my savings to proudly pay three hundred dollars for the first home of my own—a small camping trailer I could park at whichever farm employed me, not too far from where other migrant workers were housed in busier seasons.
On the first or second night after taking up residence in the trailer, I discovered it had several almost unfixable leaks. This coincided with my discovery that the cold of winter in Mendota was much more oppressive than that of the Baja. Clearly, I was not prepared for the bone-chilling wetness of those frigid nights and early mornings, especially as I attempted to acclimate to a much more intense work regimen than I had known before. But I was not about to admit that I couldn’t handle it, so I decided that I would embrace, even celebrate, the hardships and see them as educational. Who, me, worry about the weather and admit to feeling more alone than ever before in my life? Not a chance. And to prove it to myself, I decided to love my leaky trailer all the more for its flaws—not to mention for its ugly, awkward blue-green trim. I was still my father’s son. If the weather was cold and the work was grueling, so be it. My belief was that I was being tested—physically and mentally—and that if I could get through this pass successfully, nothing could stop me. If something happened to shake my confidence, I could live with that. If I could fight back by making light of the problem as not such a big deal, I would prevail. That’s how I chose to view my leaky trailer—not as the trappings of poor me but as a palace!
Then I learned that one of the most menial and most challenging jobs for any farm worker was the seasonal requirement of moving irrigation lines. Wouldn’t you know it? That was my winter job—the first test handed to me, just in time to bring me seriously down to earth. To some, this trial by fire might have been nothing but a choice to put up with the job nobody else wanted. But for me, that would have been defeatist. Instead, I had to figure out how to take it in stride and excel at it. My inspiration? Bruce Springsteen, champion of the working class, whose “Born in the USA” was already an anthem for me, even though I wasn’t born here. To demonstrate my rugged individualism, I bought an all-terrain vehicle, a Honda 175 motorcycle (red, my new favorite color), a rarely seen three-wheeler—which I could drive in the fields as well as on the road.
Moving irrigation lines was worse than I’d heard. The task was to move twenty-yard-long sections of the lines from one row of cotton seedlings to the next, picking them up at one end and then at the other, shifting them bit by bit. The ground was a nasty consistency between mud and quicksand. Anyone wearing boots or shoes would sink precipitously into knee-deep mud and become stuck. I could move twice as fast if I went barefoot, though I still sank down in the mud to my knees and my feet were quickly torn to shreds, becoming frozen and bloody. And that was my life—pretty much all day, every day, in the cold. Brutal!
The physical toll included exhaustion, discomfort, and lots of pain, but the real challenge was the mental test—the need to confront my fear of the discomfort, my dread that the hours would elapse too slowly, my resistance to the sheer monotony of the repetition and the menial labor, my insecurity that others might look down on me because I worked in the dirt, and my own maddening impatience for the work to be over.
At first, I survived by daydreaming about my unfolding master plan to make a lot of money as quickly as possible and return to my country triumphant—no longer the child of a poor family or a teacher who couldn’t afford to do the job for which he was trained, but a man of stature, wealth, and options. However, this fantasy started to wear thin once I had collected a few paychecks. With my wage of $3.75 an hour—actually 50¢ more than the minimum wage at the time—I began to realize that I would need much longer than a year or so to accumulate the kind of savings I’d imagined I would put away in that time.
So I reminded myself that I would not labor here for the rest of my life; my work on these California farms was only that first step toward saving enough to return home and acquire a university education. Other steps would come. But just as important as seeing the big picture was learning how to be in the present moment and to inhabit the little picture—to intensify my concentration on whatever task was at hand. Little did I know that learning to wield this sword of intense, pure focus would serve me well in the future—from moving irrigation lines to picking tomatoes to battling brain cancer.
I learned that with focus came patience—a commodity that I’d never had in great supply. And, ironically, my patience was what enabled me to move up rapidly at each new job that I was given. Patience—which is as necessary for tending crops as it is for conducting Nobel prize–winning research—also nurtured joy and a passion for life. Without joy, of course, we’re left with drudgery and even hopelessness. Passion further encouraged me to do my best, no matter how menial or small the job. Some might think me crazy to find passion for field work. But I learned to love the labor as a treasure I had unearthed in the San Joaquin Valley, one that made me rich forever and that made me feel like the alpha male I wanted to be. This period in the fields was my time in the sun, my opportunity to rise, and I wasn’t going to let the bitter, cold winter or irrigation lines or leaky trailers stop me.
And rise I did. Before the season was over, I had worked my way up from moving irrigation lines to driving one of the biggest, baddest, most intricate pieces of farm equipment of the era. Manufactured by Caterpillar, it looked like a space-age dragon and could practically fly, able to plow soil in wide swaths—provided, that is, that the driver could maneuver it with the utmost precision.
I loved driving that dragon, sitting up in the cab with my coffee and breakfast, seeing the steam rise from the hot thermos and my breath escape into the cold air, as I raced a pack of wily coyotes that were determined to jump into the cab and get to my food.
When the winter season finally came to an end in late March, I rejoined the crew working for Uncle Fausto. There at the ten-thousand–acre family-owned ranch that had been founded during the Great Depression, I was inspired to learn some of the history of this Greek family and discovered that the owner’s grandfather had come to Ellis Island and migrated west, starting as a seasonal farm laborer and working his way up until he had enough money to start a small farm of his own here in the heart of central California. It was wonderful to imagine the stages of growth of that first harvest and picture the crops flourishing over the years so that future generations of his family would be the beneficiaries of his dream. Where else but in America could such a success story be told? What was to stop me from eventually cultivating a ranch of my own? Nothing!
Nothing, except that every time I rose to the top of the class at one job, the slate was wiped clean as soon as I moved to the next job, and I had to start fresh. Fortunately, I moved up rapidly, sometimes on a daily basis, other times within a week, until finally I was the head of a crew. This progress was a reminder that while patience was a virtue, I preferred the motion forward—like those speedy stars I loved in the night sky.
But whether moving slow or fast, I had many moments of doubt. One such incident took me by surprise during a lunch break when I decided to converse in Spanish with the kid who worked behind the counter at the little market out in the middle of nowhere. By now, I had invested in my first Spanish-English dictionary (kept in my hip pocket, always at the ready) and had even started a journal in which I was attempting to write my thoughts in my very broken English. Most of the time, I placed my lunch order in English and got little reaction from the teenager who worked there, who was clearly Mexican-American—probably first generation.
On this day, being my natural, gregarious self, I said something in Spanish about the beautiful spring day and then parted with, “Have a pleasant afternoon, brother.”
Saying nothing, the kid stared back at me in revulsion. No, his look was one of disdain. Even derision.
In that instant, I felt as devastated as I had at six years old when the big kids played me at marbles and stole money from the gas station cash register. When I analyzed the exchange at the market, I realized that the teenager’s embarrassment at our shared ethnicity had less to do with me than with his shame, perhaps, about his parents, who may have been migrant
