Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, and, "Jesus Christ! Look!" he said. The vineyards, the orchards, the great flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in rows, and the farm houses.
And Pa said, "God Almighty!" The distant cities, the little towns in the orchard land, and the morning sun, golden on the valley. A car honked behind them. Al pulled to the side of the road and parked.
"I want ta look at her." The grain fields golden in the morning, and the willow lines, the eucalyptus trees in rows.
Pa sighed, "I never knowed they was anything like her." The peach trees and the walnut groves, and the dark green patches of oranges. And red roofs among the trees, and barns – rich barns.
– John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 18. The Joads feast their eyes for the first time on California’s aesthetically pleasing lush San Joaquin Valley. Probably no other passage in the novel describes the beauty of California like this one. The refugees from the exhausted Dust Bowl farms are impressed by what they see. Steinbeck uses color imagery, "green" and "golden," to suggest that they have arrived at a place teeming with new life, hope and prosperity. The San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento Valley together form the 450-mile long Central Valley, which is the world’s largest agricultural area. Little wonder that the Joads believe that they have just reached Paradise.