Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Read online

Alfredo looked over the agenda. “Ah. That was something a few sessions ago. MWD has gotten their Colorado River allotment upped by court decision, and they’d like to sell that water before the Columbia River pipe is finished. The planning office has determined that if we do take more from MWD, we can avoid the penalties from OC Water District for overdrafting groundwater, and in the end it’ll save us money. And MWD is desperate—when the Columbia pipe’s done it’ll be a real buyer’s market. So in essence it’s a buyer’s market already.”

  “But we don’t pump that much out of the groundwater here.”

  “No, but the pump taxes for overdrafting are severe. With the water from MWD we could replenish any overdraft ourselves, and avoid the tax.”

  Kevin shook his head, confused. “But extra MWD water would mean we would never overdraft.”

  “Exactly. That’s the point. Anyway, it’s just an inquiry letter for more information.”

  Kevin thought it over. In his work he had had to get water permits often, so he knew a little about it. Like many of the towns in southern California, they bought the bulk of their water from Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Water District, which pumped it in from the Colorado River. But much more than that he didn’t know, and this.…

  “What information do we have now? Do they have a minimum sale figure?”

  Alfredo asked Mary to read them the original letter from MWD, and she located it and read. Fifty acre feet a year minimum. Kevin said, “That’s a lot more water than we need. What do you plan to do with it?”

  “Well,” Alfredo replied, “if there’s any excess at first, we can sell it to the District watermaster.”

  If, Kevin thought. At first. Something strange here.…

  Doris leaned forward in her seat. “So now we’re going into the water business? What happened to the resolution to reduce dependency on MWD?”

  “It’s just a letter asking for more information,” Alfredo said, almost irritably. “Water is a complex issue, and getting more expensive all the time. It’s our job to try and get it as cheaply as we can.” He glanced at Matt Chung, then down at his notes.

  Kevin’s fist clenched. They were up to something. He didn’t know what it was, but suddenly he was sure of it. They had been trying to slip this by him, in his first council meeting, when he was disoriented, tired, a little drunk.

  Alfredo was saying something about drought. “Don’t you need an environmental impact statement for this kind of thing?” Kevin asked, cutting him off.

  “For an inquiry letter?” Alfredo said, almost sarcastically.

  “Okay, okay. But I’ve stood before this council trying to get permission to couple a greenhouse and a chicken coop, and I’ve had to make an EIS—so somewhere along the line we’d surely have to have one for a change like this!” Sudden spurt of anger, remembering the frustration of those many meetings.

  Alfredo said, “It’s just water.”

  “Fuck, you must be kidding!” Kevin said.

  Doris jabbed him with an elbow, and he remembered where he was. Oops. He looked down at the table, blushing. There was some tittering out in the audience. Got to watch it here, not just a private citizen anymore.

  Well. That had put a pause in the conversation. Kevin glanced at the other council members. Matt was frowning. The moderates looked concerned, confused. “Look,” Kevin said. “I don’t know who these nominees are, and I don’t know any of the details about this offer from MWD. I can’t approve item twenty-seven in such a state, and I’d like to move we postpone discussing it until next time.”

  “I second the motion,” Doris said.

  Alfredo looked like he was going to make some objection. But he only said, “In favor?”

  Doris and Kevin raised their hands. Then Hiroko and Jerry did the same.

  “Okay,” Alfredo said, and shrugged. “That’s it for tonight, then.”

  He closed the session without fuss, looked at Matt briefly as they stood.

  They had hoped to slip something by, Kevin thought. But what? Anger flushed through him again: Alfredo was tricky. And all the more so because no one but Kevin seemed to recognize that in him.

  Their new town attorney bulked before him. Buddha standing. “You’ll come by to see my house?”

  “Oh yeah,” Kevin said, distracted.

  Oscar gave him the address. “Perhaps you and Ms. Nakayama could come by for breakfast. You can see the house, and I might also be able to illuminate some aspects of tonight’s agenda.”

  Kevin looked at him quickly. The man’s big face was utterly blank; then his eyes fluttered up and down, wild as crows’ wings. Significance. The moonlike face blanked out again.

