There is a sparse beauty to the western flank of the San Joaquin Valley. Sere hills loom up to the west, filled with canyons and ravines that served as hide-outs for 19th century bandits.
Orchards, cropland and sporadic patches of brushy desert roll out to the east, across the valley floor. Winds blow hard through here, bending the trees and grasses and kicking up dust storms.
However beautiful, the landscape can become more than a little monotonous. As you drive up or down California on Interstate 5, the freeway that runs in a straight line along the valley's west side, the eye begins to search for any break in the unchanging scenery, for something new to look at.
And then up pops one of Shane P. Donlon's road signs, hawking valley real estate.
Festooned with shamrocks, the white and blue signs are fixtures along I-5 in the stretch through Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties. Some promote specific properties, others are more generic.
"Land, land, land," touts one. "Croplands and orchards," offers another. Donlon's most fetching roadside attractions, though, are the signs he strings out Burma Shave-style, making pitches with rhymes and couplets, one phrase at a time.
-- 312 Acres, goes the first in a row of four signs planted in an orange grove near Los Banos, followed every 20 yards or so by these:
-- Buy these little
-- Vitamin C
-- Makers.
A bit farther north, there is this series:
-- A pleasant drive from the East Bay
-- When you get there you will want to stay
-- A little above the valley floor
-- Commercial or cattle or who knows what more
Who knows what more?
Now there is a question worth lingering over a bit.
"Who knows what more" is a riddle that is confronting, not just the west side, but all of the San Joaquin Valley.
The valley is changing, and changing fast. Its population is expected to triple in the next 40 years or so, climbing toward 15 million. Its cities and towns already are pushing out deep into the countryside. Once isolated, the valley now attracts home buyers willing to endure the hard commute over the passes to Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
There are those in the valley who fret that California's agricultural heartland is destined to become, as they inevitably phrase it, "another L.A." Others promote visions of a valley that somehow manages to balance rural charm and urban amenities, new economy and old--"silicon chips and cow chips" is how they like to describe it.
Much of the discussion about valley growth in the last few years has focused on the Highway 99 corridor, a reference to the older freeway that cuts along the east side, stringing together Bakersfield, Visalia, Fresno, Modesto, Sacramento. More and more, however, there also has been talk about future development springing up along I-5, on the valley's west side.
This would have seemed ludicrous not too long ago. When the freeway opened in 1972, filling stations were so few and far between that motorists routinely ran out of gas. For a long time this was a part of California reserved for stashing the unwanted--a place for giant tire piles, hazardous waste dumps, prisons.
"It was just desolate," recalled Shane B. Donlon himself the other day. "There weren't even many ranches."
The real estate broker was in his little two-room office in Patterson, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt, bluejean shorts and no shoes. "That's just me," Donlon said of his bare feet.
He confessed that he had been a bit hesitant about granting an interview. The last time had been 15 years ago or so. A reporter had come down from San Francisco and, Donlon said, "made me look like a real doofus."
A doofus?
"A hayseed," his lone office assistant interjected.
"You know, since we're in the valley. . . ."
In fact, the 58-year-old Donlon is no hayseed. He was raised on a family farm in Oxnard and attended St. Mary's College, where he majored in French--"if you can believe that," he added. He received his real estate license in 1965, served a hitch in Vietnam and then came to Patterson to run a farm his father had started.
A soft-spoken man with a sly sense of humor, Donlon said that starting out he decided he needed a title--"everybody else had a title." And so he settled on "agricultural entrepreneur," a fancy handle he prints on his business cards to this day.
In the mid-1980s, a couple of down years in agriculture convinced Donlon it was time to get serious about the real estate business. He decided to specialize in ranch properties and bought advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and other publications. Nothing came of them. Then he put up his first roadside sign, "and the phone wouldn't stop ringing."
It is ringing still. "Sales over $150,000,000," proclaims yet another Donlon sign, this one posted outside his single-story office building next to a burger stand.
"The signs," Donlon said, "are everything."
