Tuesday, December 19th
Don't Take Away Our Polluted New River!
Not Enough New River?
Events befitting the turmoil of local water controversy have folks in California actually worried that we’re getting less and less of the most polluted river in North America.
Since the New River was formed in 1905 by the accidental breach of the irrigation delivery system from the Colorado River, Imperial County has annually received thousands of acre-feet of Mexican water free of charge. As Mexicali grew, however, so did the load of human feces, fertilizer, detergent, and the effluent from slaughterhouses and industrial plants. Just about every disease can be found in the New River. Fecal coliform counts remain thousands of times higher than allowed for human contact.
So why would anyone want this water? Since the historic Quantification Settlement Agreement was signed in 2003, California must find ways to live within its 4.4 million acre-feet allotment of water (something it has never done). And, despite its need to REDUCE its use of Colorado River water, southern California won’t be denied growth. Over the last fifty years, the New River has annually delivered about 150,000 acre-feet of water at the boundary, enough for about 300,000 homes. Filthy or not, that’s real water. So LA’s Metropolitan Water District has filed a claim on New River water.
If you doubt that New River water could be fit for any use, you’re wrong. The two U.S.-built power plants near Mt. Signal in Mexico have already tapped into New River water to cool their turbines. Recent looks at a US Geological Survey website show that annual flows of the New River at the international boundary are now 25% below 26 year average rates to about 112,500 acre-feet. Proposals for new transmission facilities near Mt. Signal indicate that SDG&E would like to build another power plant across the border to take advantage of a more streamlined permitting process, cheaper labor, and lax pollution enforcement. This means more Mexicali water diverted for cooling—and less water crossing the border.
All these developments have left the Calexico New River Committee puzzled. For five years, executive director Pablo Orozco and his committee have advanced a proposal to encase the New River from the border to beyond the Calexico city limits. They also want to put a trash screen at the border to stop the floating parade of debris and illegal immigrants who use the River. But how can they engineer an encasement project if the flow rate is a mysteriously shrinking target?
Meanwhile Mexicali is about to reduce the flow of the New River even further. A new pumping station and treatment plant known as Mexicali II will be operational this September. Funded by the U.S. EPA, Mexico, and Japan, this happy project is the culmination of steady progress to upgrade the Mexicali wastewater collection and treatment system. Much to the surprise of skeptical New River watchers, Mexicali will soon treat all its wastewater. Unfortunately, the US will no longer receive the treated water.
Mexicali II was set to be completed several years ago, but it was blocked by residents who didn’t want the waste-water treatment plant in their neighborhood of El Choropo, south of Mexicali. Consequently, an additional 18 kilometers of pipe had to be laid. Starting in September, 20 million gallons of water per day will be pumped “over the hump” of the ancient Colorado River delta. After treatment, that water will flow south, not north. Some treated New River water will irrigate a golf course and ecological park. Farmers may buy treated water for irrigation, and the remaining flow will drain into the Rio Hardy and the Sea of Cortez.
Suddenly the problem of the most polluted river in North America will have been transformed. Instead of the historical average of 150,000 acre-feet of water per year, the U.S. will receive only 90,000 acre-feet. The MWD wants the water, and so do we. Although a small part of the Salton Sea equation, a lessened New River flow at the border worsens an already intransigent problem about how to keep the Salton Sea wet.
Just when the New River will be substantially cleaner, just when the U.S. actually wants the New River water, the flow will drop by 40% of historical rates.
And soon it may be even less. Francisco Bernal, Mexicali representative of the International Boundary and Water Commission, has poured verbal acid into the turgid waters. “We plan to re-use all the New River water in Mexicali,” he said at a recent IBWC Citizens’ Forum meeting.
Bernal’s remarks were played down by Al Goff, Bernal’s counterpart in Yuma. “They’ll never eliminate the flow of water at the boundary,” said Goff. “At least not in our lifetimes.”
For water watchers in Southern California, there’s drama on every horizon.
bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 12.19.06 @ 02:44 PM PST [link]
Sage Advice at the Carnicería
Get It While You Can
As I walked up to the meat counter, one person was ahead of me. He had a cell phone to his ear and a pained look on his face. He glanced at me, as if seeking sympathy, and without saying a word, reached across the counter and handed the phone to the butcher.
