There is a place in the California desert where a pipe pokes out from a berm made of broken concrete and delivers freshwater to a dying sea. I stood there recently, on a beach of crumbled barnacles, and watched it gush. The sea was the dull blue of a cataract, surrounded by small volcanoes, bubbling mud pots, and ragged, blank mountains used for bombing practice by the Navy and the Marines. The air smelled sweet and vaguely spoiled, like a dog that has got into something on a hot day. When the wind blew, it veiled the mountains in dust and sent puckered waves to meet the frothy white flow from the pipe. The sea, which is called the Salton Sea, is fifteen times bigger than the island of Manhattan and no deeper in most places than a swimming pool. Since 1924, it has been designated as an agricultural sump. In spite of being hyper-saline, and growing saltier all the time, the sea provides habitat to some four hundred and thirty species of birds, some of them endangered, and is one of the last significant wetlands remaining on the migratory path between Alaska and Central America.
In early April, the governor of California ordered the state to conserve a million and a half acre-feet of water in the next nine months, a drastic response to an intensifying four-year drought that has devastated small communities in the north, decimated groundwater supplies in the Central Valley, and made the cities fear for the future. To achieve this savings, Californians are starting to forgo some of the givens of life in modern America: long showers, frequent laundering, toilet-flushing, gardening, golf. It can be hard to visualize a quantity of water. An acre-foot is what it takes to cover an acre to the depth of twelve inches: some three hundred and twenty-five thousand gallons. A million acre-feet is about what the city of Los Angeles uses in two years. A million acre-feet, give or take, is also how much runs off to the Salton Sea each year from the farms of the surrounding Imperial Valley. Salty, spent, and full of selenium and phosphates, the excess water flows down to the sea, where, two hundred and thirty feet below sea level, it evaporates under a blistering sun.
With the state turning brown, the eye is drawn to the bright-green place with the enormous wading pool. A hundred and thirty-five miles east of San Diego, the Imperial Valley has a population of a hundred and eighty thousand, and about five hundred thousand acres of farmland. It was settled as an agricultural area in the early twentieth century, and holds senior rights to water from the Colorado River. California’s share of the river was divided in accordance with the doctrine of prior appropriation: whoever first put the water to “beneficial use” could continue to claim it, so long as they did not waste. Of the 4.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water that California is normally entitled to each year, the Imperial Irrigation District’s allowance is 3.1 million. Alfalfa is the most widely planted crop, followed by Bermuda grass and Sudan grass, and flood irrigation is typical. A third of the hay is exported to China and to places lacking the land or the water to grow grass—the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Japan—where it feeds dairy cows and the cattle that produce Kobe beef.
In 2003, in the largest agricultural-to-urban water transfer in United States history, San Diego County made a deal with the Imperial Valley to buy as much as two hundred thousand acre-feet a year. San Diego County has a growing metropolis, a population of three million, a substantial biotech industry, and virtually no natural water supply. By 2021, the transfer will account for a quarter of its water. The deal gives Imperial billions of dollars to spend on improving efficiency on its farms and in its irrigation infrastructure, which in some places is primitive.
The transfer, mutually beneficial and environmentally necessary, changes the Imperial Valley’s relationship to water, bringing it more in line with the realities of long-term drought in a state of thirty-nine million people. There is just one catch. Between the needs of the city and the farmers sits the Salton Sea, which conservation will destroy. “The sea is the linchpin between Colorado River water and urban Southern California,” Michael Cohen, a senior research associate at the Pacific Institute, a water-policy think tank, says. Without the inflows, the sea, already shrinking, will recede dramatically, exposing miles of lake bed loaded with a hundred years’ worth of contaminants. Much of the wildlife will disappear—poisoned, starved, or driven off. The consequences for people around the region could be dire, too. Before irrigation, the valley was plagued by violent dust storms. With the water gone, the lake bed could emit as much as a hundred tons of fine, caustic dust a day, leading to respiratory illness in the healthy and representing an acute hazard for people with compromised immune systems. No one knows how far that dust can travel on the wind. Mary Nichols, the state’s top air-quality official, says, “The nightmare scenario is the pictures we’ve all seen of the Dust Bowl that contributed to the formation of California in the first place.”
Last year, when Axel Rodriguez was four, he started coughing, a weird cough that sounded like a drum, deep and percussive, and scratchy, as though something inside his chest were trying to claw its way out. The cough would go away for a few days, only to come back stronger.
