False hope

Yo, California,

Can we just pretend the last month never happened?

Can we go on thinking the creeks had disappeared to a trickle, that rivers sank, showing the old ribs of long-forgotten wharves, the hills turned rock gray, the land became hopeless?

Because this — this heavy rain and snow, this gift of such strangeness — is really not helping.

Soon the I-told-you-sos who finally realized that maybe they shouldn't water during a storm, will open the valves once again. The holdouts will start watering again, thinking somehow the drought is over.

It's not. The ground is muddy, the puddles are welcome, the rivers swell and churn, but the drought is still here.

Call Industrial Light and Magic. We need the illusion of dry.

We need billboards blocking lakes, depicting them as sere beds of despair. We need fake sun and blue skies of linen. We need the clacking feel of thirst in our throats.

We need to embrace the three-minute shower, the ones we were taking a month ago, as a permanent practice. We need to keep capturing shower water and tossing it on dying plants outside.

We need to let yellow mellow, and make it law.

Because this — this gift of strangeness — will become more strange, not less, as we become more plentiful and demand more plenty.

After 166 years of this, we can't keep pretending we live in Eden, and making it look that way through wanton water waste. It's not Eden. It's dry desert and chaparral. We've just been extremely fortunate.

Influence peddler

Five hundred hashmarks, it turns out, takes a very long time to make.

This is blog post No. 500.

High time, then, to examine how I've done in changing the world from my little virtual outpost these last five years.

Not all of these posts have been phoned in. Not even most. Oh, they comprise so much navel gazing, of course, but almost always in thoughtful consideration of the fuzz therein. Occasionally I have looked beyond myself, out into the crazy beautiful stinking tragic foregone world, rolled this blog into a megaphone and used it to shout at the world: Hey, fix that!

And how did that turn out?

Let us review: I, in chronological order:

• Got Jerry Brown elected governor. That has turned out rather well, especially considering the Schwarzenator he replaced. Third time being the charm, Brown is the older crank caretaker who doesn't really care what you or I think. He loves high-speed rail despite the cost, wants to build tunnels shoveling precious water to Southern California with greater ease, and could possibly be on the new Bay Bridge when its corroded cables snap in a massive CG effect gone real, but other than that, a nice change of pace. The guy who'd rather live in an unfurnished apartment his first time around now will move into the old haunted governor's mansion in which he was raised, remodeled with oodles of high-end restaurant-style kitchen appliances, but we'll give him his due.
  
• Stopped our sycophantic Yankee adoration of the British royal family. We only pay attention to Queen Elizabeth and her kith and kin now when one of them has a baby. Or gets engaged. Or married. Or breaks off the engagement. Or divorces. Or says something inappropriate. Or breathes.
  
  Of course, I showed the world how to make money off it all.
  
• Exposed the great wine fraud. It all comes from one source, and "winemakers" use the power of suggestion to get you to believe different "wine" "varieties" taste different from others. Again, you're welcome.
  
• Ended war in our time.
  
• Sustained the Occupy Wall Street movement by sheer force of will, and reduced the owners of our money to the petty government-sponsored thieves that they are. Our political landscape is forever changed. You're welcome, once more.
  
• Gave veterans and public education all the resources they need.
  
• Finally saw the light and heard the screams, and stopped war in Syria. ("Ending war in our time" still results in stubborn little skirmishes, like spot fires). Oh, and turned the tide for equality in marriage. Apathy is over!
  
  Though — funny thing! — war was harder to end than I had given it credit. But I finally made our leaders tell the truth. President Obama thanked me for making it so, which was nice.
  
• Changed Scouting policy to include Scouts who are gay.
  
  All attempts at facetious self-deprecation aside, I feel like I was on the "right side of history" on this subject, or at least in the right place at the right time. It's one of the few issues for which I can speak from the heart, about which I know more than a little.
  
  Of course, I don't really expect to move anyone's thinking on anything I write here, just to turn my own thoughts to concrete. Part of me — the ego part — couldn't help but wonder if I could, somehow, compel someone to see another side of an issue. Maybe that's why I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote — and wrote — on the matter.
  
• Stole Christmas. And good riddance!
  
