The Human Drought and the New Western Rainmakers (An Essay on Hope for the Promised Land) Part 1 continued.

Part 1 continued.
  ...If I did I have a care back then I still wouldn't have known, that my arrival to San Diego was coinciding with the beginning of the longest and largest drought in man's recorded history, west of the Rockies. Growing up in Minnesota where, in one year the weather swings anywhere from thirty below zero in February to one hundred above in July with an eighty percent humidity, one can't help but be pretty in tune with the weather. Mother nature dictates a Minnesotans daily life on a whole different level than most other people in the world! The last time I checked, International Falls, MN still holds the USA's record for coldest recorded temperature at about minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit! But I was twenty-two years old and I think the first time I even glimpsed the news back then was when September eleventh happened.
   In case this information is new news to anyone reading, allow me to catch you up. The entire southwest, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico have been in drought conditions since the year 2000. In the last four or five years the drought has intensified and taken on new catastrophic levels unseen by humans in this part of the country. Only now is it really going to hit home as California prepares to get serious and start issuing fines for water wasters. Starting tomorrow, August 1, for the first time in state history, people will be getting dinged up to five hundred buckaroos if their sprinklers get the sidewalk wet. I have done some reading but don't know the full details of how the new rules will be carried out from one city to another, I just know that it's finally here and the realities of what is going on will start to be felt by all. I've been monitoring the whole thing from my desktop for the last couple of years as my life has radically changed from carefree rocker to stay at home dad for three sons. But now I'm getting ahead of myself here...let's jump back to, oh let's say about three years ago.
  Marie and I had just welcomed our twins to the world and we were taking them on their first road trip up to the Sacramento area, where Marie's mom and dad had just purchased a palace of a house in Eldorado Hills. It was our yearly Thanksgiving trip and we had not seen the new place yet. We arrived at night after a brutal twelve hour trip that included a puke fest, leading to an extended clean up at a roadside truck stop. The next morning I drove out for groceries and a quick kid break. The navigation system led me around the back way from where we drove in, up to the top of the hill that looked down on Folsom Lake. I'll never forget when it came into my view. I pulled over and got out to give a gaze. It instantly made me miss Minnesota as I looked upon the giant man made lake. I grew up a fisherman in the land of lakes, walleye country! One day my boys will fish also and seeing what nana and papa were living next to now I was filled with happy thoughts of getting them started as little outdoors men. But now flash forward through three years of rapidly intensifying drought...

 

 

...pictures don't lie. To stand in that same spot today, I feel like the native American with the tear streaming down his cheek while someone drives by on the highway and hucks their trash on to the roadside. It's all been let out into the central valley to alleviate the drought. It's gone, in short and when or if it will ever come back...well that's why I'm writing this.
  I suppose some sort of thesis or mission statement is owed to you, my reader, by now. Before you think I'm trying to get a donation out of you or tear your heart asunder with horrifying images and bleeding heart stories. I'm not working for Greenpeace or asking you to hug a tree and stop flushing your toilet. I'm quite simply condensing the info for you that I've acquired through tracking this drought and imparting a message of hope in what appears to be an increasingly hopeless situation. In short, I'm telling a personal story.
  The fact of my life is that I have three young boys to raise, in a city that has to have it's water delivered. The Colorado river basin and the Sierra Nevada runoff that we Californians depend on is disappearing so fast that my sleepless nights are spent wondering what my sons world will look like in ten years. And when I say ten I'm not exaggerating, we are that close to the edge here. It's not like I get to sleep much these nights anyway, but I admit that the fear and stress I've been feeling when I look at scenes like the above picture, has had a grip on me for too long now. If it were not for the good news that my reading eventually led me to, I don't think I would even be able to write this because then... I would start preaching, and no one wants that. Before I keep droning on about this subject though, I would like to mix it up a bit and drone on about a little geography. It isn't my favorite subject, just to let you know, so i'll try to be funny for both of us...to be continued.