The following day I was knocking pecans out of a tree for pay. There was this pecan tree and a tarp spread out on the ground beneath it and a wooden mallet in my hands. Every time I whacked the trunk a shower of pecans, leaves, dust, twigs, bugs, caterpillars and birds’ nests fell out of the tree and into my hair and down inside my shirt. After one afternoon of pecan knocking, I took my pay and thumbed a ride to Stockton, where I’d been told they needed hands for the peach canneries.

For two weeks I worked in the cannery, slopping around over the juicy floors, the squashed and quartered peaches. The air, hot and steamy, reeked with the sweet stink of rotten fruit. I carried crates of peaches off the loading dock and up to the women on the line, whose work was to skin and slice the peaches. Since they were paid by the crate, they preferred large peaches—less work, same money—and whenever I brought one of these ladies a crate of small peaches she would scream at me in language I shudder to remember and sometimes fling a few hard green ones at me as I retreated fast, ducking down behind the stacks of empties. They were all sick, those women, sick with fury and insult, overwork and boredom, abandoned by their menfolk, fighting one another, penned up all day in that foul shed. They worked with sharp little knives; one day I saw a woman running down the aisle with her hands over her face, blood streaming between her fingers.

Taking my pay, I left them there, those poor women in their outrage and misery, and took off afoot for Yosemite Valley. I wanted to see the big trees, the high waterfalls and the granite face of El Capitan. Made it too, by God, after a couple of days’ trudging through the golden hills, past the manzanita and Emory oaks, along the narrow asphalt road that led into John Muir’s range of light.

Later…. Back into the flat and sweltering Central Valley, south through Fresno—where I saw Saroyan’s home—to Bakersfield, up over the Tehachapi Pass and into the desert. At once I felt as if I had left California behind and was mighty glad of it. A long, windy night on the back of a flatbed truck, under the new moon, brought me at dawn to the town of Needles and my first view of the Colorado River.

Needles in August must be one of the two or three hottest inhabited places on earth. A fearful, scalding heat that makes you hurry from shade to shade. With forty dollars in my shoe and hope in my heart, I stood all day on the eastern edge of town, thumb out, begging for a lift. Nobody stopped. Across the river waited a land that filled me with strange excitement: crags and pinnacles of naked rock, the dark cores of ancient volcanoes, a vast and silent emptiness smoldering with heat, color and indecipherable significance, above which floated a small number of pure, clear, hard-edged clouds. For the first time I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings—the place where the tangible and the mythical become the same.