• Ended gun violence … stopped the unbelievable tragedy … before it could get any worse … mopped up the blood … so much blood … really, a lot of blood. But now it's mopped up. All is well.
  
• Made government transparent. And not just that thing President Obama did, where he said his government is transparent when he meant, no, it is not. Now our overseers are exposed to daylight.
  
• Shortly after, brought peace and common sense to our government.
  
• Sorted out our official religion, the National Football League. Now we play nice.
  
• Set our minds free.
  
• Ended drought in California. Taught homeowners the error of their false bounty.
  
• Trumped presidential aspirations, for the good of the country.

It stands to reason all this saving the world stuff can be overwhelming to process, which is why I peppered the blog with bits about swimming and Giants baseball and paid doodles.

Now, if you'll excuse me, time to work on No. 501. But really, what problem could possibly be left to solve?

That is, except for determining if this counts as a blog post.

What goes around …

Any good news source worth its salt commits to telling you the whole story, pursuing the conclusion with unflagging patience so you, dear reader, may know the whole truth, may find out how it all turned out, and …

Who am I kidding?! Just count yourself lucky I remembered writing about this stuff in the first place.

Now I'm following up:

Scouting nearly reaches the 21st Century

Put aside, for a moment, the weirdness that Robert Gates, former CIA chief, now runs the Boy Scouts of America.

Forget that the premier organization for American boys selected as its president the chief spook, the guy who ran the U.S. Defense Department under a couple of presidents. Forget that after a lifetime of controversial statesmanship, seeing the world's dark horror firsthand, Robert Gates now wants to be the chief Scoutmaster.

Consider instead that Gates quickly unleashed some reality on Boy Scouts: It needs to lift its ban on gay leaders.

Scouting earlier this year had changed its policy to allow gay Scouts, but not gay adult leaders. It was a massive empty gesture, looking progressive but effectively doing nothing but the same ol' same ol.'

"We'll help you become a man, and work that gayness right out of you so you can be a right-thinkin' red-blooded American adult."

Not gonna happen.

Gates said as much when he spoke to Scout leaders earlier this month at its annual meeting.

“I was prepared to go further than the decision that was made," Gates said to the Associated Press before the meeting. "I would have supported having gay Scoutmasters, but at the same time, I fully accept the decision that was democratically arrived at by 1,500 volunteers from across the entire country."

Enrollment dropped after Scouting's decision. The decision has divided Scouting. Gates' first task is to shore up flagging membership. But his direction is the right one. Whether Scouting installed him as the tough-talking high-profile figure to do what the organization couldn't — speak truth to power — it's the right direction.

Opponents arose anew.

Headlines for Gates' speech included, "Robert Gates Caves on Gay Agenda for Boy Scouts," from Newsmax.com ("Independent. American." is its tagline; "consistently way right of center" would be more accurate); "Robert Gates to Boy Scouts: Surrender Your Principles," from the Catholic Crisis Magazine.

And the triple-whammy headline from another "independent" news source, WorldNetDaily.com:

THE GAYING OF AMERICA

Robert Gates' surrender of the Boy Scouts

Exclusive: Pat Boone to group's prez on homosexual policy: 'What are you thinking?'

What Gates was thinking is that Boy Scouts can't hide from the real world anymore. Its obligation, its mission is to help boys of America be independent, self-sufficient leaders. Not just some boys: All boys who want the Scouting experience of learning citizenship and leadership from the lessons the outdoors teaches. Because few boys live anymore in Lem Siddons' world of "Follow Me, Boys!"

Life ain't a Disney®™ movie. It's waaaay more complicated. Boys need something more. Better. Gates, who's steered through the dark, complex world, knows that.

Keep climbing, Scoutmaster Gates.

Hung out to dry

I'm happy to report my neighborhood has dried out. Where not two months ago I saw stubborn greenery and wet sidewalks in the face of the fourth sere year of drought, now I see lovely brown, lovely yellow. Lawns are drying to the left of me, dying to the right, as neighbor after neighbor has let their curbs lose appeal so that we might all have enough water.

Our ugly former lawn doesn't seem so lonely anymore.

Granted, some folks still water, and their simple act of sprinkling lawns seems now so aggressive and wanton next to the brittling landscape of their neighbors. Eventually their sprinklers will go dusty too, I hope.

