Concrete by Mary Soderstrom

Author:Mary Soderstrom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2020-10-05T17:08:31+00:00

Making the Desert Bloom, Keeping the Flood at Bay

As Joan Didion wrote in her book of essays The White Album: “Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.”16 I am one with Didion. San Diego, where I spent a good part of my childhood, gets slightly more rainfall than Friant does in a year, about thirty centimetres, but that is definitely not enough to support a population that reached half a million by 1960 and two million by the end of the twentieth century. When I was growing up, the water we drank was piped in from the Colorado River, and its taste was something that made newcomers turn up their noses or even gag. Even then, we had low-water plants as landscaping, and I was taught to be fanatic about turning off the water when brushing teeth. No grass for our school playgrounds, of course: my memories are of constant skinned knees and elbows from collisions with the asphalt paving.

There was water nearby, but it was the salty ocean. We spent a lot of time at the beach, but swimming there was nothing like swimming at Friant. First of all, the water was much colder. Most of the time the California coast is affected by the California Current, a swooping river of ocean water that chillily runs southward from the Gulf of Alaska and British Columbia along the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean basin.17 Usually it only begins to warm up when it reaches the Baja California peninsula, which means that water temperatures at Southern California beaches are as much as ten degrees cooler than those on beaches at the same latitude in the eastern United States.

Then there are the waves. My high school was one where guys (and they were almost all guys back so long ago) hung out the windows of the second floor every morning to see what the surf looked like. If it was good, they’d be gone after lunch. I caught a few waves myself, bodysurfing. Swimming, though, was hard unless you fought yourself out past the line of breakers.

The calm waters of Millerton Lake behind Friant were quite different. There I could paddle around wearing a sun hat and prescription sunglasses, something you’d never do at the ocean. But with my specs on I could actually see across the lake to the golden hills on the other side, even glimpse the still-snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains off to the east. The only real problem was the way the shoreline fluctuated as the season progressed and more and more water was drawn down to irrigate the crops that would feed millions. By August, what in the spring had been an island in the lake had become a hill, and you had to drive several kilometres farther along the shoreline to get to the area reserved for swimming.

The water of the 245-kilometre-long Friant-Kern canal—visible at a couple of places on the road

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