I realized it yesterday hiking through live oak and bay laurel, redwood and Douglas fir. The trail wound around and through precarious stacks of boulders teetering on cliff edges, a stumble in the wrong place deadly and I rarely stumble in the right place, and I laid my hand on sandstone. It is rounded there, the rock, hollow, pithed by centuries of erosion. It is alive, almost. I felt affection for the rock, a fondness, a regret that I will miss it fondly. I ran a finger along a long smooth ridge, a band of finer grain, a line of rock marginally less complaisant to the seductiveness of wind, of water.
I realized I have been saying goodbye to the land for some time.
There was a land of juniper and pine, a universe of gray, khaki, and dust-olive, a sky island in the desert that I loved. It was a refuge from searing heat and dry. Its coyotes were sleek, fattened on rabbit flesh. I woke there a dozen times, eyes slaked with a night of desert starlight and the sight of my breath steaming at dawn, the scent of coffee and juniper and piñon pitch and frying eggs in the pan. That land is gone, supplanted by a burnt land. Two years since the fire and I finally went in to look last week. Looked at the black skeletons of juniper and pine. Looked at black smears that were once blackbrush and sage, cacti, the centuries-old middens of packrats. Looked at the contorted corpses of Joshua trees, ropy limbs dangling limp and swaying, standing dead two and a half years now. Looked at land scraped as bare as if sheep-burnt. The last time I saw this land whole I was in a hurry to get to a phone, and drove away without a rearward glance, and it is gone.
All landscapes die. The broad wooded valley in the banner painting you see above is dead, flooded in salt water when the icecaps melted. All landscapes are reborn. Two centuries ago that flooded valley housed birds to blot out the sky, salmon the size of dogs, bears that dined on beached whale carcasses, people so well fed on mast and meat that tens of generations of them never touched a plow. That land is dead, now, too, and the landscape struggling to replace it dies stillborn, a million minor lacerations draining it.
All landscapes die and are reborn, and the apathetic, the soulless would take that as an excuse to further wound the land, as if mortality was sufficient grounds for murder.
I walked along the bottom of a lake last week, scuffed my boots along its bottom, watched the silt billow. It is the largest freshwater lake west of Lake Superior. It has been without its water for a century, more or less. A very wet year will fill its very bottom, now, for a few weeks. It is Tulare Lake, named for the tules — reeds — that fringed its shifting shore.
People who lived along the lake used the phrase “out in the tules” to describe the back of beyond, the farthest remote land, the places from which you would have to hike a whole day just to become merely far from everything instead of impossibly remote. You will still hear the phrase if you live in California long enough. The essence of wilderness, out in the tules near Tulare Lake, and almost completely gone now, scraped clean and filled with endless straight rows of cotton. Only a token, carefully managed fragment of the lake’s wetlands survive, in the Kern National Wildlife Refuge shown above.
It was the wildest thing they could imagine and they killed it: an outcome both improbable and unsurprising.
I speak of Tulare Lake in the present tense despite it all. Cultures that rely on irrigation with imported water, the historical record tells us, are blessedly short-lived. The Tulare Basin’s culture is based on some of the most grandiose waterworks ever built, and by all logic must therefore be due to wink out any minute now. Once the pumps go mute, once the Ozymandian dams and aqueducts stand truncated and broken and the rivers flow over them in raw and ephemeral cataracts, Tulare Lake will return. But it will not be the same lake. The world’s southernmost Chinook run, which reached the lake in wet years, is gone. The old lake’s massive fishery, a hundred tons caught in a good month, may never recover. The lakebed is choked with aldrin and dieldrin, lindane and Cygon, lead oxides and selenium. A historic fluke just barely saved the tule elk from extinction, and some live nearby: genetically depauperate elk herds may roam the resurgent, post-industrial tules if their survival suits our whims until then.
But the old lake is dead, and my apocalyptic optimism a crutch. The old lake bed lifts itself up in each wind and fills the air with silt. Along Utica Road near Corcoran, in the south end of the lakebed, a corporate cotton farmer has plowed too early and the land has come undone. The road is obscured by drifting sand, and then the signs and finally the sky are obscured by the lakebed sand. Tumbleweeds bounce across the road, three feet in the air, invasive seeds spilling as they roll, until they reach an already buckling barbed wire fence, where they pile improbably high, driftwood in a dead lake’s cove. Round the decay of that colossal wrack, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands blow far away.