I have to laugh at the California Department of Boating and Waterways, appealing to boaters in its public service announcements that a day without watering their lawn will mean one more day of fun their boats, with enough water to prevent running aground. Seems a stretch, but hey, the advertising is free, I guess. Whatever floats your boat.

We're a long way from saving, and it may be too late. Some communities in the eastern San Joaquin Valley are out of water, and hot summer has yet to come.

Sprinkle a little holy water for hope …

It is designed to break your heart

A. Bartlett Giamatti, short-lived commissioner of Major League Baseball, said that about the game.

Don't I know it!

I like winning as much as the next red-blooded fan. But not at the cost of hard reality.

The brutal math of baseball means a hero loses his second chance. The Giants sent journeyman ballplayer Travis Ishikawa packing.

In baseball lingo, The Giants designated Ishikawa for assignment. That means he has a short time to decide whether to go down to minor-league baseball and hope for a chance with the big club again later, or try his luck elsewhere.

Elsewhere is where he was last year, schlepping it out with the Pittsburgh Pirates after he'd been let go before by the Giants. He was thinking of quitting. Then the Giants reacquired Ishikawa, and he made his way back into the lineup in the second half of the season.

Good thing, too, because Ishikawa hit the greatest home run in San Francisco Giants history (Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World" in 1951 was the New York Giants' greatest home run, propelling that team over the Dodgers into the World Series.)

Ishikawa's improbable two-out, bottom-of-the-ninth, three-run homer against the St. Louis Cardinals put the Giants into the World Series for the third time in five years, and the Giants went on to win their third World Series ring.

The Giants nation went wild.

Then Ishikawa got hurt as this season began, and others took his place. The outfield soon filled up with too many lefthanders like him. He was built to be a first baseman, but the Giants have more than enough of them.

Ishikawa, October's hero, loses out. Winning has won out. It's a damned shame.

I hope he never has to buy a drink — even if it's milk — in the presence of a Giant fan for the rest of his life. He deserves that much at least.

We'll always have the memory of that home run, Ishikawa sprinting around first, arms upraised like wings.

Do some damage wherever you land, Mr. Ishikawa. Just not against the Giants.

'Twas ever thus

Some things never change, as this cartoon attests from 25 years ago.

But I must report firsthand that not everyone acts like this. Folks in the Central Coast — Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties in particular — regard water as precious cargo.

A waitress told us her restaurant could be fined for giving us water without our asking first.

A small public park included a new sign, proudly proclaiming the city's intent to let the lawn die.

Raised eyebrows are tamped back down with prominent signs indicating this or that particular patch of healthy greenery is sustained with recycled "gray" water.

Spare, native landscaping is much more prevalent there, and the sense of conservation is palpable. They acknowledge what too many others do not, that California is a Mediterranean climate.

Lesson learned.

Or is it?

Curb appeal

How's everything over your way?

Here, we are settling into the third week of May. Somewhere around May 19, May 22 maybe. We're not particular.

Yes, we're from the future. Thanks to an aggressive daylight saving program, we sprang forward many, many times, lopping off months. It's easy when you eliminate winter.

Downside: Solemn Spring ceremonies to celebrate rebirth and renewal are awkward, since you can't welcome what didn't go away in the first place.

Trees have leafed out already, fluorescent green. Shrubs have exploded in flowers, spewing their suffocating perfumes and casting nutlets with ochre snowdrifts on the walkways. Everything reaches to the warm sky.

Everything you'd expect of May 19, or maybe May 22.

Everything is Spring — except the water. The water is late summer. The mighty Sacramento River, our Mississippi, winding more than 200 miles out of the Cascade range far north, past Sacramento and down another 100 miles to San Francisco Bay, is syrupy and somnolent, dark green and dying, marking a new ring on the land with each week, lower and lower in its bed. The American River ladles into the Sacramento, trickling over a sandbar.

Lake Tahoe, the great deep sapphire mecca, 100 miles away in the Sierra, runs low too. It's hard to look at the pictures.

By the time you reach May 19 or 22. We'll be in August, the hills sere and probably aflame. The rivers, in autumn, will be ahead of us in the future still, aching for winter that may or may not come.

