My first great insight to the psyche of America happened when I visited Mission Trails Park. The story told by the placard at the monument describes how the monks who first settled here repeatedly attempted to build a damn across the river to allow irrigation of their crops. Living in a desert meant that it was pretty much a requirement for sustaining life in the beautiful but harsh land. For many years they labored, occasionally managing to temporarily damn the river, before floods or the sheer force of the river destroyed the damn again. I looked at the placard, then I looked at the river, and I realized that this story was just a pale reflection of the culture that still exists here to this day. America suffers the ‘most active weather climate’ on the globe. That is to say, temperature extremes, tornadoes, hurricanes, storms and other weather features that so frequently receive bad press are more common here than anywhere else. Then there is the small matter of the fact that the entire West Coast lies along an earthquake fault line.
Who in their right mind would choose to concentrate their areas of civilization along an earthquake fault line? No one. Of course Americans do, which is a tribute to their perseverance, but also a shocking indictment of their total insanity. I keep trying to explain to any American that will listen that they are all going to die, but will they listen? No.
My associative memory, which is clearly running in overdrive at the moment, has again kicked in. I am reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. The dialog is approximately:
Teacher: Calvin, in what state are you living? Calvin: The state of denial. Teacher: I can’t argue with that.
To explain this combination of perseverance and insanity, I use the term “The American Spirit.” In essence Americans are a ‘can do’ nation. This isn’t a bad thing. Hell, compared with the prevalent attitude back home of, “That looks hard, can’t someone else do it?” and “That’ll never work.” the “can do” attitude often seems like a good thing. Yet, even in my most stoical mood I still wonder whether some pragmatism might be a good thing. Of course pragmatists would sit round and ask awkward questions like what’s so bloody great about the west that would make me trek across 3000 miles of inhospitable land to get there. And why would you want to put a man on the moon anyway? I think these two events are related. The same combination of insanity and perseverance that sent millions of people fleeing their homelands in search of the American Dream has survived through the generations. To put it another way, the obstacles many individuals faced to get to and to survive in America mandated a high level of motivation to keep battling, and a super human level of self-delusion, to believe it was worthwhile. Once one understands this explaining why anyone would choose to live in an area of land subject to immense weather forces, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and naturally occurring bush fires suddenly seams so much easier.
Of course it is easy to forget about the earthquakes and their kin, because it is not something one suffers from everyday. But the other natural feature of San Diego is that it is basically a desert. OK, technically it gets more than 6 inches rain a year, which is the magic figure botanists and their ilk use to define what is and isn’t a desert. But basically, unless you want to spend all your leisure time carrying a watering can round the garden, your best choice of garden flora is a cactus. And this is my definition of what is and isn’t desert. Unsurprisingly, the meager rainfall that lands in the area is insufficient to support a population of 3 million Americans. Which is a shame because that is how many people there are here. In fact even tapping water from the largest river on the continent (The Colorado) there is still insufficient water to support the population. This isn’t surprising given the amount of water wastage. Even though this is (by my technical definition) a desert, most roads are built with sprinkler systems built into them, in order to make it easier to keep the grass on the side row nice and green and alive. Of course, this is clearly an ingenious labor saving device that saves someone from having to wander back and forth to the standpipe with a watering can all day. And just to make it even easier for the worker, they do it during the heat of the day, when the grass’ ability to absorb the water is at it’s least efficient. So, speaking as a foreigner, I would have thought the solution would seem to be simply to grow something indigenous along the roadside, and thus save what must be the vast majority of the local water usage. In fact, it turns out that I am too simplistic to conceive the real solution. The local planners have instead decided to capture the wastewater coming out of the toilets in the rich neighborhoods, and pipe it through to the poor neighborhoods for drinking. Sounds absurd? You think I’m joking? I told you, I’m too simplistic to conceive such a plan.
Or maybe I just lack that level of insanity that is so necessary to the American Spirt.