by Simon Schama
“I think we should do a piece to camera inside,” said the director, smiling one of his most disarming smiles. Behind him was the ruined house on the plains sunset. “Take a look; see what you think.” I approached gingerly and with mixed feelings. It seemed—as it often does—indecent to pore over the wreckage of someone’s misery; like making oneself comfortable sitting on their gravestone. But I was pulled by the kind of forensic curiosity that no self-respecting historian can do without. Any sort of step up to what was left of the front room had long ago vanished. Using an equipment case to hoist oneself up the two feet or so needed to get inside meant reaching out amid broken glass, shredded wood, and three-inch nails. I did it anyway. And there I was inside the dead and broken body of the dream. The terrible part about it was not the chunks of scrofulous plaster hanging from the remnant of the ceiling, or the areas of rotting wood floor that were now open to the dirt below, and beneath which something was scuttling. The worst part was that, through all the debris, it was so very easy to see the life that had once called this place home. Ragged and filthy fragments of wallpaper had made a cheerful splash in the front room. Through the doorway, its frame intact, had been a kitchen, the chimney still standing, and opposite the brick cavity that must have been a cold pantry. At the back of the shell was the ancient rusted remains of a spring mattress, small pieces of stuffing hanging on the wire. I stood there listening to the pet dog bark outside, a mother calling her kids back home in the sunset, a window framing a farmer high on his tractor before the light went; listening to sounds that weren’t there.
We were packing up our gear when a pickup rolled by and stopped. “You guys know so and so?” said the voice from the truck, belonging to an open-faced friendly woman in her forties. I confessed we did not, wondering if the next question was what we were doing there, so and so owning the land we were standing on. But on the High Plains, once they have a sense you’re not there to do any harm, they don’t interrogate. I asked about its history, and she was happy to tell me, yes, the house was long abandoned and she didn’t rightly know why it hadn’t been leveled before now; and, yes, it had somehow survived the dusters and got fixed up “a bit” only to get knocked around again by all the bad times, and now it was just a family place where kids came and rode their horses during summer vacations, the parents making sure the kids didn’t crawl all through the house and do themselves mischief. “So the family stayed after the storms?” I asked. “Oh sure; somehow you know they made it through; around here we’re not the kind that gives up easily. But I tell you what, it was a close thing, nothing much between my husband’s family—they settled here in the last years of the old century—and starving half to death. Now my husband he says, Katie, we could live on the buffalo grass if we had to, but that’s just big talk. Now look around; you wouldn’t know all that trouble now, would you?”
Katie drove off, a petulant little puff of dust raised by the back wheels of her truck as if warning us against undue complacency. But I looked through the gold radiance of the sunset at the plowed fields, the same ones that had risen in the sky, like a malevolent genie. I had had a sample of what they could do earlier when I picked up a handful and before I knew it, the dust had blown straight into my eyes, blinding me in seconds and taking hours and many glasses of water thrown in my face to get clean again. Now the fields looked like every farmer’s dream of happiness. Swallows were doing showy aerobatics in the sky; a jackrabbit was scampering toward a distant fence; the early evening air smelled of germinating abundance. And then I thought of Woody Guthrie, the Oklahoma boy singing a road song:
I’m blowin down this old dusty road
I’m blowin down this old dusty road
I’m blowin down this old dusty road, Lord, Lord
And I ain’t gonna be treated this way
I’m goin where the dust storms never blow
I’m goin where them dust storms never blow
I’m goin where them dust storms never blow, blow, blow
And I ain’t gonna be treated this way
39. Roll up that lawn
I was ten and in the front stalls of the Golders Green Hippodrome. The finale to act 1: the whole cast, Curly and Laurey; cowboys and farmers, no more feuding; all pals now, holding hands marching to the front of the stage bathed in brilliant light; the orchestra ecstatic in the pit; the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.
O---o---k---la ho ma,
Where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain
And the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet,
When the wind comes right behind the rain…
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say:
Yeeow! Ayipioeeay!
