Robert Sturgeon could be an axe murderer. He could be a 'cool dude' with hot cars from the Valley. He could be a native farmer. Or he could be an intellectual posing as a farmer.

Who is Robert Sturgeon and why do I care? Three years ago I received an email with some comments about my new website. I began corresponding with this Robert Sturgeon. He often spoke of how city folks like me perceived life on the farm and how very wrong we were. His comments were often political and sophisticated but clearly supporting the farmer and the rural way of life.

I asked if I could publish his email comments in the section of my website called NewStory. I fancied NewStory an online magazine with stories by writers I knew or found. He agreed and we published a few of his columns and some photos.

Meanwhile the project drew him in and he created his own website with the same material and more. Sturgeon lives in Los Banos, a small farm town in the middle of California off I-5, the main north-south Interstate. I used to go through there a lot in the years before I worked online, so I knew the place. I wondered if I would ever meet this guy.

Other people emailed me about his column or wrote to him directly. One close woman writer friend of mine got involved in a very long correspondence with him. Eventually when Sturgeon told her he would be in the Marin area and perhaps they could all meet, she got nervous and fearful. The meeting never happened and she stopped writing to him. She even speculated that perhaps he was in a wheelchair or had a major physical impairment that made him want to avoid a meeting.

Her reservations didn't affect me much and when I finally found that I would be passing through Los Banos, we arranged to meet. Unlike most San Franciscans, I love the Central Valley of California and the towns in it. When I was a child on the east coast, my father was a fruit broker and he worked from about 4 am till 2 pm. Then he came home and from 3-5 made his calls to California where it was still early. He visited towns like Fresno and Bakersfield every year. In those days no one in the east had ever heard of these places.

I finally visited Fresno in late 1991. I drove on a street that turned into a bridge over the railroad. I looked down and saw the 'auction houses' and sheds where fruit was loaded on railroad cars, sold, and shipped across the country. And I knew my dad had talked to men in those sheds almost every day of his working life.

I waited in Ryan's Restaurant in Los Banos for Sturgeon. When he arrived all I could say was "You look like a farmer." So much for me being a city slicker. He is tall, large but certainly not fat, was wearing some kind of overalls and had a very pleasant normal face. He was walking and talking, unlike my friend's speculations.

Sturgeon comes from mostly Irish stock (with a little Chickasaw) who settled in the valley in the 19th century. They've been farmers in Los Banos since that time. Now I'm not checking the story that follows, but this is what he told me about Los Banos. Two guys named Miller and Lux owned Central Valley land from Mexico to the Oregon border in the mid 19th century. They built the first series of canals to irrigate the ranches they owned. Charles Lux, a lawyer, was responsible for the "most important water case law in the history of the state," according to Sturgeon.

The later big waves of immigrants to the valley were Portuguese and Italian. The Delta Mendota Canal was built in the 1950s and the San Luis Dam in the 60s, and then the Cal Aqueduct system was completed. These systems provide the irrigation that serves the tremendous abundance which grows in the valley.

Los Banos means The Baths and refers to hot springs or pools in the foothill creeks west of the present town and I-5. The town grew from about 5000 people to10,000 when the Dam was built, and today has a population of about 20,000 people. Commuters are moving in when they discover housing for under $100,000 only an hour's drive to San Jose and Silicon Valley.

Sturgeon is primarily a cotton farmer. He farms 147 acres. Ninety two are his own and 55 part of a family inheritance. The Central Valley produces about 1 million bales of cotton a year, the 2nd largest state cotton production after Texas.

He likes to talk about the farmers he knows who are all computerized and use various sciences in their propagating and farming. He believes, and probably correctly, that city people think of farmers as backward uninformed people with a narrow focus in life. He writes about these urban misperceptions. "The average acre of urban land uses far more pesticides than the average acre of farmland. People in a city acre are using poisons for pest extermination, toxic household products, toxic auto products and god knows what else!"

When he offered to drive me around on a mini-tour, I told him about the axe murderer. But I also told him about the first "date" I had once just after I moved to California with a man I didn't know well. When I had said to him "How do I know you're not an axe murderer, he replied, "How do I know YOU'RE not an axe murderer? You're from Lizzie Borden land."

The most interesting thing to me in Los Banos is his field. It is 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile. It was completely clear of plants with neat furrows covering the entire area. He talked about farm machinery and farmers sharing their new gadgets and contraptions. He talked about irrigation and planting and harvesting the cotton. It only takes him 1 and 1/2 days to plant this huge field, unless he was putting on the city girl. When I asked why there were no weeds growing, he said, "Cause I hired a fellow to come and spray the field with a plane and ... It Worked!"

At the corner of his field was a "camp," which means ten acres where migrant farm laborers live in season. He doesn't own this camp. It is for sale, but the price is high - $400,000. I thought that was expensive for land, even for a development. But that was the price for the barracks and all the improvements to the 'camp.' "These laborers come here for a few months and make so much more than they ever could in Mexico and return with the money for their families. It's probably a good thing." He had a non-reproducable expression as a response to the question "Are they legal workers?"

We drove up to the foothills where people recently had built a few large homes on 20 acre plots. We drove around the streets of Los Banos and saw the outside of his nice suburban home on a residential street. I had expected a ranch or farm house set back from a rural road with those old palm trees that tell you the house has been in the family for years.