Where the water goes, p.17
Where the Water Goes, page 17
13.
BOONDOCKING
South of Parker Dam, the Colorado winds for about ninety miles through or alongside the reservation of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, which covers nearly 300,000 acres in southwestern Arizona and southeastern California. The reservation was established in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. Its residents include four thousand Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi, and Navajo Indians, known collectively as the Colorado River Indian Tribes. As a result of various court cases and legal settlements, the tribes own the right to use more than 700,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water—about a quarter of Arizona’s entire allotment. That water is used to irrigate roughly eighty thousand acres of tribal land, much of which is leased to non-Indian farmers.
The second largest town inside the reservation, after Parker, is Poston. It consists of little more than a few dozen houses and a depressing-looking post office, but during World War II it was the site of one of the country’s largest Japanese American internment facilities, the Poston War Relocation Center. The center was divided into three separate detention camps, and because of their location, in what was then an especially remote part of the desert, there were no guard towers and the perimeter fence didn’t go all the way around: like a dare. In 1999, the National Park Service published an illustrated history of all the country’s internment facilities, Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites. The book says that summer temperatures at Poston were so high, and winds from the desert so strong, that internees named the three camps Roasten, Toasten, and Dustin, and that the lumber used for the buildings shrank so much, because of the dryness and the heat, that the contractor—Del Webb, who three years later became a co-owner of the New York Yankees—had to fill the gaps with millions of feet of wood strips.
Just beyond the southern end of the reservation, on the California side of the river, I looped around to the north and drove up Colorado River Road. Almost all the houses on both sides were trailers or double-wides, and the ones on the right-hand side stood on lots that backed up to the river and had their own docks. RVs and boats were parked in many of the driveways, and some of the lots were surrounded by chain-link security fences with sliding gates. Next to one of the driveways was an enormous saguaro cactus and a cross made from four-by-fours and covered with what looked like plastic rings. The cactus was more than twenty feet tall, and one of its many arms, up near the top, looked like a bunched-up mutant fist. Next to another driveway was a mailbox in the shape of a reduced-scale but still quite large Jet Ski. Its owner was standing next to it, retrieving his mail. As I drove by, I shouted, “Nice mailbox!” and he nodded the way you would if you had just won an award and wanted people to know it hadn’t gone to your head. In another driveway, a guy was cleaning a set of golf clubs.
The northern end of Colorado River Road merges into the entrance of Mayflower Park, an RV campground and recreational area owned by Riverside County. I told the guard at the gate that I was just looking, and he let me drive in without charging me for a day pass. “The clear blue of the river mimics the beautiful blue skyline with spacious green grass nestled in between,” the website says. The park has 179 RV sites, most of them with hookups, and it has picnic areas, horseshoe courts, shuffleboard courts, a lawn-bowling pitch, places to fish, and a big boat ramp leading down to the river, which at that point is a couple of hundred yards wide. I parked near a picnic area and walked down to the river. The water was low, and it barely seemed to be moving, despite a sign that said swimming was forbidden because of dangerous currents. The long view was nice, though: the beautiful blue skyline mentioned on the website, plus a dog pile of cumulus clouds above the full length of the Dome Rock mountain range, ten miles to the east.
Parking an RV at Mayflower in a site with a full hookup works out to somewhere between $200 and $300 a week, including charges for things like trash collection and holding-tank dumping. At one of the occupied sites, two older men were trying to reposition a satellite-television dish, which had blown over during the night, while their wives sat in lawn chairs and paid no attention to them. One of the men was somewhat taller, balder, and heavier than the other, and one of the wives was holding an aluminum cane and a well-behaved Australian terrier. Halfway between the men and the wives was a metal picnic table covered with a blue-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth, and on top of the tablecloth were a propane cooktop, a Culligan water filter still in the box, a hose nozzle, a foot-tall green plastic Christmas tree attached to a power strip, some Bungee cords, a toaster-size glass terrarium with a gift bow tied around it, and a large ceramic smiling frog sitting on a ceramic log embossed with the word “Welcome.” I introduced myself and tried to help with the satellite dish, but mostly I got in the way. The dish’s owner told me that he and his wife were from Oregon, and that the other couple, whom they had just met, were from Canada. “A lot of the people here are from Canada,” he said. “If you stay for any length of time, I highly recommend a water softener. The water here is like liquid concrete.” That water comes from a well, not the river, and Mayflower Park had been having serious problems with it for a while. At the other end of Colorado River Road, on a peninsula-like bend in the river, I drove through a larger, family-owned campground, Hidden Beaches Resort. Most of the people spending the winter there were doing it not in RVs but in mobile homes that looked like permanent installations. An online reviewer a few years ago complained that the river at Hidden Beaches looked “drained and muddy.”