We’re only sayin’
“You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma!”
Oklahoma, O.K.!
This was just the ticket for Broadway and for America in 1943, two years into the war, the Beautiful Morning and the Surrey with the Fringe on Top wiping out, for an evening at least, the memory of the burning hulks of Pearl Harbor, and the anxiety about the Italian invasion; a fairy tale of the High Plains, provided by Rodgers and Hammerstein, two New York Jews who, it’s safe to speculate, knew little of the Onion King of Nebraska or Simon Fishman the wheat baron of Kansas triumphally riding the combine in his snap-brim fedora and fancy suspenders.
Many of the real Oklahomans were living among the Cherokee who at last had got a break from history by having moved to the relatively dust-storm-free eastern end of the state, multiplying enough so they would become, in the twenty-first century, the most populous Native American nation in the United States. Or if they were really lucky, they might have lived near Oklahoma City and the gusher that blew in 1930, burning for eleven days before it was capped. But the Oklahomans whom the world knew about from Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange were the “Okies,” for whom the High Plains were no longer a place to scratch a living. One of them, Babe Henry, still the boss of a tire business in the Imperial Valley of Southern California, a silver-haired octogenarian with a twinkle in his eye, confirmed that the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath and what they endured was not just a figment of Steinbeck’s sympathetic imagination. All hope of work had gone, farming or otherwise; so off the Henrys went, down Route 66, the paralyzed mother and Babe’s oldest brother, who was disabled with polio, riding in the cabin while the two other boys rode all the way on the flatbed, making sure the ropes on what furniture they had stayed secure.
It was known that the farmers needed labor for fruit and vegetable picking and since the stricter immigration laws had staunched the flow of Mexicans (even those who were actually Chinese), the Okies and refugees from the dusters would have to do. They were paid a pittance, a dollar a day, and lived in conditions of great poverty; but at least they ate. Like thousands of others in the valley, Babe Henry’s family survived in a “tent house”; the floor and walls of wood up to about four feet, the rest of the space roofed with canvas. Even as they needed their labor, the Californians were not especially thrilled to have the migrants among them. Babe remembers realizing that his bib overalls gave him away in the schoolyard and getting into fights with boys who called him “Okie” as if it meant someone who was barely familiar with the basics of the twentieth century. “That’s fine if they wanted to call us names. I wasn’t ashamed of where I came from,” and the glint of the tough little boy in the schoolyard comes back. “One thing that’s good about the Imperial Valley, we have sun and we have water. We can grow crops all year round here.”
On the day we talked to him, there was no argument about the sun. It was 120°F (around 50°C), but along the road from the Henry Tire Store, the irrigation sprays were moving smoothly through the fields. A bumper crop of corn was being harvested so the rest of America could get it in spring, not summer. It was the last of the fantasy lands of American plenty; the end of the road trip. After Bartram’s Cherokee Elysian Fields, after the waving wheat dreams of the Lan
d Runners, came the permanent year-round nursery garden of the valley, courtesy of the All-American Canal, one of those made possible by the Reclamation Act of 1902. But a look at the landscape on either side of the canal—to the left a dunescape that could be Mauritania; to the right, something more like the Kentish Weald or Vermont—is to see the crazy impossibility of it all, the kind of thing that got Powell worked up. The canal is fed from the Colorado just before it enters the Pacific; and though they are growing some of the most irrigation-intensive produce in the world so that America can have its winter strawberries and green beans, the farmers have more heavily subsidized water than they can use. Upstream in Nevada, years of drought, thin snowmelt, and massive urban use have taken Lake Mead, the great reservoir created by the Hoover Dam, down to less than 60 percent of optimal capacity. Evaporation in the ever more broiling summers has taken still more of the water into the blue Nevada sky. The jetskiers on the lake don’t care, though if they take a look they will see the abandoned hulks of old pleasure boats trapped in hard-caked mud where once there was water. A garden of frondlike reeds and grass has grown over the dry bed covering the embarrassment of the boats with their delicate greenery.
