Imperial (155 page)

In the unincorporated little town of Cabazon just west of Palm Springs, Harvey Williamson, the water board President,
watches the district’s big wells drop a foot a month. The cause for the decline is a mystery.
The mysterious cause might be the Arrowhead bottling plant, a conjecture which Arrowhead naturally denies. What should Harvey Williamson do?
“We don’t expect to run out next year,” he says . . . “But if water levels keep dropping, we will run out someday.” Imported water flowing through a pipeline could be the answer, he says.
In other words, let’s buy or steal it from somebody else.

A seasoned private detective from San Diego tells me: All the incestuous, evil little politics going on, that’s gone. Now all the corrections money, that has dramatically changed the towns. Before, there were little Chinese markets everywhere. Now it’s all Sears, Wal-Marts, Kmarts. Bottom line is, it’s just exploded. I just remain stunned at the way that from Temecula to El Centro the desert is booming like crazy! And the water, where’s it going to come from? They’re going to be fighting over water really soon . . .

I refuse to believe that. Once a man told me that the United States dollar could not keep weakening against other currencies, and when I asked him how he knew that, he confidently replied: Because any other possibility would be unthinkable!—In his dauntless spirit, I insist that Imperial’s future remains as white as the clouds of steam arising from Tecate’s brewery!

So does California’s. Therefore, California keeps right on growing.

Back in 1967, the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty recommended that
no more public money be invested in developing privately owned farmland
until the nation needed more farm products.—Well, then, let’s develop other zones of California!—And so the San Fernando Valley, which once comprised a subdivision of Mulholland-watered citrusscapes sold off by the Chandler Syndicate, has now boomed into true greatness on this cool moist October moment, the smog at bay, everything convenient thanks to wide streets with thirteen-stranded power poles, the turn signal resembling a sick child clicking its throat, the driver’s consciousness low on the pavement as he speeds through intersections, heading east toward the mountains. A teenaged girl in pink pushes the button for a walk signal, the light going fast now from the orange sky, and that mall clock on a pillar shaped like a double-bladed axe proves that it is 5:07; 71°; the cold yellow orange digital display comprised of glossy spheres like flying fish eggs. Turning south on 405, one finds oneself heading for mountains behind an immense blue truck which screams
SAFE AND COURTEOUS
. A plane, blinking at the navel, slowly labors behind power wires; one then proceeds west past Pigeon World, and enters a very dark tunnel with a mural of fishes, and garages glowing red and blue in the direction of the wool-clot clouds, the beer factory silhouetted like children’s toy pyramids, its pink smoke rising into the sky.
Hola
to La Brea Immanuel Mission Church! Then it’s on to Koreatown, the crawling lights around the Young Dong Restaurant on Wilshire, and we ride through the night of Koreatown up to the stubby light-pixelated phalli and tombstones of skyscrapers beneath which tiny people scuttle, silhouetted by the cold colored lights of downtown Los Angeles.

Imperial’s a miracle, all right; the All-American Canal’s another miracle; housing “developments” are miracles, too, and even if we exclude our meditations to agriculture alone, I can think of a certain other place, oh, yes, and almost half a thousand miles it runs, green and tan, red and brown, that wide, flat groove between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range—yes, flat above all, dusty in summer, foggy in winter, and at rare snatches so clear that all the agricultural puzzle-pieces of it suddenly become as distinct as the silhouettes of the crows on its road-signs. It runs from Mount Shasta all the way south to Grapevine, split down the middle by the blue doglegging of the California Aqueduct. Black cows at sea in yellow grass, almond orchards laid out in vast grids which resemble military cemeteries, the shadowy hollows of tan-grassed hills, roads and houses infesting this outstretched land in whose midst hunkers the state capital, Sacramento; thus our great Central Valley, from which, they say, half of California’s agricultural profit comes, vibrating like the I-5 Freeway itself. In comparison, the Imperial Valley’s half a million irrigated acres mean little.