We're in a drought, of course. You probably heard. The worst ever recorded, some say. Superlatives don't really matter here. Either California will run out of in a year, as a NASA scientist projected, or it won't.

The larger truth remains: We waste precious, fragile, finite water. We are champions of taking it for granted, and we need to change it, feast or famine.

I call a curb appeal on curb appeal.

It's customary in such a crisis to throw around blame, and farmers are the customary target. Though I can't claim to know much more about farming than the average shopper, I can at least claim that much, having reported on the industry for a job.

Farmers, I learned as a reporter, grow food! That we eat! To live! World markets crave California foods, many of which are grown here only. Jobs, economy, esteem, natural resources harnessed.

Maybe some farmers waste water. The farmers I met pay dearly for water, or must wait behind other farmers in a Byzantine construct of laws that give first-serve priority to some over others. For the farmers I met, water is a costly input to be parceled out, so trees and crops get drip irrigation at optimum times of day for optimum use.

You can find exceptions, but this is the rule.

Why grow crops for farm animals to eat? You might challenge. Grow that food for humans! Stop eating meat, I'll say back. Farmers must respond to market demands (for the most part; some crops are grown or not grown for silly reasons to meet some untenable law or the other, but California is largely a market-trigger farm economy, not propped up by subsidies).

In general, yes, farmers use a huge majority of the state's water. But their water goes into food we need and that the world buys. Leave farmers alone in this, except to encourage more efficient irrigation more widely.

The solution is no farther than your own yard.

Having resumed long walks, I tell you it's rare that a lawn is not bright green and lush. Maybe one in 30 homes has a dreary unwatered lawn (like mine) or planned xeriscaping. The rest, full green and growing.

Homes that obviously want from urgent attention elsewhere still have green lawns. Homes with trucks parked diagonally across the front lawn still do not deprive those tires of soft, cool emerald carpet.

Maybe Sacramento is different, I'll grant. People tell me that Sacramento has just relied on two rivers flowing by, and drawn up its water as it has pleased — I'm not native. Water was only recently metered here (yeah, I know, hard to believe), though the cost of water is relatively low and no one seems to care we're in a drought.

That lawn does no good. Oxygen into the atmosphere, maybe, but we can live with the loss. It makes us feel good, I guess. It makes people feel good driving by, triggering in us some sort of pride in our bounteous place the world.

Even the water that sheets off sidewalks and runs into the gutter a block down to the storm drain: "Curb appeal."

We need to change our minds. We are bleeding ourselves out in stupidity.

Ditch your lawns. Let 'em die. Need greenery? Put in native plants on drip irrigation. After one season, you won't need to water. Also, you can live without a lawn. Give it a try.

It might surprise you that California was not covered in vast manicured lawns when the Miwok and Maidu came to this place thousands of years ago. This is a dry so-called Mediterranean climate, but we wash down our driveways like we're Seattle.

This just in: Washington and Oregon, also suffering drought.

Golf courses? Kill your lawns. Golfers? Lump it. Embrace the new challenge. Your Scottish forebears did.

The same goes for houses of worship. If green lawns are what congregates your people, you're not doing your job very well.

Government facilities? Stop watering. Keep only the parks green so the community can share some enjoyment.

You too, apartment complexes. Give renters a break.

In fact, give us all a break. We live for rewards, not punishments. Tax breaks for triggering certain low-water usages. Let's race to the brownest!

This drought may not get worse, but droughts may come more frequently, and a long-term drought is projected by 2020.

Even if we're flush again, so to speak, we need to stop being such pigs with water.

The chairman of Nestlé, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, caught global flak for saying water is not a human right and that a value should be assigned to water as a commodity. He has backpedaled since to make the point I can advocate: We deprive water to those who need it most, and waste the good water we have.

Gov. Jerry Brown (coincidentally, governor during our last great drought of 1976-77) has called for greater water storage as response to this drought. I like Gov. Brown mostly. He has so been there and done that that he manages the state with clear eyes and not much care for what naysayers say.

So I'm flabbergasted that he has not done what I'm asking, what he asked during the last great drought.

Stop wasting our water.

To dust you shall return

We spent Sunday picking over our own bones, just like everyone else.

