141 | Fish Story

1980 | Delta-Mendota Canal

1980 | Delta-Mendota Canal

It appears unlikely, but this was a promising place to put out your line. The water in this section had indeed been screened at the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the fishracks, but tiny fingerlings and some eggs made the trip through the low-lift pumps and were thriving in the canal. So fishing was encouraged to bring the striped bass and other species out before they had to contend with the next series of pumps and distribution systems downstream. Do watch your footing though; the canal banks are steeply sloped and gravelly, the concrete lining walls slick with algae, and you will need to tread water and drift along the side until safety escape ladders or last-resort buoyed lines come near your hands.

▷ At the time of this picture, there was a State Police officer patrolling in a light plane, low and slow in an aerobatic Citabria, just in case someone tried to make trouble or get into it. My foundation letter led to a congressman’s introduction to the state water agencies, and a phone call got me a superb ride and a great conversation with a fine pilot.

140 | Arizona West, Homeward Bound

1980 | Arizona 95 Swings West

1980 | Arizona 95 Swings West

On the long road home, after having “been” there and “done” something, it’s not easy for me to break momentum and pull over.

But the stops I do make, for one reason or another, are not just to look around, but to take the place in.

139 | Water in the West

1980 | Gene Wash Dam

1980 | Gene Wash Dam

Gene Wash Reservoir is tucked into the desert behind a modest dam and this even smaller peripheral dam, which closes off a pesky ravine cutting away from the selected ‘natural’ storage basin.

Water here is held after its first pump lift from the Colorado River impounded by Parker Dam, and from here it’s pumped up into Copper Basin, a remarkable place before and after the engineering, which feeds a tunnel through Whipple Mountain; then gravity takes the water sixty miles to Iron Mountain, where another pump station sends it up and through another tunnel at that site, and then it rolls through yet another tunnel under Coxcomb Mountain to Eagle Mountain, and one more lift after that allows the water to run through many more tunnels and siphons all the way down into the Los Angeles Basin.

137 | San Luis Reservoir

1980 | San Luis Reservoir, Los Baños, California

1980 | San Luis Reservoir, Los Baños, California

Offline reservoir along the California Aqueduct. It’s a place to store water pumped up from the Aqueduct as contingency storage, and also to collect runoff from the watershed to the west. On this day the level is very low; in California, there is no such thing as a “normal” year of rainfall – the long-term graph shows that it’s frequently boom or bust.

136 | The Line of Least Resistance

1980 | O’Neill Forebay, San Luis Dam

1980 | O’Neill Forebay, San Luis Dam

Here’s an idea: you need electric power in the hot California afternoons, but the nights are cooler and there’s less demand for power overnight. So why don’t you take some water out of the supply running in the California Aqueduct toward the south, and borrow it in this pool, then at night pump this water up into the San Luis Reservoir above, and store it until the next afternoon, when you can swap the fields on the pump motors and turn them into generators, drop the upper water down through them and make lower-cost extra power to send down the lines to the air-conditioners? It’s actually the same water and the same energy (less certain losses of efficiency), but the dollar cost differential is significant, and engineers make this sleight-of-hand pay off.

135 | Starting Point

2013 | Studio City, California

2013 | Studio City, California

We chose this house for its bones and for the sturdy eighty-year-old stucco over steel mesh which held it safe through the many quakes including the big ones in 1971 and 1994, and for the animated sidewalks with little kids riding their tricycles. But we could not quite guess who had chosen these colors, or who had applied them, though when we put up a calendar in the tiny dining room which was a refuge from the remodeling and a sort of field office, they began to make sense only after I had made this picture during a short break from plans and permits.

So it’s true that photographs can be time-release capsules of meaning.

▷ Two new books are out: VERTICALS and Mixed Documents Handbook No. 2

▷▷ Details at ⋖ BOOKS ⋗ or the main menu above.

133 | Finishing

2005 | Sherman Oaks, California

2005 | Sherman Oaks, California

Concrete is a fascinating material; what you see is not what you get. It requires a lot of pre-visualization but offers a great opportunity for invention. The results are rather permanent, so “measure twice, pour once” is a huge understatement of the care and audacity required in the creative concrete process.

This job was scary – Jay Griffith had called for black concrete with a retarded cure to be washed down the next day for a soft sand finish. A truckload of black goo was pumped in to produce what looked like a fancy oil spill. But at the end of the second day’s work, the surface had settled into a delicious soft gray that looked just like a sugary licorice gumdrop.