Cal Travels West

Living within Cooper's body I was to learn much about modern California and the political and business culture at its core. I reveled in the remaining beauty that had stirred my soul so many years before and became reacquainted with the efforts of the grifters and snake oil salesmen that came to inhabit the halls of democracy to exploit what was left, in the putative names of progress, the future, and profit. 

I studied and read everything I could find in an attempt to understand how the pluralism championed in James Madison's Federalist 10 had evolved (or maybe simply matured) to the barely recognizable orgy of special interest money, venal careerists attempting life-long sinecure feeding at the public trough, and swamp creatures with oily smiles and loose checkbooks that appeared at the corrupt core of the modern political enterprise.

It also gave me an opportunity to interact and study up close the dreamers, nature lovers, good samaritans, and tree huggers who still give me hope that what remains of the natural world can be preserved and even in some places restored to something resembling the beauty bequeathed this and future generations. 

I keep discussing California and the west, as if you, the reader, understand what I refer to.  Most likely, if you are like most humans, your visual knowledge of the west comes from what you’ve seen in the movies. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, maybe John Houston. So to start, let’s define the term. The west is where I came to live because the Amazon jungle, my home for thousands of years, was being invaded. Its remoteness was a thing of memory. Even after traveling to Cervantes' 16th century Spain I had no clue what drove these modern humans. I came north and west because wilderness still existed there, and because the indigenous human beings, whom I had come to respect, were threatened with extinction and genocide. Since California is a western state, and in myth and reality is defined by its western topography, geography, and seismology, this is where I had chosen to set down roots. 

Textbooks, or if you prefer, Wikipedia, will tell you that the geographic west is defined as those areas from about the 100th meridian to the Pacific, and from the 49th parallel to the Mexican border. In reality, it is not the 100th meridian that marks the west's beginning, but a perceptible line that roughly coincides w/it, reaching southward about a third of the way across the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas, and then swerving more southwestward across Oklahoma and Texas. This is the isohyetal line of 20 inches, beyond which the mean annual rainfall is less than the 20 inches normally necessary for non irrigated crops.

The western landscape that I have come to love is of the widest variety and contains every sort of topography and land form. No physical part of the true west can be found in the east. The west is short grass plains, alpine meadows, geyser basins, plateaus and mesas and canyons and cliffs, sinks, sagebrush, joshua tree and saguaro deserts. While unique from the east or mid-west, the west is actually half a dozen sub-regions, as different from one another as the Olympic rain forest of Washington State is from Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

I have traveled them all. Up the Missouri and across the Rockies with French trappers to their winter quarters in Jackson Hole. Down the Columbia following Lewis and Clark to Fort Clatsop overlooking the western ocean. I've traveled the length of the Colorado from the headwaters of the Green River above Flaming Gorge to the river’s delta below the Mexican border, chasing the ghost of John Wesley Powell. I’ve gazed in awe at the Yellowstone country traversing the high plateau with the King Survey expedition. I stared down from the Uinta Mountains at the Great Salt Lake with Brigham Young and his Mormon settlers and ran the trap lines with Jedediah Smith from Montana to the Trinity Alps in Alta California. Through it all the new humans were a mystery, because while the mythical Don Quixote may have tilted at windmills, at least what he was battling was semi-real and tangible. 

My confusion surrounding these illegal immigrants did not result from a lack of effort on my part. I could easily be the first Goddess to sit a PH.D in American studies. I have tried for centuries to understand the new inhabitants of the North American continent. After first venturing north with Coronado in his quest to locate the mythical 7 cities of Cibola,  I traveled east when news reached me of a new nation and hopped  back across the great eastern sea to France with my friend Thomas Jefferson and from there to London and the south of England and the village of Selbourne where in 1789 I met the Reverend Gilbert White. Thomas and his beautiful mulatto girlfriend, Sally, had read to me wonderful passages from the good reverend’s book, “The Natural History of Selbourne, a collection of letters on the wildlife, seasons, and antiquities of White’s parish.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Having traveled so much of the world, California is where I decided to put down roots and spend my time, however long that might be, here on Earth. My adopted home is a western state. That means it exists somewhere between myth and reality. The myth of unlimited abundance, opportunity, and of limitless resources, and the reality that the west is defined by inadequate rainfall. In short, a general deficiency of water, because, the west, the great historian Walter Webb opined, is "a semi-desert with a desert heart."  

