Valley Productivity and Heaven

We who have not seen it for ourselves can not properly imagine the wealth that the Big Valley offered her people.

One person alone in the Great Valley could easily enough make a living—on rabbits, ground squirrels, maybe ducks in the winter. But how could thousands of people, whole villages of people sustain themselves, day after day, year after year, a hundred or more people in one spot. There couldn’t be that many rabbits and ducks in the wholee valley.

Say, two or three ducks a day per person, or a quart of acorns, or the same amount of wildflowers seeds, or grasshoppers, or a pound or two of salmon, or shellfish, or deer, elk, pronghorn.

Multiply that by 200 people, and do it all over day after day, little wonder the Indian tribelets so jealously guarded their territorial collecting-rights.

And not only food, but think of all those luxurious rabbitskin blankets, feather cloaks, thousands of ceremonial woodpecker scalps, otterskin quivers, and all the firewood they consumed, and building materials, bedding, special basketry fibers garnered in quantity. . . .

How inexhaustible can Mother Nature be ?! Her people not only lived, but lived well, in comfort, even luxury by some standards. And yet the supply never ended. No matter how much grass and flower seed they harvested, the valley would be a solid blanket of flowers next spring, the salmon would come crowding up the rivers in masses undiminished, the clams never could be used up. Small and large mammals remained plentiful, and above all, the great, sky-brightening waves of yelping, bugling, quacking waterfowl could be counted on like clockwork . . . the great Mother never failed to give, and give abundantly. Nor was it only food for the body.

To the Indians, food was the focus, it being the most unpredictable or most limited commodity in their world—although they seldom went hungry. We who are glutted with food and don’t have to look for it, rarely think about it. What we lack and need and have to look for, is beauty—food for the soul. The Indians didn’t think much about that, being surrounded by it, day in, day out.

Now the valley is our symbol of barrenness and boredom and monotony. We have, true to form, turned it upside down.

From the most beautiful to the least, the California Empty Quarter—our own Rub al Khali.

Exploring the valley in search of any miraculously surviving little oasis of reality in the endless agricultural dead zone, I have more than once been blessed with an experience like this:

You are out in the middle of the primeval valley, in April. The landscape is oddly lumpy with mima mounds. All is green, pink, white, yellow—dazzling yellow, all in a soft carpet a little more or less than ankle high. The air is soft, barely warm. The sky is hazy blue, with tall white clouds stacked against a line of low hills far in the distance. A calming silence pervades the whole scene, but when you tune your hearing to a more subtle frequency, the place becomes alive with little voices—various zips and buzzings of busy insects reveling in the flower explosion, distant silvery bird voices . . . 

Nothing can be so calming and relaxing and soothing and yet so lively and exciting and electric at the same time. Senses all alert—visual overload, counterpointed with sweetly subtle [?] of scent, touch, sound, and all speaking to you of purity, freshness, perfection, overflowing clean life, and giving waves of anticipatory goosebumps to those of us with a penchant for details and exploration, beckoning with promises of endless discoveries just waiting for you—pots of multifarious gold, and much more than that, much better.

You have arrived. This is it. The search is over, and nothing left to do but deliriously open one bright present after another. How can such multitudinous magic suddenly erupt out of a barren waste? How can we be so sick as to turn all this into a real barren waste?

What now would it cost in dollars to supply even 100 people with enough flower seeds and wild geese to keep them from starving? And how long could it be kept up before the supply dried up for good?