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In our emptying house the return becomes real. Nick and I move boxes and avoid conversation, as if speech, with its hints and fears, could make us change our minds. We are unsure of what we are doing. We make busy with arrangements each day, phone calls, random notes. We wear ragged clothes for packing and fight the dust while the rooms clear. The school calls with dates and classroom numbers, confirmations of what I will be teaching in September. Nick sings the Fresno State fight song in the background while I speak with administrators, the chair of my new department, and other faculty members. When I hang up, I feel a warm breeze run through the house from every open door and window and dream of my new job, once again hoping we've made the right decision. In the backyard I find Nick sitting in a battered camping chair that has missed packing with his head resting on the chair-back, eyes closed. He hears me walk out onto the concrete steps of the patio and says, with eyes still closed, "We're doing the right thing," as if he is talking in his sleep.

I sit on the porch step and watch him. I imagine Nick daydreaming of the return, of the familiar smells of alfalfa and cotton, the wide expanse of land, and the new relatives, second cousins and newlyweds we have never met. I remember a time, just five quick years ago, when Nick and I met, and think about how tricky fate can be. We balance on the edge of a return, packing the house and our San Diego lives into boxes, as if our new relics can establish us once again in the Central Valley, easily. To return with Nick, a man so unlike any I have met before, one who understands the nature of the Valley in all its complexity, is a wonder to me. And finally, a man I don't have to hide my family from.

The night we met, Nicholas stood at a makeshift podium in a cramped, downtown San Diego coffeehouse making hair-trigger movements with his eyes, taut and ready, joined uneasily with the languid gestures of his long hands. He read poems about Fresno, calling them serenades to his forgotten hometown, a place he said nobody sang serenades to anymore, a place forgotten in literature with the deaths of Steinbeck and Saroyan. The audience seemed lulled by the word Fresno, as if the softness of the s and the drift-away ending of the o were enough to make them dream false images–of wheat fields, open sky, and friendly rural folk. But Nick's poems spoke of detail, of the reality of life in the Central Valley–the boredom-inducing drone of swamp coolers on hot nights, the zap of bug catchers hanging outside bedroom windows, aimless teenagers shuffling in the parking lots of the Circle Ks, and the faint sound of rural sirens, so eerie in a landscape that stretches empty and flat in every direction. In all this, the song of the serenade seduced me, and Nick and I mixed together like the words and images of his poems.

It was later we began watching the stars. From the city, an hour's drive east leads to the low brush-covered desert, smooth plains with sudden, unexpected peaks, like a sheet of paper that's been wadded up and then uncrinkled again. On small holidays Nick and I trekked up late-afternoon canyon walls searching for lookouts, and then we'd nestle into one another, waiting. In the jet dark it would begin, the parade of stars falling quickly through the night sky, open wide with shooting points of light amidst the stable unity of familiar constellations. There beneath the dark sky that seemed almost within reach, we talked of home, of what it meant to come from towns riddled with poverty, prejudice, fundamentalism, hope. And although our lives were lived in separate places–Nick’s in the city of Fresno, and mine fifty miles southeast of that city, in the rural outpost of Porterville–we discovered a sameness, a similarity to our lives, lives shaped and measured by the landscape of our experience, or what outsiders called the Great Central Valley.

I never thought I'd go back–at least not alive and certainly not so young. The Central Valley was a place full of lurking ghosts and sky so big I felt diminished beneath it. My father's ethic of getting out, chanted to many Valley children whose parents felt stifled by the open space and insular communities, worked its power on me. I left to live in the big cities, learning to love my crowded, habit-trail apartments like a busy hamster. Living in those cities, I saw the Central Valley as a mythical place, a place I had to leave to appreciate and later, understand.

From the perspective of our adult eyes, looking into the Valley like those outsiders, it became a place not just of bored hot nights, our jobs at grimy mom-and-pop diners or doughnut shops, or the daily accumulation of teenage despair, but a place full of a history not taught to us there, a history we began to search for, one that told us who we were and where we came from. So to the surprise of everyone, most significantly to us, and against the I-told-you-so looks of my aunts, we found ourselves slouching back toward the stretched plains of Fresno, its familiar roads lined with oil horses and cotton fields.

Growing up the children of Okies in the Central Valley was not something one talked about with outsiders. The term itself one rarely heard at home, a word whispered and filled with shame. Nick's family, like mine, came out from Arkansas in the late 1930s, when Route 66 was full to bursting with migrants from the Dust Bowl, areas in the southern Midwest devastated by a decade of dust storms that eroded topsoil until the land, previously farmed by sharecroppers and tenant farmers–rural people raised on the land with usually no higher than a sixth grade education and too poor to pay the poll tax–could no longer support them.

At first, California actively recruited families like ours, with flyers appearing in the small towns of Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas, advertising high picking wages in a California painted as a green oasis, ripe and ready to harvest for any family willing to move. There had been a decade of strikes in the state between the Mexican bracero pickers and the Anglo growers, and the government's repatriation program for Mexican laborers created a labor shortage that made it increasingly difficult for growers to hire cheap pickers. The wages and working conditions the braceros protested seemed like jewels of hope to families devastated by the Dust Bowl. They arrived in droves.

