1. waters recede
In 1986, the faucets in California’s skies closed and the state embarked on a long, parched passage through one of the lengthiest droughts in modern history, a devastating lack that peaked in 1988 when the entire country withered[i] and lasted until an unusually heavy El Niño drenched the state in the winter of 1992. The year the drought began I turned 11 and stopped sleeping with any regularity. One or two long nights became several straight and I grew acquainted with exhaustion’s dry depletion.
More than three decades later, drought and sleeplessness only make sense in light of each other, the wrinkles around my eyes furrows in fields un-watered, the next dry spell possibly one short season away, the damage cyclical and compounding and invisible to anyone not paying particular attention. My state and I are connected on a deep and primordial level: scarcity and overuse are draining what is buried deep within us. And at this point, the harm may be irreversible, though we show no signs of slowing our consumption.
After all, there’s an economy built on constant withdrawal regardless of cost.
2. sporadic showers
Sleeplessness grows leaden with age, the frustrations and isolation of another night when everyone in the house sleeps without me more difficult to shrug off. Lonely and avoiding electronic screens that keep me awake, I’ve taken to writing myself notes. Read together I find a rough draft of sorts in my effort to connect lack and liquid.
*
The raindrop’s path from cloud to congregation is only rapid on the universe’s clock. There is, of course, the plunge from cloud to dust, hurtling earthward when water’s weight breaks the barrier of gas holding it kin. But all momentum staggers when that cannonball lands.
It persists because it must; because drops that fall and fail to evaporate are compelled to reach the open spaces below, breathing their longing for collection through rock and silt and soil. Only when they reach an invisible lake of others do they rest.
Sleep, I think, works this way for everyone but me, a conclusion drawn in my loneliest moments because I am evaporating slowly.
*
I watch water flee the bottom of a sink and try to slow its disappearance with just my mind; conjure an image of a full basin. Of course, gravity operates regardless of my wishes and I’m left with just a damp sheen clinging to porcelain…enough to feel not hold.
*
When I was a child, my family left our trailer in the desert for a house near the ocean. I have never stopped feeling desiccated, even when—on a whim—I could fall prone into the world’s largest body of water.
It was leaving the Pacific that allowed me to see the desert depth within me. Now, I wander telescopic night’s gasping spaces when memories of sleep cling like salt left on my body by an ocean I merely visit from time to time.
3. sleep studies
The largest portion of agricultural production in the United States comes from the San Joaquin Valley. To say it’s a particularly exceptional place to grow, raise, harvest, and distribute what the country runs on is an understatement. The valley—roughly 400 miles long and 20 to 70 miles wide—is basically a hyper-fertile trough collecting water and sediment from the Sierras to the east and coastal ranges to the west. That soil nurtures crops and products ranging from citrus to grains, alfalfa to the cows that consume it, grapes to wine, tomatoes and garlic to the pasta sauce they comprise.[ii] A drought there is felt in food supplies around the world. When it comes to stocking the pantry of the global 21st century, the demand for California’s fields and farms is unrelenting, regardless of whether or not there’s enough surface water to keep up.
Consumption, it seems, is endless and unfazed by West Coast weather. Ironically, those who live in the Central Valley experience the highest rate of food instability in the country. One might see this as the cost of feeding the world, another the human toll of living well beyond our means. The rain, however, is unmoved, falling or failing at the whims of weather patterns and man-made climate change. And when it stops, which happens every 15 to 20 years, those fields still need irrigation.
In response, we dig, drilling into massive reserves 300 feet or more underground, to pull through inefficient industrial straws enough liquid to survive the arid years until rain and snow melt return. In the early 20th century, this seemed a sensible response, but ballooning population and improvements in technology meant people across the country and then the oceans demanded their oranges and pistachios year-round. There has been no sleep for the Valley since, regardless of its need for fallow seasons.
4. depletion nightmares
Humans are takers. Engines of extinction. Agents of the Anthropocene. Almost 8 billion machines that run on water and rest without realizing we are running out of both.
