I’ve written before about not knowing where ideas come from. Or at least not knowing exactly. But for many years I’d held onto this image of a Hispanic police officer standing in the lettuce fields of the Salinas Valley while migrant farm workers stood by. Something had happened that brought him there. What, I didn’t know. But the workers weren’t helpful because they were scared of the consequences of what might happen if they stepped forward and offered information. That image stuck for some reason, not ready to be let go of, probably because I had nowhere to put it. I just had the image.

There was no backdrop.

Up till now, I’ve written four hopefully comedic books. The topics to me are serious enough to write about, and I care about the characters enough to let them do what they want. And what they want is usually funny to me.

Now though, it’s going to get a bit serious.

I feel lucky that I grew up in two worlds that were just a five-and-a-half hour drive apart. One was in Orange County where I surfed and skate boarded, and the other was Salinas, California, where I played in the oak covered hills until nighttime. I often feel I was born of those two fathers. One of water, and one of earth.

How what I once saw when I had lived in Salinas propelled me to start writing Migrant based on that image which stuck with me since before I had even started to write novels, I can’t be completely sure. Gotcha. Maybe it was seeing these migrant farm workers in the hot sun all day, picking lettuce and stacking crates, wondering even as a child:

1. what was that life like?
2. Where did they live?
3. Where did this abundance of laborious energy come from?
4. Maybe even, why did they do that and not something else less tough?

I had gone to high school, split between both cities for two years each. One was in Huntington Beach, California and the other was Salinas High School, which had celebrated its hundredth anniversary on one of the years I was there. I remember seeing one of the Salinas High School cowboy tough guys come to school with a black eye. The rumor was that the high school cowboys challenged some Chicano gang members to a fight. The rumor also went that the cowboys got their asses kicked.

But you never heard about gang violence back then in Salinas; I graduated in 1987. If you did, it was a fist fight and nothing more. It was a sleepy farm town. They had a world famous rodeo and John Steinbeckhad lived there and written stories about the area. That was the claim to fame. Oh, and they grew more lettuce in the Salinas Valley than the entire world combined.

But somehow between when I had moved back down to Southern California in 1987 and 2009, Salinas went on to become the murder capitol of America. The gang violence had exploded. There were times when five or more murders committed within a week. It was a bloodbath.

Suddenly, that cop in those lettuce fields I had imagined so many years ago had a reason to be there.

I had my backdrop.