Water

I cannot recall what my mother set out to buy in places like Redlands, San Bernardino or Riverside...provincial towns that fairly burst with urbanity compared to the post-cowboy, tumbleweed village of Banning...for remote shopping was part of the family landscape.  To buy real stuff, you drove over the hills, about 30 miles, in search of larger shops and finer goods.  The latter included school clothes, which may be why I have forgotten the practicalities of these trips.  God only knows what my younger siblings were watching for as we sped along the highway.  I was on the lookout for only one thing: flowing water.

The high point was the Santa Ana River.  The highway crossed over it, affording a spectacular view.  The weedy, arid Southern California plain sank into a sandy bottom of water courses, dotted with shrubby versions of junipers, cottonwoods and willows.  And, oh yes, somewhere winding through the center of it, a meter's width of water with at least 10 cm of depth.

That was enough for me.  This was the whole purpose of the trip.  Maybe I lived in the desert, but this was not desert, not this bit with the open water running among the leafy trees, however stunted.  The mighty Santa Ana River.  It rose in the not-too-distant mountains, descended to rush over the Southern California plain and...I had sighted this once...widened into a mind boggling estuary before doing its bit for the Pacific Ocean.

The problem was that from a speeding car, a meter of water goes by awfully quickly.  My mother had no patience for my river-watching obsession, and my brother and sister openly derided my wackiness.  I didn't care.  I was a man with a riparian mission.  See the rivers.  And this was one.  Actually, it wasn't the only one.  There was another, unreliable version.  And it must be said this other one tempted and tantalized.

The San Gorgonio River.  It ran only a short distance from my home and occupied a stony gorge a quarter-mile wide.  The problem was that it didn't so much run as sit.  A narrow rivulet of water snaked through it a few months of the year, and even that was a mile or two up stream from my desert home.  In short, despite its impressive canyon, dubbed by locals "the water canyon," the thing was dry as a stone.  The quarry near our house probably sucked the last water out of the river bed to rinse gravel.

Still it had such potential.  Looking up the deepest part of the water canyon from a country road that wound into the hills, the wide, straight-sided gorge turned, steepened out of sight into the mountains.  At the bend, one could see a few pine trees creeping toward the desert.  There the piney waterworld gave up, the wide river canyon becoming a spent, desert thing.  Unless there were heavy rains, and then the San Gorgonio River almost looked like one.  The flow widened to maybe 10 meters.  This didn't last.  Worse, it required prodding the parents to drive up the water canyon.  Neither had patience for mindless kid excursions, particularly this one, motoring along a familiar rocky wash.  Still, after pleading, I usually got my way.  The river had its own way, of course.  And rains or not, sometimes it simply stayed small.

There were alternatives.  The road grader had left a ditch along the edge of our driveway that filled with water when the storms came.  On rainy days, probably numbering less than 10 per year, I stood at the edge of the drive and stared into the muddy course.  The water gurgled brown and red.  Somehow, it didn't look like a miniature river.  The ditch flowed with what might have been my mother's ground-up flowerpots.  I followed the runoff downstream.  The clay-red fluid coursed away from our house and into the county land that bordered the Morongo Indian Reservation.  Here the chaparral was taller than I, a greasewood forest.  For several years, I had a go at damming the course of the runoff.  But engineering was never my strongest suit.  The earthen dams, even the ones built with a crew of boys and reinforced with the odd board, washed away before I could ever see the tiny reservoir that must have briefly built up behind.

Still, without the dam, there was a place where the greasewood extended over the running wadi like an arbor and the liquid clay gurgled underneath, conveying an almost pastoral sense.  As though the desert actually flowed with water.  As though the desert wasn't a desert.  The gray skies accompanying the storms slightly undermined this effect.  Water flowing on a sunny day was more my idea of how things should be.  Still, with a little imagination, one could see the desert greening and softening.  This was particularly true for a few months in the spring when the wild grasses sent their sprouts up through the prickly ground.

Too bad about the San Gorgonio River.  It was built to disappoint.  The thing was actually designed more like the river equivalent of a ski jump.  Starting about 3000 meters above, waters hurtled down the canyons, joining forces above Banning, then flowing into a few remarkably primitive concrete channels owned by the municipal water company.  There wasn't much, in the end.  The mountains rose out of the desert, after all, squeezing the clouds dry.  The town squeezed the canyon dry.  And that was that.

Still, I couldn't let go.  Once or twice, crossing the Santa Ana River on some shopping expedition, the rains had spread the waters into something that actually looked like the rivers one saw in films.  Why I cared about all this one way or the other fascinates me to this day.  Are we born attuned to land and climate?

I can see the contrasting effect in others.  Some people take up life in the desert like reptiles.  They bask in dryness.  In the mornings, they wander outside and watch the rocks begin to bake, the seed pods blow, the snake skins rustle.  The enjoy the way glass turns blue in the solar blaze.  When the heat rises, they retreat.  Water never worries them.  There isn't much.  And not much is needed.  Desert rats.

Which must make me a Norwegian rat.  It is raining now in Menlo Park, hard and relentless.  Optimists have termed this the first storm of the season.  I am never convinced.  Rain, its presence or absence, is a personal matter.  I have the conviction, rarely confessed, that my personal worrying and concern over the precipitation can only help things along.  As far as rainfall is concerned in California, we are never out of the woods.  Except when we are in the desert which is permanently and tragically out of the woods.  Not to mention out of the question.  

When I was 17 years old, my graduation present was a Santa Fe train ticket to Chicago.  The journey was an interesting one.  But it only became fascinating in Iowa or the train tracks let go of the land, meandered over something that looked like a lake that was actually the Mississippi River.  I'll be in Dubuque next month.  Guess when I must see.