An Author Without Borders
 Charles McGrath - New York Times
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July 29, 2009
| | The writer William T. Vollmann at the Terrace Park Cemetery in Holtville, Calif., a burial place for illegal immigrants who have died crossing the border. (Monica Almeida/The New York Times) | |
Holtville, Calif. — William T. Vollmann, legendarily prolific, writes in a studio that used to be a restaurant in Sacramento. The place is surrounded by a big parking lot where he encourages homeless people to camp out. Inside he runs a one-man assembly line. His bibliography so far includes nine novels, including “Europe Central,” which won the National Book Award in 2005; three collections of stories; a seven-volume, 3,000-page history of violence; a book-length essay on poverty; and a travel book about hopping freight trains, a hobby of his even though his balance is so bad that he has to use a plastic bucket as a stepstool.
Mr. Vollmann’s newest book, “Imperial,” which comes out from the Viking Press on Thursday, costs $55 and is 1,300 pages long — so heavy, he observed recently, that if you dropped it, you’d break a toe. A companion volume, to be published next month by powerHouse Books, contains some 200 photographs he took while working on “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like the Salk polio vaccine.
Mr. Vollmann, who just turned 50, is a loner, a bit of a recluse, despite being married and the father of a daughter, and a throwback: a wandering, try-anything writer-journalist in the tradition of Steinbeck or Jack London. Some people think he’s a little nuts.
To research “The Rifles,” a novel partly about the 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic, Mr. Vollmann spent two weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole, where he suffered frostbite and permanently burned off his eyebrows when he accidentally set his sleeping bag on fire. But being eyebrowless has its advantages, he discovered more recently, while experimenting with cross-dressing to research a novel he’s now writing about the transgendered. He didn’t have to pluck his brows when getting made up.
Mr. Vollmann collects pistols and likes to shoot them. He has traveled to Thailand, Bosnia, Somalia, Russia, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, studying war and poverty, and has a way of picking up prostitutes just about wherever he goes. He has spent considerable time with skinheads, winos, crackheads and meth tweakers, and has ingested plenty of illegal substances himself.
“Crack,” he said recently, “is a really great drug — it’s like having three cups of coffee at once.”
“Imperial,” which is about Imperial County in California, the vast, flat and arid region in the southeastern part of the state, bordering Mexico, is an extreme Vollmann production: brilliant in places, practically unreadable in others. There are lyrical passages, and others edging over into magenta (“And change came; just as the urine of dehydrated people is turbid and dark, failing in transparency, so the evening sunlight, as if heated to exhaustion by and with itself, now lost the glaring whiteness which had characterized it since early morning, and it oozed down upon the pavement to stain it with gold”), along with scientific chapters, complete with graphs, on salinization and agricultural productivity, and 175 pages of notes. A page early on has a title warning of “Impending Aridity.”
The more interesting stuff includes chapters on narco-ballads — songs, outlawed in Mexico, celebrating drug lords — on early California history, on the Chinese-dug tunnels in Mexicali and on Mr. Vollmann’s lingering breakup with an old lover.
The book is a little like the Imperial Valley itself: pathless, fascinating, exhausting. Its two great themes are illegal immigration — the struggle of countless thousands of Mexicans to sneak into the United States through the Imperial Valley — and water, which has transformed the valley, or parts of it, from desert to seeming paradise but at great environmental cost.
Mr. Vollmann’s editors urged him to cut, he said, and he resisted: “We always go round and round. They want me to cut, and I argue, so they cut my royalties, and I agree never to write a long book again.” He acknowledged that the length of “Imperial” might cost him readers but said: “I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.”
On a cloudless, sun-baked day last week Mr. Vollmann, with a characteristically bad haircut, toured some of the landscapes that had inspired him, traveling from San Diego across the border to the Mexican town of Tecate, down the mountainous, hairpin road to Mexicali and then back across the border into California, through the Imperial Valley to the Salton Sea, an enormous inland lake that is the region’s agricultural sink, so hyper-saline from irrigation runoff that it is almost toxic.
Along the way, some of the secrets of Mr. Vollmann’s method began to reveal themselves. Mr. Vollmann doesn’t drive, and his Spanish is only so-so, so he was driven, as he was for most of the 12 years it took him to write the book, by Terrie Petree, who also served as an interpreter. She learned her Spanish as a Mormon missionary in northern Spain, which also prepared her, she said, for having doors shut in her face. Mr. Vollmann sat in the passenger seat, taking in everything and peppering Ms. Petree with questions. Far from manic, he was preternaturally calm and patient, dosing himself with nothing stronger than bottled water.
