The Wycherly Woman

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Coming over the pass you can see the whole valley spread out below. On a clear morning, when it lies broad and colored under a white sky, with the mountains standing far back on either side, you can imagine it’s the promised land.

Maybe it is for a few. But for every air-conditioned ranchhouse with its swimming pool and private landing strip, there are dozens of tin-sided shacks and broken-down trailers where the lost tribes of the migrant workers live. And when you leave the irrigated areas you find yourself in gray desert where nobody lives at all. Only the oil derricks grow there, an abstract forest casting no shade. The steady pumps at their bases nod their heads like clockwork animals.

Meadow Farms lay on the edge of this rich and ugly desert. From a distance it was a typical lost valley city thrown down helter-skelter at the foot of barren-looking mountains and garnished with a little alkali dust. When I drove into it past the euphoric sign at the city limits, Fastest-Growing City in the Valley, I could see some differences. The main street was clean and freshly paved; the buildings along it included substantial new ones, and others going up; the people on the street had a hustling, prosperous look.

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