Throughout its history, the conservation movement had been little more than a minor nuisance to the water-development interests in the American West. They had, after all, twice managed to invade National Parks with dams; they had decimated the greatest salmon fishery in the world, in the Columbia River; they had taken the Serengeti of North America—the virgin Central Valley of California, with its thousands of grizzly bears and immense clouds of migratory waterfowl and its million and a half antelope and tule elk—and transformed it into a banal palatinate of industrial agriculture. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

I have no apologies. I was a crusader for the development of water. I was the messiah: Floyd Dominy, Former Commissioner the Bureau of Reclamation.

Before Michele got Covid, we planned to go down to Lake Tulare, which used to be part of a vast wetlands fifty miles – plus or minus – north of Bakersfield at the southern end of California’s Great Central Valley. It used to be is the operative phrase here: Lake Tulare started disappearing in the 1880s when the local White farmers started diverting the creeks and rivers feeding the lake. At the time, an estimated – very roughly estimated – 10,000 to 15,000 members of the Tachi Yokut tribe lived around the lake, and, depending on your point of view, they were either driven out or left because the lake was going dry and they couldn’t make a living (I’m going with a combination of both, BTW).

As the lake and wetlands were reduced and the Native Americans left, White farmers turned the former lake area into a farming area. Now, the lake has, at least temporarily, returned – without the accompanying tulle-filled wetlands – flooding the field. Michele suggested I go alone while she was quarantined at home. Ironically, the best place to stay near the lake is the Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino, which is owned by, you guessed it, the Tachi Yokuts. I’m ambivalent on the question of Native Americans being given the right to fleece people by way of reparations for them being cheated by other people. On one hand, we did take their land away and are not going to give it back, so we do owe the Native Americans something, but saying you can have legal gambling seems a little out of left field.

I say that with very little data; I’ve only been in two Native American Casinos, one in Bishop and this one out in the middle of nowhere. The Wanaaha casino in Bishop, owned by the Bishop Paiute Tribe, was almost empty the time I stopped by, and it occurred to me that Bishop is probably not a good place to build a casino. It is out of the way, and there are too many other attractions.

However, It turns out that the middle of nowhere is an excellent place to build a casino. The Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino is a stellar success story; the Tachi Yokuts paid off the original construction loan in seven months and now use the money generated to pay for youth recreation programs, college scholarships, and the construction of homes on newly acquired land. I arrived at twilight, checked into a lovely room, had the worst Manhatten I’ve ever had with a mediocre dinner, and…

I checked out the next morning to look for Lake Tulari.

For years, I have been quoting John McPhee, who quoted geologist Eldridge Moore in Assembling California when he said that California’s Great Central Valley is the largest flat place in North America. I believed Moore, but not as viscerally as I would have liked. After driving around looking for the lake, I now believe it. The farm roads in the area run north-south or east-west as if the lake were not even there, which, of course, it wasn’t when the roads were put in.

When I had checked in the night before, I asked how I could get to Lake Tulari, and one of the young women said to drive to the end of Nineteenth Street, which I did the next morning. That was the first and last time I actually saw the lake. The lake had partially evaporated – but only partially, even in the high temperatures -but was now partially refilling because of the late spring thaw in the Sierras.

I drove around for a while, trying to get a better view of the lake, but I kept running into roadblocks at intersections. This is not an area of family farms or what I think about when I think of family farms; this was an area of corporate farms. When I got up in the early morning, the temperature was in the low 80s; now it was about ten, with the temperature climbing past 90 and scheduled to rise to 115. I drove back to Tachi Reservation for a quick look around…

…and left to drive east to Big Pine through the Sierra foothills, where I surprisingly found an old oilfield being reopened.

It was getting very hot, and several of the roads were still blocked by last winter’s storms and the whole trip was starting to feel like a boondoggle.