Axel’s mother, Michelle Valdez, is twenty-four, with straight, dark waist-length hair and, behind studious glasses, eyes made up like Cleopatra. She told me recently that the problem had started in August, when the family moved into a new house, a pale-yellow stucco rental in Calexico, about thirty miles south of the Salton Sea. “The houses in this area catch a lot of dirt,” she said—from the cars on the heavily trafficked road nearby, from the grass that the landlord insists on mowing, from neighboring Mexicali, the polluted city of a million just across the Mexican border, and, most of all, she said, from the farm fields throughout the valley. “We are in a hole here,” she said. “All the nasty stuff just sits in it.”
In September, the cough came and didn’t let up for two weeks. “Morning, afternoon, evening, it was cough, cough, cough,” Valdez said. Axel missed school, and his throat got so swollen that he could barely eat. He became a regular at the emergency room. Valdez and her husband, Antonio Marron, plied Axel with cough syrups, drops, Claritin—they’d been told he had allergies—and when those didn’t work they contemplated taking him to Mexicali for an herbal cure. “I was very desperate,” Valdez said. The medicines were also putting pressure on their finances. At the time, Marron was making about two hundred dollars a week working at Best Buy; Valdez stayed home, taking care of Axel and his sister, Ana, who is three.
One windy, cold morning in September, Axel told his mother that his chest hurt and he couldn’t breathe. Marron covered Axel’s face with a blanket and took him to the emergency room again. His lungs were swollen and full of mucus. This time, Marron was told what the family had already begun to suspect: Axel had asthma. At the hospital that day, they met a nurse, Aide Fulton, who runs the Imperial Valley Child Asthma Program. She began to educate them about how to manage a chronic condition in an environment seemingly designed to aggravate it.
Around the same time, Valdez had an episode herself, a tightening in her chest that felt as if someone were squeezing her with a belt. She went to the hospital, and learned that she’d lost a quarter of the capacity of her right lung. The diagnosis was chronic obstructed pulmonary disease, a condition associated with lifelong smoking. Valdez, who is not a smoker, has a genetic predisposition to C.O.P.D., but this was her first experience of it. She said, “I told my husband, ‘I never had an attack until you brought me here!’ ” Not that Marron has been spared. His current job, installing alarm systems, has him in and out of doors all day, and he recently came down with an infection in his lungs.
The valley is eighty per cent Latino and mostly poor. It also has the state’s highest rate of asthma-related hospitalization for children. The Imperial Valley Child Asthma Program is the only free asthma-education program in the county, and it operates on an average budget of a hundred and forty-six thousand dollars a year. Fulton told me that in the past few years there has been an increase in referrals from the towns adjacent to the Salton Sea. (At one school, in the seaside town of Calipatria, sixty-five children are ill.) “We already have an unmet need,” she said. “What are we going to do when the Salton Sea dries out?” She is thinking of her clients, and she is thinking of herself. Her husband has asthma, her oldest daughter has asthma, and, after twenty-five years in the valley, she has it, too. “The issue of the sea is a bomb,” she said. “It’s a monster coming to get us all.”
To the water-minded, the Salton Sea represents a loss of control. For thousands of years, the Colorado River periodically flooded the basin, forming a huge body of water known as Lake Cahuilla, where Native Americans fished and camped. Dry, the land belonged to the Colorado Desert. It was an intimidating wasteland, but it gave people ideas. By the turn of the twentieth century, a company of engineers and real-estate promoters had succeeded in diverting the Colorado into a dry riverbed that once fed Lake Cahuilla. With irrigation, according to a contemporaneous account, the “great expanse of burning waste” was allowed to “blossom into a garden of incomparable beauty and richness to give homes to thousands and sustenance to millions.” The rubric of the valley’s first newspaper was “Water Is King—Here Is Its Kingdom.”
The engineering of the canals and gates, however, was inadequate. Whenever a head gate silted up, a cut was made around it. In 1905, the Colorado overwhelmed one of the cuts and poured full force into the desert, destroying railways and towns. By the time the river was contained again, two years later, there was a huge lake in the basin, and no way to get it out.
As agriculture expanded in the valley, more and more water flowed to the basin. Rich in fertilizers, the water created an algae forest, which in turn fed a tilapia population that was a hundred million strong in the late nineties. Seabirds fish there—white and brown pelicans and double-crested cormorants. There are egrets, ibis, ducks and geese, stilts, dowitchers, and avocets; at one point, three and a half million eared grebes were counted. Yuma clapper rails, which are endangered, browse the freshwater marshes created by the farm ditches and the canals.
