More drought, less drama

Part two of our road trip across the country where we drive up the coast from California back home to Washington.

Your email program might truncate this post. If that should happen, you can read the whole post on the Mostly Water web site, where you’ll also find part one:

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First an addendum to that last post, specifically about the Texas Panhandle and Western Oklahoma. In addition to the Dust Bowl and a demise of Route 66, the area is also still recovering from the Smokehouse fire of February and March 2024, the largest fire in Texas history, which burned 1,500 square miles of rangeland northeast of Amarillo and killed more than 15,000 head of cattle. The residents there are all too aware that it could happen again. Indeed, as we drove through, fires were already burning just across the state line in Nebraska, so temperatures of 100 degrees, drought, and high wind in March are certainly a concern to more than passing camper vans.

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Picking up where we left off last time, we’ve just arrived at a friend’s house in Coachella Valley. We wind up spending a few days there. We have medications to pick up and laundry to do, and after a couple of weeks on the road it’s just downright comfortable to spend some time in a luxurious house with a pool.

Someone has to do it.

It’s 100 degrees and sometimes windy in the valley. When the wind blows it can kick up a dust storm which can be quite toxic, especially if the dust is coming up from the Salton Sea a few miles to the south. As the sea dries up, the agricultural run-off from the Imperial Valley and other pollutants that are in the lake form a layer of toxic dust along the shoreline, which the wind can carry as far as Palm Springs. A couple of weeks after we left, the Coachella festival was overtaken by dust storms and violent winds which tore up tents and caused some of the performances to be canceled.

While California is not currently quite in drought, the prognosis is not good. Much of Southern California, including the Coachella Valley, relies on the Colorado River as a source of drinking water which in turn relies on the snowpack in the Rocky Mountains which this year is very low.

More northern parts of California rely on the Sierra Nevada mountains where the snowpack, despite the recent snowfall, is at only 18- 23% of normal, as the heavy snow earlier this winter was largely washed away or melted by the torrential rains and high temperatures that followed.

I wrote some time ago about the tone deafness of opening a surf park in Thermal in the Coachella Valley not far from a trailer park on the Taurus Martinez Indian Reservation, where the water quality is so bad it’s undrinkable. That water has been cleaned up but alas the surf park is going ahead over the opposition of many of the locals, who, however, are more concerned about the noise and traffic than about the flagrant waste of water.

Sticker shock

We don’t pick the greatest time to drive a diesel van across the country. We suffer a little sticker shock, paying $7.19 a gallon in Indio, with the total cost of the fill up $150, the most I’ve ever put in a vehicle at one time. Thank you Donald Trump.

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On day 18, after a few days of R and R, it’s time to resume our journey home. Driving up the California coast has been a life goal for as long as I can remember. We head west on Interstate 10, battling strong winds through the San Gorgonio Pass, and head over towards the coast and California Highway One, recently rebuilt through Big Sur where it had been washed out by storms. If heat, drought, and dust storms are one side of climate change, violent storms and torrential rain are another.

We stay just north of Big Sur at Plaskett Creek, a US Forest Service campground. Despite the Forest Service cuts, this is a great campsite, without power with but with water available nearby. The bathrooms, perhaps because of the cuts, are not open and porta potties are outside instead. Nevertheless, we have a great time and still have 92% in our batteries when we leave the following morning.

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Day 19 is A long day. We continue California One then head over to visit a friend in Salinas. From there head up through San Francisco, the first time I’d been back since 1990. I’d visit frequently back in the late eighties, when I still had a proper job, and Silicon Valley still made silicon.

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San Francisco entered my consciousness in 1967, the Summer of Love, when I was sixteen. A group of us would hang out on “The Hill,” an area of open space across the street from my house near Portsmouth, England, always with a transistor radio playing. We’d pick wildflowers to wear in our hair, as instructed by Scott Mackenzie, and the girls would paint more on our faces with makeup, and wish we were going to San Francisco.

