waited for history, its elbows tense,
watching the curve of a particular road
as if something might happen.
--William Stafford, "At the Bomb Testing Site," 1966
A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.
--John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
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| Deadpool, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown 2022 |
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The camera briefly tilts down, showing the lakebed shattered by the heat of the sun like a windshield meeting a good sized stone.
Mind Wandering
If the scale were much larger, each rupture in the clay could hold groves of cottonwood at the bottom of moist dark canyons, where animal trails would wind through soft sand arroyos beneath the great shadowed cliffs, and where occasionally a human trail would lead to a series of ladders that, if climbed, would take one on top of hard flat mesas to pueblos and villages and missions and cathedrals that overlook corn fields below--magical places with names like Acoma, the sky city.
In a world like that, the impact of such a large quantity of shoe suddenly dropping from the sky would be astonishing enough for the plot of a B-grade movie. Or, if real, it would have far-enough reaching consequences to send a Fox-news host with furrowed eyebrows and a dumb, questioning look to ask, "But isn't science supposed to be skeptical?"
Shocked, the data guy he's interviewing would ask, "Didn't you watch the footage? It's on every network but yours."
"What is footage anyway?" would ask the Fox News host. "How do we even know it's real? Doesn't every news story have a slant to it? How can you sit there in your cloistered, liberal, elite world and claim to know what's real?"
"I can claim it's real because my wife, mother in-law, and three children were at mass when that giant shoe came down and ended my world."
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The head of the YouTuber is seen for the first time against an almost solid blue sky holding a single white cloud. He wears a cap and has a goatee and appears to be Mexican or Native American. He says, "I'm going to continue cruising around areas of the lake today, seeing exactly how low the water's gotten. This was all under water a year ago. It's rough right now. It really is. The cracks in the ground go down about a foot and a half, and there's fish down in the cracks. It's crazy."
Grappling
The rate at which Lake Mead is dropping is surreal. We've had a lot of the bizarrely accurate facts to deal with lately: the whole COVID experience, the attempted coup in Washington, riots across the nation, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and just this week, watching the supreme court casually unravel the constitution. Normal only remains normal when things are stable enough to establish trend lines. Normal never dictates that things will proceed as usual. Normal only suggests it, based on past data.
Upheaval does happen. I have always wondered what it would have been like to have stood at Red Rock Pass 15,000 years ago at the moment ancient Lake Bonneville, which once covered western Utah and parts of Idaho, Nevada and Oregon, emptied most of her 19, 691 square miles of lake, over 900 feet deep in places, in a Biblical-sized torrent that discharged 15 million cubic feet of water per second (compared to Niagara Falls, which discharges 100,000 cubic feet per second). Oh, how the earth must have shook!
Facts can be astonishing. Lake Mead has dropped 140 feet since 2000. That's the height of a fourteen-story building. At its lowest level since being filled in the 1930's, the reservoir is nearing dead pool status, when the water level is so low it can no longer flow down stream. The combined reservoirs of the Colorado River are at 50% capacity. If it gets to the point where California no-longer receives the river's waters, we will be at that moment when metaphorically a giant shoe drops from the sky and we can't wrap our heads around the new reality. Statistically speaking, some animals had to have stood at Red Rock Pass 15,000 years ago at such a moment--when the roar in their ears and the chaos before their eyes could not be comprehended based on previous experience.
We may be approaching such moment. Humans may soon observe the last drop of water from the Colorado River flow into the last orange grove California to receive it.
If you think that won't be a big deal, you know even less about economics than I do, and nothing about how much California is a part of your life, no matter where you live, especially if it's within the United States.
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Lake Mead--cool blue rippled water before sandy beach and a gravel ridge blotched by occasional brush. It could be any western reservoir on any given year unless one notices that the top of the ridge is actually the former shoreline. Then the houseboat on the beach, tiny in comparison, takes on significance and provides scale to just how much the lake has dropped.
Grappling
980 feet above the Salt Lake Valley there is a flat line that runs along the Wasatch Mountains called "The Bench". It is in fact a beach, the former shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville. Many homes are built on this flat and have sliding glass doors that open onto back patios that look over the valley below, and in the evening, the gloriously red Great Salt Lake at sunset. Prime real estate with prime views.
This too may be a moment in time, a moment of brilliance, before the lake, like the setting sun, is gone. If something is not done very soon, it is quite likely there will soon be a Utah without a Great Salt Lake. Hard to comprehend.
Worlds change, big and small, without participants realizing they were once at the flute-end of consequences.
When the big shoe of reality drops from the sky and lands on your tiny village, no amount of propaganda techniques from a news network dislodged from reality will alter the scale and immensity of the new normal impacting you.
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This fish here, on its side, half decayed, half embedded in cracked clay, it's dead rotted eye staring up at an overzealous sun, warns us of the scale and immensity of the loss we face.
Our YouTuber asks, "Why didn't the fish just swim to deeper water?"
He then pans around. "This little inlet closed, and the fish's world became a dead pool."
The waters were deep and cool. Life was good. The waters lowered. Life wasn't as good. Things became crowded. Still life was busy. Other fish to catch. Things to devour. Sex to have. Offspring to be born. Life went on. The problem was ignored.
Fish swam in and out through an ever narrowing channel between the pool and lake. One day the channel's water was too low. Perhaps there was panic. Perhaps there wasn't.
Regardless, the dead pool became the new reality.
Now, there is a fish, half decayed, half embedded in cracked clay. Its dead, rotted eye stares up that an overzealous sun.
There is a shoreline 980 feet above the Salt Lake Valley called "The Bench". It is in fact a beach, the former shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville. It speaks of a world that once was, now gone.
Unless we act quickly, the Great Salt Lake will be gone, as will Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and whatever forest is nearest to your back door.
The western United States has not witnessed drought like our current one in 1200 years. It is believed that one ended the Anasazi civilization. If that isn't a giant shoe dropping from the sky to wake us up to our new reality, what is?
There is skeptical. And then there is stupid. Climate change is real. It is that big shoe.
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