By the nineteen-sixties, the Salton Sea had become a recreational area, attracting more visitors than Yosemite. The California Department of Fish and Game introduced sport-fishing species like corvina, sargo, and croaker. Tourism flourished, and with it marinas, angling operations, and yacht clubs. Speedboat regattas were held on the sea; people water-skied. An hour from Palm Springs, the sea even drew celebrities. Desi Arnaz came for the golf, and Frank Sinatra hung out at a boat-racing spot called Date Palm Beach.
But the shoreline was unstable, constantly revised depending on the amount of water coming from the Colorado to the farms. Floods in the seventies and eighties inundated many of the properties closest to the sea, causing widespread abandonment. Now, as the water diminishes, the ruins of the heyday are being revealed. Next to the North Shore Beach Yacht Club, which was wrecked by a flood and then rebuilt as a community center, the husk of an old bait shop sits in the shade of a fat date palm. The docks are gone, and the water is distant; pelicans sit on the stranded pylons.
The people who refused to be flushed out or who have reoccupied the shore live an existence so marginal and peculiar that the filmmaker John Waters narrated a documentary about them. Their home, he says, is “where utopia and the apocalypse meet to dance a dirty tango.” These people are waiting for something that will never come: enough water to bring the good times back.
In a small coastal town called Bombay Beach, I stopped at a cinder-block market with bars on the door, looking for something to drink. The town is made up mostly of trailers, which become more dilapidated the closer you get to the beach. In some parts of town, there is no water and no electricity, and the dwellings are lean-tos made from cardboard and plywood. “It’s the third flipping world!” a woman working at the market told me. She was in her early fifties, with a tattoo of a chain-link fence and a purple rose around her wrist. She invited me to come back that night to hear her band, Heat Hell and Winter, play fifties covers at the Ski Inn, next door; back in the day, supposedly, you could water-ski right up to the bar. But she warned me to stay away from the beach. “It’s spooky after dark,” she said. While we were talking, her husband came up to the counter. (He is Heat, she is Hell. Winter, he said, was at home taking a nap.) He knew just how to fix the water problem. Why not build a pipeline through the mountains and pump in water from the San Diego Bay?
Driving through the farmland of the Imperial Valley inspires awe and indignation. Like a jungle, it seethes: yellow-green Sudan grass; rough, inky sugar beets; alfalfa as bright as a banker’s shade; mixed lettuces that grade from light green to violet. “You could not paint a picture that is a better color,” Kay Pricola, the executive director of the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association, says. “We are dependent on the water. We exist because of the water.” The unplanted land is grayish, crusted, flocked with crystalline white salt, like a Christmas attraction in a Southern California mall.
There are four hundred and fifty farmers in the Imperial Valley, some of them descendants of the pioneers and many of them quite prosperous. In addition to the forage crops, they grow much of the winter produce eaten in this country. It is hot in the valley, up to a hundred and twenty degrees in the summer months. The farmers tend to travel. Their wives may prefer to spend summers in La Jolla. Half the land is tenant-farmed; in some cases, the owners live elsewhere. “It functions as a plantation,” a local activist told me. Larry Cox, a prominent valley farmer who is the president of the Imperial County Farm Bureau, disputes the characterization. He says that treating farmland as an investment is more like owning an office building in San Diego and hiring someone else to run it.
I asked Al Kalin, a man in his mid-sixties who has farmed by the sea his whole life, what it felt like to have access to a precious resource in such great quantities. He squinted at me. “It’s like you have a big gold mine,” he said. “Who’s going to try to come and take it away from you next?”
For most of the farmers, cheap water is a birthright, and they are loath to part with it at any price. But by the late nineties the situation in the Imperial Valley had begun to look absurd. Historically, California had used more than its allotted 4.4 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado. With growing populations, Arizona and Nevada now wanted their water for themselves. But California’s cities were growing, too. Rural, sparsely populated Imperial County evidently had more than enough, however. In order to bring California back down to 4.4 million, Imperial was going to have to share its water with the urban coast.
