Water wealth
by
The late-summer green of forests, marshes, swamps, and riparian verges shocked me again as it always does when I visit the East Coast. Coming up from Washington, D.C. to Bradley, CT, I watched it all stretch out below me, first abstracted ribbons of river meanders and forests like green fur, and slowly resolve to the over-saturated reality of forests and trees at landing approach. As a California, which I think I can now say I am after over 20 years, I see the water and the evidence of water and I think "what wealth!"
Right now, this moment as I write this, it's raining, a perfectly ordinary thing for late August in Connecticut. And yet, still, I think, how extraordinary and wonderful, how lush and rich. People on the East Coast, and other places where it rains year-round like this, I suppose don't think of water so much, because they don't need to.
In her essay "Holy Water" (1977) on the California water system, Joan Didion wrote, "Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive." And later in the same essay, she wrote, "Water is important to people who do not have it." In a contemporaneous critical review, Martin Amis wrote about "Holy Water" that Didion "indulg[ed] her curious obsession with Californian waterworks." Of course an English man, living in England where they are are so wealthy in water that they hardly think of it, would find Didion's interest in waterworks a "curious obsession." It is difficult to understand, to imagine, to deeply internalize that what it means to live in a place without enough of a resource that falls freely from the sky at all times of the year and in fact so much so as to be a nuisance or even serious problem.
"The West begins," Bernard DeVoto wrote, "where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches." This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read[...]. - Didion, "Holy Water"
Perhaps, if I ever moved back to the East Coast again, or moved to another water-wealthy part of the world my mind would recalibrate to what shade of green is normal for late August, and begin to take for granted or at least plan my garden around the idea of regular rain. For now, each time I visit these places, I remain surprisingly surprised.