And more houses come to the Central Valley (whose residents never imagined they would compete with distant Imperial), and more cities grow. I wonder where their water will come from?

Here in the capital, the newspaper gives me fifteen “water-wise tips” including:

1. Incorporate hardscape elements into your yard such as paths, boulders, decks and patios. None requires water.

That comes from the “Drips and Drops” feature.

Will California’s future years truly be pale as mummified fishes on gravel by night at Bombay Beach? Never! An oracle named Angela Anderson gets quoted in “Drips and Drops.” She happens to be the water conservation administrator for Sacramento.
“We just ask that water is used efficiently so that we have an ample water supply for new developments and existing homes,” says Anderson.

New developments! Well, then
WATER
must still be
HERE
. What a relief!

Herbert Marcuse, 1955:
The individual comes to the traumatic realization that full and painless gratification of his needs is impossible. And after this experience of disappointment . . . the reality principle supersedes the pleasure principle.

But here at the San Diego County Water Authority, we now sell almost six hundred thousand acre-feet of water per year to our thirty-two members—everyone from Chula Vista to Ramona to Oceanside, not to mention twenty-nine others, and, to be frank, we don’t subscribe to the reality principle. We don’t need to, since
WATER IS HERE
. More strictly speaking, water is in Imperial, but we have never been cheated out of a water-drop in our lives. (At the Travelodge in San Diego I asked old Dick: Do you think it will rain today?—He proudly replied: It never rains in southern California.) So let’s sit down with Metropolitan and Interior to prepare our ambush. Imperial is weak; so let
her
discover the reality principle! That way, we can enjoy the pleasure principle a few years longer . . .

EIGHTY PERCENT

In the month of May, 1991, when Los Angeles finds itself compelled to live with a water-usage reduction of twenty-six point five percent (the Marin Municipal Water District suffers worst of all, with a fifty-percent cutback), certain selfish nobodies, whose identity the Association of California Water Agencies tactfully reserves for another page, experience no water shortage at all!

Not being tactful, I’ll let you in on the secret right away: These sinners inhabit the Imperial and Coachella valleys. Sharing their guilt are the parasites of the Yuma Indian Reservation Project and the Palo Verde Irrigation District. Almost
eighty percent
of California’s share of Colorado River water goes to those four, simply because they were there first! To those water-accountants among you who crave hard numbers, read on: The All-American Canal continues to spill as much as three million delicious acre-feet of Colorado River water into the Coachella and Imperial valleys every year—twice the quantity that the Mexicali Valley gets. Never mind Mexico; what about
us
? My fellow San Diegans and Angelenos, oh, my dear thirsty brethren in National City, my cousin victims in Escondido, my angry friends in Long Beach, would you call the distribution of water-wealth in our great state equitable? Just as California lemons run the risk of turning grey and oozing with sour rot fungus, so our patience nears blight or outright spoliation; I’m referring to our long-standing, self-denying, and ultimately preposterous forbearance with the yokels of Imperial!
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD,
forever.
Never fear; we have money and numbers. We’re going to get them.

THE EARTHQUAKE WITHOUT CASUALTIES

And so as the millennium turned, Imperial’s eponymous county got squeezed by San Diego, Los Angeles, to whose vast water district San Diego had belonged for half a century now, and even the United States Interior Department.

(I asked Richard Brogan: Would you say there’s more pressure on Imperial from San Diego, Los Angeles, Coachella or the Inland Empire?

He replied: In my very general and brief experience, I think the Metropolitan Water District is the biggest, the most capable and the least open.)