He gave me a mournful look. “I’ll just screw it up,” he said, as if I was a buddy that had arranged a meeting with him there. “I’ll let her tell him herself what she wants.”
He sighed. “My wife, she makes a great caldo. You know what a caldo is?”
I nodded.
“I’ve got diabetes, so caldo is good for me. But I let her choose the vegetables.”
He began to examine imaginary potatoes. “If I do it she says, ‘This one is too ripe. This one has a bruise. This is one–’ there’s always something wrong with what I try to do for her.”
I agreed with him.
“Yeah,” he continued, “the women, they’re in charge. I told my son, ‘You better let them do what they want or you’ll be miserable.’”
The butcher listened intently with the tiny cell phone jammed against his heavy head. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief.
My new friend gestured in exasperation. “Look how long it’s taking her to tell him what she wants. I can’t believe it.”
He gave me a long hard look. His eyes bore into me with anxiety and determination. “That’s why Mexican men run around on their wives.”
I must’ve had a surprised look on my face. Well I was surprised. Do people tell you things like this in the grocery store?
He pressed on. “Yeah, their wives, they’re driving them crazy.”
Then he had a thought, like maybe he had incriminated himself before me. I mean, we hadn’t really done any male bonding at all. No drinking, no feats of courage, no bawdy jokes.
“I’m older now,” he said, a little apologetically. “I’ve mellowed.”
So did he or didn’t he do what Mexican men have to do?
He turned to face me. “This is how they are,” he began. “My wife and I, we went to Paris. We did the whole thing, the Louvre, what you call it, the Champs d’Elysse, Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, all that crap. She got tired of museums and sight seeing pretty fast, but she always found energy and time for shopping. She had to get something for everybody. And you know what, on the last day, she dragged me out again. I told her, ‘Now what? You’ve got a gift for every cousin you’ve ever met.’ And you know what she told me, ‘I’ve got to get some things for people that I’ve forgotten about.’”
I started looking at the meats to make my choices, figuring that my lack of attention might slow my new brother’s confession.
“That’s the best cut right there,” he told me. “Get the chicken too. That’s better for you. Humans aren’t really meat eaters, you see. Lions and tigers, they have a really rough stomach. But humans don’t.”
The butcher carefully handed the phone across the counter. “Did she tell you?” my pal asked.
The butcher nodded.
“You know what she wants now?”
The butcher patiently said yes, yes, and wandered off to get whatever it was.
For some reason, I imagined that my new friend was retired U.S. Navy. Maybe it was the authority with which he told me things, or the way he seemed so firmly planted on the ground, or the tight little mustache that graced his upper lip.
“My wife told me, ‘You can go out with the boys on Wednesday night,’ but the trouble was that I didn’t want to go out with the boys. I wanted to go out with the girls. I wanted to smell perfume, touch some skin. And you can’t play that game, going out with the girls, or just ‘the girl’ because, you know, that’s another woman. The second woman is not a third species. They want the same things. They want you to pay attention to them, they want you to make little gestures, so they know they’re wanted. Either that, or it’s just ‘show me the money.’ Yeah, get down to brass tacks.”
He backhanded me on the shoulder. “Except for these young ones,” he said, with a knowing, gnome-like sneer. “The ones who want to deny all that—that old-fashioned stuff about women being from Venus. Yeah, they use bad words and think nothing of mentioning farting. They sit and dress any way they want. They even talk about the ondas, sex, fucking, just like men—with men around. TO MEN! What happened to courting for God’s sake?–la movida-eh? How do any of them fall in love?” He was shouting now.
In a softer voice, he went on. “There’s trouble there.” He nodded and pointed his finger for emphasis.
He shook his head. “I’m out of my league there, anyway.” Smiling as if it took some effort, he continued. “All I want,” he paused. “All I want from her now is my own space, that’s it.” He drew his hand down and across the air.
“And in that space, what does she care if I go down to Mex from time to time and rent a little.” He held his hand up, his eyes wide and innocent. “I’m no don Juan, no. And I’m not putting on airs with another woman. Just want a little affection on my own terms. What’s wrong with that? They’re clean.”
