Ruminations About Water Across the West While on Vacation

There is nothing like having time to ponder.  It's when all those little tails of thoughts, those unresolved endings, finally get tied off.  It relieves stress, at least in my mind, by not having to tow around all of these things that make me wonder.  I can put them to rest as largely foregone conclusions and finally move on in forming new thoughts.

And so this vacation I find, as I look out the window of the car, the plane, and the bus, that we are indeed visibly running out of water in this part of the world.   I see low reservoirs, dry farmland and dead grass.  I see bricks in the motel toilets and turned off drinking fountains at the rest stops.  The city of Hanford California is drilling it's wells deeper to provide (as stated in the little newspaper, The San Joaquin) "another 15 years of drinking water."   My friend who owns 70 acres explains to me that farmers in the San Joaquin are primarily watering their perennial crops as predicted shortages of water may not support their usual output of tomatoes and cotton.  Lake Shasta is visibly lower than I've ever seen it.  Lake Tahoe is also low.  It's early in the dry season and big parts of California are burning from wild fires.

Coming out of the reasonably water-flush Willamette River Valley I find it hard to absorb the obvious evidence of the lack of water.  But it sure hits home when I go out for a jog and the air is so full of smoke that my eyes tear up.  I very quickly call it a day and give up on the jog. Back in the house I get a drink from a water jug that's delivered by a truck twice a month because the tap water is sulfuric and therefore undrinkable.  Now the Hanford locals are worried about fertilizer pollutants from decades of farming.  We drink water from someplace else.

We now live in a time when commodities we once took for granted like cheap food, plentiful water and cheap gas are going away.  Golf courses and other play grounds of the wealthy will now get their water at the expense of people going thirsty.  In the San Joaquin, golf courses will be green at the expense of people eating.  We're backed into a corner by high fuel prices because we can't simply transport more water from someplace else.  As a matter of fact, we're out of "someplace else" to get that water from anyway. 

This is the San Joaquin, a place I've written about before, calling it "The Place Where Food Comes From."  It is one of the most artificially fertile places on earth.  The rivers run dry here.  They are sand beds and repositories of trash for those who can't afford the prices of the landfill.  When someplace as important to industrialized food and sub-urbanization as the San Joaquin goes dry. it gives everyone in contact with the land a sense of dysfunction.  The people drink alcohol and do drugs, it's no wonder the California prisons are so full.  People also escape in movies and in cyberspace, believing their fake landscapes in shopping malls and amusement parks are the reality.  They turn away and don't quite know why.

I've seen, not only on this vacation, but in other places in the last 3 months, other San Joaquins.  They are in Illinois, in Ohio, in Oregon and Idaho.  Millions of people will see the new wells, the empty reservoirs, the dry rivers and think little of it.  It's not being reported on Fox news.  The lack of water is not as exciting as Jennifer Anniston's love life, or Bill O'Rielly telling carefully set-up liberals to shut up.  As long as we can buy a bottle of water at the vending machine or get something, drinkable or not, from the tap, we're apparently fine.  At least until the wells run dry. 

 The lack of water is only an indicator of the underlying issue.  We're giving up as a people, not wanting to make conclusions from the evidence.  We want to be spoon fed everything that is knowledge.  We want to trust the government and the news and the papers and everything that is fabricated there so that we don't have to think.  We're giving it over.  We've fallen as a society.  We can't even see that the Earth is drying out under our feet without someone else to show us.  We run around the planet touting a thin agenda believing science or religion or government or something else will save us.  Like a woman dying of thirst in the desert, we are hallucinating an oasis of our own creation while walking farther and farther away from the source of our next drink.