Nathan Matias rides into the Yokuts Valley, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains east of Fresno, CA. Photo by Ivan Sigal (CC BY 4.0) This article is part of a series by J. Nathan Matias for a 500+ mile bicycle ride in June 2023 that is raising funds for Rising Voices, Global Voices’ endangered/Indigenous language program, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Donate to the initiative here. I'm Nathan Matias, a Guatemalan-American writer and academic who journeys through landscape, ideas, and histories on two wheels. This June, the writer and media artist Ivan Sigal, who is also Global Voices’ Executive Director, and I spent six days cycling through California’s Central Valley meeting people, making media, and collecting stories. We are also raising funds for the Central California Environmental Justice Network and Global Voices. When the two of us set out on our 550-mile bicycle storytelling adventure in the footsteps of the 1966 Farmworkers March, we were chasing a legend, seeking a conversation, and trying to understand a region that will shape the shared future of our planet. Nathan and Ivan's ride route from Bakersfield to the Bay Area: Source: Open Street Map I first imagined our ride on a snowy December night in Ithaca, New York, after rushing into my local grocery store. Although I was a research fellow at Stanford University in California’s Bay Area for the year, I had evacuated the area and returned to New York after air pollution nearly paralyzed me with an asthma attack. Stuck indoors in the freezing winter, I was watching documentaries about California history from what felt like the wrong side of the continent. When a box of mandarins from Reedley, CA captured my attention at the grocery store, I knew I wanted to learn their story. Cycling through Pajaro, California after the devastating flooding of April 2023, J. Nathan Matias wonders what his life might have been if his body had withstood the dangers of farm labor. Five months later, as we descended from Sequoia National Park at the midpoint of our ride, we glimpsed Reedley’s orange groves framed between the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. By that point, the oranges had become a plot device in the much larger story of the climate, labor, and future of California's Central Valley. Bicycle tours tend to prioritize exquisite landscapes, but since our ride is also a journalistic exercise, we needed to adopt a different philosophy of route-making. (L) Orange groves in Reedley and Orange Cove California. (R) Mandarins grown in Reedley at a grocery store in Ithaca, New York. Photos by J. Nathan Matias. As I write this, I am on the plane back to my home in Ithaca, New York. Looking out the window, I can trace our path along highway frontage roads and delta levees that stretch for hundreds of miles. From this distance, the Central Valley can seem like an impending disaster—an impossible dream that a century of extraction and injustice are bringing to the point of collapse. As the Fresno journalist Mark Arax writes in The Dreamt Land, “the valley had been doomed from the get-go by its compulsion to intensify farmland, and it was a life’s work to write about the doom.” In contrast with the harsh, engineered landscape, we met people with remarkable creativity, resilience and hope while riding at the pace of what Paul Salopek calls “slow journalism.” We spoke with farm workers, politicians, scientists, parents, journalists, and a group of high school students on their graduation day. We watched egrets wheel and hunt over a wetland preserve, and on one mountainside at dusk heard the story of a grieving woman about to bury her husband of 44 years. Everywhere we went, we encountered people who are working to document the challenges their communities face and organize for change. Cesar Aguirre, Oil and Gas Director at the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Photo by Ivan Sigal (CC BY 4.0) This oil derrick in Arvin, California is located next to a school. Photo by Ivan Sigal (CC BY 4.0) Oil derrick in Arvin, California, located just a few yards away from the backyards of residents’ homes. Photo by Ivan Sigal (CC BY 4.0) The evening before setting off, we visited Arvin, California, where local community scientists do air quality monitoring to protect their schools, churches, and families from oil well air pollution. We also visited Weedpatch Camp, a migrant labor camp built in the 1930s for climate refugees from Oklahoma. It's still used today for migrant laborers in the Central Valley. “Owners no longer worked on the farms.