On Roots, My Grandfather, and Water in the West
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
— Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI
Things I remember of my grandfather:
Sinking into the worn leather seats in the back of his old white Buick, on the way to a high school football game, the Cranberries on the radio.
Watching a senior league softball game. Seeing him catch a deep fly ball in center field and fire a rocket to first base before the runner could tag up.
His morning workout of crunches with gray plastic dumbbells on the carpet.
Making sure he wasn’t around before trying to rile up my grandparents’ pug, who would tear circles around the living room like a maniac if you went through the requisite sequence of movements. Grandad did not like this.
His white windbreaker and penchant for ginger snaps.
The time my sister and I spent a week weeding the yard as punishment for refusing to get out of the pool when he ordered us.
When I was fifteen and he had faded from Parkinson’s and dementia, and I spent an afternoon with him after school while my grandmother ran errands. I dragged through homework as he took the utensils from the silverware drawer and sorted them, then re-sorted them. On finishing the second time he looked at me for approval — the look a student gives a teacher after guessing at a math problem, or the helpless stare you give someone trying to make a point in a language you don’t understand. I won’t forget that look — its wrongness, its inversion of the appropriate order of things. He died later that year.
I wish I’d known him better.
Grandad was a Coast Guard helicopter pilot, reserved and stern, the disciplinarian who balanced the fun and enthusiasm of my grandmother.
Most of what I know of his character I learned after he was gone. Certain fragments of his personality that emerge convince me that we would have become close as I grew up — how small problems infuriated him and big ones did not, his moodiness, the dry sense of humor that escaped me as a kid, how he read a lot and liked to garden.
Five years after he died I heard him speak. Driving up the coast to San Luis Obispo after a night of little sleep, finally able to breathe having escaped the greedy tug of LA sprawl, I floated up the 101 and looked over the cliffs at the water below and tried to quiet the incessant howling in my head that told me I did not actually want to go to medical school. The sight of boats made me think of the Coast Guard.
At once I heard Grandad’s voice say You’re gonna be ok, Andrew. Chalk it up to poor sleep, stress, whatever you want, but I’ve experienced nothing like it before or since. I took it to mean I would indeed become a doctor and be happy doing it. Since that ship plainly sailed a long time ago, now I don’t know what it meant.
My grandparents arrived in San Diego in 1979, winding their way by military appointment from New Orleans and Connecticut to Bermuda, Montgomery Alabama, Chicago, Foster City California, and Annandale Virginia. They planned to return to Virginia after Grandad finished his career in the Coast Guard. But my grandmother fell in love with San Diego, and they never left.
And now I find myself, a generation later, wondering how we got stuck in this place that continues to swallow money and grow fat and bloated, forever spilling outward through clogged highway arteries.
But it must have looked different then, set in the context of a more hopeful America, when San Diego was LA’s quiet laid-back little brother with half its current population. When asked if they would have chosen to stay if they moved to the city today, my grandmother seems doubtful. If they looked close, could they have predicted the massive growth that recast the city throughout the 80’s and 90’s? Maybe, maybe not. The 80’s were not a decade of limits.1
Even the 90’s seem quaint, looking back. I remember bumping over dirt roads for half an hour in our neighbors’ red van to get to the beach. The suburbs to which my parents moved around the time I made an appearance in ‘91 was the end of the line at that point. Today Peñasquitos sits right around the bullseye of sprawl.
My point: in an era where no land is sacred, where all things wax and wane quicker than one can grab hold of them and shell shocked ecologies struggle to adapt, is it possible to see a place a hundred or fifty or even ten years in the future and say yes, this will still be a good place?
I don’t know.
What seems obvious is that it’s beyond time to leave — the Southern California of today has thoroughly overshot its limits in a region explorers in the 1800’s claimed Europeans would never settle extensively due to the lack of water.
Settle it they did, though. 24 million people now. It seems that the physical principle they neglected is the one that says in the West, water flows uphill towards money.
The transformation of country that had once been a parched afterthought into a chain of cosmetically semi-tropical palm-tree-lined green-lawned hulking metropolises is a fascinating one. In Cadillac Desert Mark Reisner describes how Southern California managed to meet the water demands of its populous and grow wildly during the early 20th century through chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies. It all began when LA deviously collected water rights in the Owens Valley, garnered public support for the 225 mile long aqueduct by engineering an artificial drought, made a handful of bad rich men a lot badder and a lot richer, and turned the Owens Valley dry.
Reisner’s basic point is that settling the arid west in such numbers was an absurd idea from the beginning, and cannot be maintained forever. Nobody knows how long exactly. Sometimes long range projections are easy, and short range projections are hard. Leave a cup of a coffee on the counter and I can predict its temperature in a few days with absolute certainty (room temperature...). But as for a few hours, who can tell? Maybe you’ve got a good thermos.