By the hundreds we came, on the new dusty trail we were making along a contour of the damp barren slope, above the quiet water, like nomads afraid to stray too far from sustenance.

But it's too late. The sustaining water of Folsom Lake is disappearing.

In a good year we'd be under 40 feet of water where we walked, near the southern shore of the lake known as Brown's Ravine.

This is not a good year.

Following the driest year in recorded history, 2014 has begun with a warm unwelcome spring, the sky this morning unblemished blue, with a yellow-brown, almost glowing edge along the horizon in every direction. The sky itself, it seems, is drying up.

Folsom Lake is going, going …

Our son and his girlfriend, visiting and wanting to hike, came with us to look for the remains of a Gold Rush town again exposed by drought.

Mormon Island formed in 1848 on a sand bar near where the south and north forks of the American River joined. The town comprised members of the Mormon Battalion, discharged from their duties in helping fight for the United States against Mexico, and Mormons brought to the area by Sam Brannan to investigate this land as a possible home for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

With not a lot to do, some of the Mormon men helped John Sutter build a lumber mill in the foothills, where the guy in charge of the project, James Marshall, first found gold. Even with carpentry and providing for their families, the men still had a lot of leisure time and spent it looking for more gold.

Mormon Island began as the site of the greatest placer (surface) mining find of the Gold Rush. Heavy gold sparkled from the riverbed, easy pickings. Sam Brannan became rich beyond reason by telling the world about it. Maybe the world wanted to believe that all the gold in California was so easily found. Whatever the reason, tens of thousands came, from every state in the union and every liveable part of the world, as I say on the Underground Sacramento tour.

When the world arrived, sick and gaunt but still lusting for gold — even when it realized getting any would require hard work — Brannan had all the necessary tools ready for sale, at the exorbitant prices the market would bear.

Brannan was also asking finder's fees from the Mormons of Mormon Island making claims on the gold finds, which have been reported erroneously as Brannan exacting tithes from the faithful and keeping them for himself. When the military governor of California told the Mormons Brannan had every right to ask the fees — as long as they were fool enough to pay them — the fees dried up.

Mormon Island, the town, burned up, as Gold Rush towns tended to do. It had a brief glorious existence — from 1848 to 1856 — including four hotels, three dry-goods stores (including one of Brannan's), five general stores, and a Pony Express station. It boasted of having hosted the first grand ball in Sacramento County, and a population of 2,500.

A few people still lived in the town limits until the mid-20th Century, but in 1955 Folsom Dam was built and the three forks of the American River stoppered into a sprawling lake for recreation, flood control, electrical power, urban consumption — all those marks of progress.

The bodies of the town's pioneers were moved to a cemetery high and dry. What little was left of their town disappeared under the dark green water for decades. Its outskirts have peeked out a few times since during drought.

Even with Folsom Lake at its lowest level yet, the center of the old town is still under about 90 feet of the water.

What visitors see now is the periphery, the uncertain edges of the town. So much might-have-been and could-be's. No one seems sure what they're looking at, as the rubble of foundations rise from the wet earth.

More people than would have shown up with their fishing/wakeboarding/party boats on a searing July day have made the pilgrimage to Brown's Ravine this winter Sunday of a three-day weekend. What the Parks and Recreation Department may have lost in boat haulage fees, it's making up in vehicle day passes.

"Go all the way to the end," said the cashier in the ranger kiosk guarding the entrance. She knew where we were going. Down a windy road, past scores of sailboats hauled out of the water months before and imprisoned in their own special parking lots. They'd bob in a marina normally.

The shopping-center sized parking lot, where boaters park after putting in, was filling with cars. Already we could see the dust clouds where clots of people roamed the same dusty trail over the next rise, where the lake had been.

We joined the caravan, the carnival, the strange spring frolic. Part of me felt like we had heard about the little child who fell down the dry well, and had come in our lusty curiosity to witness the anguish. Part of me felt like we were the kid down the well, waiting out the end. Just a couple of vendors and the funereal feel would have made it complete.

Groups of people took selfies and group photos amid the laid-stone foundations, cheery in their collective unknowing doom.