Something, someone, has to give: either the farmers sell or relinquish some of their quota from the Colorado Lower Basin allotments, or the pipes of Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego will run dry. “Our water is not for sale” was the steely answer I got from one old Imperial Valley farmer, even though, like most of the farmers, his land is leased to agribusiness. The zero-sum game between competing interests was exactly what the prophetic Powell wanted to avoid. He had spent all his life on, or thinking about, the waters of the Colorado and the other western rivers, and saw in the prudent economies they prescribed a way for the American West to bring a sense of community to a nation he believed badly needed it. The refreshment in every sense of local self-determination.
Which is why I would have loved him to have been sitting with me in Las Vegas. I would even have taken the one-armed major to the Strip and into the twenty-four-hour night of the fantasy hotels, and before he could flee from the robot-chatter of the slots, I would have pointed him to the bodies of water that are everywhere in Vegas—the Pirates of the Caribbean Lagoon, the mock-Venetian Canals, the swimming pools the size of Brooklyn—and explained that they represent the triumph of recycling, every drop constituted from multiply used “gray water,” and without me going into details he would have known exactly what I meant.
And then, if he had been reasonable, I would have taken the major to the real Las Vegas, miles away from the Strip, the one place he would have felt at home: the spring of “the meadows” (vegas) itself, around which the little town was originally founded; the water that the Indians and the Spanish used to feed their corn and beans and drank from. That it is still there is something of a wonder, but around it now is the Las Vegas Springs Preserve, one of the most beautiful and inspiring places in the United States: a few acres of desert garden; succulents, cacti, and other blooming plants that can be grown with the minimum of water; species entirely natural to south Nevada. Through the garden wind handsome trails; and gently rising over them is the educational Desert Living Center, where thousands of Las Vegas schoolkids learn something about the past and future of their water; the possibility of life in a heated-up world. On Fridays in summer there is Mozart and white wine, but the cultural trimmings should fool no one. At the heart of this whole enterprise is the South Nevada Water Authority, and the person who runs it is Pat Mulroy, who, one is absolutely certain, would have given John Wesley Powell and William Ellsworth Smythe a run for their money.
Being half Irish American and half German, Mulroy has steel and charm in exactly balancing proportions. She came to Las Vegas from Germany in 1974 before the mob got out of town, arriving too late one night to argue about rooms. The one she got boasted a circular bed and a mirror on the ceiling. Mulroy, who is middle-aged and still strikingly beautiful, had no idea there were such things. In the morning she rose from the round bed, took a look at the barely developed desert outside her window, and thought she was on Mars.
Her Mars definitely had water, and since 1989 she has been running the Water Authority, which, under the guise of its dull civic name, represents the most hopeful course for the American future, dominated by neither the raw power of the market nor the overbearing and remote authority of federal government. In the deals Mulroy has made for her metropolitan boom area, with others in the Lower Colorado she has managed to make local and common interests converge. She thinks the states of the Lower Colorado Basin (plus Mexico, which under the terms of the 1922 agreement gets a share) have no choice. Certainly Las Vegas, which now has a resident population of 400,000 and an annual tourist invasion of forty million, has no alternative but to be ecologically sound if it’s going to survive. It starts with the principle “if it hits the sewers it gets recycled,” but Mulroy has also pioneered the construction of pipes that take any storm runoff (for there are storms) and extra waste straight back to Lake Mead. In the 1990s it was possible to broker “banking” agreements with states like Arizona in which their unused groundwater allotment would be bought by needy Nevada. Put into action, Arizona would in a given year take less of its groundwater, and the corresponding amount of its share would then be available for Nevada at Lake Mead.