The primary unity of the west is a shortage of water.  I learned this early on, traveling the southwest with Coronado, as well as in my time living in the Spanish missions. The lemons and oranges, grapes and cattle ranches, were not viable without imported water, and this is the reality from the western slopes of the Rockies to the coast of California, with few exceptions, a lesson the whites who settled here refused to comprehend.

Because just below the surface, always ready to emerge from intermittent slumber, ready to crush dreams and schemes, lies an immutable limitation. That despite all the wealth and innovation of the millennial dreamers, political strivers, real estate scam artists, venture capitalists and code writing geeks and gamers, western growth has been and always will be perpetually constrained by that western paradox - that among the beauty and mild climate, the limitless Pacific, the magnificent Sierra Nevada, and the seemingly endless forests, there exists a permanent lack of the one thing that can not be increased, but only moved around and redistributed - water. 

Because at its heart, at its very essence, the west is much more than topography and land forms, dirt and rock.  Most fundamentally it is climate. Climate that expresses itself in the land, air, flora and fauna. While understanding climate can be complicated, it is here where the west becomes quite simple. While not all the west is arid, it is surrounded by aridity, except at the Pacific edge. 

The west is shaped by the way the continent bends ocean currents; by the way the prevailing winds blow from the Pacific; by the way mountains are pushed up creating well watered coastal or alpine islands; by the way mountains catch and store the snow-pack making settled life possible in the dry lowlands; and by the way these mountains create the dry lowlands by throwing a long rain shadow eastward.

Much of the western US, excepting the narrow Pacific coastal plain, lies in one or another of those rain shadows, such as the Great Basin and lower Colorado River country, or in the semi-arid steppes of the Montana, Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico plains. Despite the warnings of observant visitors like Major John Wesley Powell, either as a result of desperation, devotion, stupidity, or simply greed, the warnings went unheeded and the newcomers continued to believe that “rain would,” as in the immortal words of that flimflamming conman Charles Dana Wilber, “follow the plow.” a deception that would lead to death and despair for many innocents.  Because, regardless of the puny human efforts to rearrange the landscape with Panglossian public works, climate defines the west and aridity defines the climate. 

Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character.  It is aridity that gives the air its clarity, aridity that puts brilliance in the light and polishes the stars, and aridity that requires the grasses to evolve as bunches rather than turf. The consequences of aridity multiply by a kind of domino effect.  In the attempt to compensate for nature's “inadequacies,” the technologically adept humans have remade whole sections of the western landscape. The modern west is as surely Lake Mead, Lake Powell, Salt Lake City, the irrigated greenery of Arizona’s Salt River Valley, and the smog blanket over San Jose, as it is the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Powder River Country, or the Grand Canyon. 

Initially, California, on which the Spanish padres affixed my name, appeared to be an exception to the general state of aridity, but it is not. Although from San Francisco northward, the coast gets plenty of rain, that rain, like the lesser rains elsewhere in the state, does not fall in the growing season, but in winter.  From April till November, it just about can't rain.

However, there has always been a conflict between those who come here to bask in the beauty that is California and those who see that beauty as a means to a material end, whether that be through farming, mining, timber harvest, furs, or fishing. The invading settlers came first from new Spain and were followed in quick order by those from New England, Russia, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Wales, Japan, China, and places too numerous to mention. They came to the newly "discovered" land and claimed paradise by the Pacific as their own. No room existed for those who worshiped me. who loved the land and the fish, the birds, rivers, mountains and valleys - who went by names such as Ohlone, Chumash, Yakut, Hupa, and Yurok. Riches went to the new arrivals, genocide to my people - the human beings. 

The Spaniards and missionaries came to set up rancheros using diverted water and to fish for souls. They ran cattle, grew grapes and oranges, and converted the human beings, hoping to forget me and to worship their new gods - Jesus and gold. But nature - the beauty and bounty of the new lands only had value if it could be converted to human use.

The 49ers came for the gold in the hills. During the gold rush, miners came to California, not to make the valleys bloom, but as seekers of imagined great wealth. They came as destroyers. Mining devastated the foothills and stripped them of timber. It took only 10 years from the discovery of that cursed metal at Sutter's Mill in Coloma on the American River, to turn much of the  Mother Lode to a denuded wasteland of caved in hillsides, heaped debris, and tree stumps. Hydraulic mining, the washing down of my mountainsides by high-pressure hoses, poured thousands of tons of mud and silt into the Yuba, Feather, American, Merced, and Sacramento rivers, which ran reddish yellow with waste.

