Great Escape
Escape to the Azores Islands, 1,000 Miles From Land
Azoreans who left their home for California suffer from a special kind of homesickness, saudade. I came to share their feeling.
It seems impossible now, like trying to remember when I couldn’t read or didn’t have a scar on my shin from that time I toppled off a bicycle, but I had never heard of the Azores Islands when a photographer at the Fresno Bee dropped a picture on my desk of a man plowing a field with two oxen.
In California. In the 21st century.
The man stood on a flat cart. He had a cell phone to his ear. He was gesturing wildly with the other arm as great clouds of dust swirled behind him.
“I love this picture. I took it driving past,” the photographer said. “Do you think you could find a story?”
“Absolutely,” I told her. How could there not be a story there?
A couple of weeks later, I was on my way to the plower’s house for an interview. I drove to a ranch in Tulare County, a part of California where everything is big. Big trucks, big belt buckles, big dairies, big silos and tractors and loading docks. This was before the big drought in California, and even the unplanted fields were spring…