Mayflower Park and Hidden Beaches are on the outskirts of Blythe, which is the biggest town in the Palo Verde Irrigation District, a long, skinny agricultural area that borders the Colorado on the California side and draws water from it. Palo Verde’s water right has a priority date of 1877. The intake is at a thousand-foot-wide diversion dam and spillway at the northern tip of the district, five or six miles upstream from Mayflower Park. From the dam, the water flows into a “desilting basin,” and then through a network of canals and ditches to roughly ninety thousand acres of cultivated land. I drove past a recently plowed field whose furrows were so straight and sharp and smooth that the field looked like brown corduroy pulled tight on an artist’s canvas stretcher. The soil was as dark as chocolate, and for a moment I thought it must have been brought in from somewhere else—maybe India, where real estate developers in the United Arab Emirates buy topsoil for golf courses—but of course it was just silt deposited by the wandering Colorado. I saw fields in every condition from recently harvested to about-to-be harvested to recently planted to empty. I also saw warehouse-size stacks of baled forage crops, mainly alfalfa and Sudan grass. And I stopped briefly at the main entrance of the main section of the Palo Verde Ecological Reserve, a thirteen-hundred-acre conservation area that runs along the river for a few miles, beginning a short distance upstream from Mayflower Park. The reserve was created in 2007 by the state Fish and Game Commission plus various partners. It consists almost entirely of former farmland, which has gradually been planted with cottonwood, mesquite, and other native riparian vegetation. The project is an attempt to re-create something like a natural floodplain habitat, and the old irrigation levees that crisscross the replanted fields make good hiking and biking trails. Hunting is allowed; a sign near the parking area said “Shotgun Shells Are Litter, Too!”
In 2003, state and municipal water authorities in California, together with the U.S. Department of the Interior, negotiated the Quantification Settlement Agreement for the Colorado River, a pact that is being phased in and will take full effect in 2021. Its purpose is to reduce California’s reliance on the Colorado River to its compact allotment, 4.4 million acre-feet, and to “transfer” a significant fraction of that water from farms to Los Angeles and San Diego. In 2004, in conjunction with the agreement, the Palo Verde Irrigation District made a long-term deal with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to annually supply municipal users there with as much as 118,000 acre-feet by fallowing, on a rotating basis, up to twenty-eight percent of the district’s farmland. As I drove around, I saw many fallowed fields—which stand out from cultivated fields, even ones on which crops have been planted but haven’t begun to come up yet, because they look as though they were quietly trying to turn back into desert. Landowners receive a bonus payment for signing up for the program, then an additional fee for every acre they take out of production. They’re allowed to apply small amounts of water periodically to keep their fields viable and their irrigation systems functioning, and fields that have been fallowed for a year are typically more productive when they’re planted again, after “resting.” The 2004 agreement runs for thirty-five years and could eventually transfer a total of almost four million acre-feet of Colorado River water from the district to metropolitan Los Angeles.
• • •
FROM BLYTHE, I headed east across the river to Quartzsite, Arizona. It’s famous partly for being one of the hottest places in the United States, partly for being what the town’s website calls the Rock Capital of the World, and partly for being what may be the country’s largest wintertime RV assembly point. The town has a permanent population of only about thirty-five hundred, but it attracts more than two million visitors every year, most of them during months when my yard in New England is covered with snow. Almost all the visitors arrive in RVs or in trucks pulling some sort of trailer. (There’s only one motel, a Super 8, within twenty miles of the town center.) The area doesn’t have enough wired and plumbed campsites for all the people who show up, so the majority “boondock,” by parking in the desert on one side or another of the highways that intersect there, mostly on Bureau of Land Management land. Sam Penny, an RVer and a travel blogger, first visited with his wife, Alice, in 1999 and wrote, “I decided the main thing when boondocking at Quartzsite was to park in a place that had intrinsic beauty. Later I found that one should also look for some place where those with generators would not gather, at least if you happen to be a solar boondocker like we were.”
The World Wide Web and Amazon.com have been a great gift for older people who now live mainly in RVs and have things on their mind. The most recent posting I could find on any of Penny’s numerous blogs is from late 2014, so I fear the worst, but during his traveling and publishing heyday his principal areas of interest included the trips he took with Alice; outfitting his RV, a fifth wheel with slide-outs; the Ebola virus; solar power and LEDs; the possibility of a new killer earthquake occurring on the New Madrid Fault in the Mississippi River Valley (a disaster he explored in two science-fiction novels); and “the Great Collapse of our civilization.” Just south of Quartzsite, I passed a huge motor coach parked by itself in an empty expanse of desert next to the highway. The owner had positioned his vehicle so that one of its long sides faced the road, and he had hung up an enormous, not-inexpensive-looking banner announcing that books he had written were available online (and also, I assumed, in the motor coach). I wanted to drop by, but I couldn’t figure out how to get to the place where he was parked without registering at a BLM campsite.
