The Right Places by Stephen; Birmingham

promoted as “the World’s Smallest Mountain Range.”
    It used to be that the Central Valley floor had a panoramic view of the snow-capped Sierras to the east and the lower coastal range of mountains to the west. Wherever you went in the Valley, the old-timers say, the mountains hung on two horizons. Today, they rarely show themselves, and this is the price the Valley has had to pay for irrigation. The air is no longer as dry as it was, and a misty haze nearly always obscures the mountains. Irrigation has also subtly changed Valley weather. It used, literally, never to rain in summer, but in recent years there have been sudden flash summer storms. These can be disastrous to certain crops. Peaches, for example, if hit by rain must be harvested within exactly seventy-two hours. Otherwise, brown spots appear, the peaches will not pass inspection, and an entire year’s crop—and income—will be lost. This happened to the peach ranchers of Modesto in 1969. Now, in addition to labor and Washington, the farmers bemoan the uncertainty of the weather—which, ironically, their own irrigation brought them.
    Continuing north, one begins to encounter around the town of Corning, low, rolling hills. Then, through Red Bluff and Redding—lumber towns—one enters the high hills and pines, and the Valley is over. The Sacramento River, wide and sleepy as it spreads across the Delta, is a racing torrent here, a mountain stream. Climbing still higher, along a winding road with an Alpine feel to its bends, one comes to the Shasta Dam, from which the Sacramento River now issues through giant penstocks. At Shasta Dam, the visitor is barraged with statistics—how many thousands of kilowatts the dam generates (enough to light half the world), how many miles of recreational lake-shore the dam created, how many billions of gallons the man-made lake can store (enough to cover the entire state of California to the depth of one inch). On the horizon stands the white and symmetrical silhouette of Mount Shasta, whose seasonally melting snows help fill up the enormous lake.
    Meanwhile, back in the state capital, young C. K. McClatchy is the fourth generation of his family to operate the “Bee” chain of Valley newspapers. There are Bee s in Sacramento, Fresno, and Modesto, and Mr. McClatchy’s wealthy maiden aunt, Miss Eleanor McClatchy, heads up McClatchy Enterprises, which includes radio and television stations. (A fifth generation of McClatchys is waiting eagerly in the wings.) C. K. McClatchy, typical of Valley men, has a special feeling about the place and what it means. “There is a sense, here,” McClatchy says, “of the continuation of history—of the Gold Rush, of the opening up of the West, of the growth of California from the earliest pioneer days to where it is now the most populous state in the union. And you get a sense here of how history has moved—swept, been carried, into the present, and how the present has maintained the integrity of the past. The Valley has kept up with its history like no other place I know of. Just go and stand on the rim of Shasta Dam”—called “the Keystone of the Central Valley Project”—“and see the thing that is the source of so much that has happened to the Valleyand beyond it, and you’ll see what I mean, why I find this Valley, plain and flat and conservative as it is, one of the most thrilling places to be alive in that I know.”
    And so this is one of the right places, too. Who needs Paris here, either?

Photo by Prowell. Courtesy of the Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce and Pier
    The good life afloat—Pier 66, Fort Lauderdale

    4
    Fort Lauderdale: “How Big Is Your Boat?”
    Many of the places where the money is new are affected to some degree by boosterism. But the point is, everybody knows this and nobody is ashamed of it. The new rich believe in living as they wish to live, not by any set