Saturation Point?

Each time Kevin Loder found a potential site for his lake in the desert, he’d call up his friend Laszlo Bayer and they’d drive out to have a look. One time they visited an old vineyard, another time a date farm, then a tract of cholla cacti. Loder would stop the car and ask his friend: “What do you think? Do you see it?”

Bayer had to be blunt. He knew young Loder had a wife and three kids, and his insistence on chasing this lake dream had put the family through hard times. “No,” he’d admit. “I just see a bunch of sand.”

This went on for years. Loder’s mid-30s gave way to his mid-40s. Loder’s wife went to work in her brother’s chiropractic office to support the family. Loder, though, kept searching those forsaken patches of desert and imploring his friend to imagine a lake there. Then one day Loder dragged Bayer to a spot in pleated hills as dry and brown as instant tea mix. Bayer was thinking: “Not another one of these.”

They stopped the car on a rise. Looking west, they saw a sweep of empty sand for 30 miles. Below was I-10 and beyond that Palm Springs and the rest of the Coachella Valley, rapidly filling with folks who’d moved to the desert from greener, lake-filled places.

“Do you see it? Do you see it now?” Loder said, urging his friend to imagine a lake scooped out of the mud hills. He imagined million-dollar homes dotting the shore, heard the whistle of expensive ski boats and the slap of their wakes against the docks. At dusk, homeowners back from shopping on El Paseo in nearby Palm Desert would saunter down to the beach to watch the water turn from orange to lilac.

His friend hesitated, taking it all in. There was something different about this site. “Yeah, I can actually see it here,” Bayer said finally. “I think this is the spot.”

*

THERE’S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT A GUY WITH A GRANDIOSE VISION wandering around the desert raving, “Can you see it?” For ages, schemers have flocked to this arid sector of the state, intent on building spaceports, time machines and utopian colonies. What’s different these days is that when wild-eyed men talk of dreams involving water, investors actually listen. Checkbooks open. Watery dreams are manifest.

The gurgling has now reached a crescendo, and Palm Springs is in the midst of the most audacious burst of water-based development in its history. Like a dot-com about to crash, the valley seems to be blowing its reserves on a big waterlogged party. The humidity is up (the phrase “But it’s a dry heat” has become a local joke), a new mosquito-control facility is under construction and Southern Californians are packing their water wings for a weekend in Palm Springs--a place that, if left alone, would be one of the driest on earth.

Motorists on Highway 111 soon will see a fake river materializing on a vacant piece of dirt in aptly named Rancho Mirage. A visionary brother to Kevin Loder is building a shopping and entertainment center with waterfront dining, fountains and cascading waterfalls. “It’s water that brings a desert to life,” says an ad for the project.

On the other side of I-10 from The River shopping complex, developers are planning a new high-tech city for 10,000 called Joshua Hills: 7,000 water-guzzling new homes along with a 3-million-square-foot technology center and several new golf courses. That’s in addition to at least 90 new housing developments underway in the valley.

The most visible symbol of the aqua craze is the proliferation of golf courses--the number stands at 108, with about 30 more approved or proposed. In addition to the usual acres of mushroom-dotted Bermuda grass, the clubs are featuring more and more waterfalls, fountains and lakes. The valley is awash in the distinctive antiseptic water scent that permeates theme-park rides.

Country clubs aren’t the only ones erecting monuments to sloshing abundance. “New homes nowadays feature massive amounts of water,” says Ron Young, sales manager for a popular local TV show, “Real Estate Showcase.” “This has become a tropical desert. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday the whole desert was linked with canals.” (The idea isn’t so farfetched; at the Marriott’s Desert Springs Resort & Spa, guests ride gondolas along waterways to dinner at one of the lake-view restaurants.)

Ralph Hemingway is typical of desert home buyers who can’t get enough of backyard lagoons, infinity pools, streams and putting greens. The Seattle shipping executive has homes on Lake Washington in Seattle and on the Hawaiian coast. In his Palm Desert home, you’ll find a stream meandering in the front entrance, through the living room and out the back, where a bronze fly-fisherman casts toward an imported saguaro. (Saguaros are not native to the Coachella Valley.)

“We live on the water wherever we are,” says Hemingway, a distant relation to the famous novelist. “This is the closest we could come to living on water in the desert.”

Mists billow from restaurant misters up and down Palm Canyon Drive, drenching menus and making patios slick underfoot. Even the golf carts spit drizzle from miniature misters. Water literally runs in the streets of Palm Springs, to the consternation of hydroplaning drivers who can’t dodge the streams fast enough to keep their BMWs clean. Still, a faint chorus--nearly drowned out by the hiss of lawn sprinklers--is asking how long this last gasp of gushing excess can continue.