But that was before the first modern drought of near catastrophic magnitude in 2002. After that neither California nor Arizona had anything spare to trade in a water banking deal. Drastic measures were needed in Las Vegas if it was to survive. Mulroy then decided that since domestic and business interior use was almost all from gray water, a little educational incentive was needed to cope with exterior waste. Her targets were two of the most sacred spaces in American life: the golf course and the lawn. After 2002, Las Vegas residents would be paid a dollar a square foot to take up their lawn and replace it with desert “xerigraphic” landscaping; the species and rock gardens on show in her preserve, all of which require only the most minimal drip watering. Xerigraphic landscaping is now big business throughout the Southwest. But each week it’s possible to see trucks from Pat Mulroy’s Authority carrying away sod in cylinders that look like Swiss rolls. Golf clubs all over the metropolitan area have ripped out anything beyond the immediate playing areas on and close to the fairway and likewise replaced them with either artificial turf or desert landscape. If it sounds like symbolic rather than substantive action, it isn’t. Mulroy reminds me that 70 percent of all Southern Californian water use goes on into-the-ground exterior use, overwhelmingly gardens, parks, and golf courses, where it irrecoverably disappears.
Outside the city, leading down from Lake Mead, Mulroy and her hydraulic engineers have built a series of stepped “minidams,” eleven of them, to regulate the flow from the precious reservoir in keeping with whatever conditions in a given season or year require. The masonry and concrete used for the dams are debris from the demolition of the old hotels of the great days of the mob. So, those wicked dens of iniquity, the Dunes and the Desert Inn and the Sands, where Sinatra crooned and Martin drank and all of the Rat Pack behaved rattishly, have been given a second life as the enablers of the green life. The thought of all this saintliness may make their shades reach for a stiff JD on the rocks; but as long as the rocks are frozen gray water, who cares?
I ask Pat if she thinks America will come to Vegas to learn, of all things, about how to survive global warming rather than how to win big at the poker tables. She looks at me for a moment from those clear Nordic-Irish eyes, relaxes, smiles and says, “It’s the next generation, our children.” I can tell she has her own, pictured that very moment in her mind’s eye. “They want to survive. And we want them to survive, don’t we?”
40. Windmills
Flying back home to New York from San Diego and passing over the southern Sierra Nevada, I remembered a journey in the opposite direction spent beside Grigory the Russian. It was in the early days of glasnost, and this was Grigory’s
first time in the United States. He was on his way to a mathematics congress, I think at Stanford. After some polite mutual introductions, he trying out his fractured English, we relapsed into the usual things: reading, poking around in the meal tray for something that approximated food. Every so often Grigory, who had the window seat, would look out the window at whatever bit of America was passing below. And since it was one of those miraculously clear days, coast to coast, there was a whole lot of America to look at. Beyond the Great Lakes over Nebraska and its irrigation circles, the habit became more than looking. The Russian turned his body three-quarters in the seat and pressed his sandy-haired face against the window like a child trying to get at a Christmas display in a department store. As the scenery became not just picturesque but spectacular and the torn-off snowcaps of the Rockies climbed into the window frame, Grigory became fidgety, almost agitated. On and on he stared at Colorado and Utah with such strange intensity that I began to feel guilty for not looking quite so hard myself, all the more since I was then writing a book about landscape. It was a morning flight, due to land at San Francisco around one in the afternoon, but as the jet flew west, the interior of the plane had grown dark, most of the passengers opting for sleep or closing their shades to watch movies. It turned out that it was this airborne darkness at noon that was upsetting Grigory and which he found incomprehensible when there was the beauty of the earth to witness beyond those pockmarked little windows. When we crossed Lake Tahoe and the pinewoods that Mark Twain had accidentally set alight, it was finally too much and he broke from his silent agitation. “AH,” he said very loudly, turning to me and waving a contemptuous hand at the dozers, “these people, why do they SLEEP? Why don’t they SEE? Why do they not UNDERSTAND? This belongs to THEM! They must TREASURE like gold; you tell them, you must tell them now, wake them up and tell them, go on, yes, see, TREASURE.” “I wish I could,” I said, “but they’re really into Back to the Future.”
