system . They can put some over the hill by remote control from this room in Sacramento with its Univac and its big board and its flashing lights . They can pull down a pool in the San Joaquin by remote control from this room in Sacramento with its locked doors and its ringing alarms and its constant print-outs of data from sensors out there in the water itself . From this room in Sacramento the whole system takes on the aspect of a perfect three-billion-dollar hydraulic toy, and in certain ways it is . “let’s start draining quail at 12:00” was the 10:51 a . m . entry on the electronically recorded communications log the day I visited the Operations Control Center . “Quail” is a reservoir in Los Angeles County with a gross capacity of 1,636,018,000 gallons . “ OK” was the response recorded in the log . I knew at that moment that I had missed the only vocation for which I had any instinctive affinity: I wanted to drain Quail myself .
Not many people I know carry their end of the conversation when I want to talk about water deliveries, even when I stress that these deliveries affect their lives, indirec tly , every day . “Indirec tly ” is not quite enough for most people I know . This morning, however, several people I know were affected not “indirectly” but “direc tly ” by the way the water moves . They had been in New Mexico shooting a picture, one sequence of which required a river deep enough to sink a truck, the kind with a cab and a trailer and fifty or sixty wheels . It so happened that no river near the New Mexico location was running that deep this year . The production was therefore moved today to Needles, California, where the Colorado River normally runs, depending upon releases from Davis Dam, eighteen to twenty-five feet deep . Now . Follow this closely: yesterday we had a freak tropical storm in Southern California, two inches of rain in a normally dry month, and because this rain flooded the fields and provided more irrigation than any grower could possibly want for several days, no water was ordered from Davis Dam .
No orders, no releases .
Supply and demand .
As a result the Colorado was running only seven feet deep past Needles today, Sam Peckinpah’s desire for eighteen feet of water in which to sink a truck not being the kind of demand anyone at Davis Dam is geared to meet . The production closed down for the weekend . Shooting will resume Tuesday, providing some grower orders water and the agencies controlling the Colorado release it . Meanwhile many gaffers, best boys, cameramen, assistant directors, script supervisors, stunt drivers and maybe even Sam Peckinpah are waiting out the weekend in Needles, where it is often no degrees at five p . m . and hard to get dinner after eight . This is a California parable, but a true one .
I have always wanted a swimming pool, and never had one . When it became generally known a year or so ago that California was suffering severe drought, many people in water-rich parts of the country seemed obscurely gratified, and made frequent reference to Californians having to brick up their swimming pools . In fact a swimming pool requires, once it has been filled and the filter has begun its process of cleaning and recirculating the water, virtually no water, but the symbolic content of swimming pools has always been interesting: a pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body . Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable . A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye .
It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recen tly . In my memory California summers were characterized by the coughing in the pipes that meant the well was dry, and California winters by
Not many people I know carry their end of the conversation when I want to talk about water deliveries, even when I stress that these deliveries affect their lives, indirec tly , every day . “Indirec tly ” is not quite enough for most people I know . This morning, however, several people I know were affected not “indirectly” but “direc tly ” by the way the water moves . They had been in New Mexico shooting a picture, one sequence of which required a river deep enough to sink a truck, the kind with a cab and a trailer and fifty or sixty wheels . It so happened that no river near the New Mexico location was running that deep this year . The production was therefore moved today to Needles, California, where the Colorado River normally runs, depending upon releases from Davis Dam, eighteen to twenty-five feet deep . Now . Follow this closely: yesterday we had a freak tropical storm in Southern California, two inches of rain in a normally dry month, and because this rain flooded the fields and provided more irrigation than any grower could possibly want for several days, no water was ordered from Davis Dam .
No orders, no releases .
Supply and demand .
As a result the Colorado was running only seven feet deep past Needles today, Sam Peckinpah’s desire for eighteen feet of water in which to sink a truck not being the kind of demand anyone at Davis Dam is geared to meet . The production closed down for the weekend . Shooting will resume Tuesday, providing some grower orders water and the agencies controlling the Colorado release it . Meanwhile many gaffers, best boys, cameramen, assistant directors, script supervisors, stunt drivers and maybe even Sam Peckinpah are waiting out the weekend in Needles, where it is often no degrees at five p . m . and hard to get dinner after eight . This is a California parable, but a true one .
I have always wanted a swimming pool, and never had one . When it became generally known a year or so ago that California was suffering severe drought, many people in water-rich parts of the country seemed obscurely gratified, and made frequent reference to Californians having to brick up their swimming pools . In fact a swimming pool requires, once it has been filled and the filter has begun its process of cleaning and recirculating the water, virtually no water, but the symbolic content of swimming pools has always been interesting: a pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body . Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable . A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye .
It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recen tly . In my memory California summers were characterized by the coughing in the pipes that meant the well was dry, and California winters by
Similar Books
