Drought and domestic partnerships - 22 February 1991

Only two weeks ago, I was staying in the hills above what a famous old geographer once called, a few thousand square miles of lovely land that lie close the edge of one million square miles of desert and semi-desert which radiate from it in nearly all directions. Fly over this landscape at any time, the eastern stretch of it, even from say 30,000 feet and you would see nothing from horizon to horizon but an ocean of sand rising in the west to the ridge of the coast range mountains.

But two, three months ago, flying a little lower, you could have seen black beetles moving in long ranks toward formations of other beetles. All of them setting off clouds of sand and closer still and you'd have seen little jets and streaks of fire and smoke, as if from guns. They were guns. And the formations of beetles were tanks. What was going on down there was a steady, continuous rehearsal by day and by night of the war to be, on similar terrain. We were looking down on the California desert and the manoeuvres that, after 15 January, would be staged for real in the war called Desert Storm.

I imagine that anyone who has not driven much in California or flown across its 200-300 miles width from east to west, will be surprised at the comparative ratio between the now densely populated Los Angeles County, that formerly few thousand square miles of lovely land, and the one million square miles of the California desert. Who would have thought that you could build and sustain a city of 13 million people on a littoral or a coastal basin when once over the coast range you drop down the eastern slopes into a burning desert?

Well, Californians learned, long ago, that, without water, there would be only jack rabbits, a little farming on a lot of acres, some pasture and an irrigated oasis or two. Fortunately for California and its determined settlers, the eastern side of the central valley is enclosed by the ramparts of the Sierra Nevada. A great mountain range, 75 miles wide. From its peaks, the land slopes gradually to the west and the chief resource of the mountains is precipitation. Most of it in winter, in the precious form of snow. Early March is usually the time for the winter records. At the summit of the Sierra, the snows have lain 25 feet deep. The record is 880 inches of snow in one winter; 15-20 feet depths and drifts of 40 feet are common at this time of the year. And from all this, from the run-off from the Sierra comes California's main source of water flowing into dams, reservoirs, aqueducts which pipe it westward. To make the desert bloom and the coastal towns habitable.

But ten days ago, the average Sierra snows were only eight feet. And I saw lakes and reservoirs so dried and cracked across their whole surface that they looked, from the air, like crocodile reservations. California is now in its fifth year of drought. And the normal rainy season, January-February, is over. It's the worst drought this century. All the big reservoirs are down to more or less than 20% of capacity. The state has cut off water to 50% of its farming. To the farmers who grow rice and/or cotton which are famously thirsty crops. They were using the word "crisis" when I was there in summer of last year and again in December. But this month, it looked for the first time as if a water famine was in their not too distant future.

The day we arrived at our friend's house, high in the hills above Hollywood, the first thing our host begged of us was never to keep a tap running and to take a Second World War British bath. About the depth of the palm of a hand. The television news alternated between scenes from the Saudi Arabian desert and the expanding California desert. Local news ending at night with delicate instructions about when and when not to flush the lavatory. Every morning the newspapers listed frightening hikes in the price of fruits and vegetables. California provides half of the nation's supply. Tales of farmers who had quit. Farm banks going bust.

Little wonder then in California, if nowhere else, there were two topics that overwhelmed all others. The war and the drought. And it's only now struck me that, if there had been no war, of course I would have talked from California about practically nothing else. Oh perhaps, too, about the passage of a bill, in San Francisco, vetoed by the mayor a couple of years ago. A bill to allow homosexual couples to register at City Hall as permanent partners. It stopped short of declaring them married, and the lobbying is still going on to have the city formally legalise such partnerships and entitle them to things like inheritance, insurance, sickness leave, that are now enjoyed by married couples, what in one big district of San Francisco you'd better call "married straight couples" if you don't want to be accused of insulting the residents of that district, where something like 200,000 homosexuals live and have their being. Naturally, they constitute a powerful voting block, are well-represented in the city government and have no intention of abandoning their crusade for civil and legal rights equal to those of married heterosexuals.

The present bill, all the newspapers insisted, was mainly symbolic. But a symbol can be a tonic to some people. And it was an extraordinary scene in the Great Plaza outside City Hall the first morning the authorities were ready to receive and register these loving couples. Hundreds of them, embracing, waving papers, dancing little steps of glee, and some of them just holding hands and weeping. It would have taken, I think, a 100% homophobe not to be moved at first by such a scene before he remembered to be embarrassed.

So why didn't I talk about these things sooner? Because of the war. Our absorption in it. Our doubts. In spite of the reporting of the thousands and thousands of sorties. The misgiving that twice the bombs of the Second World War had yet not crushed the dread dictator of Iraq. And, mainly I think, what someone called in spite of all the official reassurances, the pit of the stomach fear of what might happen when, if, the hundreds of thousands of men, and the thousands of tanks, began to slug it out on open ground. For the first time since I can remember, without thinking it through, I felt, week after week, that what people here across the country felt about the war, the attitude, support, simple patriotism, fake and florid patriotism, sincere opposition, stupid opposition from people really opposing Vietnam. These things seemed to me to make purely domestic topics, problems, seem parochial and irrelevant.

But it now occurs to me that the war, while it has put on hold, on the back burner as they say, many other problems and issues, sadnesses of American life, they cannot be permanently filed and forgotten. What the commentators call the nation's capital, Washington, still racks up every night a homicide or two. The soothing word has gone out that cocaine is going out of fashion among the middle-class yuppies and high flyers of the 1980s, that is. But crack, the cheaper and more swiftly addictive form of it is still the main currency of exchange on the street corners of a score of big cities and hundreds of little ones. There are still over 350,000 crack-infected babies in New York state.

There's not yet any official account of how the, what is it, $50, $100 billion lost to their depositors by the thrifts, the building societies, are going to be paid for. The state of public education is, from all reliable surveys, no better than it was last year. And could be worse since the recession, which is hitting almost every part of American life, since the recession has required the most wounding cuts in state and city budgets for education, as for other things like mental health, like child-care, provisions for the disabled. Even, we heard this week, a cut in the federal money for veterans' hospitals. What are they called elsewhere? During the First War, I remember being taken to visit relations and friends in what was known as a "blue jacket" or wounded soldiers' and sailors' hospital. "Veterans", is simple and good. Though the word "wounded" has gone. I think for ever.

Do you remember the time, sometime during the planning of Overlord, the invasion of France? There was a meeting, either at 10 Downing Street or in Eisenhower Platz – Grosvenor Square – where the supreme commander has his headquarters, there was a tense discussion about the receiving of the dead and treatment of the wounded back in England after the first landings on the Normandy shore. An American, colonel, I think, started talking about arrangements for ICPs. Mr Churchill looked puzzled and said, "What, pray, is an ICP?" Without missing a beat, the colonel said, "Impaired combatant personnel, sir". Churchill's brow turned to thunder. "Don't ever," he said, "call any of our men by such a name. They will be known as wounded soldiers." It was at a later time that one of his own officers had picked up, what was to become, in this country at least, the standard, dreadful expression "body count". Churchill rebuked him. "They are dead men. The honourable dead."

In this war, the generals and colonels in their briefing sessions use a phrase I wish they'd drop: collateral damage. You know what it means? It means civilians, old men, women, young and old, and children. Incinerated. And gone for good.

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