  “Okay,” Kevin said. “We’ll come by.”

  “I shall expect you promptly at your leisure.”

  * * *

  Biking home in the night, the long meeting over. Kevin had had to take some tools over to Hank’s, and Doris and Nadezhda had gone directly home, so now he was alone.

  The cool rush of air, the bouncing headlamp, the occasional whirr of chain in derailleur. The smell everywhere of orange blossoms, cut with eucalyptus, underlaid by sage: the braided smell of El Modena. Funny that two of the three smells were immigrants, like all the rest of them. Together, the way they could fill him up.…

  Freed of the night’s responsibilities, and still a little drunk, Kevin felt the scent of the land fill him. Light as a balloon. Sudden joy in the cool spring night. God existed in every atom, as Hank was always saying, in every molecule, in every particulate jot of the material world, so that he was breathing God deep into himself with every fragrant breath. And sometimes it really felt that way, hammering nails into new framing, soaring in the sky, biking through night air, the black hills bulking around him.… He knew the configuration of every dark tree he passed, every turn in the path, and for a long moment rushing along he felt spread out in it all, interpenetrated, the smell of the plants part of him, his body a piece of the hills, and all of it cool with a holy tingling.

  * * *

  Kevin’s thighs had stiffened up from the afternoon’s flight, and feeling them, he saw Ramona’s legs. Long muscles, smooth brown skin, the swirl of fine silky hair on inner thigh. Wham, wham, the frame of the ultralite shuddering under all that anger and pain. Still wrapped up with Alfredo, no doubt of that. Hmmm.

  Long day. Four for four, boom, boom! His wrists remembered the hits, the solid vibrationless smack of a line drive. Thoughtlessly around the roundabout, up Chapman. Overlying the physical memories of the day, the meeting. Oh, man—stuck on that damned council for two whole years! Anger coursed through him again, at Alfredo’s subterfuge, his smoothness. Buddha standing, the weird mime faces of their new town attorney. Something going on. It was funny; he had caught that from right as near sleep as he could have been. He knew he was slow, his friends made fun of him about it; but he wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t. Look at his houses and see. Would he have noticed that crammed item on the agenda if he had been fully awake? Hard to say. Didn’t matter. Pattern recognition. A kind of subconscious resistance. Intelligence as a sort of stubbornness, a refusal to be fooled. No more classrooms falling off their chairs.

  He took the left to home, pumped up the little road. He lived in a big old converted apartment block, built originally in a horseshoe around a pool. He had done the conversion himself, and still liked it about the best of any of his work; big tented thing bursting with light, home to a whole clan. His housemates, the neighbors inside, the real family.

  Last painful push on the thighs, short coast to the bike rack at the open end of the horseshoe. Upstairs Tomas’s window was lit as always, he would be up there before his computer screen, working away. Figures crossed before the big kitchen windows, Donna and Cindy no doubt, talking and pounding the cervecas, watching the kids wash dishes.

  The building sat in an avocado grove at the foot of Rattlesnake Hill, one of the last knobs of the Santa Ana Mountains before the long flat stretch to the sea. Dark bulk of the hill abov
e, furry with scrub oak and sage. His home under the hill. His hill, the center of his life, his own great mound of sandstone and sage.

  He slipped the front tire of his mountain bike into the rack. Turning toward the house he saw something and stopped. A motion.

  Something out there in the grove. He squinted against the two big squares of kitchen light. Clatter of pots and voices. There it was; black shape, between trees, about mid-grove. It too was still, and he had the sudden feeling it was looking back at him. Tall and man-shaped, sort of. Too dark to really see it.

  It moved. Shift to the side, then gone, off into the trees. No sound at all.

  Kevin let out a breath. Little tingle up his spine, around the hair on the back of his neck. What the…?

  Long day. Nothing out there but night. He shook his head, went inside.

  2

  2 March 2012, 8 A.M. I decided that as a gesture to its spirit I would write my book outdoors. Unfortunately it’s snowing today. The balcony above ours makes a sort of roof, however, so I am sticking to my resolve. Roll out computer stand, extension cords, chair. Sit bundled in down booties, bunting pants, down jacket, down hood. Plug in and pound away. The mind’s finest hour. My hands are cold.