The 2003 agreement with San Diego was part of a larger deal called the Quantification Settlement Agreement, which also included the transfer of as much as a hundred and three thousand acre-feet to Coachella. The valley stood to benefit handsomely. The deal provided payments to the Imperial Irrigation District (this year, the rate is six hundred and twenty-four dollars per acre-foot), a windfall that would be used partly to improve irrigation systems: installing drip lines and pump-back systems, lining canals and building automated gates. Knowing the chaos that would be caused by a dried-out sea, the architects of the transfer planned for “mitigation water,” achieved by fallowing farmland, to be added to the sea. Landowners with dormant fields would be compensated for each acre-foot of water that they didn’t use.
Still, the farmers were offended. Bruce Kuhn, who was the president of the irrigation-district board at the time, described the sentiment in the agricultural community as “How dare you?” He said, “Their grandfathers farmed with all the water they needed. Their fathers farmed with all the water they needed. I’m not saying they were spoiled, they just weren’t used to being told there were going to be limits.” Some pointed out that more efficient methods wouldn’t entirely eliminate the need for flood irrigation, which flushes the salts that accumulate around roots and eventually kill the soil. Outsiders, Kalin told me, have little appreciation of the reasons behind the valley’s farming practices.
As the deal was being negotiated, the federal government applied pressure. At one point, it scrutinized Imperial’s water use, determined that it was not, in fact, beneficial, and suggested cutting the allotment. The community was enraged. According to “Unquenchable,” a book about water policy in America, a member of the county board of supervisors called it “the great water rape.” Nonetheless, the transfer passed, by one vote. Kuhn voted yes, and lost the next election, as well as lifelong friends and business for his levelling company. (He is back on the board now.)
The state had agreed to devise and fund a restoration plan, and the mitigation water bought some time. In 2007, it released a proposal that envisioned a large wetland at the southern end and, at the northern end, a saltwater lake where people and birds could fish. In between, where the playa was exposed, emissions could be controlled with chemicals or irrigated salt bush. The plan estimated the cost of restoration at nearly nine billion dollars, but the mechanism for financing it was left vague.
By the terms of the agreement with San Diego, the mitigation water expires at the end of 2017; without it, according to projections, the sea will begin to decline precipitously. “We have an ‘Oh, shit’ deadline with 2017,” Keali’i Bright, the deputy secretary of legislative affairs at the California Natural Resources Agency, told me. The nine-billion-dollar plan was unrealistic, he said. “It paralyzes us from action.” Instead, the state is spending thirty million dollars for what it calls “no regrets” projects at the sea. Last week, California also moved to form the Salton Sea Task Force, whose goal is to devise a new strategy, and fast. The first step is a meeting next month to “discuss options for governance that provide stable partnerships between the state and stakeholders.”
As 2017 approaches, the Imperial Irrigation District is increasingly impatient, and is using San Diego’s need of the water as a cudgel. Predictably, the relationship between the Imperial Irrigation District and the San Diego Water Authority has the barely subdued tension of an arranged marriage. (Al Kalin, who has a mischievous sense of humor, told me that he likes to annoy people by wearing a S.D.W.A. cap to Imperial Irrigation District meetings.) In the fall, the irrigation district petitioned the state to honor its obligation to the Salton Sea. The petition sets in motion a process that, I.I.D. leaders suggested to me, could result in their accusing California of breaking its contract—thereby nullifying the transfer. No restoration by 2017, no water for San Diego.
The San Diego Water Authority has taken pains to present the problems at the Salton Sea as far outside the scope of the water transfer. But it is a delicate balance. Kevin Kelley, the general manager of I.I.D., told me, “San Diego has a real needle to thread. If you’re saying the transfers aren’t contributing to the decline of the Salton Sea, and you’re at all costs choosing ag-to-urban water transfers over public health, I can see where they’d be nervous.” Others find it disingenuous to link the restoration and the transfer. One water expert told me, “You were using water inefficiently. It was your obligation to clean up the inefficiency. It would be unfair for I.I.D. to hold the transfer hostage.”
When I visited the San Diego Water Authority, a strenuously Xeriscaped building on the outskirts of the city, the general manager, Maureen Stapleton, described the partnership cautiously. “They have water that has a value, and we have money and we exchange,” she said. “They need money to conserve and improve their system, and we need their water. It’s an excellent matching of needs.” As for conditions at the sea, she said, “We can’t support and don’t believe it’s appropriate to be pointing to the Quantification Settlement Agreement.”
We talked a bit about the history of the Salton Sea. Dan Denham, her associate, who focusses on Colorado River water, mentioned how remunerative farming is for landowners in the Imperial Valley.
