The rich are different from you and me. They have nicer socks.

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Some months ago, I found myself at a speaking engagement at a posh resort in the hills outside San Diego, the sort with beautiful eucalyptus trees, and golf carts.

I’d brought some business attire for my panel discussion (in our family we refer to them as “grownup clothes”), but realized I’d forgotten to pack socks. All I had were the white athletic socks I’d worn with my tennies for the flight. This would not do.

I’d planned to sneak away, before my appearance, and find a store at which to buy socks. But that morning, I stumbled into the resort’s pro shop, and realized they had golf wear. For $14, I picked a nice dark pair of socks. They worked perfectly with my grownup clothes, but more importantly, they may very well be the most comfortable pair of socks I’ve ever owned.

I’ve always been skeptical of the baggage carried by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (perhaps somewhat apocryphal) observation that the rich are different from you and me. But now I realize that they are. They have nicer socks.

Before there was Wikipedia….

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Pocket Guide to Science

Pocket Guide to Science

For Christmas, my friend Alison gave me the 1928 Popular Science Monthly “Pocket Guide to Science.” It’s a treasure, including things like this:

What produced the Grand Canyon of Arizona?

It was cut down, during millions of years, by the Colorado River which still flows in the bottom of it. The sand and clay cut out of the Grand Canyon was carried down into the Gulf of California. It has made the flat, muddy plain part of which is now the famous Imperial Valley of California.

The Imperial Valley was famous in 1928? Good to know.

To be fair, there were some things we understand today that hadn’t been quite worked at in 1928:

Why do we believe that the earth may be slowly shrinking?

That is one theory of how mountain ranges are formed. As the earth shrinks it wrinkles up its surface skin a little, some geologists believe, just as the skin of a prune wrinkles up when it dries and shrinks. These wrinkles on the earth are what we call mountains. It is possible, however, that mountains can be formed in other ways also.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: real water, real people

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Whitehorse Lake

Whitehorse Lake

Three years ago John Leeper, then head of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, told me about the importance of the deal that assigns long-neglected water rights along with the money to bring the water to arid eastern side of the reservation: “Real water to real people in real time.” Last week Roberto Rosales and I went out to Whitehorse Lake for an update:

The buckets are for the relatively short drive to the Whitehorse Lake chapter house, where they’re filled with safely drinkable water. For a dollar, community members can take a shower there, too. It’s a longer drive to one of the windmill-fed stock tanks to fill the 50-gallon barrels Smith uses to haul water for his family’s six goats and the two trees outside the house. “We haul it daily,” Smith said.

The network of blue stakes leading outward from the big new water tank at the foot of the mesa is a signal of change. In November 2012, 24 Whitehorse Lake homes were connected to the newly arriving water lines. Last month, the home Smith shares with his 87-year-old father, Chee Smith Sr., was among the next 21 homes to be connected, with the final plumbing now underway to connect the indoor plumbing to the water lines and newly dug septic systems carved into the hard desert earth behind each house.

“Once they hook up, they don’t have to haul any more,” the younger Smith said.

 

the China butcher

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Here is an item I ran across this evening while reading old California newspapers. It appeared in the Daily Evening Bulletin of San Francisco,Tues. Feb. 15, 1876:

Last week, at Jacinto, a Chinaman got his left arm broken between the wrist and elbow. He came to Chico for assistance and called upon the China butcher, who is also a professor of surgery. He immediately proceeded to work and put the bones in place, procured a young rooster, killed it, and broke every bone in it, and with the mangled fowl bound up the arm in a firm and compressed manner. In less than twenty-four hours the man was able to move his fingers, and this butcher-surgeon says the arm will be well in a week.

The Windmill

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“For certain specific purposes, and, primarily among them, for pumping water in moderate quantities, the windmill is not only a thoroughly reliable, but at the same time the most economical prime mover, and as far as judgment can now be passed, will hold this place for many years to come.”

– Alfred R. Wolff, The Windmill as a Prime Mover, 1885

“The only water we had, we fetched from wells, and lucky indeed, was the family that could afford a windmill.”

– anonymous resident describing life in Tucson’s barrio in the 1890s

Windmill, John Fleck, 2013

Windmill, John Fleck, 2013

Does drought matter any more?

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In Southern California, the link between weather and water has been inextricably broken. Here’s Bettina Boxall on why L.A.’s driest year, ever, doesn’t matter all that much:

Although this year’s No. 1 ranking makes for an interesting conversation piece, it has little practical effect. As anyone driving around Los Angeles can see, lawns are still green, swimming pools are full. Southland water officials aren’t sounding the alarm bells.

It has been a century since Angelenos relied primarily on local sources for their water. The city is mostly sustained by imports from other parts of California and the Colorado River. And though it has been dry all over, regional water managers say they have ample supplies in reserve.

 

 

The shortcomings of the Endangered Species Act in western water

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Reed Benson:

[I]n places where there is no river-dependent species listed as threatened or endangered, environmental factors often carry little weight in water management. Without a listed species, water allocation and management often ignore the health of the river. And even where listed species do exist, focusing on the needs of a single species (as the ESA does) may do little or nothing for other wildlife, or for river recreation. In short, the ESA protects only one of the important values that rivers provide.

Also, a discussion of the critical question of what counts as a “discretionary action” by a federal actor in an ESA drama.