  “Stark bewölkt, Schnee.” We haven’t seen the sun all year, even the Zürchers are moaning. Suddenly a dream comes back to me: Owens Valley in spring bloom.

  Writing a utopia. Certainly it’s a kind of compensation, a stab at succeeding where my real work has failed. Or at least an attempt to clarify my beliefs, my desires.

  I remember in law school, thinking that the law determined the way the world was run, that if I learned it I could change things. Then the public defender’s office, the case loads, the daily grind. The realization that nothing I did there would ever change things. And it wasn’t much better at the CLE, or doing lawsuits for the Socialist Party, miserable remnant that it was. So many attacks from so many directions, we were lucky if we could hold on to the good that already existed. No chance to improve things. Nothing but a holding action. Really it was a relief when this post-doc of Pam’s gave me the chance to quit.

  Now I’ll change the world in my mind.

  Our balcony overlooks a small yard, surrounded by solid brick buildings. A massive linden dominates smaller trees and shrubs. Wet black branches thrust into a white sky. Below me are two evergreens, one something like a holly, the other something like a juniper; the birds are clustered in these, fluffed quivering feather-balls, infrequently cheeping. Between two buildings, a slice of Zürich: Grossmünster and Fraumünster and their copper-green spires, steely lake, big stone buildings of the university, the banks, the medieval town. Iron sound of a tram rolling downhill.

  I’m writing a utopia in a country that runs as efficiently as Züri’s blue trams, even though it has four languages, two religions, a nearly useless landscape. Conflicts that tear the rest of the world apart are solved here with the coolest kind of rationality, like engineers figuring out a problem in materials stress. How much torque can society take before it snaps, Dr. Science? Ask the Swiss.

  Maybe they’re too good at it. Refugees are pouring in, Ausländer nearly half the population they say, and so the National Action party has won some elections, become part of the ruling coalition. With a bullet. Return Switzerland to the Swiss! they cry. And in fact yesterday we got an einladung from the Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich. The Stranger Control. Time to renew our Ausländerausweise. It’s down to every four months now. I wonder if they’ll try to kick us out this time.

  For now, all is calm. White flakes falling. I write in a kind of pocket utopia, a little island of calm in a maddened world. Perhaps it will help make my future seem more plausible to me—perhaps, remembering Switzerland, it will even seem possible.

  But there’s no such thing as a pocket utopia.

  * * *

  The next morning Nadezhda joined Kevin and Doris for the visit to Oscar Baldarramma. They biked over in heavy traffic (voices, squeaky brakes, whirring derailleurs) and coasted down Oscar’s street, gliding through the spaced shadows of liquid amber trees, so that it seemed the morning blinked.

  Oscar’s house was flanked by lemon and avocado trees. Un-harvested lemons lay rotting in the weeds, giving the air a sweet-sour scent. The house itself was an old stucco and wood suburban thing, roofed with concrete tiles. A separate garden and bike shed stood under an avocado tree at the back of the lot, and a bit of the house’s roof extended before the shed: “Carport,” Kevin said, eyeing it with interest. “Pretty rare.”

  Oscar greeted them in a Hawaiian shirt slashed with yellow and blue stripes, and purple shorts. He ignored Doris’s exaggerated squint, and led them inside for a tour. It was a typical tract house, built in the 1950s. Doris remarked that it was a big place for one person, and Oscar promptly hunched over and took a long sideways step, waggling his eyebrows fiercely and brandishing an invisible cigar: “Always available for boarding!”

  Kevin and Doris stared at him, and he straightened up. “Groucho Marx,” he explained.

  Kevin and Doris looked at each other. “I’ve heard the name,” Doris said. Kevin nodded.

  Oscar glanced at Nadezhda, who was grinning. His mouth made a little O. “In that case…” he murmured, and turned to show them the next room.

  When the tour was finished Kevin asked what Oscar wanted done.