But the reality of California was in sharp contrast to the friendliness of those flyers, where eventually police patrols at the state line where Route 66 crossed into California refused entry to Dust Bowlers. My father's family of eight took up residence in a tent in Woodville, a "little Oklahoma." I’ve heard stories about the local chapter of the Legionnaires surrounding the shantytown, men armed with bats and knives threatening Woodville's inhabitants with anti-migrant epithets, more words Nick and I grew up catching in whispers and glances: "fruit tramps," "white trash," "Okies," "white niggers."

This history, the certainty of facts and details, was never taught at the schools we grew up in, and the stories we gathered from our families were pulled from them like stubborn mules. I had never even heard of The Grapes of Wrath until, in college in San Francisco, I was forced to write a paper about where my family came from, and in the library, amongst books on the Depression and California, I began to piece together a past I knew little about. What had previously been my individual family’s stories suddenly became a movement, a migration, a history.

What happens to children like us, shamed by our pasts from within our own families and ignored or forgotten by the collective memory of the established communities of the Central Valley, those fifth generation farming families of the Forty-Niners, where everyone is supposed to be like everyone else, white, and above all, middle class? In the mind, in our secret lives, what compensations, what ghosts follow us?

As children we learned early on to pick out people we knew were like us. At school it was easy to tell. We were the kids who still spoke with Southern accents, before we learned the right way, and although being Okie was only occasionally directly stated, it was certainly understood. Nick remembers a time he brought home two new playmates, one whose family, he later learned, still picked, and the other whose family lived in Snob Hill, an area of town where the older, established families lived, those who openly protested the arrival of Dust Bowlers in the Depression. Nick's mother, although kind to the boy whose family still picked, encouraged Nick to play more often with the other boy, whose father was an executive with the Grower's Association and a member of the Fresno County School Board. This desire to fit in, to cover the past with new stories and tales, to be just as good as or, preferably, better than the rich kids, was a notion Nick and I both grew up with. But I tried not to play with other kids, preferring my cousins to new encounters because those outsiders, the kids who weren't the children of Southern migrants, were threatening. In my imagination they had new homes or old farmhouses set amidst acres of orange groves; they had history, where their stories involved grandparents or great-grandparents driving stakes into California farmland that was new and unclaimed; and above all, they had language, a language without howdys and y'alls.

In those hazy days of growing up, throughout the seventies, the Central Valley was filled with mystery and enchantment, as hometowns are to young children. But the onslaught of the eighties and the pangs and adjustments of puberty brought a keen awareness to teenagers straddling the Valley's working class, with the faint chance of college never mentioned at home but available nonetheless. And Nick and I, in our separate towns and separate lives then, took similar paths: me at Porterville Junior College and Nick at Fresno State.

I felt real in those cool classrooms, reading Aristotle and Plato, and I studied hard, determined to get out, go on to someplace like San Francisco State or Los Angeles. College was like rain in the desert, a chance to hear someone speak a language totally foreign, one with real "ing" endings and without constant comparisons between life and the Bible. And under the secret prodding of my father, telling me I could do it, knowing full well my mother and aunts wanted me to grow up to be just like them, all the time hiding behind the we-did-just-fine-without-going-to-school comments, I finished my two year degree in four, and transferred to San Francisco State.

On the long bus ride each day through the city streets to school, I grew an even heavier anticipation of college and what happened there, images of women professors with age as their talons of achievement and books they'd written etched in the very lines of their faces. That was who I wanted to be. And now I am returning to the Valley, many years after my first tastes of the cities, of those cool classrooms, armed with the same talons of achievement, ready to teach history and literature, particularly that history of the Valley that I didn’t have growing up, to the fresh faces in the classrooms of Fresno State. It all seems like a twist of fate, of some grand plan taking place in the minds of my aunts, who say to me now, We always knew you'd come back. But I think of it in other terms, like my father, who responds, To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose.

Our time in San Diego is limited now and I try to negotiate visits to special places in the face of a rapidly approaching moving date. I have made two trips to the desert without Nick. I make the trips in the day, walking amongst the sparse desert brush that I still can't name. There is a certain spindly cactus that blooms a kind of small red apple at its nine-foot tips. And every plant, tall or short, whether obviously cactus or more toward a kind of tumbleweed, has spines. Sometimes I stop on the trail and stand at the edge looking out at the terrain. I could break from the path if I could manage the careful navigation of thorns. The wide, flat plains remind me of home, making the skin on my neck flush.

At night it seems most real. Nick sleeps cupped into my back and I watch the stars for both of us through the window. Sometimes he muffles words in the dark–field, trash, cotton. He tells me of dreams where he is little again, dreams of his brothers.

