It is very easy to sit at the bar in, say, La Scala in Beverly Hills, or Ernies in San Francisco, and to share in the pervasive delusion that California is only five hours from New York by air. The truth is that Las Scala and Ernies are only five hours from New York by air. California is somewhere else I can tell Modesto from Merced, but I have visited there, gone to dances there; besides, there is over the main street of Modesto an arched sign which reads: WATER-WEALTH-CONTENTMENT-HEALTH. There is no such sign in Merced. Joan Dideon - Excerpt from Notes from a Native Daughter Between 1982 and 1986 I produced the Great Central Valley Project with photographer Stephen Johnson and writer Gerald Haslam. The project was a photographic survey and examination of California's intensely farmed agricultural heartland and was also the place that we all once called home.