false starts in Oildale - August 2011

For awhile Cornerstone was working toward a collaboration with the unincorporated town of Oildale, just north of Bakersfield.  Will visited the I-9 residency in Fowler then headed south to explore Oildale.  We're including some of his notes (I edited a bit) about that visit because it's helpful to know a little more about Kern County in general and some of the flavors and questions that arise.  Also, it's great to know a little more about Will's creative journey.  

Bakersfield:

I got into Bakersfield and headed straight for the Bakersfield Museum, located in the center of town. It sits beside a beautiful park and in a neighborhood with a number of social services agencies. I came in and saw a painting exhibit by Ann Laddon of the fields and hills near Bakersfield. They were filled with deep pink and orange, and I thought about orange, a color I don’t often use in my writing. I wondered what I could do to incorporate it, as well as what other painting style could influence the play?

I left and headed to the Kern County Museum. It struck me as I drove how empty Bakersfield is on Sunday afternoon. The park was empty, most of downtown was empty, the museum was largely empty and, with the exception of the strip club parking lot on the way to the Museum, almost all of the parking lots were empty. 

I went to the Kern County Museum because of a huge, interactive exhibit about the oil industry In Bakersfield. It featured an oil derrick and several grasshoppers out front (which you could move by pushing a button. Cool). That exhibit, unlike much of the museum, is filled with technology and is new. There is a list of supporters on plaques in the first room. In addition to the state bond funds that supported it, donors included: Chevron- Texaco, Shell, and many others. The museum includes a room that shakes as if you were drilling into the sea floor, a holograph style projection onto a dummy who narrated working for oil industry (reminds me a lot of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland), and a number of films. There were also huge drill bits, an old redwood oil pump, and a number of huge wrenches: it makes you see the enormous physical effort required for this kind of work. 

A number of things were not in the exhibit: a discussion of the environmental costs of oil; anything about the economic costs for surrounding neighborhoods; anything about Native- American people, although there is a whole section of one film about people moving west during the 1800s, and a description of important people such as Kit Carson; and, except for the hologram, very little about the life of contemporary workers in the fields and in supporting industries. All in all, it was eerily optimistic: “A country needs oil, and the oil industry grew to meet it!” 

All that said, there were fascinating stories about the oil industry in Bakersfield: oil was found in 1899 by a man named McQuarters (sp?). Up until that point the area was dominated by gold miners, and 200 oil companies were incorporated within a matter of days. People were fighting each other trying to hold onto their leases. After just 4 years the fields were pumping 24 million barrels annually, which was 2/3 of the nation’s oil supply. The area filled with worker camps for male workers, houses for families, and every matter of entertainment and vice you could imagine: vaudeville performers came through, and the Ziegfeld Follies toured in 1910. 

The last exhibit was about the Bakersfield Sound. The exhibit includes guitars, boots, photos and stories, as well as buttons that, when pressed, played songs (my favorite: Jo Maphis’ Fire on the Strings). I wondered about the Peter Jones Music Store; the Blackboard café. I was curious about the music of Bonnie Owens; and excited to hear about people who I’d known about (Buck Owens, Merle Haggard) and people who I hadn’t (Red Simpson). 

In the museum shop on the way out, I spoke to a woman who was waiting with her fiancé to meet with folks in the museum about using the large hall for the wedding. They were a bi-racial couple (she white, he - I believe - Latino) and I asked her about Oildale. She said: “They call people in the neighborhood 08ers, because of the last two numbers in the zip code. Now this is coming from someone who is Okie, but they’re really Okie.” This is clearly an insult. I ask her more about her ancestry and she says, “My grandfather’s grandfather came here to follow his daughter who had run off with a Democrat. When he got here, he started working in the fields. He worked one month and then he dropped dead. He’s buried in the oldest cemetery in Bakersfield.” 

Oildale

I drove along Chester Avenue over the Kern River.  Just over the bridge, staring down into Oildale, is a large Marine recruiting billboard with an African-American man dressed in formal Marines attire (white gloves, etc) and the logo “Dedicated to a Sense of Honor”. His was the only black face I saw all day. 