The urbans,
as Imperial County called them, requested her to sign a water-transfer agreement which would begin to dry up the farms in whose name she had come into being. (We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.) Ask the ghost of Phil Swing what would happen should water be withdrawn from a preexisting huddle of human beings.
It would constitute the economic murder of any community which we stood by and permitted to develop with the use of this water,
he replies. (That’s 1925. He’s talking about Mexican Imperial. He wants us to get that water first and build the All-American Canal, before Mexicali and Tijuana grow too big.) One academic compared the economic losses which the water transfer would exact upon Imperial County as similar to those of an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.5. San Diego restated his conclusion as follows:
The urban agencies, which used to divert this water from the river at virtually no cost, will now be paying to implement agricultural water conservation programs that make transfer water available without economically harming the agricultural community.
And on Coronado and Wilshire, trees and silver-grey building-windows cool your gaze; then, whirling round the corner in your Los Angeles automobile, you meet a burst of sun, more glorious trees and a fountain’s white spurt.

OTHER AUTHORIZED USES

WATER IS HERE
.
We just ask that water is used efficiently so that we have an ample water supply for new developments and existing homes.
There is an abundant supply of water.
Surely one of Coachella Valley’s defining images into the next millennium is of beautiful green fairways and blue lakes, often ringed with the rugged rocks and desert plants they have replaced.

And California’s smacking her thirst-cracked lips! She’s not particular anymore; she longs even to slurp up the
aguas negras
of the New River, then wash it down with selenium-salted gulps of the Salton Sea! In 1983, the year after La Quinta incorporates and two years before the urban population of Baja California reaches one million, three hundred and fifty thousand, the United States informs Mexico that even the seepage waters drooling out of the All-American Canal belong to
us.
We reserve the right to lay down concrete, thereby preserving our water from crossing without permission to Southside. A laudatory biography of William Mulholland concludes:
In spite of rationing, and even with the possibility of a new aqueduct, it is unlikely that the region’s critical water problems can be solved. As the twenty-first century approached, the same problems that challenged William Mulholland confronted the city
of Los Angeles
again.
Well, one can’t blame Los Angeles for trying to solve it! In 2003, she applies for nearly half a million acre-feet of New River water
(purpose of use: municipal and industrial).
Eagerly seconding her, the federal government, Imperial County’s new enemy, decries the fact that so much water fails to return to the Colorado River, as opposed to
the return flows of many other,
I presume saintlier,
water contractors within the Lower Colorado River Basin.
(Why doesn’t it return? Because the Imperial Valley is at or below sea level.) Oh, the outrage of that! You see, since they dead-end in the Salton Sea, the stinking fluids of the New River, the Alamo and the Whitewater
are no longer available for other authorized uses or users.

In response, American Imperial sends out this cry to
My Fellow Farmers Throughout California:
We need
your support to withstand the largest attack on agricultural water rights in California since Owens Valley.
Warning:
This is a precedent for ag communities all across California and the rest of the arid southwest.

SHOT 107

... The Emir stares before him, whispering:

“He who controls water--is the victor . . .”

“We just ask that water is used efficiently so that we have an ample water supply for new developments and existing homes,” says Anderson.

SHOT 108

... Tamerlane’s warriors gallop into the square . . .

“AN ABUNDANT SUPPLY OF WATER”

Fortunately, Southside suffers no such worries. The Mexicali yellow pages for 2002-03 assure me, in prose which could have been written about Imperial County in 1950:

Fertile Lands Surrounded by the Desert

The Valley of Mexicali is the most important agrarian region in the state. There is an abundant supply of water, and, with a watering capacity for 220,000 hectares, it has proved its fertility for the cultivation of cotton and other grains.

Meanwhile in Tijuana, whose people drink up water from wells, the subterranean source of the La Misión stream, the Tijuana and Las Palmas rivers and of course the Colorado, the television announces
SUSPENSION OF WATER
and rapidly lists many
colonias
in small type. But their water has suffered a suspension mainly because their arteries needed cleaning. Call it the merest
inconvenience,
not a
shortage.
An agronomist in Tijuana informs his visitor:
At this moment, we are not in a water crisis.
He continues:
Agriculture goes well in this state, but not in Tijuana. It’s mostly because of the water here.