all-night watches on rivers about to crest, by sandbagging, by dynamite on the levees and flooding on the first floor . Even now the place is not all that hospitable to extensive settlement . As I write a fire has been burning out of control for two weeks in the ranges behind the Big Sur coast . Flash floods last night wiped out all major roads into Imperial County . I noticed this morning a hairline crack in a living-room tile from last week’s earthquake, a 4 . 4 I never felt . In the part of California where I now live aridity is the single most prominent feature of the climate, and I am not pleased to see, this year, cactus spreading wild to the sea . There will be days this winter when the humidity will drop to ten, seven, four . Tumbleweed will blow against my house and the sound of the rattlesnake will be duplicated a h undred times a day by dried bou gainvillea drifting in my driveway . The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way . I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry .
“The West begins,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, “where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches . ” This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read, and it goes a long way toward explaining my own passion for seeing the water under control, but many people I know persist in looking for psychoanalytical implications in this passion . As a matter of fact I have explored, in an amateur way, the more obvious of these implications, and come up with nothing interesting . A certain external reality remains, and resists interpretation . The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches . Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control . Some fifteen years ago I tore a poem by Karl Shapiro from a magazine and pinned it on my kitchen wall . This fragment of paper is now on the wall of a sixth kitchen, and crumbles a little whenever I touch it, but I keep it there for the last stanza, which has for me the power of a prayer:
It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile .
I thought of those lines almost constan tly on the morning in Sacramento when I went to visit the California State Water Project Operations Control Center . If I had wanted to drain Quail at 10:51 that morning, I wanted, by early afternoon, to do a great deal more . I wanted to open and close the Clifton Court Forebay intake gate . I wanted to produce some power down at the San Luis Dam . I wanted to pick a pool at random on the Aqueduct and pull it down and then refill it, watching for the hydraulic jump . I wanted to put some water over the hill and I wanted to shut down all flow from the Aqueduct into the Bureau of Reclamation’s Cross Valley Canal, just to see how long it would take somebody over at Reclamation to call up and complain . I stayed as long as I could and watched the system work on the big board with the lighted checkpoints . The Delta salinity report was coming in on one of the teletypes behind me . The Delta tidal report was coming in on another . The earthquake board, which has been desensitized to sound its alarm (a beeping tone for Southern California, a high-pitched tone for the north) only for those earthquakes which register at least 3 . 0 on the Pdchter Scale, was silent . I had no further business in this room and yet I wanted to stay the day . I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and
“The West begins,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, “where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches . ” This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read, and it goes a long way toward explaining my own passion for seeing the water under control, but many people I know persist in looking for psychoanalytical implications in this passion . As a matter of fact I have explored, in an amateur way, the more obvious of these implications, and come up with nothing interesting . A certain external reality remains, and resists interpretation . The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches . Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control . Some fifteen years ago I tore a poem by Karl Shapiro from a magazine and pinned it on my kitchen wall . This fragment of paper is now on the wall of a sixth kitchen, and crumbles a little whenever I touch it, but I keep it there for the last stanza, which has for me the power of a prayer:
It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile .
I thought of those lines almost constan tly on the morning in Sacramento when I went to visit the California State Water Project Operations Control Center . If I had wanted to drain Quail at 10:51 that morning, I wanted, by early afternoon, to do a great deal more . I wanted to open and close the Clifton Court Forebay intake gate . I wanted to produce some power down at the San Luis Dam . I wanted to pick a pool at random on the Aqueduct and pull it down and then refill it, watching for the hydraulic jump . I wanted to put some water over the hill and I wanted to shut down all flow from the Aqueduct into the Bureau of Reclamation’s Cross Valley Canal, just to see how long it would take somebody over at Reclamation to call up and complain . I stayed as long as I could and watched the system work on the big board with the lighted checkpoints . The Delta salinity report was coming in on one of the teletypes behind me . The Delta tidal report was coming in on another . The earthquake board, which has been desensitized to sound its alarm (a beeping tone for Southern California, a high-pitched tone for the north) only for those earthquakes which register at least 3 . 0 on the Pdchter Scale, was silent . I had no further business in this room and yet I wanted to stay the day . I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and
Similar Books
