Imperial (179 page)

In 1970 the water table was thirty or forty meters deep, they said. Now it is sixty or seventy meters deep. The water was starting to get more salty so we moved the well . . .

(They gave me a glass of well water to taste, and it did taste slightly saline but not much.)

When they finish lining the All-American Canal, will you still have water? I asked.

We’ll still have water, but it will be lower, maybe a hundred meters.

When you did first hear about this matter?

They’ve been saying it since last year. On the radio.

Will it be much harder for you?

There’s a committee here that’s looking at the problem and we think that it will be all right.

That was his answer, which was confident like him. She remarked, and only on the surface did it seem irrelevant, that once there had been a fountain in the park and the water had been white with salt. They used to wash clothes in that water, but the clothes dried with white crystals on them.

What are your aspirations for the future?

That God will bless us and we will keep moving forward, said the woman. What more can you ask?

They didn’t believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe, only in God.

She had never been across the border. He had been a couple of times
just to look around.
In fact, he had explored all the way to Los Angeles.

Here there’s more freedom, he concluded. In America you work all the time.

Do you have any desire to visit America? I asked her.

Actually, yes, she said smiling. I was praying that God will let me know the other side; I am hungering for it.

Her husband fell silent.

What of America can you see from this side?

Since I’ve never been there I can’t say, but there’s a canal.

I asked him: Is there anything you want Americans to understand about Mexicans?

There should be better communication between the two, he replied.

Do you feel badly that the United States took so much of Mexico?

He shrugged and said: Either way there’s still a lot of land.

THE DESERT DISAPPEARS

Within the Republic of Northside, lining the All-American Canal would endanger four wetlands totalling six hundred and thirty hectares, three of them along both sides of the canal; the fourth, by far the largest at five hundred and seventy-five hectares and which contained salt cedars, arrowweeds, mesquites and marsh, was between Drops Three and Four. Within Mexico, two thousand two hundred and seventy hectares in the Andrade Mesa would be affected, and two-thirds of that probably lost. These areas were mostly in Ejidos Irapuato and Netz. The second-largest Mexican populations of two bird subspecies, the Yuma clapper rail and the black rail, might disappear. Seventy thousand acre-feet per year would be taken from Mexicali’s thirsty maw. I can’t help believing in people.

There’s a committee here that’s looking at the problem and we think that it will be all right.

Anyhow, what was extraordinary about it? It was nothing more than the next reification of subdelineation.

GOLD AND JADE

Mucho calor, muchos mosquitos.
It starts in June, and by August . . . the wife said laughing.

Before, it used to get hotter, Señor Castro put in.

She nodded.—Sometimes children and old people would die.

Why is it cooler now?

Because we have water, they explained.

MORE GOLD AND JADE

Oh, yes.
WATER IS HERE
.

The old man from Durango who was sitting in the park in San Luis Río Colorado with his shoes off, in a plaid shirt and a baseball cap with an American logo, said to me:

I’ve planted and harvested corn and beans. I once owned some land which was expropriated by the
ejido.
I also had some ancestral land until my father died in 1967. My little brother owns it. We plant corn and beans, but it’s a very hand to mouth life since there is no irrigation.

What is it like where you come from?

Well, there are just a lot of
ejidos.
In Durango it’s all
ejidos.

And what is different about San Luis?

Here it is all businesses. Down there it is all farmwork, he aphorized, nodding cautiously. He had a thin grey moustache and gold teeth.

If you wanted to farm here you could, he said knowingly, because the land here is
irrigated.

REPRISE

And in Ejido Morelos, the rancher Gilberto Sanders had reassured me: We have plenty of water here. There’s a canal, a concrete canal without a name . . .

YOU, TOO, WILL GO THERE

I supposed that they would all still have water, just less of it.

Down in Colonia Santo Niño I met a man who worked for the State Commission of Public Services in Mexicali. His department concerned itself with issues of potable water. He said that the lining of the All-American Canal would be
a big problem for Mexicali.

It comes from the valley over near Calexico and it drops over to this side, he said; quite a bit of water comes from there.

Will some of the
ejidos
have to close up and leave?

It will affect them quite a bit, because they’re selling the water to San Diego and Los Angeles.

Will they have to leave?

No. But they’re going to have to live on a strict quantity.

How about in this
colonia
?

It’s measured, but you can use as much as you can pay for. I myself spend about thirty or forty pesos a month for washing water, and for drinking water two hundred and ten pesos in a big jug . . .

So perhaps it would be merely a little worse for the Castros in Ejido Netzahualcóyotl, whose name, by the way, memorializes the Aztec ruler Nezahualcóyotl, Fasting Coyote. Here is one of his poems:

Like a flower,
we will dry up
here on earth. . . .
though you be of jade,
though you be of gold
you will also go there
to the place of the fleshless.

WATER IS HERE.

WATER IS HERE.

WATER IS HERE.

Chapter 194

SAN LUIS RÍO COLORADO
(2006)

H
is name is Mariano Silvas Contreras, the waitress said. He is a United States citizen. It has been about eight years since I have seen him. I came back here to San Luis to find out about him, because I heard that he was here. I have been here for four months, and I know absolutely nothing about him. I don’t know if he died or anything. But if he is alive, I would like to live with him, because he is my father. And since he is a United States citizen, I would like him to help me go there. I know that he was married in the United States but I don’t know if they were really married or if they were just living together. It came to the point that my parents did not want to be together anymore. I am not trying to molest him. I think that he would want to see me, because every time we met each other, he would hug me and he would cry. He always drank a lot, and you cannot have a conversation with someone who has been drinking. So the conversations were very short. I am still in touch with my mother but I live here with my sister. I know he worked over
there
—by which the waitress meant Northside—although he lived here. He was a day laborer, a vaquero, so he worked on some ranches. He talked a lot about a place called Casas Blancas. I don’t know where that is.