I was in the neighborhood to attend a church called Church without Walls, and it’s an outdoor congregation, almost like a revival, in an empty lot just north of the river. The area just north of the river is considered the poorest section of the neighborhood (there is more and more owner occupied homes the further north you go); and this section of the neighborhood is arguably the section most subjected to stereotypes and derision from folks outside the community (from the woman who checked me out at the hotel: “People in Oildale are nicer once you get past the train tracks.” The train tracks dissect the neighborhood, very roughly, along class lines). 

As I drove parallel to the river looking for the church, I was stuck me the dustiness of the streets – as compared to Bakersfield – and the poverty: trailer camps, rundown buildings, one empty lot where a goat wandered. It reminded me of a small Western Kentucky town I visited during my time in Appalachia. 

As I watched the church service, I talked to folks, I found myself coming to a belief that I had thought before but not really articulated: that if I share everything I see, including my own biases, and try to portray folks honestly, that is good. I don’t need to idealize or mythologize folks. Portraying them as human, filled with beauty and strength and imperfection, is a way for me to share my humanity; and that is something. 

I came to the church, which lies in a huge empty lot covered in concrete and lined with dark wooded trees. On the lot are two trailers ; two large [shipping] containers; and a number of cars, including a white van with “Church without Walls” in graffiti style writing..

The church itself is made up of two large tents with 150 seats or so, and a stage at one end where a man and a woman were playing guitar and checking the sound level. The woman next to me said that the tent had been up for a long time; although this is technically a mobile structure, it didn’t seem temporary. In the seats were about 30 adults; about 10 children were running around and playing just outside the tent.Several children played with semaphores, which I learned later was for praise dancing. They ran around with diaphanous cloth attached to short metal poles, the colors pink and a kind-of- abalone. The cloth blew in the wind, and thinking of it makes me think of pinwheels. 

I sat next to two folks: a man with a wizened face collared shirt opened all the way to show his bare chest; many teeth were missing and he held a cane. And a woman with a wide smile. In front of me is a woman who is with her two children, who have a hard time sitting still. She has tattoo on the back of her neck, muscular arms, and is constantly telling her kids to be quiet. One of the children has blond hair and eyelashes, almost to the point of looking albino.  In the rest of the congregation: people with strength in the eyes, in their jaws; a young woman whose eye shape suggests fetal alcohol syndrome; a young man behind the sound board who looks just barely tolerant of the pastor, who is questioning whether the sound board operator knows how to turn his headset mic on; a man in a cowboy hat and jeans who walks back and forth across the center aisle; a man in a four wheel scooter, whose seat is shredded all along one side; another one woman in a scooter who is asking folks if someone has taken her cell phone, which was in her purse by the bathroom; a lone non-white face, at the other side of the seats. I notice people’s hands: some with sores, other’s holding canes, holding babies, plucking a guitar. They look like hands that have worked hard. 

The Pastor’s service is direct, simple, and clear. He speaks about temptation, and says that he “hates church”. The reason that he hates church is because it is all about rules, which come from the outside. For him, finding your way to God is from the inside; that one doesn’t want to sin after one is saved... The passage was from the New Testament, I don’t remember which book. It’s a case for Christianity told, says the pastor, to explain Christianity to “the Jewish Mind”. As he speaks, he mentions Jewish celebrations (Sukkot? Can’t remember) as being against the Christian way, in a similar tone to what I have read in the writing about early Christians as they talked about ‘Paganism’. There is something in the phrase, “The Jewish mind” that makes me nervous.

He points out a man in the congregation who “came to service last year and said, ‘I’ll come for now but as soon as football season comes I’m not going to be here. ‘ But football season has started and he’s here.” 

After the service, everyone gets in line for food. There are now more people in the line than were there at the service. I stand between the man who has previously watched football and a man with a cane and radiant eyes.  The man who watched football has a long brown beard and a pot belly, and holds his body strongly vertical. He has a baseball cap (“I remember when sex was safe and motorcycles were dangerous”) and a t-shirt (a deer and hunting rifles, along the words “Bounty Hunter, the right to bear arms since 1776”).

I ask him about if he stopped watching football right away, or did it happen gradually?

Man: First, I got sober. I go to AA and NA three days a week with my fiancé. It’s just like he said. It happened from the inside. I used to do meth – back when they called in Bennies – when they had crosses on them. I did it since I was 14. But the Lord got me through all of that. Next is cigarettes.