“Water built this place,” says Steve Nagle, environmental resources director of the Coachella Valley Assn. of Governments. “Now the question is: Is there going to be enough water the day after tomorrow?”

If the vision goes bust, Palm Springs is going to look like a Disneyland ride when the machinery malfunctions and the lights suddenly come on. With the mirage unmasked, we’ll see the wires, putty and drains beneath the fake streams. Dried-up stalks of palm trees will scratch in the wind. A hundred artificial lakes will be reduced to pockmarks in the sand, with golf balls rotting on the sun-baked bottoms.

*

KEVIN LODER LIVED IN PALM SPRINGS IN THE 1970S, WHEN THE water frenzy had not yet peaked and backyards were more green gravel than emerald lawns and heirloom roses. “It felt hot. It looked hot. Everything was hot,” says Loder, now 46.

Then he and his family moved to Idaho, a land of greens, blues and aquas. When they returned to the desert, Loder had the idea of importing Idaho’s cool colors to a desert that gets three to six inches of rainfall a year, and where summer temperatures routinely exceed 110 degrees.

Loder is nobody’s idea of a wealthy developer. He dresses in flip-flops and baggy trunks, making a swift change to polo shirt and clean tennies only when necessary for business meetings. He’s built like Fred Flintstone, with perpetually peeling sunburnt lips and hair that always looks wind-whipped. But he had hit on something undeniable: When cool water meets human skin on a hot day, the result is pleasure. That’s why you see tourists raising their arms as if in worship when they walk from the blazing sun into the fog of an overhead mister. That’s why the Cahuilla Indians once spent their summers near the canyon waterfalls. The lust for water in the desert is not some perversion of modern life; it’s an ancient and natural impulse.

“Everyone loves the sound of water. They love the sound of rain,” says Dave Rogers, co-owner of Mirage Water Features, a company that builds backyard water extravaganzas costing as much as $400,000.

Loder’s real-estate ventures went bust in the California recession and he took over a ski-boat dealership. It didn’t turn out to be the best business move, but it did get him out to a boat show at a man-made water-ski lake in Barstow. He immediately knew he’d found a way to bring those Idaho colors to the desert. He came home and told his wife that he was going to build a lake in Palm Springs.

“If this could work in Barstow,” he said, “it could certainly work here.” A lot of these Coachella Valley millionaires grew up in greener, wetter places, he told his wife. The first man who could give them a lake in the desert would surely become wealthy.

Kim Loder was enthusiastic. After all, she ran away and married her husband when she was 16 (they met when he was a business student at San Diego State University) because she loved his visionary nature. She thought he was the most creative man she’d ever met.

“Everybody thought he was nuts,” she says today. “They’d say: ‘Kevin, just go get a regular job.’ ”

Instead, Kim went to work while her husband began a difficult, decade-long pursuit of his dream. The first obstacle was the Environmental Health Department of Riverside County, which said that Loder could build a lake if he wished, but due to sanitation concerns, no one could swim in it.

“I’m going: ‘Oh, great, what good is a lake if you can’t swim in it?’ ” recalls Loder, who eventually agreed to provide monthly water-quality tests. With his friend Laszlo Bayer in tow, he located and eventually rejected five different locations for the lake, in each case making the rounds of about 15 agencies for approval.

At home, Kim was getting restless. Her husband’s quest had been going on so long that folks in church greeted them not with “How’re the kids?” but “So, how’s the lake?”

“Visionaries always see into the future and they kind of forget about today,” Kim says. “So I was the one saying, ‘Honey we’ve got to pay these bills.’ ”

Even her husband had doubts. “If this is such a good idea, why hasn’t it been done?” he wondered. “Who am I, in the history of the world, to be the first person to put a ski lake in the desert?”

Finally, three years ago, Loder drove up to a parched date-and-citrus farm in the hills above Indio and met the 80-year-old owner of a 96-acre property. Vernon Winte was the latest in a long line to scoff at Loder. “When this man Loder started talking about a ski lake, I told him: ‘I don’t even want to listen to your proposal,’ ” recalls Winte. “It just didn’t make much sense to me.”

Loder eventually swept Winte up in his enthusiasm by helping him imagine a lake, much as he had done with Bayer. But once the developer purchased the old homestead, new doubters bubbled up. “Where will all the water come from?” they wanted to know. Fortunately, Loder was prepared for the question.

*

TAP A LOCAL ON THE SHOULDER AND ASK IF THE WATER WILL LAST, and you’ll hear some version of this reply: “There’s a huge lake beneath us and it can never run out.” True, there is a huge underground lake, called an aquifer. Despite sporadic reports puncturing the everlasting aquifer myth, faith in that magical, mysterious water reserve is what gives desert dwellers the audacity to keep building lakes, streams and golf courses.

