The Oakmont Valley
“Within the Oakmont Valley, poverty and affluence was divided with a fine stroke of the knife. For most folks, rent alone was hard enough to come by. This was especially true in recent years as real estate agencies bought up vast swaths of cheap, open land to turn into a spiderweb of houses, malls, and big box stores. The newly erected houses that would colonize the region would never be put up for sale. Rather, the same agencies which had built them transferred the properties to their sister company, who put them up for rent. Ownership of property was paramount, for there was one central rule all those within California understood implicitly: rent could always be increased, while a mortgage only ever decreased in time. ”
The Oakmont Valley is a fiction chunk of land far north of Los Angeles, far south of Sacramento, and distant enough from San Francisco that one can’t see it past the foothills fencing in the Bay Area.
The surrounding area of the Oakmont Valley is strictly flat, interrupted only by the Valley itself as it rises up, covered in Oaks, and then flattens just as quickly as it rose. With little sources of water, except the recently-dried river which passes through, the Valley suffers from frequent droughts.
To make matters worse, much of the farmland has been bought up by real estate developers hoping to extend the borders of the Bay Area even further. The newly built neighborhoods suck what little water there is from the earth beneath them, all in order to keep their thin strip of grass in front of their houses nice and green.
The Valley itself houses only two communities. The Town of Oakmont, wherein our protagonist lives, and it’s sister city, Arroyo Rojo. The two towns differ in nearly every imaginable way, from their politics to the geography of their land. Even as the fire marches through and decimates much of the land surrounding them, they diverge in their path to recovery. Where Oakmont, under the guise of Samuel Ward, develops a communal-based farming solution, Arroyo Rojo begins a word-for-food program that punishes those not willing to bow the head.
“Normally this time of year the foothills shimmered gold. In place of that grand bucolicity was a stagnant stain of yellow, sickly and bereft those flickering white dots and running lines of light that drifted to and fro alongside the strands of wild grass. Down there now, within those roaming hillocks, rose a plague of weariness, of despair that crept out from under the veil of smoke. This gloom clung in greedy fashion to the crooks and crevices of the mighty live oak canopies, dulling their hue to russet and juniper. Fences long since abandoned by lost farmers rose from the dull hills in lines of pure black like the singular digits of dead giants clawing for the sun’s warmth. From between sun-bleached crags—which tore hills apart and formed betwixt them hidden lands—sprawled grasping hands of sorrow, those risen trees burned to blackness and the dried, dying fans of grass coyly shuffling alongside the tide of the wind. With a heavy heart, he spied in the distance, just under a live oak’s graceful shade, a narrow skull rising slowly from waist high grass. To its right and left and behind it rose more bodies. One with a mighty set of antlers wobbled out to lead the herd. Their fragile bodies shivered under the pyretic heat. Sam knew then that by morning they would either have made it to Jonah Martin’s Homestead or they would have died trying. ”
The inspiration for the Oakmont Valley came from the many trips our family has taken throughout California. Truthfully, the entire novel is an ode to the landscape of California. Although, admittedly, the environment alone is not the only inspiration I took into consideration in regards to California’s interior.
Growing housing insecurities, global climate change, and gentrification has reshaped every inch of California. Many farms have been replaced by vineyards, many open plots of land where folks ought not live are covered in million-dollar houses, and those who have clung dearly onto their communities for generations have been forced out by money-hungry leeches who come to clear out their culture and replace it with their image of cleanliness (that is to say, wine bars, breweries, salons, and cramped apartments and condos that cost 10x more than the houses they replaced).
Many see the changes in California’s towns and cities as progress. Those folks often fail to see the lives their idea of progress has upended or, simply put, destroyed outright.