10/6: So we drove east from Clearlake. With an abruptness that tickled my amateur geologist curiousity, the yellow mountains turned into a completely flat valley. Far away on the horizon, we could barely see the other mountain range through the shimmering heat. We had reached the Central Valley. This is where a big part of all the vegetables and fruits that are eaten in the United States come from. The orchards and water covered fields took turns making up our view from our car windows.
We stopped by the signs, informing us that they sold fruit. These days, our diet consisted mostly of in season Californian fruit and berries. The heat was like a wall as soon as we stepped out of the car. Staying out in the sun for a longer period of time would havr been impossible.
I guess this plateau, which probably used to be seafloor and therefore has soil that is high in calcium and other nutrients, is very fertile. But I couldn’t help feeling the heat and seeing the clear blue sky and thinking that this needs huge amounts of irrigation. Probably from aquifers that are stressed as hell. And it made me sad. Because, even though I love peaches and nectarines, I don’t think they are worth the price of depleting our groundwater for. I really need to get back to university, so that I can learn what to do about it.
The cities and towns that we drove through in the Central Valley, didn’t feel like cities at all. They were just stretches of malls and Walmarts and drive-through restaurants along the highway. We had obviously reached another part of America, not the Arcata cute, small-scale, farmer’s market California coast, but the large-scale, corporate inland. Hanna wanted to visit a Walmart, so we stopped at the one in Yoruba City. We left pretty quickly too.
Katja Malmborg 