The state parks department has set plastic sandwich-board signs next to each conglomeration of artifacts, each discernible foundation of some building or another. The signs admonish visitors not to deface or take the artifacts, important as they are to the archaeological history of the place.

Were I the dad with the little kids, I would have been the one saying "Don't touch!" too many times. Most parents let their kids pick up all the rusted bolts and nails and discs of glass that someone has carefully set on every tree stump and wide piece of rock.

And what the hell? Why not? The artifacts aren't that particularly important. They may have come from last century; they may have come from last winter. No one knows, no one cares, except that they may be old.

They remind me of the old cars we kids came upon about a mile into the woods across the street from my childhood home. Maybe they were 15 years old, maybe 50. Bullet holes decorated each. Naturally we just knew a bloody gangster battle had taken place here, in what would have been a remote corner of Santa Barbara County. It made no sense, yet it made every bit of sense to us.

So it is with the tree-stump displays. Attach your own idea what they are, where they came from, who held them. No one's going to refute you; no one cares. Not even the parks people, even though their signs say otherwise.

As soon as possible, everyone wants these mysteries to disappear again under green opaque water. What's left of the lake seems like a live thing dying, thick and smooth like a sheen of oil. A boy navigated the muddy banks to throw a handful of pebbles across its surface, as if to awaken it.

Who knows how long the water will last, and what happens when it's gone?

I dream of the water rising again, so gently as to leave the nails and bolts and handles and glass bottle bottoms right where someone set them on their gray tree stumps.

A rant to the guy in the white house around the corner

Yeah, you! With your lawn putting-green perfect in the dead of what should be winter, I'm talking to you!

The water sheets across your sidewalk like you're lobbying for a luxury car commercial, and rolls into the gutter, quite literally re-forming the American River down the street, wasted into the drain.

There's a drought on, guy! Or girl! Obstinacy knows know gender.

If you think I'm talking to you, it's you. If you know who I'm talking about, tell him/her!

To you this may be the last day of 2013 (well, to me too). With its dry passage, though, marks the driest year in California's recorded history. That's saying something. For all of the state's bombastic beginnings, so many things were lost — fortunates, lives, reputations, virginity — but records … records, my friend, were kept.

We're out of water. Ain't any more coming, as far as we can foretell, anyway.

The latest aerial shot shows one more sheet of Bounty®™ would sop up what's left behind Folsom Dam.

Do not — do not! — wash down your driveway with the house, guy/girl around the corner. Learn basic broom skills. Do not wash your car! Let it go awhile.

I beg you.

In fact, this calls for extreme measures from 1976-77, the last severe drought, when we all lived by by the motto: "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."

Amen.

It just struck me: Jerry Brown was governor then too! He's waiting to declare this drought official, but I don't know why. The second coming of Linda Ronstadt, maybe.

Water districts aren't waiting. Folsom water users must cut back 20 percent, which doesn't seem enough. We're in serious parch. The whole state must reacquaint itself with the fact we're a Mediterranean climate.

Here's news: The geologic record indicates that across the last two millennia California has endured droughts of between 50 and 80 years. And Jerry Brown was governor then too.

Many central and southern California communities forbid new housing developments from planting lawns, encouraging native plants and xeriscaping instead. Time for it to go viral.

We are not Oregon or Washington, for good or ill.

What's worse, this drought is harshing my swimming mellow.

After days of this arrow pierced through my temples (no physician's assistant is gonna tell me it's probably just flu), I shambled down to Lake Natoma, my old haunt, to see swim friends Doug and David have fun in my absence, slicing through the cold dark water. And plenty of it: The water was at its usual level.

Come tomorrow, though, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is set to reduce what little it's letting out of Folsom Lake, which flows immediately into our lovely little Lake Natoma. I'm anxious for the result. Or lack.

Help out an old, slow swimmer. Check your sprinkler system (you look like you've got a lawn guy: Have him do it) and cut back to once a week. You're watering every day: Why? Maybe you're more oblivious than obstinate, and you don't get up early enough to see your shiny sidewalk. Wake up!

Maybe some good will come of this, like statewide xeriscaping. After the double whammy of drought and Proposition 13 in 1976-77, Californians drained their swimming pools and skateboarding took rise, never to fade again.

Just don't tell me what a nice sunny day it is.