The only thing I knew about my father were just stories about him. He was a well-to-do older man who had had children late in life, which is why when he died we became much closer to my mother’s side of the family, the Masons. However, I did know certain things. He was an avid hunter of deer, ducks, quail, and fish. This is why he had a gun locker in the basement. It was a small room filled with rifles, shotguns, and fishing gear. He was also a persistent golfer and had converted one of our garages at the big house in the city into a driving range so that he could practice his swing.
In an effort to help piece together who my father was, I convinced my brother to take a trip with me to the town where he was born, in honor of what would have been his 120th birthday.
At the center of California is a huge valley, about 50 miles wide and 450 miles long. It is very flat and produces more than half of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts for our entire country. The southern part is called the San Joaquin Valley. This valley is bisected by Highway 99 for almost its entire length. The region’s farm economy grew along this highway, which links California’s big cities to small, isolated towns like Tulare and Selma, where my father was born. It was along Highway 99 that John Steinbeck’s fictional Joad family traveled in The Grapes of Wrath. This is where the Dust Bowl migrants went looking for work, and where Dorothea Lange took some of the most famous Depression-era black-and-white photos ever shot.
In Notes from a Native Daughter, Joan Didion wrote, “99 would never get a tourist to Big Sur or San Simeon, never get him to the California he came to see.”3 This is the authentic California of almond orchards, mangy farmyards, rusty train works, peach trees, and Depression-era hamburger stands.
There was something else along Highway 99 that the tourists didn’t come to see, and this would make history. Something that no one knew anything about when my father’s family expanded there in the late 1800s just north of Bakersfield.
I had always heard that my father was born in Selma, California, in 1884, but of course we soon learned that most anyone that lived in a rural area was born at home on the farm and just listed in the nearest town. We checked the county seat, which is Fresno and only about 17 miles away, with no idea about where they might have lived. Then we got lucky. We found a subdivision map that had been filed by J. M. Kimberlin for a town called Kimberlina. It was dated 1888. Slowly, with the help of vintage newspaper articles, a story emerged.
After my great-grandfather J. M. Kimberlin became wealthy from his Santa Clara seed company, he decided to expand into wheat farming near his newly proposed town. Somehow he got the Southern Pacific Railroad to construct a rail stop right next to Kimberlina. It was all laid out with street names and everything, a complete plan. This in itself was a rather startling concept. In those days the wheat farmers were at war with the railroads. Frank Norris, who wrote the famous novel McTeague, which was made into the legendary Eric von Stroheim film Greed, also wrote The Octopus: A Story of California about the railroads crushing the wheat farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.
Apparently J. M. Kimberlin was a tough old bird, and the railroads seemed to be no match for him. The newspapers referred to him as “Professor Kimberlin,” a nod to his long history with the College of the Pacific and reputation as a scholar of ancient languages. I found a photo of him standing on the steps of his mansion in Santa Clara, and he looks like a man not to be trifled with.
Starting about 1882 the Kimberlins began acquiring land, until they were farming wheat on 10,000 acres. The farm was on Poso Creek near a town called Poso. (I couldn’t find Poso on any map, but I knew it used to be there somewhere.) With the Kimberlina railroad siding available to them, they could get freight cars to the market at Port Costa, which is just up the San Francisco Bay a little, towards Sacramento. Every year for eleven years their wheat was the first to arrive and therefore commanded the best prices. Their only problem was water, and the rains did not come. This whole thing was starting to reminded me of the mayor’s pleadings in the movie Chinatown: “Without water the dust will rise up and cover us as though we never existed.”
But there is another movie that more accurately portrays what happened to my family next. It’s called There Will Be Blood, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and based largely on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. I had met Anderson out at the Ranch while I was working on Gangs of New York. I would have loved to have asked him about his research on California, but I didn’t know then what I know now.
My notes from recording Aunt Neva told me that they endured seven years of drought. That was all I knew. Evidently, they sold out and left the area. What became, I wondered, of the 10,000-acre wheat farm and the town of Poso on Poso Creek, not to mention Kimberlina?
This happened over 110 years ago, and there has been no one left to ask for decades. I still don’t have the whole story, but I do know this: When they left Poso Creek in about 1906, they had been standing on, or near, one of the largest pools of oil in the world. The Poso Creek oil field was discovered in 1926 by the Calipose Petroleum Company. They struck oil at eight feet with their first well. The original report stated, “There is practically no water apparent.” Wonderful news for oil companies, disastrous news for farmers. They found eighty-eight million barrels of oil there. The Poso Creek oil field, I learned, is really an eastern extension of the Kern River Field, which is the third-largest oil field in the country with two billion barrels.
We couldn’t find the town of Poso because its name was changed to Famoso in 1895, so my father was actually born in Famoso. Today one of the most famous drag strips in the world is in Famoso, where we shot film for American Nitro not knowing the family connection. The railroad siding is still there, but Kimberlina was never built. All that is left is a highway turnoff sign leading to Kimberlina Road. Did my family ever learn about the oil? Eight feet is pretty shallow, even for the most primitive hand-dug water well, but I don’t think they ever did.
At current prices I may be out about $60 billion in oil profits, and it might have been for me like the Norma Desmond rant in Sunset Boulevard: “I’m richer than all this new Hollywood trash! I’ve got a million dollars. Own three blocks downtown, I’ve got oil in Bakersfield, pumping, pumping, pumping.” But the reality is more like the characters at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, watching their gold dust blow back to the hills from which it came, and like them, all I can do is laugh.
There is something primal in losing your home, family, and dog all at once. In never knowing who your parents were. They were strangers to me, and there is trauma in that. My prescription had been to find them through my ancestors, and it seems to have worked. I was functional again.
3. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster, 1979).