If he helps me with my citizenship, then I can go. But I have never been across even once, to go shopping. To me it sounds a little scary. And besides, I don’t have my papers, so I cannot do it. I have been going around asking questions about it and people tell me maybe I could ask Customs if he goes back and forth . . .

She was a beautiful, beautiful girl with a wide golden face and blonde-brown hair, dark brown eyebrows and golden-brownish eyes.

Chapter 195

BLYTHE (2005)

Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly . . .

—Ray Bradbury, 1950

I
n 2005 the columnist George F. Will, whose elegant sentences and rightwing themes had entertained me for years, turned his attention to the following problem (so my hometown paper entitled the editorial):
Old water agreement maroons booming Las Vegas
. Poor Las Vegas! And which boulder blocked that watercourse’s way? Thomas Blythe, of course.
Because of the principle “first in time, first in right,” California got an abundance.

One would have supposed that a conservative would favor this principle.
Of course in the classroom my kids didn’t talk about it.
You can’t produce things the way you used to
.

Almost a tenth of all Americans depend on the
Colorado River’s
water. But agriculture sops up 90 percent of it. The sprawl of Phoenix onto agricultural land actually decreases water use.
So sprawl away, America, sprawl away! Then we’ll never be thirsty anymore.

The heroine of Mr. Will’s column is
the elegant, no-nonsense Pat Mulroy, 52,
general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. This woman informs the interested Mr. Will that
the Strip accounts for less than 1 percent of the state’s water use—while producing 60 percent of the state’s economy.
I can’t help believing in people.

While Mr. Will does not come out explicitly against
first in time, first in right,
he is clearly on the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s side. What would Emerson say? Mr. Will, by the way, is about the only popular commentator of my own epoch who might have actually read Emerson.

What is a conservative? I had thought him to be, among other things, an individual who respects the inviolability of private property—Thomas Blythe’s, for instance.

Of course, Thomas Blythe is long dead. His Mexican holdings went back to Andrade, who transferred them to the Colorado River Land Company. As for the property rights invested in his eponymous town, these now hinder the growth of Las Vegas.
“ Moisture Means Millions.”
But agriculture sops up 90 percent of it.

CRIME SCENES

Ride with me along Highway I-10, the boundary of Imperial, on a cloudy ninety-degree July morning, with the green and olive scrub and the sawtoothed mountains on either side. Look with me down into the yellow grass, and then the long gap below mountains ending upon a very distinct flat horizon. It is all bushes and clouds, surprisingly lush for Imperial, and there is a white sign: 150 ACRES.

Look up a splayed ocher canyon lined with pallid rocks; and ahead you will see a low many-toothed shard of blue-grey mountain severed from the earth by a pale horizon-line.

Coming into Blythe, you will find a long fence of citrus trees, hay bales, fields, a row of date palms, a canal, an adobe house bearing an advertisement for bail bonds, and the palm-backdropped Sunlite Bowling Center with a black and peeling billboard. Welcome to the Courtesy Coffee Shop. You need not neglect the Hot Group, nor Erika’s Sand Bar. Now it is a hundred and two degrees, and you may as well retreat beneath the old archway’d architecture of Imperial. Yes, old! First in time, first in right—

On a decidedly unincorporated road in the unincoporated realm of Mesa Verde, there is a water tank labeled
OASIS
. Leaving the petroglyphs and intaglios to their bygoneness, let us drive the dirt road that passes directly between sets of power poles. Now we come into the tall tough greenness of riverbottom vegetation, and then there is a lovely piercing green of fresh-cut alfalfa, with mountains in all directions, a veritable table-land.

What is Imperial to you? To me, today at least, it is small houses, a child swinging beneath stately trees, the trees often nicer than the homes; Imperial is a tall rusty rocketlike tower on spider-legs overlooking the metal sheds; Imperial is the screaming green, the lovely chocolate fields of Palo Verde and Blythe.

Almost a tenth of all Americans depend on the water. But agriculture sops up 90 percent of it.

Imperial is mountains behind and citrus ahead.

Now we have arrived at that awful crime against Las Vegas, the Palo Verde Outfall: green banks on either side of a ditch of slow water; enclosed in labia of green sage, then yellow sage, then sand. That is how it is when one goes away from water: Going south from Palo Verde, one rapidly meets the end of the greenness, fields going to yellow and yellow-green brush; then reddish-grey and bluish-grey desert hills burst forth in the late afternoon, with rare thunderheads over Imperial. It is only a hundred and two degrees as evening comes over the reddish Cargo Muchacho Mountains, shadowing them into varying blue diagonals.

And after a long time one enters the yellow-green fields of Bard, which are jeweled with silver sprinkler-droplets (each another crime against Arizona and Nevada), out of which Signal Mountain rises ahead like a blue whalefin. A yellow-grassed desert swells, scattered with black rocks. Ocotillos reach for the clouds.

I always forget how beautiful this part of Imperial is. Her treasures here are conical mounds of black rock and silver pebbles, more ocotillos, not to mention chollas and Joshua trees.

Then far away I glimpse a lovely horizon-line of dunes, lavender with blue shadows, a thickening horizon-line with a very pale blue line of thicker sky behind it—the sky-blue mountains of Mexico.

Chapter 196

THE INLAND EMPIRE (2003-2004)

Southern California’s housing demand could be reduced by importing
Indiana’s weather, forcing our children to live in Texas, or telling the world
not to want our liberties.