“The one per cent are very rich,” he said.
“Oh, I think it’s more than one per cent,” Stapleton replied, dropping her guard for a second.
Denham said, “Well, most of them live here.” Suddenly, we were in treacherous territory, possibly offensive to the in-laws. The farmers so piqued about giving up their water to San Diego were in fact San Diegans?
Stapleton glanced sharply at Denham, and, when she thought I wasn’t looking, mouthed the word “careful.”
San Diego, of course, has a huge amount to lose. If the scenario at the Salton Sea seems like doomsday, imagine the San Diego of the near future, deprived of a quarter of its water in the middle of a megadrought.
Every so often, the sea burps, emitting invisible clouds of noxious hydrogen sulfide that can travel as far as Los Angeles. These “turnover” events can kill millions of fish, suddenly enveloping them in the murky, anoxic waters from the bottom of the sea. “If you had a fish tank at home and unplugged the filter and the oxygenator and everything just kind of died, it would turn into this soup,” Chris Schoneman, a biologist who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, told me. “That’s the hydrogen sulfide.”
The quality of the water is directly linked to the quantity. Salt and selenium, which occur naturally in the Colorado River, concentrate through evaporation. The less water there is in the sea, the higher these concentrations will get. Salinity has already killed off most of the fish except for tilapia, and soon the sea will be too salty for them, too. Without restoration, Michael Cohen, the Pacific Institute researcher, says, at the end of 2017 the effects of the transfer will hit the sea, reducing the volume by more than sixty per cent, and tripling its salinity in the next decade. Ecologically, he said, these changes will send the sea “over the cliff.”
In the absence of fish, brine flies and water boatmen will proliferate, and the fish-eating birds will disappear. Selenium, which causes embryonic deformities, will further impair the already endangered Yuma-clapper-rail population. By the end of the century, there will be no invertebrates left, so no birds of any kind. Salt-tolerant algae and bacteria—the pinks and oranges of a vivid sunset—will be the primary life form. In “Hazard’s Toll,” a report that Cohen and a colleague published in September, he calculates that the price for letting the sea collapse—for damages to human health, property values, and agricultural productivity—could be as high as seventy billion dollars.
At the refuge, Schoneman is watching the sea devolve at an alarming rate. Snags—dead trees from flooded farms—that served as great-blue-heron nesting habitat a year ago are now marooned on newly exposed beach. Without the water, what’s to stop a raccoon from climbing the tree and stealing the chicks? Several years ago, while conducting an aerial waterfowl survey, Schoneman and his colleague Tom Anderson noticed that an area next to the refuge, called Red Hill Bay, was drying up. They compared the photographs from one year to the next. “Ugh,” Schoneman said. “That kind of kicked us in the head.”
At Red Hill Bay, Schoneman and Anderson saw an opportunity for the birds. They applied to the state for a grant to build a complex that will mix the hyper-saline seawater with farm runoff and provide a habitat for shorebirds and waders. The project will break ground this year, and it can be expanded if more money materializes.
A few weeks ago, they drove me out to see the dehydrated bay. We climbed a hill and looked out over a khaki-colored plain, glittering with salt crystals. Schoneman pointed toward the bright-green farm fields that lay beyond the plain. “It’s over a mile that way to where the shoreline was ten years ago,” he said.
A short distance down the coast was another feature of the landscape due for renaming: Mullet Island, a small dormant volcano that was partly subsumed when the canal breach formed the Salton Sea, and which once housed a night club called Hell’s Kitchen. (The owner is said to have introduced flamingos to the Salton Sea, and there is still one pair left.) Lately, Mullet Island was a nesting ground for double-crested cormorants, but as of now it is not an island at all, just a steep hill with a water view and no birds.
Early one morning, Anderson took me out to see it. Bruce Wilcox, an ecologist who works for the irrigation district, joined us. On a barnacle beach not far from the refuge, we boarded a flat-bottomed boat propelled by an enormous fan. The boat, which was developed for navigating the Everglades, allows Anderson to glide over barely submerged farm equipment and other obstacles. We put on earphones and stopped talking for a bit. The boat zipped past a line of avocets, marbled godwits, and white pelicans, standing knee-deep and staring out to sea. A flock of cormorants, as angular as Escher drawings, spun through the sky.