As we get close to the food, I see clothing giveaways on the tables next to where we are sitting. Beside us in line, a young man plays with a hole in shoe so big that his toe sticks out. A man beside him says, “You need new shoes.” I also see a number of people with little robots made of paper, decorated with paper clips and washers; an art project that the kids did during the service.

I get food and sit next to folks who’ve been coming to the church for a long time. We talk about food, churches, and wedding locations in Bakersfield. The woman in the scooter comes by to ask folks about her cell phone. I think about the fact that at no point during the service and the meal has someone looked at me like an outsider, nor have they over-welcomed me like an important guest. I’m really grateful 

I finish my meal and walk out, past willow trees and palm trees. As I drive my car from the lot, one woman walks her children home. On the street, I see a woman [from the church] walking up Chester Avenue alongside two men. She has a wiry frame, as if slightly contorted by something.  I drive past Church Inc, the store front church were Pastor Eddie presides, a charismatic pastor with tattoos and a band who I saw on-line before I left.  I park in a dusty lot by the senior center and write notes while a white police car drives by. I decide to explore Oildale at night, so drive up Chester Avenue. I pass Trout’s bar, a massage parlor with Asian female faces on the window, and two Asian-American women (a mother and a daughter?) closing up shop. It is dark, now, and I drive down an alley behind a saloon and see the [same] woman [from church] on a curb comforting a woman who is crying. I drive down Chester Avenue, and see another police car. In four hours in Oildale: five white county police cars, two black and white county sheriff cars. I drive past a barbecue place, and head over the bridge back to the hotel. 
 

In the morning, I have breakfast with Jill Egland from the Arts Council of Kern, and she tells me about her work, the history of water in Bakersfield (the euphemism for Bakersfield: ‘Bakersfield: a river bank runs through it’), her life, and stories about Oildale. She describes Bakersfield as like the Wild West: a place where folks are fiercely protective of individual property rights. Although she is speaking specifically about water (and a case where a neighbor didn’t want a tree planted in front of his yard because it disrespected his property rights) it resonates with what I heard in the museum about the boom days of Bakersfield: with bars and Vaudeville touring companies and what seemed to be the air of the wild west.

I ask her about how wealth is distributed in Bakersfield, and where all the money from the oil goes. She says that most of the oil is now in large corporations, so it ‘flows to the top’ (and outside Bakersfield) but that most of the local family interests are not in oil itself, but in ancillary interests (cleaning wells, etc.) She says that most of the extremely wealthy folks of Bakersfield live in gated mega-mansions in the Southwest. She also explains that, after oil was found, most of the land was consolidated into two companies, whose forbearers are now Milller and Lux and Texaco (may have misunderstood this part).

She explains to me the difference between a derrick (the last one came down 1 1⁄2 years ago) and a grasshopper, tells me about the oil fields, which she describes as a ‘moonscape’ but which is lit up at night with blue flickering lights where the fittings of the oil drills come together. I share with her my feeling that people in Oildale remind me of wires, because of their resilience and strength. 

I also asked Jill about the Arts Council’s plan for work in Oildale after Cornerstone leaves. She replied, from the point of view of someone who worked in international and local community development that, “of course that is the $64,000 question.”  She stated that Oildale is the community with the least connection to the Arts Council, not for lack of effort but because of the many barriers dividing the neighborhood from the broader community. She said that her hope is to indentify “a cadre of people that we have identified and can continue working with” in the neighborhood, to use the arts as a community-building tool.

Other highlights of this trip:

* Visit to Rasmussen Senior Center, which hosts live music for seniors every day. I lined danced with folks briefly. Afterward, one of the ladies held my hand and told me, very kindly: “I think next time you should let someone lead you.” 
* Seeing a confederate flag in a window in one of the homes  
* Seeing WPA housing near the oil wells, small (one room?) and cement. They reminded me of housing for farm workers
*Seeing and interacting with several Mexican and Mexican-American residents: gardeners in the areas of the community that have lawns; two wealthy Latina women leaving the Padre Hotel drunk, and who describe the economic breakdown of the city,; a man who was with his mom at the senior center, who suffers dementia; a woman at the donut shop who came from Mexico six years ago and who is studying English at the college.  And a classic American scene later that night: underneath the silhouette of a palm tree, a group of Latino teenagers gathered around a park bench listening to Tupac while the blue lights of the oil fields flicker in the valley below.
* A visit to a sandy park at the edge of the neighborhood which looks out at the oil fields and which has a kiosk which describes the Native history of the region (Yokut, and others)
*  A visit to a convenience store in the heart of Oildale, run by a Sikh family. In the store, I had a conversation with a man from Choctaw heritage who is buying ‘Shield’ cigarettes. His mother, a full-blooded Choctaw, came from Oklahoma during the dustbowl (‘Can’t you see the Choctaw in me’ he said, pointing at his cheekbone?)
* A moment of gold: seeing an interesting building at the edge of a train tracks that once serviced the fields, I went it and met Millie Stead: a bartender in her 70s who once ran a bar right over the bridge into Oildale (it’s a barbecue place now). She and her current husband are converting the depot to a new bar, which has a penny bar (the bar is covered with pennies and polyurethane), and filled with amazing objects, including her own work of folk art that is stunning...

• A visit to the Highlander Bar, where I have an intense political conversation with a local historian in which he tells me “I’m a conservative. And if you are going to do this play, you have to understand the conservative mind”. We argue politics and, to a lesser degree, religion. He and I share the feeling that this is a deep crisis moment,..At the end of the conversation, he tells his wife that we haven’t agreed on anything, but it was a “great conversation” and he shakes my hand.

• A conversation with a local artist and his wife outside that same bar (Kary and Mike Barker): he is from Okie stock (it is his mom who pulled the babies on cotton; he described dragging 8 bags of cotton as a kid) and she’s from Polish heritage. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is now on display at the Padre Hotel.

• Straw hats seem to be one of the things that cross lines of race, class, and age.

• A late night visit to the music studio where Korn rehearsed in their early days. It’s in Bakersfield, not far from Oildale, in an industrial neighborhood (dogs guarding an empty lot, a long chain link fence, etc). The person who runs it, Terrence Fisher(nicknamed, I think, T) is a gifted community organizer.   He told me that when he first moved to Bakersfield there were signs on the bridge into Oildale that said, “n---ers keep out”. I ask him how long ago that was and he says, “Early eighties.”  He says that much has changed since then and, unlike many people who said that, he doesn’t seem be saying it as a way to deny. When I asked him how it changed, he said, “Time. And younger people. They go to high school, and bring a friend home, and say, ‘This is Leroy’, and they see their parents’ racism as stupid.”

• The lone black face in Oildale during my entire visit: a teenaged couple walking up Chester Avenue, she black, he white, evoking George and Emily in Our Town.

• Many conversations about meth, and its physical effects, and first hand sight in its effect on Oildale: teeth out, tortured bodies.

• Small community kindness: an old woman feeling sick and overheated, and refusing to take an ambulance, so a waitress at Sugar Mill Restaurant drives her home

• A conversation with an Asian-American young man at the gas station about the Asian-American population of Bakersfield. (“Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian: 11 families.” Japanese? “5 families.” Korean? “Two families.”)

• A visit to RockwellTrout’s, where I listened in on a meeting for local musicians that have come together for mutual support and advocacy.

• Also at Trout’s, I listened to Red Simpson and Larry Petree (sp?). Red emanated country cool, even in his late seventies. A young country singer dressed in a cowboy hat and a t-shirt tucked into his jeans also performed, after straddling his seat as one would sit on a saddle. At a break, I sat with Mr. Simpson on a bench outside Trout’s. He told me he’s soon sending memorabilia to the Country Music Hall of Fame, in an exhibit where he’ll be featured alongside Merle Haggard and Buck Owens.

Reading/Seeing/Hearing list

There Will be Blood (Film inspired by stories of early days of Bakersfield oil industry)

The Best of Times (Robin Williams’s film about Taft, a nearby community) 

The Other California, Gerald Haslam

“The Cousin Herb Henson TV Show” (TV show about country music which was filmed, I believe, in Bakersfield)

Music of Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Rose Maddox, and Red Simpson JusticeiinNigerianow.org
Patty Doolittle, visual artist based (I think) in Oildale
George Lakoff, Don’t Think of the Elephant (referred by Jill England)