1967 was also the year Joan Didion visited the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco to record what she saw. In her essay Slouching Toward Bethlehem, she exposes the dark side of the counter-culture revolution: a pre-school child given LSD; the rampant exploitation and abuse, sexual and otherwise; the disorganization. When I first read that piece a few years ago, I felt betrayed. She was attacking what at the time was the center of my imaginary universe. I wrote it off as an aberration, a rare lapse in form. When she wrote that she was 32 at the time, that explained it for me. Our generational motto at the time has been “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

Hearing fragments of it again in a writing workshop last week, and then rereading the whole piece afterwards, I see now that she was right about so much. In an expository paragraph, Didion lays it out:

[...] we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. [...]
These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values.

It’s always been a puzzle to me that the generation that came of age in the sixties became the mixed bag of the boomer generation of today. But it was all right there all along, hiding in plain sight. In rejecting their parents’ patriarchal and authoritarian nuclear family, they forgot to ditch the misogyny, the racism, and the exceptionalism, to name but a few, and with nothing to replace the multigenerational families of the pre-war years, they were rudderless. For sure the sixties spawned a wave of intentional communities, the best of which survive, and a whole generation of volunteers, but the sociopathic seeds of Trump, Epstein, Big Tech, and the rest were there too.

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We head out of the city over the Golden Gate Bridge and continue to Gualala Point Regional Park where we spend two nights. On the way we beat our previous record, paying $8.79 a gallon for diesel just outside of Temecula.

…in a van down by the river. RIP Chris Farley.

We have a great campsite right on the river. We have afternoon sun by the riverbank, and it’s an easy walk over to the beach where we’re lucky enough to see a migrating gray whale. At the campsite there are butterflies in the trees and a chipmunk on the table if we leave so much as a breadcrumb there. Our only regret is not spending more time there, but unfortunately there are no campsites available for another day as it’s spring break for many and the week following Easter weekend.

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On day 20, we head north along US 101, which here runs along the California coast, through Mendocino, which is of course a very cute town, and Fort Bragg, which is more functional. The Redwood forests are spectacular, and the views are amazing. I love this piece of coast. Our next campsite is a private campground just outside of Sue-Meg State Park. As soon as we check in, we immediately book a second night and have no regrets.

#vanlife cliché

Our campsite has a deck next to a pond and the even has WiFi. It’s just a short walk over to the State Park and hiking trails down to Agate Beach.

Sue-Meg State Park

On day 22, the weather’s changing with some rain heading towards the Northern California coast, so it’s time to head north into Oregon which is blessed with many great State Park campsites. We drive north through more Redwood forests as the mist begins to gather seeing them perhaps at their most beautiful. We stop at Grandfather Tree, a roadside tourist attraction to use the bathroom and check out the gift shop. While there, a gentleman comes over to take a look at our van. We chat for a while. He’s from Mendocino originally. He tells us that it used to be a great place to live, but the local economy up and down the coast has been devastated by, of all things, legal weed. The illegal weed growers had all kinds of money they’d come into town and spend. “No more. It’s like the end of prohibition!”

In Oregon, we choose Beachside State Park which is indeed right on the beach with beach access directly from our campsite. Like many beaches in Oregon this is wide and sandy. Again, we might have stayed two nights but there was no site available, so it’s time to head home.

Beachside State Park

Oregon is already in a state of drought, and the prognosis not good as the snowpack in the Cascades is way below normal.

On day 23, we arrive back in Washington to the news that most of the state has just been placed under its fourth consecutive severe drought declaration because of the lack of snow in the Cascades and the Olympic Mountains.

Our home on Whidbey Island is in one of the few counties not under the drought declaration as we rely on ground water rather than snowpack, but the western Washington mainland cities and in particular the Central and Eastern Washington agricultural areas will suffer water shortages this year.

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Thanks for following along on our cross-country journey! We’re already planning our next trip.

The end.

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Before we left, I triaged the tasks on my to-do list into what I needed to do before we left, what I could do while we were on the road, and what could wait until we got back. Well, many of that second group of tasks didn’t happen and so are added to the long list of tasks waiting for me. Plus, everything in the yard is growing, especially the weeds. All of which is a weak excuse for why it’s taken me so long to write this. Anyhow, I’m getting caught up and should be back on track with drinking water and specifically PFAS posts scheduled for the next few weeks. If you want to make sure you don’t miss them, the best way is to become a subscriber!