As the population grows, we pull more thirstily on aquifers holding 30 percent of Earth’s freshwater. The problem: our increasing dependence on these wells—what some call a “slow-speed crisis”—will leave us collectively dehydrated by 2030.[iii] Reserves on every inhabited continent are already tapped, some to the point of altering the landscape above them. Beijing, Shanghai, and Mexico City sink on soil that settles and resettles beneath them. Some expect, as climate change and population stress increasingly tax these stores, that the wars of the mid-to-late 21st century will be fought over access to water. In response, we drill ever deeper.
At the same time, reports of sleeplessness indicate our age is also draining the reserves of human rest…or so popular opinion would suggest. A multi-billion-dollar industry rests atop the crust of our insomnia. But maybe there’s no mattress or medicine or method of therapy capable of drilling deeply enough into our souls to silence a fear that we are cracking under fatigue like the ground beneath cloudless skies refusing to conjure rain, no matter how much our reservoirs need refilling.
5. well bottoms
My first collapse came 10 years after my first drought. At 21, weeks with fewer than 15 hours of sleep and three-day stretches of uninterrupted consciousness were common. I was a double major cobbling together an existence of six-class semesters and three part-time jobs to get by. Caffeine and stubbornness were all that kept me upright most days, but I always seemed to tread water; excel in some ways, even.
That streak ended the summer of 1996. Just off a journalism program in Washington D.C. that required constant 17-hour days, I spent a couple months living in my future in-laws’ basement and working temp jobs. Eight-hour workdays felt like a gift, even if I was breaking rocks with a 35-pound sledgehammer to fill science kits for minimum wage. For a month, I left began at 6:25 in the morning and clocked out by 3:30 in the afternoon, leaving plenty of time to enjoy myself.
Except, everything was falling apart. Most nights I couldn’t manage more than two hours sleep, not enough for the heavy lifting I was doing. By week two, recovery took an entire weekend, by month’s end, more. Nauseous and carrying a near-constant migraine, I left for work that fifth Monday and drifted off the highway twice in my 20-minute commute. I quit that morning, made it back to bed, and didn’t emerge until late that afternoon, a pattern I’d repeat the rest of the summer.
From the outside, it looked like I was coasting on the rent-free kindness of my fiancée’s parents. Inside, it was terrifying. I couldn’t work, sleep, or form coherent thoughts consistently and no amount of willpower or rest during daylight hours fixed it. At the time, I figured it was just a phase, not realizing this was my new normal, a cycle of depletion and collapse settling into my body to return at irregular intervals like the rainless seasons of my youth.
6. slow leak
California’s last drought ran almost the entirety of a decade and reframed sleep for me. The more the state wilted, the more connections bloomed. The more farmers drained the groundwater, the more ideas flooded my head at night. And then, scrolling randomly just before sunrise, I discovered that, of course, a word exists at the intersection of my disparate thoughts.
Subsidence.
In geological terms, subsidence is the collapse of soil capable of storing groundwater. When aquifers are overtaxed, the sponge-like composite holding subterranean moisture compacts and hardens. In many cases, it becomes too dense to ever hold water again. Farmers the world over are aware of this. They’ve experienced the compression of their fields but continue to dig deeper wells and foul more earth because the nature of a consumptive economy is that hunger feels ever-increasing.
As I read about subsidence, phrases surrounding it landed like body shots. Loss of capacity. Inability to recharge. Collapse. Permanent resistance. All felt personal. Even so, I was forced to drill more deeply into my reservoirs after each waking night. At first, I wondered how much of my creative energies insomnia cost me. My issues with attention deficit—itself a cause of sleeplessness—make it difficult enough to focus. How much more might I accomplish if my white-water thoughts would calm just enough to let me skirt the boulders in my path?
These questions quickly gave way to calculating the impact of lacking sleep on my relationships. How much water was my wife forced to carry? How collapsed had my patience become? How thirsty for attention were my children? Could people see how hard I was paddling? Yes, this is all very self-centered. Depression keeps you up at night just to fixate on the shallows of your days rather than their depths.
