Magical Drink Will Make You Grow!!

To my surprise, I'd felt most at home in the Mid-West. But as a liberal Californian, I couldn't have such high hopes for Texas. How would I survive? Despite my woes, the Lone Star state was smack dab in the middle of my cross-continental drive, and there was no missing it.

Luckily, I had someone familiar waiting for me on the other end. It was great to see my techie cousin David from hyper-liberal Davis, Berkeley's edible and political pantry. This smart guy had found a summer home for himself as an intern in Austin, and we had a good time touring Dallas's butter-heavy food scene together. Soon enough I'd found that this rival metropolis was actually darn close to my coastal hometown.

Turns out that San Diego and Dallas both have massive populations of nearly 2 million people, and both are positioned on either end of the arid Southwest. What was once a drab agricultural pitstop on the Friar's mission trail is now San Diego, the 8th biggest city in the U.S.. That's a lot of thirsty gullets to quench on the edge of the desert. Let's take a rough glance:

• 1870's 2,000        thirsty people
• 1900   20,000      thirsty people - an order of magnitude!
• 1940   200,000    thirsty people - another order!
• 1970's 750,000    thirsty people - 3x national growth rate!
• Today 1,500,000 thirsty people - doubled again!
  

(Rough #'s from San Diego History Center)

Yes indeed, every time another Texan moved to the beach, Diegan mayors and tycoons went hunting for water. Or was it the other way around? Either way, San Diego is water-limited, and its growth is water-induced.

Texas cruisin' babe! This country is BIG country, from its twangy radio to its open plains.

All of that thirst can really put a slice of stress in your piña colada; in drought years our stressed beachgoers have gone a bit wacky for rainmakers, inviting soothsayers like sewing machine salesman Charles Hatfield. But the real results seem to come from water projects. The most recent growth spurt in 1960 flowed in tandem with the construction of an aqueduct to the Colorado River. Today the Colorado River, in the desert on the other side of the mountains, is the lifeline of the city, from which the vast majority of San Diegans drink. Now that sounds like a crockpot idea to me too.

And since I'm from a city of sunburnt crockpots, I'll be dammed if I don't think outside of the pipe. Why don't we try catching our rainwater or coastal fog, and recycling the runoff from our lovely lawns? We could take a hint from the Israelis or the Namibians, who can't really ignore the fact that they live in the desert and have been relying on drip irrigation and wastewater recycling for decades. I may not be dressed in suit and tie, but all this desert wanderer wants is water, please! No ice :)