The American Future (49 page)

I was ten and in the front stalls of the Golders Green Hippodrome. The finale to act 1: the whole cast, Curly and Laurey; cowboys and
farmers, no more feuding; all pals now, holding hands marching to the front of the stage bathed in brilliant light; the orchestra ecstatic in the pit; the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

This was just the ticket for Broadway and for America in 1943, two years into the war, the Beautiful Morning and the Surrey with the Fringe on Top wiping out, for an evening at least, the memory of the burning hulks of Pearl Harbor, and the anxiety about the Italian invasion; a fairy tale of the High Plains, provided by Rodgers and Hammerstein, two New York Jews who, it's safe to speculate, knew little of the Onion King of Nebraska or Simon Fishman the wheat baron of Kansas triumphally riding the combine in his snap-brim fedora and fancy suspenders.

Many of the real Oklahomans were living among the Cherokee who at last had got a break from history by having moved to the relatively dust-storm-free eastern end of the state, multiplying enough so they would become, in the twenty-first century, the most populous Native American nation in the United States. Or if they were really lucky, they might have lived near Oklahoma City and the gusher that blew in 1930, burning for eleven days before it was capped. But the Oklahomans whom the world knew about from Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange were the “Okies,” for whom the High Plains were no longer a place to scratch a living. One of them, Babe Henry, still the boss of a tire business in the Imperial Valley of Southern California, a silver-haired octogenarian with a twinkle in his eye, confirmed that the Joads in
The Grapes of Wrath
and what they endured was not just
a figment of Steinbeck's sympathetic imagination. All hope of work had gone, farming or otherwise; so off the Henrys went, down Route 66, the paralyzed mother and Babe's oldest brother, who was disabled with polio, riding in the cabin while the two other boys rode all the way on the flatbed, making sure the ropes on what furniture they had stayed secure.

It was known that the farmers needed labor for fruit and vegetable picking and since the stricter immigration laws had staunched the flow of Mexicans (even those who were actually Chinese), the Okies and refugees from the dusters would have to do. They were paid a pittance, a dollar a day, and lived in conditions of great poverty; but at least they ate. Like thousands of others in the valley, Babe Henry's family survived in a “tent house”; the floor and walls of wood up to about four feet, the rest of the space roofed with canvas. Even as they needed their labor, the Californians were not especially thrilled to have the migrants among them. Babe remembers realizing that his bib overalls gave him away in the schoolyard and getting into fights with boys who called him “Okie” as if it meant someone who was barely familiar with the basics of the twentieth century. “That's fine if they wanted to call us names. I wasn't ashamed of where I came from,” and the glint of the tough little boy in the schoolyard comes back. “One thing that's good about the Imperial Valley, we have sun and we have water. We can grow crops all year round here.”

On the day we talked to him, there was no argument about the sun. It was 120°F (around 50°C), but along the road from the Henry Tire Store, the irrigation sprays were moving smoothly through the fields. A bumper crop of corn was being harvested so the rest of America could get it in spring, not summer. It was the last of the fantasy lands of American plenty; the end of the road trip. After Bartram's Cherokee Elysian Fields, after the waving wheat dreams of the Land Runners, came the permanent year-round nursery garden of the valley, courtesy of the All-American Canal, one of those made possible by the Reclamation Act of 1902. But a look at the landscape on either side of the canal—to the left a dunescape that could be Mauritania; to the right, something more like the Kentish Weald or Vermont—is to see the crazy impossibility of it all, the kind of thing that got Powell worked up. The canal is fed from the Colorado just before it enters the Pacific; and though they are growing some of the most irrigation-
intensive produce in the world so that America can have its winter strawberries and green beans, the farmers have more heavily subsidized water than they can use. Upstream in Nevada, years of drought, thin snowmelt, and massive urban use have taken Lake Mead, the great reservoir created by the Hoover Dam, down to less than 60 percent of optimal capacity. Evaporation in the ever more broiling summers has taken still more of the water into the blue Nevada sky. The jetskiers on the lake don't care, though if they take a look they will see the abandoned hulks of old pleasure boats trapped in hard-caked mud where once there was water. A garden of frondlike reeds and grass has grown over the dry bed covering the embarrassment of the boats with their delicate greenery.

Something, someone, has to give: either the farmers sell or relinquish some of their quota from the Colorado Lower Basin allotments, or the pipes of Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego will run dry. “Our water is not for sale” was the steely answer I got from one old Imperial Valley farmer, even though, like most of the farmers, his land is leased to agribusiness. The zero-sum game between competing interests was exactly what the prophetic Powell wanted to avoid. He had spent all his life on, or thinking about, the waters of the Colorado and the other western rivers, and saw in the prudent economies they prescribed a way for the American West to bring a sense of community to a nation he believed badly needed it. The refreshment in every sense of local self-determination.

