As the aqueducts went dry

Ray had the blazing prophet eyes of John Muir, and like John Muir, war had left him nerve-shaken and lean as a crow. The ocean had restored him. . . . Instead of going home to the heartland he liberated a surfboard from someone’s backyard and made his home in the curl. He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present. He would make a vacuum of the coast, nothing could happen there, even the things that had happened before he was born. He was surfing the day they pronounced the Colorado dead and he was surfing the day it was dammed, a hundred years before. When some omnipotent current ferried him northward toward LA, he allowed it. He surfed as that city’s aqueducts went dry. He surfed as she built new aqueducts, wider aqueducts, deeper aqueducts, aqueducts stretching to the watersheds of Idaho, Washington, Montana, aqueducts veining the West, half a million miles of palatial half-pipe left of the hundredth meridian. . . . Ray surfed as concrete waterways crept up to Alaska, surfed as the Mojave and the Sonoran licked the bases of glaciers. He was surfing each time terrorists or visionaries bombed the massive unfilled aqueduct canals at Bend and Boise and Boulder and Eugene. He surfed as states sued states and as the courts shut down the ducts for good. He surfed as the Central Valley, America’s fertile crescent, went salt flat, as its farmcorps regularly drilled three thousand feet into the unyielding earth, praying for aquifer but delivered only hot brine, as Mojavs sucked up the groundwater to Texas, as a major tendril of interstate collapsed into a mile-wide sinkhole, killing everybody on it, as all of the Southwest went moonscape with sinkage, as the winds came and as Phoenix burned and as a white-hot superdune entombed Las Vegas.

—Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus

Photo: Colorado River Aqueduct in February 2012, by Chris “Maven” Austin, CC BY-NC 2.0