The butcher handed two bundles across the counter. As my buddy reached to get them the butcher said, “She told me to give her two, but for six people, I thought that wasn’t enough, so I cut her three.”
“Too bad you aren’t the one paying for that,” my friend growled, but not in an unfriendly way. “Is that it?”
“No there’s another one,” said the butcher. “Just a minute.”
My friend rolled his eyes. “It was going to be one piece of meat. I’m glad it was him and not me.” He turned to set the packages in his basket. Passing a shelf of hot salsa, he gestured to the hottest one. “Get one of these,” he said, smiling. “Chile is good for you.” He made a tight fist and pushed his forearm taut. “Get it while you can.”
bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 12.19.06 @ 02:40 PM PST [link]
On the Border of the Metaphysic
To Infinity and Beyond
This morning I was attacked by infinity. Normally, the view from my bed is comforting because there are four walls, one ceiling and a limited number of books, drawers, and precious knick-knacks.
Suddenly it struck me that as I took one step away from my bed toward the bathroom, the earth was rotating me at 1000 miles per hour, the sun was flying away from its beginning, and our galaxy was heading off to the never-ending oblivion of infinity. Aaaagh!
And then I realized that if I looked at all the numbers from one going up, I would never stop. Even worse, I realized that if I removed all the odd numbers, I would still have an infinite number of numbers. Did that mean that the odd infinity was only half as many as the total infinity? Attacked by infinity, I felt tiny and weak and vulnerable and wanted to hide under the bed.
I was so troubled that I asked a mathematician. “Is two times infinity twice as many?”
He replied, “No, you can’t multiply infinity because infinity is not a number. If you could multiply or add infinities, then you could prove zero equals one, and if you could do that, you could prove anything, which would mean you would have nothing.”
Oh. Hmmm. Okay.
Well, I got the mathematical part of infinity out of the way. I realized that infinity in mathematics was just a construct, just something we could imagine. But what about the infinity out there, outside my bedroom door, outside my planet—in the stars and the UNIVERSE?
Are there an infinite number of stars? Can we always find one more, just like we find one more number after the last number? An interesting observation is that if there were an infinite number of stars, wherever we looked we would see one, and the sky would be lit at every point in every direction. But it isn’t, so there are not an infinite number of stars.
And what about time? Could the universe have always been here and always be here from now until–keep counting–infinite and forever?
I looked into Stephen Hawking’s book, “A Brief History of Time.” He says that before the universe began with the big explosion out of nothing, there was no time. So there was no "before." Actually, I like that, for even the scientists studying the facts of stars millions of light years away confirm that the universe appears to have a beginning–just like it says in the Bible. Those who take the Bible literally think the earth was created a few thousand years ago while the astronomers and cosmogonists believe it was a few billion. If this universe had a beginning, the astrophysicists and creationists disagree only on the element of scale.
By all evidence this universe had a finite, limited start date. How about the ending? Cosmologists formulate this question like this: Will the universe continue to expand forever or will it one day begin to shrink and then collapse on itself? Right now, all the facts say that it’s expanding and in fact expanding faster all the time.
However, it turns out that even an ever-expanding universe isn’t necessarily an infinite one, for even as it’s moving out, it’s moving in. That’s a hard one to get our thoughts around. But it’s true that astronomers say that the universe is curved, coming back around like a circle on the equator. Perhaps the very essence of space is being limited.
I spent the day wrestling with infinity, and I think I’ve got it in a full nelson, subdued, under control. Even all the grains of sand on the earth (though many) are finite. They are just as described by some number (though only God knows it) like 37 or 53–just a lot bigger. One estimate I found for all the grains of sand on earth is 6.63 × 10 to the 22nd. And the number of stars, though as Carl Sagan told us, included billions and billions, is another straight up number–somewhere between 10 to the 22nd and 10 to the 24th or so. Realize that the high end numbers (ten followed by 24 zeroes) is just fifteen times the number of grains of sand. The lower estimate is fewer than the number of atoms or molecules to make a mole. You remember what a mole is from high school chemistry, I trust. That would be Avogadro’s number. That’s 6.02214199 × 10 to the 23rd. It’s an awful lot of atoms, but it doesn’t scare chemists, who use this number like you and I make change for a dollar.
