Exodus (3) — Sandra

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 fascinating [[TODO: No wall break; experience]] 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 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’, a road that winds over the Tehachapis mountains north of Los Angeles, I study one of the largest slights against those farmers: a giant pump system designed 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 their 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. And it provides a good turnaround point. If I just gasup and get back on the I-5, I will be home for dinner.

To ponder this decision point, I visit Jones Coffee Roasters. Besides good coffee, they have a giant, crowned, lamb mural. Praying to the lamb does not give me insight. In the end, the sugar in the kouign-amann drives me forward to Phoenix. Or maybe I am driven forward by the resentment for the years I was sent to do dialysis in Redding… when I would prefer to be in San Diego or somewhere warm.

The trip from Pasadena to Phoenix — provides a very consistent scenery… of desert. And more desert. And towns along the desert. And casinos along the desert. And ‘Coachella’ where the San Andreas fault (running through the desert) meets the I-10. So a view of… a deep (but narrow) chasm in the desert.

If I had the time to stop along the way to Phoenix, I can also visit tanks, fake dinosaurs, and strange-looking trees. But I am in a hurry,

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