The aquifer became a player in Palm Springs history in the late 1800s, when desert settlers found water gushing 20 feet out of the cracked earth. Railroad crews drilled wells and discovered what appeared to be a giant water basin beneath the Coachella Valley. Geologists say it’s less an underground lake than a 30-mile-long sand-filled sponge. The sponge, which could be 10,000 feet deep in places, is plumped with pristine water dating from the Ice Age; it tests better than Evian or Arrowhead and puts Colorado River water to shame.

When word got out, men with liquid visions flocked to the valley. The first wave of entrepreneurs built homes and raised crops in the fertile east valley. Later came the builders of swimming pools, resort hotels and golf courses. After a while, though, little kidney-shaped pools didn’t do justice to the seemingly everlasting water. Men with bigger visions were needed.

The myth was reinforced during the 1980s. While the rest of California was suffering through a prolonged drought and homeowners were forced to paint their lawns green, the aquifer buffered the Palm Springs area from hardship. The aqua culture eventually became self-perpetuating. The more rivers and misters and waterfalls and lakes and rose gardens you see, the more the myth of the aquifer seems real. Another golf-course home is sold, another fountain is built.

When anyone questions a man’s use of water, he can always point to someone who is using more. Kevin Loder claims his lake will use less water than the same area planted in golf-course turf, since water evaporates from each surface of each blade of grass. The waterfalls use more than the misters, say the mister-makers. And golf-course managers point to those water-wasters, the homeowners, with their misaligned sprinklers drenching the sidewalks.

All the finger-pointing is meant to deflect charges of waste, not to cast doubt on the aquifer. Hardly anyone worries about the aquifer, even though there have been warnings for years that the big sink is not eternal after all. It’s shrinking.

The fact that the aquifer is impermanent was apparent as early as 1915, when the wells stopped gushing and farmers had to dig deeper and deeper for water. For decades the Coachella Valley Water District has known rainfall and snowmelt are not replenishing the aquifer as fast as wells are pumping the water out. “We know this water isn’t going to be there forever and ever,” says Dave Harbison, water management specialist for the water district.

By the late 1950s, the aquifer had dropped by as much as 50 feet in some places, and the local water agencies came up with a plan to replenish the supply with imported Colorado River water. The plan, implemented in the mid-1970s, funneled river water into recharge basins to slowly percolate down to the aquifer. The replenishment has been somewhat successful in the upper valley, closest to Palm Springs. But in the lower valley--scene of most new development--the aquifer is encased in an impermeable clay layer. The water company is working on ways to replenish the aquifer there, but levels are still dropping.

“It’s a toughie,” Harbison says.

If the water level drops too far, the ground above it can collapse, a process known as subsidence. A 1997 U.S. Geological Survey study confirmed that dropping aquifer levels caused the ground to subside between 1928 and 1996. Preliminary results from a new study by U.S.G.S. hydrologist Michelle Sneed show that in parts of Palm Desert, Indian Wells and La Quinta, the ground--and any structures on it-- could sink as much as a foot during the next 10 years.

Subsidence has caused big problems in other parts of the West with large ground-water basins. In the San Joaquin Valley, for instance, over-pumping of the aquifer once caused about 5,200 square miles of valley floor to sink--up to 30 feet in some places--buckling bridges and roads.

Rather than look to the San Joaquin Valley as a warning, however, many Palm Springs residents tune out threats of water shortages and collapsing luxury homes. No matter how many news stories have pointed out the reality of a shriveling aquifer, liquid optimism has prevailed. The myth is simply more powerful than any headline.

*

AFTER KEVIN LODER AND HIS SEATTLE-BASED INVESTORS BOUGHT Vernon Winte’s 96 acres for $1.3 million, Loder swung by the Coachella Valley Water District and said: “OK guys, I’m looking at this piece of dirt. Is water delivery a problem?”

For Loder, the visit was merely a formality. He says he never worried about getting water at any of his potential lake sites. His plans always were derailed by other problems--one property was too close to an agricultural area, another was sold out from under him.

Tom Levy, general manager of the water district, says his staff wasn’t as unconcerned as Loder. There was some hand-wringing over the wisdom of building a water-ski lake in a land of perpetual drought. The water district encourages large-volume commercial users such as Loder to draw directly from the valley’s allotment of Colorado River water, leaving the purer aquifer water for domestic use. But Levy and others knew that Loder’s project would nonetheless affect the reserves since the diverted river water might otherwise be used to replenish the aquifer.

