A Tale of Two Valleys

Our trip back was closer to the coast up the Salinas Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in California. It has been called 'the salad bowl of the nation' but is slowly being taken over, as is the entire state, by wine grape vines. There are still vast fields of lettuce, broccoli, cabbage and celery growing near the city of Salinas. The sight of acres of sprinklers is arresting in an otherwise dry state.

The Salinas Valley has relied for decades on an abundance of groundwater pumped from wells hundreds of feet deep, which allows them to irrigate the crops in the summer when there is no rain. It was overcast and much cooler today and the fog was still obscuring the hills to the east.

In the arid San Joaquin Valley (the Central Valley), which took us on our southward trip last week, so much groundwater has been pumped that the land has subsided by as much as 28 feet in some areas. 

Now water is transported from the north from reservoirs of Sierra snowmelt to supplement the groundwater and provide water for the crops. When drought affects the state, some Northern California water districts have been withholding valuable water for themselves, leaving Central Valley farmers to drill ever deeper wells or  just let their trees die,  leaving  acres of dead skeletons as a stark reminder that a lot of California, especially the south, is a desert. The movie Chinatown with Jack Nicholson was about the California water wars, as is the excellent book The Cadillac Desert by Marc Reiser.

As for us, the driving was slow, the roads choked with traffic complicated by a burning truck, which we never saw but which added an extra hour to the trip. As we set out this morning, we passed the Army convoy which screwed us up yesterday, now empty of its cargo and moving more quickly. When I put one of the pictures I took up on my computer, there was Arabic writing on it.