Gotham, Gauteng

Lightning strikes Hillbrow Tower in Gauteng. Photo credit: GoodThingsGuy.com

Orange streetlights spill into the darkness. The robot turns red. Shift down, accelerate, fly through. A driver never stops in this city.

Lightning strikes sideways across the sky, and a single bolt strikes at the needle-like tower at the city center. No one blinks.

On a quiet side street, a constant buzz. On top of the walls of each house hums a trio of electric wires. In the next neighborhood over, bottle shards top the walls. Unannounced visitors should knock first.

Along the roadside, open fires burn, melding eerily with the dim streetlights. Two shadowy figures huddle amidst the swirling smoke. It will be a cold night.

As the sun rises, the streets teem with activity. Fruit trees shine in their green glory. Buses hurtle past, screeching to a stop as passengers flash hand signals to the driver. Students trot to school in uniform. Fruit vendors fill the sidewalk. Tradesmen hawk their wares at the traffic light. Walking past a seemingly empty lot one peers over the fence to see a swarm of people, working below ground to erect a massive skyscraper. This city is surging forward, unified in the belief of the freedom to make a rand on the Witswatersrand. This is the City of Gold, dug from the bowels of the earth, laid brick by brick, a bustling place at the heart of the province with nearly the same name: 

Welcome to Gotham, Gauteng.

Jo-burg CBD

It is a city with Two Faces. The Gau-train rumbles past handsome estates, shack cities and belching coal plants.

It is a city of Jokers with international acclaim, Riddled with opportunity and ridden with crime.

Its wild Penguins cannot be trusted, their tuxedos and suits merely a guise for greed and corruption.

It is the ultimate Scarecrow, whisking away potential visitors with violent lullabies.

If you live nearby, you avoid a visit.

If you visit Gotham, you leave in a hurry.

If you live in another city, you know every reason why Gotham is the world's most miserable place to be. After all, you could die there.

But those who ride its streets know that the city's richness doesn't just come through the gold pumping through its subterranean veins.

Here, segregation is broken by the hilly landscape, with no mountains to separate people.

The entire continent flocks to Gotham's doorstep.

This is where music is made.

Where cultures collide.

Where languages are born. After all, Sifanakaloku - we are all the same.

Yho! Here was the very origin of humankind!

And in the spring - every tree is set ablaze with the purple petals of a million Jacaranda trees.

In the day Gotham comes to life.

But every night, this city needs a superhero.

Mother City, Sister City

I’m a big gardener. I love to watch the hummingbird and monarchs flit from flower to flower, and when I can, I like to add a new vine or shrub for them to enjoy. When I can account for rain, that is.

This week’s projections of rain were a welcome sight, but as yesterday came and went we were left with a whopping 0.04 inches. A pittance! And a pittance is the norm. In the last decade our frequency of wet years has halved to once every four years. It’s feeling awfully dry.

Wild Watsonias at Blue Gums, Cape Town

Fortunately, we are in a shared situation. At the opposite end of the globe, the Mother City of Cape Town, South Africa is wrestling with drought. They deal with the same Mediterranean climate as we do in San Diego, California – dry summers, wet winters. Well, usually wet winters – up to 31 inches, triple that of San Diego.  Just like us, Cape Town has had to learn to store enough water to get through the summer – and the occasional drought. Sitting at the tip of Africa, the City is highly isolated and surrounded by desert, without the opportunity to import supplies from distant watersheds.

Cape Town is also in the running for the world’s most beautiful city. It sits at the foot of a majestic mountain on the edge of the ocean, surrounded by abundant flora like their hundreds of native orchid species. I had the good fortune of living there and enjoying their sweet water. I worked with a team of lumberjacks to remove invasive plants which were drying up a mountainside creek that we called Blue Gums. We didn’t have pipes, just the clouds as they crashed into the peak of Cape Point and replenished the flow. With the trees cleared, the stream turned to a creek, rushing down the mountainside into the crashing waves.

Boulder Creek in San Diego, Feb 2018

The creek at Blue Gums is now just a trickle, in Cape Town’s current drought conditions. And the pipes that feed the city are similarly running dry. Here in San Diego, while the coastal areas have only received rain twice since last May, the mountain areas hold out with a small trickle, like this creek flowing from Cuyamaca Peak.

The future is uncertain, and yet we optimistically act as though we can forecast the next rain. In Cape Town, they are down to the wire, with less than 100 days left before the City turns of the taps. And with that kind of pressure, people are getting creative. This weekend, the Science Center is holding an event to “Hack the Water Crisis” to involve everyone in finding creative solutions to last the City until the wet season.

Capetonians made the mistake of fully relying on their City Supply, without taking responsibility for individual consumption. They waited until the last minute, and are running out of time. In San Diego, we have the benefit of last year’s bountiful rain. We should take advantage of the time that rain brought to us to adapt our own thirsty system to this new dry norm.

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I’ll keep you up to date with any brilliant ideas from the Hack-a-Thon this weekend, the story of how we restored the stream at Blue Gums, and applications for our everyday lives here in California.

Flash Flood

Irrigation canal for desert agriculture. Mexicali, Baja California

It has been a very dry season - in our city of San Diego, and on this blog. This rainy season has hosted but one lonely storm. The cry of drought has yet to sound, perhaps because this is our new norm. In the last two decades, only three years have boasted above average rainfall.

This blog has lain dormant as well, but not for lack of activity. Since my last post on the shores of the Atlantic, the trail of the Aridland Ambassador has taken me to deserts, watersheds and visionary cities around the world. I have devoted myself to a career in water, working to restore abandoned streams and neglected inner-city creeks. And I have grown intellectually while studying hydrology and watershed science at San Diego State University.

The world seems to be descending into extremes, but there are so many ways for us to right the ship. Over the next few months I will begin blogging again, recollecting those memories from my time abroad [2013-2015] as an Aridland Ambassdor and my last three years learning about the Colorado River Watershed and the City of San Diego as a graduate student. Let it rain!