Goodnight, California

I offer another chronicle, a 14-hour tour of the skeleton I once knew as California.

An acquaintance had also emailed and reminded me that not far away there was a mound of used drip hose on the roadside. That mess proved to be quite large, maybe 1,000 feet of corroded and ripped up plastic hose. I suppose no scavenger thinks it can be recycled. I promise to haul it away this week. One must be prompt: even a small pile attracts dumpers like honey to bees. They are an ingenious and industrious lot (sort of like the cunning and work ethic of those who planted IEDs during the Iraq War). My cousin

Most of the rest of the states will hold out much longer.

Got to disagree...

Most States run by conservative legislations are doing fine...

Most are not even close to collapse nor will be in the future...

Of course all bets are off if the entire country goes bankrupt and even if it does states are sovereign entities...

I know it horrible to contemplate (at least in DC) we don't actually need DC to keep our states running...

Lived in SoCal for 20 years......left 5 years ago. Husband's company gave up and moved to a neighboring state so they could stay in business. I really miss friends, the activities and the beauty that California is. Driving down the 5 through the Central Valley in the fall of 2009, I noticed many small yellow signs that said ‘Congress Created Dustbowl’. Nearly 6 years later, the whole state is experiencing what the Central Valley has been enduring for a while now. I don't know what it would take to awaken the Legislators to reverse their agenda, but it is destroying a beautiful state. This seems to have really ramped up since Motor-Voter became Law. I pray the whole country doesn't follow California into the silt at the bottom of the pond. But we are all heading there at full tilt right now. Some a bit slower than others, but the Feds are assuring we will all end up in the same place eventually.

A rather melancholy bit, that.

All that remains is the original house I live in and 40 acres.

It used to be a much bigger farm than that and VDH was, before he became a classicist, a raisin farmer. Try that now and you lose everything. And, as he has pointed out with less bitterness than I would have, people with palatial Hollywood mansions are complaining that their lawns are brown because - wait for it - of the rapacious farmers.

This isn't, of course, the first drought that California has experienced, but it is the first with the sort of population density that makes it impossible to endure and a political system that makes it impossible to cure. A farm can go back to the land in a handful of years after decades of cultivation; a city takes decades of senescence before it turns into the sort of hellhole that cannot support life, especially if the inhabitants find it within their means to stave off ruin by plundering the dwindling rural economy. If I were a rural landholder there such as VDH I wouldn't be for long. Things are likely to get much worse before they get better.

Already the signs of plunder are before us through VDH's eyes. Gangs of dumpers, gangs of collectors, copper thieves, property invaders, and vandals seeking anything worth stealing. For now these are only temporary interlopers. In time they'll have come to stay.

It is with a bit of cosmic irony that a region populated by Dust Bowl refugees should now find itself being depopulated by the same. Sad that those who managed to make it a go are now being ushered out by rule-changers and playing-field-tippers, a productive class displaced so that the unproductive may lay claim to land they can do nothing with. There isn't much room for a freeholder in that mess. Time to pack it in and go.

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