In the 20th century urbanites seemed to collectively forget that cities do not spring forth fully provisioned, that food and water do not materialize in a vacuum, that for most of history civilizations based their settlements on an underlying natural resource base. Perhaps under the veneer of modern science and supposed rationality we have not quite thrown away that old colonial notion of manifest destiny2 nor stopped believing that the rain follows the plow.3
And shame as it is for LA and Phoenix, I fear the desert will eventually careen back and remind us of this truth. The cheap energy provided by oil allowed for a century and a half of fanciful utopian dreaming, but it sure doesn’t look like a utopia to me, and regardless, eventually one has to wake up.4
The last two decades represent the driest stretch in the American Southwest in a thousand years, worse even than the Great Drought of the 1200s that the Anasazi could not endure.5
No one knows exactly what led that vibrant culture to suddenly vanish from the Southwest. But it seems their society had grown complex and fragile as their religious and political institutions multiplied and their dependence on agriculture increased. The long drought that followed broke a people already cleaved by ideological disputes and stressed by disease.6 Sound familiar?
For a long time it was thought that the word Anasazi meant the old ones. In reality it is a Navajo word that translates to enemy ancestors.7 The judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian speaks of them, observing the stone ruins they left behind.
The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity.
For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures, and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe, and so it was with these masons, however primitive their works may seem to us.
What of those who build in concrete?
I flew out of the concrete behemoth that is LAX recently, to Virginia. It’s on the short list of places we might move. Walking through the airport I felt overwhelmed — overwhelmed by the vastness, the sheer amount of organization and material that went into its construction, the fact that we move millions of people across the world through the sky every day. Overwhelmed by the bubbling fever and pace of it all, that no one else seemed mesmerized or perplexed by its ultimate purpose. Overwhelmed by the knowledge that it will not last, by a vision of empty runways and crumbling terminals from which a future civilization will salvage and hew the building blocks of their own culture, as mustards wrench through cracks in parking lots and leathery pioneers scrape out a living. Will they know us as the old ones or enemy ancestors?
So. We will pull up our roots and find a new home, one less overtly ephemeral, that might stand the test of time. Compared to most throughout history they are shallow roots, but their filaments still comprise family, friends, community, things difficult to leave behind. Uprooting was woven into the fabric of this country, and more or less into that of modernity itself. I hope it will not always be that way.
The mystic and thinker Simone Weil claimed that to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.8
Roots are a sense of deep belonging, to a specific place, people, culture, and ethic. They are reciprocity and obligation, a shared heritage of local wisdom and story of the world, and visceral knowledge of the terrain that surrounds. They are boundaries and limits. Roots are the relations, to the human and inhuman, by which a person intuitively understands who they are.
They are the antithesis of airports and highways and fluorescent supermarket lights and office buildings, those smooth gray symbols of placelessness.
From roots local autonomy blooms, and the ability to weather storms in the larger world. A rooted culture is insulated, like the mitochondria of a cell — it produces its own energy, contains DNA unique from the larger structure within which it lives.
It all sounds a bit nostalgic, doesn’t it? But at the same time, the need for roots seems to me like something intrinsic to humanity that we deny at our own peril, and I have a hunger for them.
The trouble now is where to find some good solid ground in which they can grow. It might be too late in this life for Bernadette and me to sink them deep, but not for Eloise. And surely not for her children, who might grow up knowing who they are and their place in the world.
I’ve looked long and hard and concluded that it’s impossible to predict what changes the caprice of modernity will enact on a place over fifty or a hundred years, whether it will still be hospitable a few generations down the line. So I’ve squinted at the broad strokes and identified some essentials. Adequate water. Suitable for chestnuts. Some bits of authentic local culture still around. Not where everyone else seems to be moving. And now there’s nothing to do but pick out a few places that meet that criteria, throw a dart at the map, and dig in for the long haul.
When I consider my grandfather’s words now, I think he may have meant something like this: You’ve got hard decisions to make, but you will make them, and you will be able to deal with the consequences.
And if one day when I am gone I speak to my own grandchildren, I can at least assure them that I acted with them in mind. Maybe some of them will eat chestnuts from the trees I planted, or build a house from their wood, and from that green world they will have learned their place.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-31-me-321-story.html
Manifest destiny was the 19th century belief that American settlers were destined (through their special virtue) to expand across North America and conquer and tame the West into an agrarian utopia of sorts.
The rain follows the plow was a 19th century psuedoscientific theory that claimed that human settlement and cultivation in an arid region would increase rainfall and fertility, which would only increase with the population. It first popped up after farmers started moving to Kansas, Nebraska, and further west at the beginning of an uncharacteristically wet period. To quote Reisner:
“The Great American Desert appeared to have retreated westward across the Rockies to the threshold of the Great Basin. Such a spectacular climatic transformation was not about to be dismissed as a fluke, not by a people who thought themselves handpicked by God to occupy a wild continent. A new school of meteorology was founded to explain it. Its unspoken principle was divine intervention, and its motto was 'Rain Follows the Plow.’”
Meaning cheap and easily available energy allowed the massive dams, aqueducts hundreds of miles long, and engineering projects that supply the cities of the west with water. Not only is the climate getting drier, limiting the basic availability of a baseline level of water for use in the summer, but as energy gets increasingly expensive, we won’t be able to maintain the huge amount of infrastructure involved. Quoting Reisner again, previously there were limits, “Then came cheap oil, electricity, and the motorized centrifugal pump. Finally freed from all constraints but nature’s (irrigation would last only as long as the finite aquifer held out), the farmers began pumping in the finest California tradition—which is to say, as if tomorrow would never come.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01290-z
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/science/08anasazi.html
https://www.hcn.org/issues/307/15815
The Need for Roots, 1949