And then, sinking deeper still, meditations on the physical toll of sleeplessness took hold. Again, the dangers of slaking our outsized thirsts with too much drilling made a sense of this. Beyond obvious issues like compacting land, entire infrastructures above ground are being compromised. Cities sink. Foundations fracture under buildings. California’s patchwork levee system, made mostly of dirt walls put in place by farmers, crumbles as the earth shifts. One earthquake could trigger a massive collapse and foul freshwater millions of people.
And how might compacting aquifers add pressure to the fault lines veining the expanse of the state? What about the strain warping roads and train tracks and underground utility lines? All are major issues that merely seem less important because of their relative invisibility. The same is true of the health damage chronic and sustained insomnia can create:
· Possibility of early death
· Depression
· Injury
· Sexual dysfunction
· Anger/irritability
· Weight gain
· Cloudy thinking
· Loss of productivity
· Troubled biological timekeeping
Each potential decline branches weaves its own web of problems—visible or not—and the questions get personal. How many hours or days or weeks have been shaved off my life? Is depression a cause or symptom of my insomnia? Is this why my joints ache or is that the weight I’ve put on? Did that weight come from not sleeping? Is my diet keeping me awake? Should I try pills again, even though I can’t function when I take them? Did this cause my heart issues?
And then the despair; three decades of frustration now a knot in me that feels permanent, tightening with each dry hour lost. Nothing I’ve tried works, no medication or meditation or breathing pattern or exercise regime or shift to my sleep cycle. About the only time I simply fall asleep is when I’m camping next to running water. Unfortunately, I can’t camp all the time and there’s no guarantee the water will always run in California.
7. headwaters
It’s pure fiction to pinpoint the moment insomnia first tapped my reserves. But I can remember, vividly, a night marking the end of regular sleep.
By then, I was familiar with using books to chase exhaustion until three or four in the morning, though that never really worked. I remember what I was reading—Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman—and the chili we ate for dinner. I can still hear my dad’s rattling snores against the wall between our rooms. At some point, I woke up—or thought I had—with my nose pressed into my book’s spine. I shifted to slide it from under me and that’s when I felt cold metal against my neck. Then I heard a click, followed by a muffled voice.
“Don’t move or I’ll kill you.”
I froze, my head just off the pillow and blood pooling in my limbs. The house was so quiet I thought I could hear him breathe and the pressure against my neck felt constant. Soon the pain came, deep cramps from holding one position for so long. And then my dad snored, loudly. I cried at my parents’ presence being exposed and held my head up for a minute more. But then I couldn’t and collapsed face down, sobbing and convinced I was about to die.
Until nothing happened. I lay there for a long time, eyes clinched, refusing to turn my head. When I finally did, I found nothing but the doubt of being gaslit by a dream. Even so, I couldn’t shake the chill of the gun’s barrel or the distinct tone of his voice or how the door I closed at bedtime now stood open. I rolled onto my back, eyes trained on the shadows moving across the doorway, and waited until enough gray light gave me the courage to get up. At 5:30, my mom found me at the kitchen table with my third mug of tea.
“What are you doing up?”
I weighed my words, wanting to tell her but knowing I’d feel a fool. After a beat, I gave what’s become my standard response to this question, regardless of the circumstances.
“I just couldn’t sleep.”
It’s the ‘just’ that matters. It makes the experience manageable for people who have no trouble laying down and sinking head-first into an undisturbed pond. Insomniacs, however, know the secret of that ‘just,’ the reversal of physics that floats our fatigue-heavy heads on the water’s surface in ways even Peter’s doubt couldn’t sink.
8. Deserts don’t need much rain, but travelers an oasis…
When I was about twelve, a counselor gave me a “guaranteed” sleep strategy. Count to ten, flexing a different set of muscles at each number for ten seconds starting with your toes. When you release the squeeze, let go of a worry. By the time you hit ten, you’ll be out.
