Venice

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EXODUS — SANDRA

It is very cold — as the sun starts lighting up the sky. I do the graveyard dialysis session for Satellite in Redding, California. This type of session is for patients that need a longer and gentler dialysis: 23 patients and I spend eight hours together starting from 10PM. Almost everyone sleeps, although some watch late night television.

I hate the cold, but today is the beginning of a new life. Or at least a vacation. My first marker is near Phoenix, which should be ‘a tad’ warmer. It is a long drive (maybe 13 hours), but is super-wide freeways as soon as I reach I-5 until I get off the I-10. With a tank full of gas, my Prius should be able to get to Los Angeles before it — I hear some people personify and name their cars, but that seems very nerdy to me — needs to be refilled. My guess is I will stop a couple times on the way for Peets and In-n-Out, so it might take me more like nine hours to get to Pasadena where I ‘change direction’ and head pure east.

The drive down I-5 is both boring and fascinating if you know what you are looking for. California is like a giant garden where instead of hoses or pipes coming from your house to water various trees and plants you are growing, the water cascades down from the Sierras through aqueducts and rivers to reach huge tracts of plants and trees… which are growing food for the whole nation. As you drive down the I-5 from true Northern California (north of Sacramento), you can see the rivers cross under the highway headed due west for the coastal populations. But the aqueducts weave back and forth with the I-5 to support all the farms along the way to Los Angeles. That ‘support’ varies though: water is allocated to farms, and that allocation may not be sufficient for those farms to survive. Especially on years where California is in drought, which appears to be currently two out of every three.

While I progress to Los Angeles, I weave with the aqueducts a

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dozen or more times. I also see a dozen or more billboards saying “No Water… No Jobs!”, “Where water flows… food grows!”, and similar. Many farmers are very angry about the water allocation in California.

As I approach the ‘Grapevine’ that winds over the Tehachapis mountains north of Los Angeles, I study one of the largest slights against those farmers: a giant pump system to push millions of gallons of aqueduct water over the grapevine with me. A couple million gallons each minute. Three billion a day. A trillion gallons a year. All streaming by the farms on its merry way to quench the thirsts of the people and the lawns of Los Angeles. I can’t imagine why those farmers are so angry.

I stop in Pasadena — because it is a nice city along the highways to Phoenix. I also went to college here, so it provides both fond and unpleasant memories. Nostalgia I guess.

Pasadena is pretty hip, so I can get some good lunch and coffee. I visit Jones Coffee Roasters to visit the giant mural of a sheep and get a good mocha. I am an Ares born in the Lunar Year of the Ram, so the sheep is triply-cute to me. After polishing off a KouignAmann and the Mocha, I head onward to Phoenix by taking Raymond Ave North – to East on California Blvd – to North on Pasadena Ave – onto the Long Beach Freeway – which merges onto the 210 east. From there I shift onto the 10 east out by the Claremont colleges. LA directional descriptions were ingrained into me during the decade I spent down there.

The trip from Los Angeles to Phoenix involves

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