Essay: Modesto

I.
A giant arching sign greets you as you enter Modesto.

It’s a bit over-reaching, this civic motto, boosterish and therefore suspect:

“Water, Wealth, Contentment and Health.”

You might think you are in Yosemite looking up at Half Dome, but you aren’t. That’s a two-hour drive from here.

I’m not sure Modesto should be bragging about water; water that has to be imported, piped down from Oroville Dam or somewhere north. I’d read that the farmers mined water out of the ground here with hundreds of wells, lowering the already-low Central Valley water table, potentially causing minor earthquakes.

It certainly did not look like a very healthy place, based on the miles of impervious surface, sprawl and strip malls I drove through that afternoon as I left the highway. It reminded me of east Memphis, with no Graceland to compensate for it.

II.
Later that evening, at the Quality Inn, the tap water tastes metallic.

It’s no granite-purified Hetch Hetchy nectar, like you get from the tap in San Francisco or Berkeley.

A place that calls itself The Quality Inn makes me think there is not much quality to be found.

I have no choice in the matter. I met someone in Modesto for dinner, and it is too late to drive back to Berkeley. And it was in my price range.

This Quality Inn is plopped down on a tiny parcel bound by a Highway 99 offramp, an industrial dairy across the street that looked like a cement plant, and small auto repair shops, shuttered and silent on a Saturday evening.

Cars matter in Modesto. Cars, especially hot rods, are the lingua franca here. Modesto is the hometown of filmmaker George Lucas, whose second motion picture was the coming-of-age film American Graffiti. American Graffiti was filmed in Petaluma, in Marin County in the summer of 1972, to make it look like 1962 Modesto.

Even Modesto lacked the Modesto Lucas wanted to capture.

III.
I found the Quality Inn, Modesto affordable and safe, despite the noisy, industrial, highway-side location. The front desk staff is nice and helpful, especially when my room key does not work.

There’s no carpet in the hallways of the Quality Inn, Modesto, just shiny gray wood parquet flooring, which probably makes it easier to clean. You can hose it all down at the end of the night, using your imported Oroville water.

The King bed in the room is comfortable. There are four pillows, arranged in staggered fashion against the gray-fabric headboard. The cable channels work, but the desk chair is beat up like it had been in a brawl.

I settled in for the evening, having driven 250 miles in one day. My eldest daughter had gone into labor that night back in North Carolina, with my first grandchild due the next day.

I had stumbled onto a minor strain of Contentment, as the arched sign promised, and began calling my home for the night, “The Almost-Quality Inn.”

IV.
I sleep well, despite the highway noise.

The complimentary breakfast Sunday morning is a dud, no break in the fast.

A messy sideboard features containers of corn flakes and an inferior version of Lucky Charms, plastic bowls, and a pitcher of warm milk.

The spread lacks basic protein and fiber options: no yogurt, fruit, toast, eggs, or bacon, just raw waffle batter in a plastic Tupperware pitcher poured into small paper cups so you could make your own waffles in the waffle maker.

It’s a high-fructose corn syrup kined of place, as if the Quality Inn chain was a subsidiary of Archer Daniels Midland.

I rename it “The Unqualified Inn.”

IV.
I found the hotel clientele the previous evening intriguing: families who had kids playing in a local softball tournament, including women in their 60’s sporting loose blouses and tight shorts, chaperoning sunburned teenage granddaughters in softball uniforms, their plastic cleats clacking noisily down those gray wood parquet floors in the hallways.

I pictured them at home in remote farming communities, in places I’d driven through to get there from Marysville, places like Galt, Manteca, Ripon and Salida.

They are Swedes, most likely, who attend the Covenant church on weekends when there weren’t softball tournaments. When they turn off the bedside table lamp on a school night, there are few lights around them to be seen.

Playing in a softball tournament in Modesto in late May is a big deal. They subscribe to Modesto’s four gospels of “Water, Wealth, Contentment and Health.”

IV.
When I check-in to the hotel on Saturday night, I notice a Mariachi band checking out: fifteen to twenty young men in Elvis pompadours, wearing matching blue, red and yellow long-sleeved silk shirts, black slacks and shiny black cowboy boots.

They are all getting into a small touring bus, like the kind you see pulling out of nursing homes. They are in a banda competition that evening, the front desk clerk tells me. Their band leader and lead singer is very famous.

The band has their luggage stacked in the parking lot; they’re not coming back to the hotel after the competition. They’re headed somewhere else in the middle of the night: Yuba City, Willows, Orland, Corning or Red Bluff.

This famous lead singer, whose name I don’t not recognize, is waiting in a wheelchair out in the parking lot. The girl from the front desk hands me my room key hurriedly, running outside to get her picture taken with him.

This is her wealth, I realize, sharing that photo with her family later that evening when she is off work, a brush with greatness, in a parking lot overlooking highway 99.

Modesto will appear in Jon Obermeyer’s third collection of essays, Hear Me Out, in early 2024.