Obviously, the guy had no grasp of my issues. Some nights, I ran the count ten times over, no closer to sleep in the end than the beginning. It’s the rare person, I discovered, who can speak rain into existence.
9. A night a week, that’s all I ask…
In 1986, California almond growers faced a crisis: they couldn’t sell their product. Pulling together under the Blue Diamond cooperative, they created a slogan and ran it aggressively in TV ads nationwide. “A can a week, that’s all we ask.” It worked. Sales climbed and the industry boomed just as the rain stopped falling.[iv] This confluence represents the cycle of depletion we find ourselves in today. Hell, it came with a ready-made tagline for our times.
California: Popular Demand and Not Enough to Go Around.
The Gold Rush. The Oil Boom. The Second Great Migration. One hundred years of periodic explosions in growth when people came west for golden promises and found there’s a cost to pay for year-round sunshine and all we love about this place. Unfortunately, that price has been forestalled by a line of credit still merely collecting payments on interest alone in damage to the environment: construction driving extinction; toxic chemicals leaching into soil so we can create more toxins; wildfires burning more and more often. And yet, the population grows—more than 40 million as I write this sentence—demanding more without using less.
In this regard, almonds[v] are the perfect expression of the overdrawn economies of water and rest. California’s Central Valley produces a staggering 80 percent of the world’s almonds, channeling more than $10 billion into the state’s economy annually. But they are a notoriously thirsty crop, guzzling more than 10% of all water used for agriculture here. That’s more water than every person in Los Angeles and San Francisco uses each year.[vi] It is no fallacy to say the biggest threat to California’s aquifers may be the almond economy.
Despite knowing this, resistance to change has been stiff. Most almond growers claim they’re trapped. They know their product damages the environment and their ability to continue growing it, but they can’t afford to shift their methods or downsize production to more sustainable levels. After all, this demand underwrites the livelihood of thousands. So, they drill and draw and the valley compacts more tightly around their trees’ thirsty roots.
Sleeplessness, too, creates this perceived trap as the ever-increasing need for productivity generates more work and less sleep, stressing already taxed reserves of energy because the only way forward seems to be continuing the cycle. Until, of course, you collapse and the system that depleted you moves on, unaware it’s weakened itself with your loss.
10. evaporation
Joan Didion’s essay “Holy Water,” likely the most famous Western meditation on the subject, focuses not on who controls the water supply in the California, but rather control itself. Her fascination, then, is the way in which our efforts to resist the true nature of the land in the way we reconstruct it with water from other places.
“Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive…. It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recently.”[vii]
More and more, I find myself at odds with this sense of control, and by extension the essay itself, which until recently was one of my favorites. Unlike Didion, I cannot fixate on water anymore. Instead, I sit alone with another’s night’s exhaustion I can’t control, waking dreams of a day when there is not enough water collapsing inside my head.
[i] Keith Schneider, “Recalling ’88 Drought’s Disaster, Farmers Say Deluge Is Not as Bad.” New York Times, 8 July 1993. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/08/us/recalling-88-drought-s-disaster-farmers-say-deluge-is-not-as-bad.html
[ii] Nate Holdsworth “Overdraft of the Central Valley” Power Point Presentation, 2011.
[iii] Laura Parker “What You Need to Know About the World’s Water Wars.” National Geographic, 14 July 2016. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/07/world-aquifers-water-wars/
[iv] “Quest ongoing for memorable slogans.” Modesto Bee, 21 July 2007. http://www2.readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=51274
[v] Tom Philpott and Julia Lurie. “Here’s the Real Problem with Almonds.” The New Republic. 31 December 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/125450/heres-real-problem-almonds
[vi] ibid
[vii] Joan Didion, “Holy Water.” The White Album. Fararr, Strauss & Giroux, 1971.
Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction currently spinning his phrases in the Los Angeles area. His work has appeared most recently in The Jabberwock Review, Punctuate, The Other Journal, and at Drunk Monkeys in the One Perfect Episode section.