much a postapocalyptic road trip as it is a book about that genre of tale, a warning of what it is used for, a psychedelic remix, one part 21st-century Odyssey, one part environmental tone poem in which the central character becomes the desert itself.

It takes us a bit to get there. First, Luz, Ray, and Ig must visit with the aforementioned old friend, Lonnie, who is cosplaying as a Mad Max–y guru on the coastline. “If I was going anywhere—which I’m fucking not—I’d go to the Amargosa,” Ray says. And you can almost hear the bro-pocalypse tone when he adds almost as an aside, “There’s supposed to be a town out there.” So they drive east, dodging mile-wide sinkholes, beckoned along despite the destruction as if by magnetic pull toward the rising wave of sand on the horizon. At one point, they peer into the distance and see it: “There was nothing cool or blue or airy about this calcium-colored crust capping the range. It throbbed with heat, glowed radioactive with light.”

Warnings abound, some of them echoes from the past. At one point, we learn that Luz’s mother, Estrella, died by drowning. Luz’s father, a prospector in oil, has siphoned more than his fair share from the earth. Is she destined to be sacrificed back to a sand-born sea and to the land’s wrath? We discover that as a child, Luz was considered one of the first babies born in a new era of time and American life, her life marked as a kind of species ground zero. Baby Dunn, she was dubbed, a doom-period celebrity, her personal experiences tracked in the public eye like the progress of human survival. Perhaps fame and doom were always this wrapped around each other. Picturing her in her borrowed Karmann Ghia with her stolen baby and (not-husband) Ray, a hatbox hiding the last of her cash, it’s hard not to start casting, in one’s mind, the actor who would play her in the film version.

Gold Fame Citrus is full of such cinematic moments, in this world where the Central Valley has turned to salt flat and a wicked wind blows. In one of the most memorable scenes, they come across a yucca plantation. Trees stretch on and on to the horizon, at first like a beacon of hope: life! But when Ray and Luz approach them softly, they discover that the trees are utterly hollow, dead a long time from the inside out. There’s no groundwater. The plantation is not a sign of life but a graveyard. It’s when this book turns—when destruction is not reflected back onto Ray, Luz, Ig, and all humans, but destruction of nature itself is seen for the massacre it has always been. Not much later, Luz forgets to put the cap back on their last bottle of gas, and nearly all of their remaining fuel dribbles out. Ray wraps up and heads out to seek help and doesn’t come back.

When this happens, a whole new book begins. The desert rears up and surrounds Luz and Ig as they are slowly dying of thirst. As if to help us appreciate this fact, Luz’s point of view fades to black, and as the book’s middle opens up, we are in a new mode—essayistic. Nearly factual. The desert can’t be avoided because it is everywhere, “dunes upon dunes. A vast tooth-colored superdune in the forgotten crook of the wasted West.” If this were a play, the scene would begin with “Enter desert,” which Watkins would queue up like a beast of yore. Experts, scientists, travelers, and even residents attempt to fathom it, and it is beyond all their capacities.

Still came BLM and EPA and NWS and USGS, all assigned to determine why a process that ought to have taken five hundred thousand years had happened in fifty.… Did [the Needles Dozen] realize that the dune now behaved more like a glacier, albeit a vastly accelerated glacier? Question: Were they aware that geologists had ascertained that the base of the dune—the foot, they called it—was rock? That it carved the land more than covered it? Question: Did they wish to comment on the fact that the buildings they envisioned, in which they had spent the entirety of their short lives—their homes, say, or their twelve-step club—had already been crushed, were now but fossil flecks in banded sandstone?

The dune, we learn, is considered international waters, a new frontier. When Luz and Ig awaken in a school bus being tended to by a woman named Dallas, it is as if they have left the United States. They are out of the bosom of crumbled society and are at sea on a sloping, moving, shifting bedrock of sand. It’s not clear where they are, or even when. But it’s a world in which water is somehow in greater plenitude. It turns out that Levi Zabriskie, the leader of a commune in the Amargosa, whom Luz will soon meet, has a douser’s gift, and as a result, the people there treat him like a god. Ray may have “had the blazing prophet eyes of John Muir,” but they are nothing compared to the deep, burning intensities summoned by Levi.

In one of the first pieces she ever published, Watkins wrote about her father’s membership, one he ultimately rejected, in the Manson family. “My father first came to Death Valley because Charles Manson told him to,” she wrote in 2009. “He always did what Charlie said; that was what it meant to be in The Family.” Watkins has since written around this piece of family history in her feverish and bioluminescent 2022 novel, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, a book that skates close to the facts of her life as a woman becoming a mother raised in the shadow of a cult. In Gold Fame Citrus, she looks at how all colonialists and explorers are cult leaders in their way. How it is this tradition that unites the three elements of the book’s title.

As Luz settles into a life of being taken care of, “Ig’s back, round as a beetle’s against her,” the ghosts of the explorers of decades past flit through her dreams as if to haunt her. She dreams of John Wesley Powell, Mulholland, Brigham Young. Her subconscious—or that of the land—is trying to awaken the cycle of taking from which she proceeds. Meanwhile, all the commune residents reenact the land thefts of the past. At night, they light bonfires that burn with an odd sheen. Luz goes to find out why, and she discovers that it’s because they’ve used evacuation pamphlets that read, “LEAVE OR DIE.”

By the time Levi has started to seduce Luz, we know there’s something off here. That for all the comforts of the commune, for all its safety, it depends on the very same hierarchy that brought Luz and her society to this brink. While talking to Dallas, Luz puts this quandary in intimate terms. “It’s just. You spend your life thinking you’re an original. Then one day you realize you’ve been acting just like your parents.” How does one end such a destructive cycle? Not since Robert Stone’s 1974 Dog Soldiers has there been a novel written about America’s violent present that leans so surreally on hallucinogenic transformation to answer this question. Both novels suggest that some form of escape is not possible. Perhaps, as with the coyote carcass Luz sees “going wicker in the ravine” earlier in the novel, accepting the end is better than fighting it with partial measures. After all, Luz learns that one of the plans for the Amargosa might be to nuke the whole thing and use it to excuse the endless toxic waste the rotting American arms have created.

Earlier, before all this falls apart, Ray talks to Luz about modern-day Californians and how they brought this disaster on themselves. It’s an attitude redolent of Steinbeck, but with a cruel punisher’s streak in it. “California people are quitters,” he says. “No offense. It’s just you’ve got restlessness in your blood.… Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That’s why no one wants them now.” No one but the desert, and that’s how this incredibly dark novel offers up an unusual form of solace: Eventually, it suggests, whether the land is conquered or not, its generosity is complete. It will welcome us all back into it in due course.•

Join us on May 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Watkins will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Karen Russell to discuss Gold Fame Citrus. Register for the Zoom conversation here.