2 When Water is Money, Drought is the Taxman: Tales of Boom and Bust on the Sant
2 When Water is Money, Drought is the Taxman: Tales of Boom and Bust on the Santa Ana River
Heather Williams
About a million years ago when I was first hired at Pomona College, I had this magnificent adventure driving across the country to Southern California from Pennsylvania. I had been working on soft money, which means almost no money. I tell you, I miss those days when I traveled in my beat-up Ford Escort hatchback from wherever I had made just enough money to live for a while to wherever I could make about the same.
And because the summer before I’d been at the University of Pennsylvania, I’d been unhoused while I finished my dissertation on the road between New Haven and my home in Kansas. I took a southerly route through the Atlantic states where I sat for a time on the porch of my great grandmother’s cabin in the woods of North Carolina, writing on one of those first-generation laptops. There were chapters that got edited in campgrounds and at a series of Waffle Houses somewhere between Charlottesville and Memphis. Aside from my books and that always-about-to-die computer, I had a tent, a cookstove, a sleeping bag. At the time, I thought I was low on my luck. But looking back, I never felt freer.
On my way to California, one of the most magnificent finds was pulling off the highway and driving into the Kaibab National Forest on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. A great deal of it has since burned, and now the charred skeletons of pine trees dot a landscape of young aspen and oak. In the summer of 1998, however, the forest still was dominated by a curtain of deep-hued evergreen. I drove at sunset through the forest and sometime after dark pulled off on a dirt road and drove a few hundred meters to a clearing and bedded down for the night.
At dawn, I woke up to find my sleeping bag in a meadow of wildflowers, piñon, and ponderosa pines. A deer and her fawn were grazing just a few feet from me. We stared at each other open-mouthed for what seemed like a long time.
Like so many other sojourners in the US West, I felt that I had discovered a private paradise, that I must be the first to see this beauty in this little alcove of the woods.
I spent the day hiking the Grand Canyon, later writing in my diary in all superlatives, sketching the landscape badly but enthusiastically. On the second day, feeling expansive, I browsed in the National Park bookstore. I had only a bit of cash, but felt moved to pick up a book that, from the cover, looked properly dark and intellectual. It was a sepia-toned photograph of an expired palm tree in a parched desert, a late paperback edition of Cadillac Desert, Mark Reisner’s classic history of Western water folly. I remember taking it back to my secret little meadow camp and reading it with a great sense of purpose. What was the desert anyway? How did people round up enough water to support this sprawling civilization in a place where I hadn’t seen rain threaten once, and where I hadn’t seen a pool of freshwat