Which is why I would have loved him to have been sitting with me in Las Vegas. I would even have taken the one-armed major to the Strip and into the twenty-four-hour night of the fantasy hotels, and before he could flee from the robot-chatter of the slots, I would have pointed him to the bodies of water that are everywhere in Vegas—the Pirates of the Caribbean Lagoon, the mock-Venetian Canals, the swimming pools the size of Brooklyn—and explained that they represent the triumph of recycling, every drop constituted from multiply used “gray water,” and without me going into details he would have known exactly what I meant.

And then, if he had been reasonable, I would have taken the major to the real Las Vegas, miles away from the Strip, the one place he would have felt at home: the spring of “the meadows” (
vegas
) itself, around
which the little town was originally founded; the water that the Indians and the Spanish used to feed their corn and beans and drank from. That it is still there is something of a wonder, but around it now is the Las Vegas Springs Preserve, one of the most beautiful and inspiring places in the United States: a few acres of desert garden; succulents, cacti, and other blooming plants that can be grown with the minimum of water; species entirely natural to south Nevada. Through the garden wind handsome trails; and gently rising over them is the educational Desert Living Center, where thousands of Las Vegas schoolkids learn something about the past and future of their water; the possibility of life in a heated-up world. On Fridays in summer there is Mozart and white wine, but the cultural trimmings should fool no one. At the heart of this whole enterprise is the South Nevada Water Authority, and the person who runs it is Pat Mulroy, who, one is absolutely certain, would have given John Wesley Powell and William Ellsworth Smythe a run for their money.

Being half Irish American and half German, Mulroy has steel and charm in exactly balancing proportions. She came to Las Vegas from Germany in 1974 before the mob got out of town, arriving too late one night to argue about rooms. The one she got boasted a circular bed and a mirror on the ceiling. Mulroy, who is middle-aged and still strikingly beautiful, had no idea there were such things. In the morning she rose from the round bed, took a look at the barely developed desert outside her window, and thought she was on Mars.

Her Mars definitely had water, and since 1989 she has been running the Water Authority, which, under the guise of its dull civic name, represents the most hopeful course for the American future, dominated by neither the raw power of the market nor the overbearing and remote authority of federal government. In the deals Mulroy has made for her metropolitan boom area, with others in the Lower Colorado she has managed to make local and common interests converge. She thinks the states of the Lower Colorado Basin (plus Mexico, which under the terms of the 1922 agreement gets a share) have no choice. Certainly Las Vegas, which now has a resident population of 400,000 and an annual tourist invasion of
forty million
, has no alternative but to be ecologically sound if it's going to survive. It starts with the principle “if it hits the sewers it gets recycled,” but Mulroy has also
pioneered the construction of pipes that take any storm runoff (for there are storms) and extra waste straight back to Lake Mead. In the 1990s it was possible to broker “banking” agreements with states like Arizona in which their unused groundwater allotment would be bought by needy Nevada. Put into action, Arizona would in a given year take less of its groundwater, and the corresponding amount of its share would then be available for Nevada at Lake Mead.

But that was before the first modern drought of near catastrophic magnitude in 2002. After that neither California nor Arizona had anything spare to trade in a water banking deal. Drastic measures were needed in Las Vegas if it was to survive. Mulroy then decided that since domestic and business interior use was almost all from gray water, a little educational incentive was needed to cope with exterior waste. Her targets were two of the most sacred spaces in American life: the golf course and the lawn. After 2002, Las Vegas residents would be paid a dollar a square foot to take up their lawn and replace it with desert “xerigraphic” landscaping; the species and rock gardens on show in her preserve, all of which require only the most minimal drip watering. Xerigraphic landscaping is now big business throughout the Southwest. But each week it's possible to see trucks from Pat Mulroy's Authority carrying away sod in cylinders that look like Swiss rolls. Golf clubs all over the metropolitan area have ripped out anything beyond the immediate playing areas on and close to the fairway and likewise replaced them with either artificial turf or desert landscape. If it sounds like symbolic rather than substantive action, it isn't. Mulroy reminds me that 70 percent of all Southern Californian water use goes on into-the-ground exterior use, overwhelmingly gardens, parks, and golf courses, where it irrecoverably disappears.

Outside the city, leading down from Lake Mead, Mulroy and her hydraulic engineers have built a series of stepped “minidams,” eleven of them, to regulate the flow from the precious reservoir in keeping with whatever conditions in a given season or year require. The masonry and concrete used for the dams are debris from the demolition of the old hotels of the great days of the mob. So, those wicked dens of iniquity, the Dunes and the Desert Inn and the Sands, where Sinatra crooned and Martin drank and all of the Rat Pack behaved rattishly, have been given a second life as the enablers of the green life. The thought of all
this saintliness may make their shades reach for a stiff JD on the rocks; but as long as the rocks are frozen gray water, who cares?

I ask Pat if she thinks America will come to Vegas to learn, of all things, about how to survive global warming rather than how to win big at the poker tables. She looks at me for a moment from those clear Nordic-Irish eyes, relaxes, smiles and says, “It's the next generation, our children.” I can tell she has her own, pictured that very moment in her mind's eye. “They want to survive. And we want them to survive, don't we?”