From the Desert to the Sea, to All of Watery California

My wife and I have rediscovered the pleasure of driving in Southern and Central California. Trapped in the glut of Los Angeles, we forget that our state is still high, wide and handsome.

Commitments of mine took us first to the Coachella Valley and then to San Jose. In between, I spent four days in the Sierra with my older son and his two boys. My wife was not with us. It was a male bonding adventure.

My wife and I spent two nights in Rancho Mirage, below Palm Springs, at Marriott’s Rancho Las Palmas Resort, and attended a luncheon at the nearby Marriott’s Desert Springs Resort.

A population boom has not yet obliterated the desert’s open spaces and clean skies. Its more than 70 golf courses have not yet exhausted the valley’s bountiful water supply.

Anyone visiting from the Los Angeles area is shocked by what seems to be a flagrant waste of water. The golf courses are fresh and green. Artificial lakes and waterfalls abound.

The Desert Springs Resort seems deliberately designed to flaunt the valley’s abundance of water. The hotel rises around an inner court into which intrudes a lagoon that connects with a group of outdoor lakes and ponds that look like the Great Lakes.

From inside the hotel one can board a deluxe launch that cruises through the various lagoons, past a swimming pool the size of MacArthur Park lake and surrounded by sand beaches. Its final destination is a Japanese restaurant.

The main floor of the hotel is lined with blocks of glitzy shops. In the window of one, my wife saw a dress marked down from $289 to $84. “If I buy it,” she said, “it will save us $205.” She bought it.

An article in that day’s Desert News concedes the valley’s ostentatious waste of water. (“Full water glasses adorn even the unoccupied tables of many restaurants.”)

Mainly, the 40-mile-long valley floats on an underground lake so deep its full capacity has never been measured. It is thought to be enough to last from 200 to 1,000 years, depending on population growth.

As if that weren’t enough, the valley’s water districts contracted in the 1950s with the California Water Project for 61,000 acre feet of water annually and its citrus farmers tap into the Colorado River instead of the underground lake. For the time being, though, the valley has given up its allocation of northern water to help the drought-stricken areas.

We stayed for two nights at the Marriott Rancho Las Palmas Resort; its hotel is heavily Spanish Renaissance in decor and overlooks its own lake and golf course. Water was served in the restaurants without request.

Two days in the valley give one the impression that we will never run out of space, water or money. One quickly realizes, though, that an everlasting supply of money is an illusion; everlasting space and water may be too.

We hurried back from the desert so I could catch a plane to Mammoth Lakes, where my son, Curt, and his sons, Casey, 12, and Trevor, 8, were to meet me. They had driven up ahead.

I caught an Alpha plane at Burbank. It was a Beechcraft 1900C, seating 19. The cabin was so low that I had to crouch as I walked back to my seat. The one-hour flight was glorious. We flew over the Sierra Madre and then the Sierra Nevada, skimming over hatchet-sharp mountain ridges with snowy flanks.

The boys met me at the airport; we drove into Mammoth Lakes for dinner at a restaurant, and then on to the cabin my son had rented at Alpers’ Owens River Ranch. It was rustic; frame construction with a peeling half-log front. A globe and a naked bulb lighted a table and four chairs in the living room. There were two beds in the living room, two in a small bedroom. Kitchen and bath were adequate. It wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but it was home.

There was no television. Nobody missed it. I played Scrabble the first night with Casey. Of course I had a grossly unfair advantage over him in years and experience, having worked with words most of my life, but there was nothing else to do. He beat me 245 to 237. He had kept score and I asked him if he was sure of his addition.

“I’m a mathematical genius,” he said.

It was cold. My son wanted to light a fire in the iron stove. But he didn’t have any matches. Neither did I. When I was in the bathroom a mouse ran across the floor. My son said, yes, there were mice. You could hear them at night running across the ceiling. He had stayed here before.

Mice or no, I slept soundly.