Today I decided it was time to pry
myself out of my canyon and go the ten miles to the nearest town to do some
banking, pick up a prescription, and pick up something for dinner as well.
The bank was no problem, since I
could use the ATM machine, and there was no else in the parking lot. Then I drove to the other bank in the older
part of town to use their parking lot, which I call town, but others insist on
calling East Village. The part they call
West Village I call the flat, since that is what it was called when I was much,
much younger. Anyway, the first people I
saw in the parking lot were my nephew, his wife and son. They have property further up the canyon from
us, and of course, in our desperately extreme drought situation here, the first
exchange among us all, almost before hello, was how our springs are holding
up. We all agreed that things are really
iffy, but they had placed a motion sensor camera near one of their water
troughs and had a picture on their iPad of a bear coming close in for water,
and then four mountain lions appeared at a later time. This answered a question my husband and I
had, which is why our big house cat, Big Mo, has been hanging very close to the
house. Anyway, we discussed the water
situation for both ourselves as well as the town, and then we all went our
separate ways.
I tootled myself over to the drug
store to pick up the prescription. I
very nice gentlemen, who later introduced himself and his wife, came up to me
and thanked me for teaching him a new word, “eutrophication”. That was a tad startling since I hadn’t a
clue as to who he was. The local Sierra
Club, not known for its accuracy in reporting, had placed a picture of a pond
of water filled with algae and dead fish.
The caption under the picture read, “Not a good sign. Dead fish were turning up in large algae
blooms in San Simeon Creek in August.
Highly toxic methyl-mercury thrives in these conditions where the
Cambria CSD proposes to put its emergency desal facility and then make it
permanent, no matter what future environmental review may find”. The dead fish in the picture were the result
of the algae blooms taking the oxygen out of the water, a process known as eutrophication. It has nothing to do with the methyl-mercury
in the sediment of the creek, which has been in the sediment for quite a long
time.
I had sent this statement above to
someone else, who had sent it on to this gentleman. So, we spent about 30 minutes in the
drugstore talking about the drought, how if it doesn’t rain the town will be in
a world of hurt, and the tactics of fear, misinformation and hyperbole. Both of us needed to move on to other tasks,
so we parted ways.
We have a really delightful and tasty
fast food trailer, Boni’s Tacos, in our town on weekends operated by a local
family, so I stopped there to pick up some burritos for dinner. As I was waiting, a gentleman who knew who I
was came up and asked how our spring was doing!
I gave him the standard, “Iffy” response, and explained that we do our
best not to overuse it on any given day.
But that, of course, necessitated a lengthy discussion on the water
situation here in town.
What started out as a fast, hour long
at the most, trip into town lasted some 2 1/2 hours! However, everyone was most polite and
thoughtful, and the discussions were informative for all concerned. There will be personal advantages when it
finally gets around to raining, as well as the obvious one of eventually,
through the natural scheme of things, filling the aquifer from which the town gets
most of its water. The personal one is
that I can go to town in an hour!
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