Queen Califia Comes Home

Western Secrets Revealed

Over two weeks I fell in love. Not with a girl, but with the western topography. Cal recommended many books to improve my understanding of western ecology. In addition to Powell’s expedition journals of the first Colorado River descent and the original notes from the Corps of Discovery, I found a little used bookstore in Denver and loaded up on western novels by Stegner, Twain, Edward Abbey, Cormac McCarthy, and Joan Didion. 

I added some physical science books that explained geology and climate by John McPhee and Aldo Leopold, as well as Dee Brown’s tragic tale of the conquest of the plains tribes, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, to get a better sense of Native American perspectives. I rounded out my historical understanding with the works of Utah-raised Harvard historian Bernard DeVoto’s fantastic studies of western migration. 

Combined with my peripatetic wanderings, and Cal’s running commentary, I was beginning, little by little, to form a better understanding of the Great American Desert, its land and people. What I observed first-hand was that while the western landscape is of the widest variety, and contains every sort of topography and landform, nothing I saw, no physical part of the true west, was buried in the east of my memories. 

The west is short grass plains, alpine meadows, geyser basins, plateaus and mesas, canyons and cliffs, sinks, sagebrush, Joshua tree and saguaro deserts. The air itself is different. It is drier than crisp toast. The first time you experience a wind eroded ship rock standing starkly against a western sunset in a desiccated ancient Pleistocene sea is something never to be forgotten by anyone with a living soul.

The variety is astonishing. While unique from the east or Midwest, the west is actually half a dozen sub-regions, as different from one another as the Olympic rainforest of Washington State is from the Sonoran desert of Tucson, Arizona. The Grand Mesa in southwest Colorado, the largest in the world, rises 11,000 feet from bone-dry alkaline desert badlands to a thickly forested alpine wonderland of lakes and meadows brimming with wildflowers into the late summer. 

Cal loved this place. She remembered it well. When we arrived at the top she begged to get out. “Whaddya think?” She said, “I am still dumbfounded that so many of your human religions are sooo depressing, like we Gods have no sense of humor. Look at this!” she shouted.

“Look at the contrast. You know how this happens? We all sat down one day at HQ experimenting with the ayahuasca we had just created, and decided that this’ll REALLY fuck with their heads, and presto, you get this shit! Way better than all those depressing dirges that your religious types sing in their churches, huh?” 

Cal kept pointing out the various landscapes and how they came about. As she tells it, the west is much more than topography and landforms, dirt, and rock, most fundamentally, it is climate. Climate that expresses itself in the land, atmosphere, flora, and fauna. 

“Pay attention, boy,” she lectured, as we traversed north to south and east to west. “Here is where the complexity reveals itself as something quite simple and unambiguous. While not all the west is arid, it is surrounded by aridity, except at the Pacific edge. The land is shaped by the way the continental masses bend ocean currents; by the way the prevailing winds blow from the west; by the way mountains are pushed up, creating well-watered coastal or alpine islands; by the way mountains catch and store the snowpack, 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 west, 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, and Colorado plains.”

“It is this aridity more than anything else that gives the western landscape its character. It is the aridity that gives the air its special dry clarity and aridity that puts brilliance in the light and polishes the stars. It is aridity that leads the grasses to evolve as bunches rather than turf.”

“It is easy to be fooled. Rain will come - or so one can be led to believe. The orographic clouds promising life-giving rains forming over the distant mountains will boil off, the vapor disappearing in midair before ever reaching the thirsty crops below. These transitive illusions have left generations of western farmers futilely shaking their fists at the mute, unblinking, rainless, cobalt-blue sky.” 

And then, tired of trying to make sense of all this to me, Cal would doze off. What became increasingly clear to me, was that a true understanding of a region, its ecology, hydrology, and geology, what is possible and what is not, builds slowly, starting from scratch. Comprehending the limitations and possibilities of a new country depends upon every sort of report, including some that are unreliable, biased, or motivated by personal interest. 

It was not until John Wesley Powell submitted his "Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States” in 1878, that the exploration of the region by white Europeans was complete. That early, partly from studying Mormon, Hispano, and indigenous irrigation patterns, Major Powell understood and accepted both the fact of aridity and the adaptations that men, institutions, and laws would have to go through if we were ever to settle the West, instead of simply raiding and ruining it. He comprehended the symbiotic relationship between highlands and lowlands and understood rivers as common carriers, like railroads, that should not be encumbered by political boundaries. 

