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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 10 p.m.. 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: California is like a giant garden where instead of hoses 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. I can see the rivers cross under the highway headed west for the coastal populations as I come down from Redding. Later I can see the aqueducts weaving back and forth with the I-5 to support all the farms along the way to Los Angeles. Large tracts of planted vegetation organized into various kinds of patterns. Depending on the angle of the field, they look like they are just in rows. But something about the repetition also makes them appear to be laid out in diagonals that match hexagons. And in the rear-view mirror, different columns and diagonals appear.

Many of the fields are completely brown and dry. A few have

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water flooding parts of them. Clearly the amount of water these farms are getting varies a lot. And none of them are getting as much as they would like. This is even a year we aren’t officially in a drought… yet. But the water a farm is allocated is based on decades of water rights and the needs of the many, which clearly outweighs the needs of the few… or the one.

While I progress to Los Angeles, I do-si-do with the aqueducts a dozen more times. I also read a dozen billboards saying “No Water… No Jobs!”, “Where water flows… food grows!”, and similar.

At the base of the ‘Grapevine’, the part of the I-5 that winds over the Tehachapis mountains north of Los Angeles, I study one of the largest visible 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 North, 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.

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