The Patch by John McPhee

Author:John McPhee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

IN THE LONG DRY VALLEYS of eastern Nevada, where rain-hadow rain falls in desert rations and the silence is so deep it rings, water has been in storage for about ten thousand years. These are the waterlogged basins, as they are known to science—the saturated valleys—but if you were to look out upon them, that description is the last that would come to your mind. You would, in a glance, take in a million acres with nothing taller than the bunchgrass, the buffalo grass, the shad scale, the white and the black sage in tawny, desiccated boulevards between the high ranges. A daisy-wheel windmill, a cluster of cottonwoods—tens of miles apart—speak of settlement in some of the most austere and beautiful landscape between the oceans. It is a country held together by its concealed water, without which it would become exposed bedrock and dust. To the subsurface, the amount of fresh supply is essentially zero. What is down there is fossil water, resulting from a time when the climate was utterly different from the climate now, a time when alpine and continental ice to the north, east, and west caused so much rain that the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada held two freshwater lakes about the size of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. Remains of that Pleistocene rainfall rest beneath the saturated valleys, prevent them from looking like Irq al-Subay, and emerge in small, sustaining quantities as spring creeks and seeps.

Las Vegas wants the water. Las Vegas is in Clark County, in southernmost Nevada, hundreds of miles from the saturated valleys. Distance is not a deterrent when you have the money. In Nevada, you can buy groundwater and, within the law, transport it from one basin to another, provided that the transfer does not impinge upon existing rights and is in the public interest. The public is in Las Vegas—marinopolis of pools and fountains. Las Vegas has less rain than some places in the Sahara, yet its areal population is more than two million. Around Las Vegas, well casings stand in the air like contemporary sculpture, and so much water has been mined from below that the surface of the earth has subsided six feet. While new wells are no longer permissible, Las Vegas desperately needs water for its lakes. They are not glacial lakes. If you want a lake in Las Vegas, you dig a hole and pour water into it. One subdivision has eight lakes. Las Vegas has twenty-two golf courses, at sixteen hundred gallons a divot. Green lawn runs down the median of the Strip. Here is the Wet’n’Wild park, there the M-G-M water rides. Outside the Mirage, a stratovolcano is in a state of perpetual eruption. It erupts water.

Las Vegas wants to drill the saturated valleys, remove the fossil water to a central place, and then pump it on to the south, in much the way that habitants in Quebec collect maple sap in tubes. Mountain sheep, antelope, deer, coyotes, eagles, badgers, bobcats will forever disappear as permanent springs go permanently dry.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.