THE BOSTICK REPORT-I just returned from a weeklong vacation up the California coast. My wife and I took our three daughters, ranging in ages from four to seven, along with their grandma. Side notes from that dynamic will be left out of this report.
We had a lovely time, staying a night in Cambria, three in Carmel, one in Santa Cruz, and two in Atascadero. Our girls had a blast, searching through tide pools, hiking through the woods to find Bambi, learning how to play Uno, and petting goats, llamas, horses, and cows. At the end, they were exhausted, a little bit bigger in mind, and homesick for their own backyard and beds.
And I was struck by how pervasive the drought is and frightened by the depth at which it is entrenching itself in every little corner.
Most bridge crossings over any kind of river along the 101 and the 1 were dry. Absolutely not one drop of water in any of the cute little creeks, tributaries, or so-called rivers. I jokingly call them so-called rivers only because I remember my wife, a native Angeleno, pointing them out to me ten years ago on trips up the coast while I, having grown up along the banks of the Chattahoochee, was eager to tease her over the “robustness” of these fractional rivers in comparison to what I had been used to.
The jokes were gone this time. There just wasn’t any water under most bridges, the smaller vegetation along the banks was dead, and the large majestic oaks that had grown up along many of these water routes were looking sickly, their edges brown.
No doubt, every person has at least heard of the fact that California is in the midst of a disastrous drought, but I think that the tangible reality of its effect is missing for most of us. I certainly wasn’t in tune with the stark nature of its effect on our agriculture and I like to think that I keep myself pretty aware.
It isn’t the empty fields that bothered me, left fallow because of drastic cuts to farmers this year. It’s the fallowed orchards I saw along the 41 to Atascadero that really illustrated the long-term effect this drought is now setting up.
Fallowing a field of strawberries and fallowing an orchard are the same in concept, but different in scope. Let a field of strawberries go and you replant the next year, harvest at the end of the season. Cut down an orchard and you’re looking at a loss of productivity that will last 4-10 years. Same idea, drastically different scope. Yet, that is what’s happening, pockets of tree stumps poking out of the ground like some kind of apocalypse.
We spoke to a guy in Atascadero, Tom, who was kind enough to let my daughters feed their goats. Their fields, according to Tom, were almost as bad as anyone in the area had experienced and the goats, milling around in a landscape of brown, seemed to agree. Tom was really generous to my daughters, letting them feed the goats what was extraordinarily pricey hay, as he recounted having to recently sell a third of his herd and hoping not to be priced out of keeping the rest.
It was all brought home to us the next day when we visited Lake Atascadero, formerly the crown jewel of the town, now just a bowl of cracked earth housing a small pit of mud. Before we had left LA for our trip, I had read a piece in the times about disappearing lakes and while it had been an informative, concerning, and shocking piece of journalism – reading about this crisis hadn’t provided the kind of contextual awareness that standing in the bowl of a dead lake gave me.
There is a political reckoning on its way about our water policies, the evidence of which is just beginning to make its mark in signs all along the driest areas of the 5. They protest lazy politicians and greedy Southern Californians.
And upon returning home, I realized how appropriate the anger drumming up in the central valley is because while there is a severe drought all across the state, I can’t sit outside here in LA without getting attacked by mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, that’s right.
I’m not confessing anything. My wife and I ripped our lawn out in 2007. In its place is a front “yard” of rocks, enclosed by a white picket fence, the landscape leveled and church pews installed around the perimeter for sitting. We have Mexican lavender, a baby California Live Oak, and a variety of drought resistant plants. It looks good and makes the front yard usable.
But you will get eaten alive by mosquitoes in the evening. That’s because all of my neighbors across the street are apparently watering rice paddies, torrents of precious water pooling up in the gutters, spilling off into the street, and finding places to puddle; incubators for mosquitoes.
All of this in the service of a lawn that, frankly, browns anyway. So much water is wasted, not just soaking lawns or spraying down driveways, but one guy is so invested in water wasting that he takes his cans to the curb at least once a month and washes them – all three of them: garbage, recycling, even green waste – in the service of some twisted sense of cleanliness, or righteousness, or “respectability”, while families, homes, and life itself is devastated in the central coast from water restrictions.
I’ve called DWP and reported them. Other neighbors have, too. But, these are the same people hiring armies of people to mow and blow their lawns each week and reporting water abusers to the DWP is about as effective as asking LAPD to enforce its leaf blower ban.
But this has to change.
(Odysseus Bostick is a Los Angeles teacher and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. He writes The Bostick Report for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 63
Pub: Aug 5, 2014