  “The usual thing.” Oscar waved a hand. “Big clear walls that make it impossible to tell if you’re indoors or out, an atrium three stories tall, perhaps an aviary, solar air conditioning and refrigeration and waste disposal, some banana trees and cinnamon bushes, a staircase with gold bannisters, a library big enough to hold twenty thousand books, and a completely work-free food supply.”

  “You don’t want to garden?” Doris asked.

  “I detest gardening.”

  Doris rolled her eyes. “That’s silly, Oscar.”

  Oscar nodded solemnly. “I’m a silly guy.”

  “Where will you get your vegetables?”

  “I will buy them. You recall the method.”

  “Huh,” Doris said, not amused.

  They viewed the back yard in a frosty silence. Kevin tried to get Oscar to speak seriously about his desires, but had little success. Oscar spoke of libraries, wood paneling, fireplaces, comfortable little nooks where one could huddle on long winter nights.… Kevin tried to explain that winter nights in the region weren’t all that long, or cold. That he tended to work in a style that left a lot of open space, making homes that functioned as nearly self-sufficient little farms. Oscar seemed agreeable, although he still spoke in the same way about what he wanted. Kevin scratched his head, squinted at him. Buddha, babbling.

  Finally Nadezhda asked Oscar about the previous night’s council meeting.

  “Ah yes. Well—I’m not sure how much you know about the water situation here?”

  She stood to attention, as if reciting a lesson. “The American West begins where the annual rainfall drops below ten inches.”

  “Exactly.”

  And therefore, Oscar went on, much of the United States was a desert civilization; and like all previous desert civilizations, it was in danger of foundering when its water systems began to clog. Currently some sixty million people lived in the American West, where the natural supplies of water might support two or three. But even the largest reservoirs silt up, and most of the West, existing not just on surface water, had mined its groundwater like oil—thousands of years of accumulated rainfall, pumped out of the ground in less than a century. The great aquifers were drying up, and the reservoirs were holding less each day; while drought, in their warming climate, was more and more common. So the search for water was becoming desperate.

  The solution was on a truly gigantic scale, which pleased the Army Corps of Engineers no end. Up in the Northwest, the Columbia River poured enormous amounts of water into the Pacific every year. Washington, Oregon and Idaho squawked mightily, remembering how Owens Valley had withered when
Los Angeles gained the rights to its water; but the Columbia carried more than a hundred times the water those states were ever expected to need, and their fellow states to the south were truly in need. The Corps of Engineers loved the idea: dams, reservoirs, pipelines, canals—a multi-billion-dollar system, rescuing the sand-choked civilizations of the south. Grand! Lovely! What could be nicer? “It’s what we’ve done in California for years; instead of moving to where the water is, we move the water to where the people are.”

  Nadezhda nodded. “We have this tradition in my country too. There was a plan to turn the Volga River right around, the whole thing, and send it south for irrigation purposes. Only when it seemed that world weather patterns might be shifted was the plan abandoned.” She smiled. “Or maybe it was just lack of funds. Anyway, in your situation, where water will soon be plentiful again, what did that item on last night’s agenda mean?”

  “I’m not sure, but there were two parts I found interesting. One, the inquiry to Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Water District, which supplies most of our town’s water from their Colorado River pipeline. Second, the nominations for the watermaster. On the one hand, it looks like an attempt to bring more water to El Modena; on the other, an attempt to control its use when it arrives. You see?”

  His guests nodded. “And what about this offer from Los Angeles?” Nadezhda said.

  A ghost of a smile crossed Oscar’s face. “When the federal courts made the original apportionment of the Colorado River’s water to the states bordering it, they accidentally used a flood year’s estimate of the river’s annual flow. Every year after that they came up short, and the states fought like dogs over what water there was. To solve the problem the court cut all the states’ shares proportionally. But California—the MWD, to be precise—recently won back the rights to their original allotment.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, first, because they had been using their rights the longest, and most fully, and that solidifies their claim. And secondly, it’s felt that the Columbia pipeline will solve the competing states’ problems, so they won’t need the Colorado’s water. So, the MWD has more water than they have had for years, and since these rights are made more secure by usage, they’re anxious to have their new water bought up and used as quickly as possible. All of their clients in southern California are being offered more water. Most are refusing it, and so MWD is getting anxious.”