But 1973 hit the east end of Riverside County like a bizarre snowstorm. If it were a year like any other, Alicia Uribe and her hundred friends would’ve been up to their shoulders in Thompson Seedless. The old ones built Palm Springs to comfort their rich arthritis the young ones dug enough deep wells to cover patches from the San Jacinto Mountains to the Salton Sea with grapes, date palms, grapefruit, melons and sweet corn. As it is, 40,000 people live along its bottom and rising sides. Without deep wells and old age, the Coachella Valley would be one long griddle of sand, anchored with greasewood and horned toads.
Three o’clock cooks spit before it has a chance to touch ground.
At ten, the heat pushes past a hundred and the asphalt on the far side of noon bubbles like cornmeal mush. The 16th didn’t feel all that different from any other spring day in the Coachella Valley. Each way Alicia looked, the world had a warp to it and a shimmer, like the air was dribbling sweat. The 90 degrees around her kept lifting off the valley floor in thin slabs. Alicia cocked her union flag over her arm and let it slop sideways like wash on the line. The road behind them slid six greasy miles east to Coachella and Indio. She and a hundred others started the 16th lined along the hot dirt shoulder in front of the Mel-Pak vineyards. It has been ever since it first happened. Alicia Uribe remembers the 16th of April like she remembers her feet or the fingers on her hands.
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