For Nick the return is different. Although with age we have both grown into a reconciliation with the Valley and with home, Nick's return has been shadowed by the death of his youngest of three brothers, all of who never strayed from the Valley, and who have all worked for the same orange grower since high school. In the summer after Nick moved to San Diego ten years ago, Jackson was killed on the job when the inner tube of a tractor tire he had been filling with air burst. The impact of the rubber against his body was so great it severed Jackson's spinal cord at the base of his neck, instantly killing him. He was nineteen. Nick and I haven't spoken much of Jackson over the past five years except for the occasional reference to his presence in a childhood story or reminiscence. Yet I imagine him sometimes, from the sunny-cheekboned photographs I've seen, as one of the ghosts whose arms we are walking into by returning home.

The Valley has undergone many changes over the thirty years since we were born there. Modesto hinges on the edge of cosmopolitanism with small communities of Bay Area transplants fitted snugly into tract complexes. My cousin recently told me she greeted a new neighbor walking past her yard only to have the woman stare blankly at her and keep walking. "Bay Area transplant," my cousin said.

Small towns that once had only a post office and feed supply, often housed in the same converted barn, now boast warehouse stores and factory outlet strip-malls. Family-owned fruit stands featuring the ripe goods and regional oddities of the area farms have been outnumbered by arena-sized grocery stores with rows of carbon-copy fruits and vegetables bearing unnatural shelf-lives. Surrounded by the very fields which harvest much of the fruits and vegetables for the entire country, the produce sections of these brightly lit stores exhibit the spooky sameness of produce sections in say, Las Vegas or Omaha.

I have been packing the books and folders, magazine clippings and taped interviews of relatives telling their Dust Bowl stories. Each book or random page has its own story, the where and how I found it, the endless computer searches and frustrated reference librarians. Because Okies are hard to find. There are of course the standards: The Grapes of Wrath, the photographs of Dorothea Lange, the work of Okie writers Gerald Haslam and Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, and the government documents of the Depression, those sterile graphs and maps monitoring the migrations of thousands. But in each of these, with the exception of Haslam's and McDaniel’s writing, there is the curious sense of voyeurism, heightened most in the work of Dorothea Lange, whose photographs convey the real sense of the American experience of the Okie, of outsiders looking into the other's world of poverty, discrimination, despair. And in those books of photographs, as the viewer, one is always placed on the side of luck–lucky to be outside the photograph looking in for only that brief moment, and then turning the page.

In the classroom of my imagination, the students stare wide-eyed at me, as if I am a relic come to life teaching them the events of fifty years past. The drive for a sense of memory may only touch some of us, or may only begin with the onslaught of the swift slide toward middle age, when we begin to question in a way we previously hadn't who we are and where we come from. The students groan, as if what they are learning has no relevance in the Valley today. All of them, whether Chicano or white, Okie or middle class, mixed or bi-racial, Filipino or fifth-generation Chinese, have been taught to forget the past in a mixture of a misguided attempt at unity and blatant racism, where silence and assimilation lead to harmony, and where the goals for everyone are clearly marked: cars, houses, good jobs. But in the classroom, those bright few, no matter their color, class, the differences of their own story, understand what I'm doing. They leave there and take something with them.

I begin to remember survival skills taught to me by my father when I was little. In the desert you can drink the water of the cacti, find shade, move only at night. I jot these quickly on scraps of paper between washing windows or walls and paste them to the refrigerator with moving tape, hoping Nick can use them for poems. Remember the North Star, Orion, and in the shadowy dawn, Venus on the horizon. I begin to remember, too, stories of Jackson that Nick has told me and I write these, in starkest detail, as I recall Nick telling them. Then Jacks took that hen and he just ran. Boy could outrun a jackrabbit. Nick stands silently in front of them, as if they are puzzles or haiku, and then calls to me, Yes.

Today Okies are still a visible subculture in the Valley. While many families, in just a generation or two, have ascended from cotton pickers to white collar professionals or even farm owners, most have achieved solidly working class status as truck drivers, or construction workers, and the women as factory laborers, store clerks, or pink collar office workers. Some have gone on to exercise against others the same kind of discrimination they have suffered, and some, under the teachings of Christ, have embraced the mixing of races and cultures in the Valley. As I recently heard my aunt say, "If I can't walk down the street with a black man here on earth, how'm I gonna walk with him in Heaven?"

The Valley has moved me in different ways, at different points of my life. I see in Nick the haunted looks I know I must also own as we pack and move, dredge up memories and try to guard ourselves from the past. Our empty house seems to usher us quickly out and we linger in the echoing rooms as if these brief silent moments might calm our edgy blood. In the desert there is a small bird who, amongst the enormous brush, finds a burrow in the drifts of sand at the base of a barb-stemmed shrub, and from there, makes her sharp call through the badlands. Waiting, and after a long silence, one hears the shrill responses of the others answering, until there is a song of calls among the hushed cacti. I imagine Nick and I like these birds after our move back home, at first using the cover of sky in the stretched Valley to protect ourselves, but then finally, after silence and a little bravery, calling out, looking for others.

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