Powell was a remarkable and prescient man. Imagine a one-armed explorer in a wooden dory pushing off into terra incognita at Green River, Wyoming Territory, rowing while tied to his heavy wooden oars. Like Lewis and Clark before him, this remarkable explorer lost no one on the wild untamed river. Each night he climbed the vertical walls of the canyon with a sextant to take astral readings! Truly amazing.

It was as recently as the 1843 Fremont Expedition, that the so-called “Pathfinder” put to the sword once and for all the myth of the fabled Buenaventura River, a conduit allegedly running east to west from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. Though no one had actually seen it (because it existed in fevered dreams, not reality)  nevertheless,  it appeared on many contemporary maps and was widely accepted as scientific fact. 

Camping beside the Great Salt Lake in Utah territory, Fremont, while studying the region’s hydrology, correctly surmised that the ephemeral streams of what he would designate “The Great Basin,” were strictly inland bodies of water with no exit to the sea. In addition he concluded that the lake itself was not drained by a giant whirlpool connected by a series of underground streams to the Pacific. That in fact, all the land between Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and California’s Sierra Nevada was landlocked. 

Powell attempted to debunk many of the remaining myths, but few would listen. In the actual desert, only the Mormons, where intelligent leadership, community settlement, and cooperation and obedience were present, were able, at least over several generations, to adapt successfully. They made a home in the desert. The many Mormons I meet in my journeys are a fascinating lot, believing in their own history and mythical self-sufficiency. In a weird paradox they cannot seem to wrap their minds around, they are incensed if they hear about a city dweller buying a coke with food stamps but propose a billion dollar federal water project paid for by the taxes of those big city residents, and they could not be more supportive. 

They loathe small-bore social welfare, but love when those federal dollars arrive in large fat gobs. People whose antipathy to the government runs from Social Security and universal healthcare, from food stamps to fluoridated water, strongly support multi-billion dollar publicly funded water works that would make Uncle Joe Stalin or Chairman Mao green (or red) with envy. 

One exasperated environmental lawyer in Denver described this apparent contradiction  when asked to decipher western ranchers’ seemingly inconsistent attitudes towards big government, with a wry smile she mirthlessly simplified it as, “Get out and give us more money.” 

Unfortunately, delusion was promoted, not the limitations Powell espoused. The individualism of the frontier, the folklore and habits learned in other regions, the usual politics, American boosterism and land speculation, encouraged settlement in terms surely to end in failure. Historian Bernard DeVoto once caustically remarked, in connection with the myth of western individualism, that the only real individualists in the West had wound up on the end of a rope whose other end was in the hands of a bunch of cooperators.

Powell understood these simple facts of life in the arid West, but few wanted to listen. A revolutionary, he might have spared the west the dust bowls of the 1890s, 1930s, and 1950s, as well as the worst consequences of river flooding. He might have saved the lives and hopes of all the innocents who tried to farm dryland homesteads in the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Montana. 

However, the boosters and the politicians always proclaimed that rain followed the plow. Free land and western migration were ingrained expectations. Habit, politics, and real estate boosterism won out over good sense, and that too is part of the history of the west, and of the western landscape. 

Tragedy would all too often follow for many who would attempt to scratch out farms beyond the 100th meridian. Here, where rainfall drops off to less than twenty inches a year - the isohyetal line of twenty inches, to use the term preferred by hydrologists - plow and plant agriculture is doomed to recurring failure.

Powell was right, but like many prophets it would take time before his truths became self-evident. When you cross into the arid zone, scale is the first and easiest of the West's lessons. Colors and forms are harder. Sagebrush is an acquired taste, as are raw earth and alkali flats. The principal invention of western American culture is the motel; the principal evidence of that culture being the small towns and kitschy businesses sprouting alongside the automotive roadside. 

Outside resource extraction, the west’s biggest industry is tourism, which exploits the mobile and the seasonal. Take a ride out on Route 66, past the dinosaurs and burger joints, and visit the towns that have come and gone. Whatever it might wish to be, the west is still primarily a series of brief visitations or a trail to somewhere else. Western literature, from Roughing It, by Mark Twain, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, to Stegner’s Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain has been largely a literature not of place but of motion. 

