This must-watch video is simply the best introduction to the San Joaquin Valley water politics I’ve seen lately.
Toward the end, there’s mention of California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intervention in the issue on behalf of a close friend and major political contributor, Stewart Resnick, who owns — among many other things — Paramount Farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Paramount, which farms about 120,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley, is allotted 480,000 acre-feet of water each year. That’s enough to cover every inch of the land they farm four feet deep. It’s also about 47,000 acre-feet more than the entire city of Los Angeles used last year. Resnick asked Feinstein to help him keep his sea of taxpayer subsidized water, and she’s done so: she has prompted a “reexamination” of the science that says salmon need water to survive.
Those of us in the desert conservation community are waiting as the Senator’s staff draft what’s being hyped as a major desert land preservation bill. Given Feinstein’s Bush-like ability to jettison science when the profits of her benefactors are at stake, I don’t personally hold much hope that her desert bill will protect the desert.
Tonight I ran, and cursed this aging frame
each mile run cursing harder than the last
each breath more labored, every pace the same
and sorry degradation, milestones passed
chained to my ankles. Streetlit sky a sieve,
the sodden city noise damping my ears,
I ran halting, frustrated, tentative.
Each draught of burning lung betrayed my years.
What point is there to this? This city but
a straitjacket, a hundred yards of gauze
I’ve wrapped me in, like xylocaine for thought
that swells uncomfortably against what was.
When Bailey developed cancer, I finally accepted that our walks would be numbered, our explorations circumscribed by her illness. But I didn’t expect to lose her so soon.
We took her in for surgery on Wednesday, thinking we’d see her again that evening, or possibly the next day. But while she made it through the surgery, she likely developed a blood clot that stopped her heart, once, twice, and finally forever.
Bailey had such a big heart, it must have taken a lot to stop it beating.
Below the fold, a draft of the next chapter of the Joshua tree book. I’ve been posting chapters on a temporary basis for vetting and feedback purposes. Chapters one and two are taken down already. Chapter three is here for the time being. Won’t be up long.
I’ll say up front that I’m not sure this will make it into the final. I’m balancing memoir and exposition. Lately I think I’ve been pushing too far into memoir in my envisioning the book, and this definitely kicks it further in that direction.
But I’m up at writers’ group tonight, and I have to bring them something to read, so here it is.
Zeke inspects a seriously dead cow, Burro Creek, Arizona. January 2 2004
Something must be in the air: the time of year, perhaps, or a regular geist asking the zeitgeist for a walk around the block, but I’ve had him on my mind for a few days, and yesterday I got a text from the ex- saying she’d been feeling the same way. We reminisced a bit on the phone. Of course that only made it worse, but in kind of a good way.
Maybe it was the snow in the Bay Area yesterday. He loved it so, the snow, and one of the things I’ll always regret is that we didn’t get him to places more often where he could be out in it.
I think one of the reasons I was able to cope with life in a city was having him there: I didn’t feel the thoroughgoing lack of connection with the real world that I do these days. Being my conduit to the real was a big job, and he did it as long as he could.
Ironically, he kind of hated the desert. At least the Mojave, and the Sonoran was a bit spiny and hot for him as well. He did love the Great Basin desert, cool and soft and sparsely saged as it is. He fit that landscape well. Well enough that I always meant to get him a blaze orange vest so as not to be mistaken for a coyote by some gun-toting yahoo.
