All these posts about the shitty air, and not a single one about the shitty water. I'm being remiss.
We get mineral water here. Oh no, not the fancy schmancy Pellegrino stuff. I'm talking real minerals. Probably lead and arsenic too. And God only knows what else. It comes out of the tap white as milk. If you let it sit for about 10 minutes, all the crap it in settles and it resembles "water". But it didn't go anywhere. It's still there... waiting for you. Nobody here drinks it. God no. Not even the locals. The first week we were here I asked a waiter for a glass of water and he looked at me like I just ordered blowfish. If you want to get rich in Bakersfield, go into bottled water.
Most of the houses in this neighborhood sport wooden fences between them, and walking the dogs through the 'hood, you can't help but notice that wherever the sprinklers hit the fences, they've become bleached bone white. And then you think... "I bathe in this crap!" Wash my clothes. Do the dishes. Maybe it's something that occurs naturally. I doubt it - nothing here appears to occur naturally. Maybe the people up north, watching us steal it and waste it have poisoned it out of spite. Can't say I'd blame them.
I tried to do some research online. I googled "Bakersfield's Shitty Water" and got the City's website, which made me laugh. And there I learned "Anyone who has lived in California knows that water is a precious commodity that has been a source of rivalry between northern and southern California since the early Gold Rush days..." No shit. That's why they steal it.
At any rate, I never found out the secret to our "White Gold". I did find out some other fun facts though. I discovered that the municipal reservoir, Lake Isabella, northeast of Bako, is held back by a dam considered the #1 risk of failure in the entire United States. It even showed a map of what the flood would look like when the dam fails (their word, not mine) and basically Bako will be under 3 or 4 feet of water. Something to look forward to.
So the moral of the story appears to be, if the air doesn't kill you, one way or another, the water will.