With the entire universe tidily finite, I felt snug and potent inside a firmament that goes on and on but still has a limit. This universe is certainly bigger than a breadbox, but a whole lot smaller than infinity. Kind of like from my bed to the bathroom. I find that rather comforting.
bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 12.19.06 @ 02:34 PM PST [link]
Border Culture
How I Became a Mexican
The first Mexican (who wasn’t really a Mexican) that I became friends with was my junior high classmate Lou G. He dressed and talked just like I did, so the only reason I learned he was Mexican was via his haircut. One Monday he came to school with what in those days was quite the radical cut, with the front of his hair combed over and the top and back sheared off in a crew cut. It was the damnedest thing.
“Where’d you get that haircut?”
“Mexicali,” he told me.
Mexicali, wow. He said it like it was no big thing, just normal life to get a strange haircut in a strange place. I got all my haircuts at the Schultz barber shop on Main Street. Mexicali, that was kind of like going to Bulgaria for a haircut.
I realized then that Lou had another life, a Mexican life separate from our American life together as students and as adolescents. That intrigued me.
It was much later that I learned that on top of being American and Mexican, Lou was also a pocho. This was explained to me by Mexican-Mexicans (who are not pochos). We had gone camping at Guadalupe Canyon with Fred P. (a Mexican-American). Arturo, the Mexican who owned the camp, immediately bristled when Fred entered our conversation. I was puzzled by his reaction because to me Fred was about as American as I was. (In those days, I had no notion that I was really a Czech-Polish-Irish American.) When I asked Arturo the problem, he just spat out, “He’s a pocho!” which meant to Arturo that Fred, as a Mexican from “el otro lado,” felt himself superior and treated Arturo disrespectfully.
That was another dimension to being Mexican and American that I didn’t know about.
Around the same time, I began to date Julie from Mexicali. Julie’s mother was from Kansas and her father was from Veracruz, which is kind of like a librarian marrying a rock guitarist. Julie was an American-Mexican. From her I got to meet a whole pack of middle class folks in Mexicali, people who valued the good life of music, art, travel, and an important ingredient for Mexicans everywhere: a good party. Unlike most of the Mexican-Americans I had gone to school with (most of whom were blue collar) and the Mexican-Mexicans that I met in the rough bars I frequented (drunk), my new friends were just like me—only a lot more relaxed about enjoying life–and Mexican.
That’s when I decided that I wanted to become Mexican too. It apparently was so easy—since Mexicans came in just about any color or lifestyle you might want. The language wasn’t a barrier. Some of the Mexican-Americans I knew didn’t speak Spanish as well as I did, so I figured I had a leg up already. And though my vocabulary was a little bookish and I missed some of the slang, I made up for that defect with a good accent.
What did I have to change to become more Mexican?
I stopped wearing short pants and t-shirts and took to upgrading my wardrobe to meet the Mexican requirement for a more careful regard to appearance. I learned to kiss my female acquaintances casually on the cheek and to greet my compańeros with a manly handshake, embrace, two slaps on the back, and another handshake. I cultivated a higher awareness of introductions and acknowledgements of guests and made an effort at a prouder posture instead of slouching in a corner like the malcriado surfer dude that I had been before.
At the time, I had a low-slung 1967 Ford Ranchero painted blue with turquoise upholstery (Mexicali workmanship). In the rear window I placed a small Mexican flag decal. One day I had it parked at Mission Beach when a Chicano vato saw it. “This isn’t your car,” he told me as I climbed aboard. “This car belongs to a Mexican!”
Exactly.
I became more Mexican but not Mexican-American like Lou or Fred, not a pocho, not an American-Mexican like Julie. In the end, I suppose I’m one of a growing number of border anglos who have adopted some of the stylish carińo (caring) that is Mexican. I don’t say that this was all done with cold calculation; it was more of a tectonic drift.
I was made aware of this drift this past summer when I joined a group of rather intense cyclists for a 35 mile ride through San Diego. As I rolled up to the crowd of intimidating athletes, I had to quickly decide who I would approach to meet to get the lay of the land. I surveyed the group and spied a Latino astride his bike under a tree at the edge of the milling crowd. Ah, that’s who I’ll meet. He’s Mexican–like me.
bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 12.19.06 @ 02:29 PM PST [link]