I know something about RVs. My father rented a twenty-seven-foot Dodge motor home in Denver in 1967 after picking me up at summer camp in Florissant, and then he and my mother and sister and brother and I spent a week traveling around Colorado in it. My father had trouble getting it up Monarch Pass in a storm and then much more trouble getting it down on the other side, and one night the holding tank suddenly overflowed all over the floor, and sleeping with the generator running turned out to be even harder than sleeping with the generator (and therefore the air conditioner) turned off. My mother assumed that these and other hardships would kill my father’s interest in RVing, whose sudden emergence had taken her by surprise, but instead they inflamed it, and during the next eighteen years he owned three. Each new one was larger and more luxurious than its predecessor, and each was known in our family and to my parents’ friends as the Bus. When I was in high school, I was allowed to borrow the first two Buses. The look on the face of a mother whose daughter is being picked up to be taken to a drive-in movie by a high school junior driving a Greyhound-size motor home is impossible to convey with words. We first got a color TV in our house in the early seventies, because the second Bus had come with one and my mother complained. The third and final Bus was thirty-five feet long. It was custom-built to my father’s exacting specifications by Newell Coach, a company in Oklahoma, and many of its numerous ingenious features were designed around cocktail hour. My father parked the Bus at the end of our driveway on a thick concrete pad that had to be repoured because the first pour (he had determined) wasn’t perfectly level.
I myself have rented RVs twice: the first time in 1991 for a New Yorker assignment during which I traveled around New Jersey with the performers of a one-ring circus, and the second time for that big western trip my wife and I took with our kids in 2006. Neither experience made me wish I owned an RV, but my wife and I have often talked about renting one again. Her interest is surprising in a way, because she’s a reluctant traveler under almost any circumstances, but not surprising in another, because there is something deeply comforting and seductive about traveling around in a semi-self-sufficient and somewhat womb-like container and spending time in welcoming communities of fellow adventurers who decorate their vehicles with ceramic frogs and signs that say “If the RV’s a-Rockin’, Don’t Come a-Knockin’.” (Sam Penny, describing a campground in one of his blogs, wrote, “At times it can seem like a hotbed from Peyton Place, if you know what I mean.”) Campgrounds where people park RVs are fun to walk around in because you never run out of interesting things to look at and think about, as on the sidewalks of Manhattan. Several times during non-RV travels of my own, I’ve met retired people who told me they had sold the house in which they raised their children and now lived solely in their RV, moving whenever they got bored with wherever they happened to be. I can’t imagine doing that myself, but I can imagine what it must be like: perfect liberty in your own covered wagon, minus the horrors of the real Old West.
For people who own RVs and hate what winter is like in the place where they usually live, the southern reaches of the Colorado River exert a strong gravitational pull, which is amplified by the presence of multitudes of other people who feel the same way. In Quartzsite, the main draws include RV and camping shows; rock, gem, and fossil shows; craft shows; antiques shows; and flea markets. The very biggest shows, which attract many thousands of visitors, are held in January and February. I was a month too early for those, but large numbers of winter visitors had begun to arrive, and I did stop at an open-air stand in the center of town where I could have bought Dremel bits, carpeting, Minnesota pipestone, decorative wall hangings, and push brooms. “We saw ground polished rock balls from marble size to bigger than a basketball,” Sam Penny wrote in 1999. “I am not sure what one does with rock balls, but some of my friends might know.” I could have bought geodes, fake-stone garden gnomes, equipment for turning ordinary-looking rocks into gems, fossilized dinosaur turds, and clocks that looked like other things. Also, if I’d needed it and had something to hold it in, I could have bought freshwater from a freshwater filling station whose storage tanks had been decorated to look like yellow-and-black floppy-eared elephants. (They dispensed water from their trunks.) Water filling stations—some of which look like gas stations and a few of which look as though they might have started out as one-hour-photo kiosks—are common in the entire region, and for people who boondock they’re a necessity.
I also visited Quartzsite’s cemetery. In the era before RVs (and also before trains, airplanes, and highways), the baking deserts of the southwestern United States posed a serious transportation conundrum: how do you get from one side to the other? One possible solution, first proposed in the 1830s, was camels. Jefferson Davis, who became Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war in 1853, was an enthusiast, and in 1856 he persuaded Congress to spend $30,000 on a test. The Army eventually imported about seventy camels, mainly from Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Mongolia, along with a few experienced handlers. One of the handlers was a Syrian (or possibly a Greek, Jordanian, or Turk) named Hadji Ali, who in this country was usually known by an Americanized nickname: Hi Jolly.
In most respects, the experiment worked extraordinarily well. The camels carried heavy loads, and contentedly ate desert vegetation that other Army animals wouldn’t, and traveled extremely long distances between water breaks. Hi Jolly once saved five American soldiers pinned down by Indians by racing toward the Indians on a camel while waving a scimitar and shouting in Arabic. But the camels didn’t get along with the Army’s horses and mules, and most of the soldiers were suspicious. Then the South seceded from the Union, and Jefferson Davis turned his attention elsewhere. Some of the camels were later sold or given away, and some were set loose in the desert, where their descendants were spotted, occasionally, as late as the 1940s. Hi Jolly—who by then was known as Philip Tedro—died in Quartzsite in 1902. In 1935, the Arizona Highway Department erected a pyramid-shaped monument over his grave, and the town later renamed the entire cemetery after him. The monument is made partly from large pieces of petrified wood—chunks of which are always available for sale at the rock, gem, and fossil shows in town. The principal speaker at the monument’s dedication ceremony was Governor Moeur, who was taking a break from his water war with California.