With Cal riding shotgun providing a running commentary and an ever expanding bibliography, I nearly maniacally drove on, crisscrossing western byways and trying to understand exactly what I was witnessing. Someone once said to me that if you do not know where you are then you do not know who you are, and in this, my first real trip beyond the boundaries of the eastern states, I was almost desperately trying to learn first where I was, so that maybe, just maybe, I could finally get a better picture of who I was, and most critically, who I wished to become.

One final thought came to me as I wrote this on a bench, staring up at the stark white temple and the statue of the Angel Moroni atop Temple Square in Salt Lake City, pertaining to the unique character of western institutions. What I find compelling, having just completed Stegner’s Joe Hill and Mormon Country, are the similarities between two seemingly disparate native western experiments in collective action, a comparison most Mormons would object to strenuously. 

Both Hill’s Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, a radical labor movement with its roots in “revolutionary industrial unionism," and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a radical modern departure from traditional Christianity, were founded elsewhere but grew to fruition in the frontier west. That shared value — of communal participation and collective identity — is what defined the Wobblies and the Latter-day Saints as dissident formations in the landscape of the west, where they found fertile ground; though only one flourished long-term.

Leaving the Bonneville Salt Flats, the road began to wear thin. The high desert lacked the beauty of the red rock country or even the stark brilliant white of Utah, instead running straight as a Georgia preacher, a monochromatic dingy brown, and it being August, deathly hot. Wells, Winnemucca, Lovelock, and Fernley were mere smudges on the map as I crossed from Utah into and through Nevada.

I-80 would abruptly end at some indistinguishable point in the desert, and a detour would guide you down what passed for a main street. A few rundown motels, a service station or two, a seedy casino, tumbleweeds blowing, and in places, usually denoted by a haggard piece of signage behind a bedraggled bus stop, a legal bordello. And then, as quickly as the signs forced you off the interstate and into town, main street would give way to desolate blacktop, leading inextricably to the ever-encroaching desert, and you would be back on the freeway and on to hundreds more miles of open road. 

I flew by the legendary Mustang Ranch just out of Reno but was too road weary to even contemplate the possibilities. And then, just past the casinos harkening weary travelers to “The Biggest Little City in the World,” I picked up the Truckee River drainage and began climbing the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. I entered California just past Verdi and pulled over to allow Cal a run, and to dip my feet in the cool Truckee, running northeasterly next to the road on its downhill trajectory, draining Lake Tahoe before spilling its guts in the barren Nevada badlands in Pyramid Lake.

Cal was euphoric. To her, California was home. She sat beside me in the passenger's seat, long pink tongue lolling, virtually quivering, she was so excited! “We’ve arrived! Now you’ll see. Hopefully understand “The California Dream! You can reinvent yourself here as so many have done before. Forget all those antiquated, hidebound east coast social mores, and breathe in the air of true freedom….at least until the Gods lay it all to waste. Look below. See that lovely valley below the haze. That is the Great Central Valley. Beyond that and over that low mountain range in the distance lies San Francisco. Unless you can help me figure something out, this lovely experiment named for yours truly might just disappear. The threat is to flood everything to just below the Sierra peaks and start from scratch! So enjoy it now, cause we have work to do!” 

The ride over the Sierras was magical; my first view of Donner Lake took my breath away. Hard to imagine in seeing the crystal blue waters of that high Sierra tarn, with sailboats seemingly floating among the clouds, the misery that befell its namesake. But on this beautiful late August day, nothing could dampen my mood as I breathed the fresh, cool mountain air and began the descent past Truckee towards California’s great central valley. Colfax, Auburn, Sacramento, the college town of Davis, Vacaville, and Vallejo, all in rapid succession, before finally cresting the last golden hills of the coastal range, yielding my first purely magical view of San Francisco Bay. 

I pulled over at a truck stop just east of the Carquinez Bridge to take it all in. San Francisco was visible in the distance beyond San Pablo and Suisun Bay. I could make out Alcatraz, and beyond it the very top of the northern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, glistening orange vermillion, protruding above the marine layer which obscured everything beyond. From there, the rest of the day was mostly a blur. Berkeley, Oakland, the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island blocking views of the city. And then, through the tunnel separating Treasure and Yerba Buena Islands, one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen: San Francisco is suddenly there before you.  Coit Tower jutting above Telegraph Hill - Alcatraz, Angel Island, the Golden Gate - all there, like a resplendent wedding cake of color topped by God’s own roach clip peeking out above the fog on Sutro Hill.