This is an extraordinarily costly practice, both economically and environmentally, and support for the oil business is not bottomless, even here. But its output has fallen dramatically since 1985, propped up by pushing steam into the wells to draw out the sticky oil that remains. The Kern River Oil Field has produced 2 billion barrels and counting. Poor people, successors to the Haggards, still live around Oildale, and still pay too much for sub-standard housing. You can visit his family boxcar at the Kern County Museum, just two miles from Panorama Park. Haggard would popularize the brand of country music known as the Bakersfield Sound. Would rumble and rattle the old boxcar we lived inĪnd I was a kid then and I loved that old train The oil tanker train from down on the river
From Panorama Park you can see the community of Oildale, where Merle Haggard grew up in a boxcar, and later wrote a song about it: It brought people from around the world to work and live here. Kern River Oilfield, discovered by prospectors in 1899, helped turn California into America’s leading oil producer in the early 20th century. The oil patch, like the sequoia groves, is too grand in scale for a human field of vision, or even to be easily photographed. Indeed, the oil fields here so dominate the landscape they remind me, perversely, of the giant trees not far away in Sequoia National Park. Beyond the river vista near the bluffs, massive oil fields stretch north for many miles, further than your eye can see. To your left, an oil refinery is in view. The vista from Panorama Park demonstrates this, to a shocking degree. But what really makes Bakersfield an island in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley is its economic devotion to oil. House of Representatives, is a redoubt of reactionary Republicanism, surrounded by a state turning ever bluer. The hometown of Kevin McCarthy, the highest-ranking GOPer in the U.S. Water that supplies the Carrier Canal also feeds the Kern Island Canal-Bakersfield once had so much water around it that its name was Kern Island.īakersfield is still an island-perhaps California’s largest isle-at least in the ways its people live and think. From Panorama Park, you can see two of the first: Beardsley Canal and Carrier Canal. It provides undeniable evidence that in California, you really can defy the laws of chemistry: Here, oil and water really do mix, and all too well.īut in the 19th century, farmers began taming those volatile river and lake waters, eventually creating today’s drier landscape, with its tumbleweeds. In heavy rains or heavy snowmelt in the Sierras, the water systems of the Kern and San Joaquin Rivers and Tulare Lake would merge, turning the middle of California into an inland sea. One of these was Tulare Lake, which could grow to as much as 60 miles long and 36 miles wide, making it the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. The river and other waterways often flooded, and the valley was a land of lakes. This land you see from Panorama Park used to be one of California’s wetter places. But it’s a time machine, a portal into the past-and perhaps into the future. This pastoral river can feel like an oasis amidst the larger, drier landscape. There are fish in the river, and birds flying above it. Whitney, the state’s tallest peak, meanders below the park’s bluffs, winding through a small forest of willows, cottonwoods and sycamores. The Kern River, fed from the slopes of Mt. And it provides undeniable evidence that in California, you really can defy the laws of chemistry: Here, oil and water really do mix, and all too well.Īs you look out and down, the water appears first. The view of oil fields and waterways isn’t exactly beautiful, but it is stunning-even overwhelming. You are witnessing how California’s past and present may be converging to create a very different future. It only seems like you can.Īnd when you take in this panoramic view of Kern County, you are not just looking out upon our nation’s greatest valley. But if you’re looking for the state’s most thought-provoking view, skip the beaches and the mountains, and head instead for Bakersfield’s Panorama Park.įrom this narrow neighborhood park atop the Panorama Bluffs on Bakersfield’s northern edge, you can’t actually see everything.
From the tunnel view of Yosemite Valley to just about any glimpse of the Golden Gate, California is famous for its extraordinary vistas.
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