Mr. Vollmann is almost excessively polite, and in conversation has a salesman’s habit of using your first name in every other sentence. He seems more innocent than worldly, driven by insatiable curiosity. In Mexicali he turned an annoying and time-consuming visit to a police station, occasioned by what appeared to be a traffic-fine shakedown, into an interview with the station’s chief of information. He also charmed a blushing secretary there and learned the name of the best taco joint in town.
In Tecate, he was so polite to Severa Piñedo Valenzuela, a woman sweeping the street, that she invited him to see her indoor garden. Her house is directly across the road from the iron fence walling off the United States border. She had never seen anyone trying to cross over, she said, and added: “They think that if they cross the border, that’s where the money is. But it’s where death is.”
On the way back to the car, Mr. Vollmann went over to the fence and peered through a gap across to a hill where a white border patrol van was parked. “At night, it looks like the Third Reich out there,” he said. “They light it up so you can see every grain of sand glowing in the dark. When we were over there, it was nothing special, but now that there’s a fence here, it feels different. It’s that crazy human thing we do about delineating things.”
He went on: “I think countries have the right to maintain their borders, but on the other hand, think of the thousands or so who have died just trying to get to the United States so they can clean toilets. It seems horrendous that they shouldn’t have a better life, especially if they’re willing to do work we aren’t.”
Mexicali is a major junction for Mexicans and Central Americans trying to cross over, and also, to judge from billboards, for Americans looking for strippers, cheap prescription drugs, plastic surgery and dental implants. It was here, Mr. Vollmann said, that he had an early insight that inspired his book.
“I used to think the Imperial Valley was hot, flat and boring,” he explained. “But I crossed over here, stayed in a hotel and realized the place was full of secrets. You’d see a building that looked run-down and boarded up, but inside it was a place of coolness, darkness, life. That seemed like such a great metaphor for this place.”
In Calexico, on the American side, Mr. Vollmann inspected the neon-looking New River, which some foolish would-be immigrants have tried to swim and which he, equally foolhardy, tried to navigate in his rubber raft. “Looking pretty good today!” he said not far from a sign warning “Agua Contaminada. No Entre.” “Doesn’t stink too much and there’s almost no foam.”
On through the valley, where the temperature reached 115 degrees, and the sun gave you a headache, Mr. Vollmann remained curious and upbeat, not even flinching at the stench from an endless feed lot. He explained his preoccupation with the marginal and downtrodden matter of factly:
“When I was a young boy, my little sister drowned, and it was essentially my fault. I was 9, and she was 6, and I was supposed to be watching. I’ve always felt guilty. It’s like I have to have sympathy for the little girl who drowned and for the little boy who failed to save her — for all the people who have screwed up.”
In Brawley he stopped for lunch with Stella Altamirano-Mendoza, who is on the board of the Imperial Irrigation District and had been his tutor in the byzantine intricacies of Imperial water politics. The stuff is so valuable, she explained, that some farmers no longer bother to farm but simply sell their water.
Near Slab City, just north of Calipatria, Mr. Vollmann stopped to pay a courtesy call on Leonard Knight, a 77-year-old local eccentric, who since 1985 has been building out of adobe an enormous, religious-theme folk-art monument called Salvation Mountain, which from a distance looks as if it had been sculptured from cake frosting.
“I sometimes think I have more ambition than brains,” Mr. Knight said, but then beamed while mentioning how many people had visited the Salvation Mountain Web site (salvationmountain.us).
As evening drew near, there was a whisper of a breeze, the shadows lengthened, greenery grew greener, and the Salton Sea almost looked beautiful, until you got up close and saw the abandoned motels and all the dead fish. “I love the desert at night,” Mr. Vollmann said. “That’s when it’s most beautiful. It feels soothing and infinite.”
The day ended with a visit to the Terrace Park Cemetery here in Holtville, where unidentified people who have died crossing the border are buried in a bare, grassless potter’s field. A danger sign warns of possible cave-ins. The graves, laid out in long, straight rows, are each marked with a brick bearing a number and the name John Doe. A few are additionally decorated with homemade wooden crosses that say “No identificado” or “No olvidado” (“not forgotten”).
Mr. Vollmann stood there quietly for a while and said, “You wonder how many are never found and never brought here,” and he added, an edge creeping into his voice: “At least they won’t be stealing our tax dollars anymore. That’s very important.” |
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Entertainment | Books | July 2009 
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