“State law doesn’t give us the authority to say: ‘You can’t do that,’ ” explains Levy. If water officials object to a project, they can appeal to the State Water Resources Control Board or to city planning agencies. The district did appeal to the control board for a ruling, but the board twice said it was backlogged and unable to respond promptly. So the local agency--under pressure from the developer and the city of Indio, which was eager for Loder’s development--agreed to funnel river water to the lake.

The scenario helps explain why there continues to be virtually no limit on the new breed of water entrepreneurs. While residents are advised to reset their sprinklers in the recently released Coachella Valley Water District 35-year water management plan, there’s no mention of limits on development. Want to install a fly-fishing stream along Palm Canyon Drive? A moat around your private estate? A submarine ride? Dream it and you can build it.

Indian Wells, the desert’s toniest address, even has an ordinance stating that home landscaping must be green and sopping. But in the town next door, former Palm Desert Mayor Buford Crites is encouraging desert landscaping in private yards and on city projects such as median strips and the public golf course, Desert Willow. But Crites is in the minority. A former Palm Springs mayor told Crites that he objected to Palm Desert landscaping: “It looks ugly.”

“No,” replied Crites. “It looks like a desert. That’s where we live.”

Crites doesn’t buy into the myth of the aquifer. “We are going to run low on water,” he says. “We can’t build forever and not have water problems. And if we continue squandering water, you can’t expect the rest of the state to have much sympathy for us when we do run low.”

The water district’s Levy argues that there isn’t going to be a crash at all. “Is water going to be a constraint in the Coachella Valley? I don’t think so,” he says, though he concedes that water will become more costly as the aquifer dwindles, and that developers will then have to think twice about building whitewater streams.

For visionaries such as Kevin Loder, all this talk about water shortages indicates meek, small-minded thinking. “We adapt and change,” he says, adding that scientists surely will figure out a way to recycle household water, purify ocean water or make it rain.

Still, Harry Quinn, a local archeologist who teaches geology at the College of the Desert, says optimists such as Levy and Loder might want to consider the lessons of history. “If you look at what’s happened in the Southwest, the Anasazi and Hohokam developed tremendous civilizations in desert areas and both of them eventually disappeared because of water problems,” he theorizes. “We have developed even greater civilizations and put more dependence on water here in the desert. If we look back at what happened before, we can almost say for sure we’re going to repeat it.”

*

ON A RECENT SUNDAY, A PICKUP truck pulled off I-10 at Jackson Street in Indio and headed straight toward the creased hills. An onlooker would think the driver had made a wrong turn--there was nothing up that way but thirsty chuckwallas. The pickup chugged up a hill, popped over a berm and there it was: Kevin Loder’s dream, also known as ShadowLake Estates, a skinny, dog-bone-shaped lake about three-quarters of a mile long and 12 feet deep. After having a look at the blue pool set in a wilderness of sand, the driver turned back toward the freeway.

A lot of people are making the same pilgrimage to have a look at Loder’s lake, including one elderly woman who said, “I thought it was a myth.” And these are happier days at the Loder house. Although building the lake was an expensive proposition--$1.3 million for the land, $1.5 million for a booster pump station to bring in city water, $2.5 million for the docks, $1 million each for excavation and the lake liner, $800,000 for a bridge across the canal and improvements to the entrance--Loder says his gamble is paying off. Sixteen of the 48 home sites on the lake have closed escrow, he says, and the sales of another 12 lots are pending. The average sale price is about $400,000, according to Loder and public records. His wife has quit her job and is staying home with the kids, where she prefers to be. Now, when people in church ask, “So how’s the lake?” the Loders can invite them out to have a soda on the family dock.

The docks, with their fancy hydraulic boat hoists and soaring cabanas, are the only completed structures on the lake, except for a pre-fab sales office. While some experts fret about the possibility of Coachella Valley homes sinking, Loder anticipates houses rising around his lake: a Greek villa, a Portuguese farmhouse, a Spanish mill and homes in other styles that already are planned. For now, there are a few homes under construction and splashes of color from yellow flowers and spreading bougainvillea.

Despite the lake’s unfinished feel, the shock of blue in desolate foothills makes enough of an impression that another entrepreneur is planning to dig three more water-ski lakes nearby, and Kevin Loder has his eye on a plot of sand down the hill. He wants to build a second lake.

On warm weekends, boaters come to Loder’s lake and the whoops of water-skiers occasionally break the desert silence. Loder’s son, Korbin, has learned to do flips on a wakeboard; Loder’s faithful friend Laszlo Bayer recently stood up on skis after 10 unsteady tries. Even 80-year-old Vernon Winte drove out to see what had become of his old homestead.

Loder likes it best at sunset, when the boats shut down and the wakes dwindle to little murmurs before dying out. A few shorebirds check out the new lake in town before taking wing toward the Salton Sea. Then, the lake in the desert is exactly as the dreamer always imagined it would be.