There’s no place like home

Phil Cobb Glasses

Albert Hammond in 1972 wrote a song that’s lyrics contained the phrase, “It never rains in California.”

After a recent family vacation to The Golden State, I stand in firm belief that Hammond must not have been far from the truth.

I don’t know how they keep that entire state from catching fire.

We entered the nation’s 31st state at Lake Tahoe.

And let me give you a little advice right here: Do not go to Lake Tahoe on the Fourth of July weekend.

We were there July 3 and were in bumper-to-bumper traffic all day.

After covering 1,508 miles the two previous days, we moved just 160 miles the third day in about eight hours of drive time.

Despite the heavy traffic and swarms of people, we did enjoy our time there.

Lake Tahoe, as most high-elevation lakes I’ve seen, is the most beautiful of blue colors.

The shades of blue change abruptly with the changes of depth.

In places, you can wade out several hundred feet in waist-deep water, but the depth changes quickly to 500 feet, then 1,000, then eventually to more than 1,600 feet deep.

Our first impression of California — and last of Nevada (we’ll get to that later) — was a good one.

Emerald Bay is something that everyone should see.

By chance, and because we knew we wouldn’t see much if we didn’t know where we were going in the crowd, we stopped at a visitor’s center.

We told the attendant we were more interested in the natural settings, not so much the traffic, or crowds.

She suggested we take a side road to Fallen Leaf Lake and the waterfall that spills into it.

She warned of a narrow, one-and-a-half lane, two-way, winding mountain road that would get us there.

She was right.

I found out how tight a spot the F-150 would fit into and just how close you can get to the edge without sliding off.

It was worth the 45-minute drive and short hike to the falls.

Although Fallen Leaf is tiny in comparison to Tahoe, it is a large and beautiful body of water.

The falls, although remote, were still crawling with people, but not so much we couldn’t appreciate their beauty.

Unfortunately, Lake Tahoe is not indicative of the interior of the state.

Once we descended from the higher elevations, and moved toward Sacramento, we began to see foothills covered with these distinct dark green trees and endless waves of about two-feet tall dead grass.

I mean, I’ve never seen drought conditions anywhere close to what we saw, not only there, but pretty much throughout the state.

I was having visions of some careless person flicking out a cigarette and starting the next great wildfire.

We did see one wildfire, luckily from a safe distance.

We later found that those strange looking trees were California Black Oaks, which is pretty cool since Chaundee’s favorite trees on the Northwest Missouri State University campus are black oaks, although a different variety.

The scorched brown grass made me wonder, “How do these trees stay alive?”

In many areas, they are beginning to succumb to what has been a particularly dry past three years.

California has a severe water problem.

It looks bad enough on the surface, but some research reveals what lies underneath might be of much greater concern.

According to Wikipedia, depending on the year, California gets between 30 and 60 percent of its water from beneath the ground, natural water reserves left over from when the Pacific Ocean covered much of the state.

The reserves are believed to be vast.

But it is thought that the state is using that water at a much faster rate than it is being replenished.

Without that ground water, the state, and much of our food supply, would be toast.

Average rainfall across the state is about 23 inches, but in recent years the totals have ranged from 11 to 18.

Factor in that about 75 percent of the annual rain falls in the northernmost quarter of the state and that about a third of the state’s surface water runs into the ocean, and it’s not hard to understand the challenges facing the residents of our country’s most populous state, especially its farmers.

California’s water woes are complicated and I’m not going to pretend I have solutions to those problems, butI just couldn’t help but think how thankful we should be in northwest Missouri for the fertile soils and comparatively abundant moisture with which we have been blessed.

We often complain when it doesn’t rain exactly when we want it to, but at least it does rain.

Somehow, despite the lack of abundant water, and what appeared to be pitiful soil, we saw just about every kind of fruit and nut orchard you can imagine, and the size of those orchards rivaled that of our soybean and corn fields.

They literally went on and on for miles across what otherwise appeared to be desert-like landscape.

We didn’t always know what we were seeing. The oranges and grapes were obvious, but the almonds, kiwi, lemons, plums, and others were more difficult to identify.

We spent eight days in California, and there was not once I didn’t think, “What would we do if conditions ever got to a point where these things wouldn’t grow here.”

I later learned through a Google search that 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots consumed in the United States come from California.

I can tell you that it makes you look twice when you pass a truck pulling two trailer loads of carrots down the highway.

We eventually left California, headed home, but to get here we had to go through the Mojave Desert, a corner of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, and Iowa.

Of all the places we traveled on our 4,700-mile trek, I would have to say the most desolate was the entire state of Nevada.

Of Nevada’s 2.8 million people, 75 percent live in and around Las Vegas.

I think the remainder must live in Carson City, Reno, or Sparks, because outside those cities, there’s not much of anything.

We often complain of traveling across Kansas and eastern Colorado, but I can tell you, that ain’t nothing compared to Nevada.

Nothing but sage brush and sand cover the majority of that state.

Not sure why it’s not covered with windmills and solar panels.

I don’t want to be mean, but it’s not hard to see why the state has resorted to sin to attract visitors.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that it sure was a sight for sore — and tired — eyes when we crossed from Nebraska into Iowa, and then from Iowa to Missouri, and eventually into Nodaway County, and were greeted with lush, green countryside — and some of the best looking corn and soybean crops we’ve ever seen.