Living among the human beings in this time was exhausting and terrifying. Jumping between the bodies of people trying to survive and the salmon making their ancient journeys I encountered many streams, where pollution was high, and salmon no longer could move upstream to spawn. Briefly I inhabited the body of the poet Bayard Taylor who wrote, “nature here reminds one of a princess fallen into the hands of robbers, who cut off her fingers for the sake of the jewels she wears." 

Hiding in plain sight among the golden grasses and coastal oases lies a singular immutable fact - California is a semi-desert that is at its heart, a desert, and that cannot be changed. No matter how much the dreamers, schemers, scammers, real estate tycoons, and corporate embodiments of Ma and Pa Kettle may wish to ignore this reality, the desert returns. 

The problem for the masters of the universe who continually seek to make and remake the virtual and corporeal world is this scarcity of water. Absent massive human intervention, the Santa Clara Valley only has a limited supply. Venture capital money can finance and help develop silicon chips the size of grains of sand and servers in the clouds to store all human knowledge, but they can't create water or increase the supply. The water molecules that existed at the time the first single cell organisms formed and the first amphibians crawled from the deep brine are the same molecules we must live with today. They cannot will more into being, regardless of the money they invest. Human ingenuity can only hold back and redistribute what there is. The gig dreams without limit remain limited by an ancient dilemma - earthlings require water, a reality even the greatest  minds have yet to conquer. 

A limit common to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and before these modern cities, to ancient Rome, the Inca empire, or the Mayan capital Tikkun, is no closer to resolution today than it was when the Romans built their aqueducts or Tupac Inca brought water from great distance to Machu Picchu. Los Angeles "found" its water 300 miles away in the Owens Valley, allowing a minor city with good weather and a deep port, but little else to become a world class city. San Francisco went one step farther, flooding half a national park to bring water from the Hetch Hetchy Valley to the coast to foster its ambitions. 

For the movers and shakers in Silicon Valley, the dilemma is different. No longer can one dam distant rivers to bring the water home as had LA and San Francisco before it. Drowning national parks and running roughshod over locals creating vast dust bowls is much harder in the days of the internet, social media, public outrage and the California Environmental Quality Act. Unlike, say, burying toxic waste, people would pay attention if corporate titans attempt to flood the Yosemite Valley behind a dam. While it has been suggested that painting O’Shaunessy Dam on the Merced River with Jerry Garcia's face and streaming Grateful Dead tunes from massive speakers might lessen opposition in the San Francisco Bay Area, on this one, even the water buffaloes defer to the polls. 

To the omniscient, narcissistic, billionaires setting the agenda in Silicon Valley, nature, in their febrile imaginations, should not be a problem. To link the human race, to put all tangible human knowledge no further away than the click of a mouse, spoke of a world without limits. A world where all was possible. A world where biological and physical limits were problems to be solved not red lines to be avoided. Much like their predecessors, they were attracted to California partly because of the siren call of the abundance of its natural world. That abundance, and the life-giving qualities of its environment, are why this land was settled and why over 38 million people have come  to my namesake state to live. 

Take a  drive with Coop and I down State Highway 395 south of the magnificent high alpine depression of Lake Tahoe crossing back and forth between California and Nevada, and you are in the high desert. The Sierra Nevada serve to block the Pacific storms, rivers play out in dry desert sumps, or do not run at all. The Humboldt, and Carson, along with the Truckee, provide brief respite and false hope, as does the snow capped Mount Whitney, but in time, the desert always wins! 

Below Whitney portal, through Bishop, Big Pine, and Lone Pine, lies the saline sink that was once Owens Lake and the Alabama Hills - dry, desolate, starkly beautiful lands that nourished my people for eons. Here, the effects of modern so-called progress are most stark. In the cafes in the Owens Valley, on the tattered black and whites hanging crooked on the cracked plaster walls, and on the hard, drawn, deeply sun-lined faces of the few remaining ranchers, you can see the past. The beautiful valley that nourished the Paiute, as well as the 19th century settlers. The trophy brown trout caught in the gently rolling Owens River. The back-country camps along Lee Vining, Rush, and Mill Creeks. 

Today, as I travel this path out along the Tioga Road past the ghost town of Bodie and the shrunken Mono Lake, and I observe the dust storms rising on the dry lake bed spewing toxic silica contaminated air towards the Los Angeles basin, where the life-giving water that once nourished this valley now empties, I question whether this desolate, desiccated, shrunken land, signifies progress or is a harbinger of a dystopian future?