At the base of Mullet Island, we got out and walked around. “Not too long ago, this was underwater,” Wilcox said. The playa was soft and fine, like cake flour, crusted over in places, bad to breathe. There was a tumbleweed, and a pile of bird bones. Wilcox said that he was working on a plan to run some water back around the base, so the birds could safely nest again—another try at beating back the desert.
Returning to the shore, through flurries of birds, I saw a few little splashes I thought might be tilapia. I was thinking about something Anderson had said: “This year, next year, or in ten years, the tilapia won’t be able to survive.” The next foraging area is a hundred and twenty miles away, in Mexico. How many of the birds would make it that far without eating?
Looking at the sea can turn the mind poetical. This is the landscape after people, you think. This is the landscape toward the end of the fish, in the last years of the birds, at the beginning of the dust.
Graciela Ruiz, who works at the Imperial Valley Child Asthma Program, wants parents to know: Chihuahuas do not cure asthma. (There is a persistent myth that the dogs absorb the illness; when a family dog dies, the afflicted child is supposed to recover.) This is one of the first things Ruiz told Michelle Valdez, when she made a home visit shortly after Axel got his diagnosis and saw Valdez’s Chihuahua, Elvira, sitting on the couch. “I know that!” Valdez told her.
But there was a long list of things that Valdez didn’t know, and she credits Ruiz with helping her make the house tolerable for Axel. Now she cleans the floor with vinegar (bleach triggered his attacks), avoids lighting candles, and limits herself to a single house plant. She got rid of her rugs, except for a four-by-six mat in front of the TV, covered the couch with bedsheets, and hung heavy curtains to block the dust from sneaking in through the windows. It was a compromise—it keeps her home at constant dusk—and an imperfect one. Valdez ran her finger across the sill and held it up: a clump of gray lint was stuck to her fingertip. “I cleaned this three days ago,” she said.
A few minutes earlier, when I arrived at the house, Axel had bounded toward me and excitedly described a recent domestic tragedy. His bunny had eaten some of Elvira’s food and died. Lanky and loose, he waved a smartphone at me and said, “My game!,” before disappearing into the kitchen and the blue glow of a Spider-Man cartoon.
“Whenever somebody comes over, he just starts talking,” Valdez said. “He likes to be around people—anyone who’s not his mom, his sister, or his dad.” He has limited opportunities to socialize right now. Because of his asthma, he can’t go to the park anymore. Of the past thirty school days, he has missed ten. Valdez has said no to karate and no to soccer. The phone and a tablet she got him are supposed to stop him from getting lonely in the dim rooms. “We’re just stuck in the house, practically every day, because he gets so sick when we go out,” she said.
Ana, the three-year-old, came over to where Valdez and I were sitting on the couch. With a top knot and purposeful brows, she proffered a doll and a painted wooden cross. She, too, wanted a playmate. Axel, Valdez said, has stopped playing with her, and begun hitting her instead.
“We started seeing a lot of changes in him,” she said. “He got a little gray. Sort of like a Grinch personality. Sometimes I would hug him and he’d say, ‘I don’t want you to hug me, I want to go out.’ ” When he threw a fork at her, she took him to Behavioral Health. Now he has another diagnosis: oppositional defiant disorder.
Axel has an inhaler, a nebulizer, and steroids; Valdez, ever watchful, can often avert the fits that used to send them to the emergency room. She is still very protective—so worried he will stop breathing in the night that she sleeps beside him, while Ana shares a room with her husband. But Ruiz told her that with medication and proper care Axel will outgrow the worst of his symptoms, and Valdez is hopeful. She has relaxed just enough to focus her concern on Ana. “I’m so scared she’s getting it,” she said. “Every time she runs, she starts coughing.” Valdez would like to move to San Diego. Whenever they visit there, Axel plays and runs and seems just fine. In the meantime, she told me, the family is moving to a different house, in a cleaner part of town.
Valdez struck me as an extremely engaged and motivated observer of her environment. I asked her what she knew about the Salton Sea. It rang a faint bell. She said that her husband had recently told her it was drying up. She shrugged. Perhaps for her, as for so many others, it was just too big to contemplate. She was a mother thinking about improving her children’s lives, but in a larger sense she was a climate refugee. As the water moves around in California, pulling out of agricultural areas and leaving them desolate, there will be more like her. The water goes where the people are, and the rest of the people follow. Whatever happens at the sea, Valdez said, “hopefully by then we’re not going to be here.” ♦
