“One of the blessings of aridity!” echoed his listener. “You are a philosopher.” He had not yet touched the other’s thought at the spring.
“You might as well call me a socialist because I praise irrigation in that it stands for the small farm unit,” retorted the valley man. “That is one of its fiats; the small unit. It is the small farm that pays. That fact brings many advantages. What is the charm of Riverside? It comes to me always like the unreal dream of the socialist come true. It is a city of farms, of small farms, where a man may make his living off his ten acres of oranges, or lemons; and with all the comforts and conveniences of a city within reach, his neighbors not ten miles off! A farmer in Riverside, or in any irrigated community, does not have to postpone living for himself or his family, until he can sell the farm! He can go to church, can walk there; the trolley car which passes his door takes him to a public library, or the opera-house. His children ride to school. His wife does not need to be a drudge. The bread wagon and the steam-laundry wagon stop at her door.”
Rickard observed that perhaps he did not know anything about irrigation after all! He had not thought of it before in its sociological relation, but merely as it touched his profession.
“Not going into soil values, for that is a long story,” began the older man, “irrigation is the answer which science gives to the agriculturist who is impatient of haphazard methods. Irrigation is not a compromise, as so many believe who know nothing about it. It is a distinct advantage over old-fashioned methods.”
“I am one of those who always thought it a compromise,” admitted the engineer.
“Better call rain a compromise,” retorted the irrigationist. “The man who irrigates gives water to the tree which needs it; rain nourishes one tree, and drowns out another. Irrigation is an insurance policy against drought, a guarantee against floods. The farmer who has once operated an irrigated farm would be as impatient were he again subjected to the caprice of rain as a housewife would be were she compelled to wait for rain to fill her wash-tub. There is no irregularity or caprice about irrigation.”
“Wonder how the old fellow picked it all up?” mused Rickard with disrespect. Aloud he said—“You were speaking of the value of the soil?”
“Look at the earth those plows are turning over. See how rich and friable it is, how it crumbles? You can dig for hundreds of feet and still find that sort of soil, eight hundred feet down! It is disintegrated rock and leaf mold brought in here in the making of a delta. Heavy rainfalls are rare here, though we have had them, in spite of popular opinion. Were we to have frequent rains, the chemical properties, which rain-farmers must buy to enrich their worn-out soils, would be leached out, drained from the soil. I can’t make this comprehensive, but I’ve a monograph on desert soil. If you are interested, I’ll send it to you.”
“I should like it—immensely,” assented the engineer, still amused.
“It explains the choice of the Aztecs, of the Incas, of Carthaginians, the Moors,” observed the stranger. “They chose the desert, not in spite of the soil, but because of it. I doubt if they were awake to the social advantages of the system, but it was their cooperative brotherhood that helped them to their glory. We are centuries behind them. Look what the acceptance of the superstition has already cost California! The Mexican Boundary Survey Commission did its work pretty thoroughly until familiarity with the bad lands they were plodding through confirmed the old superstition. The international line was to cut across at the mouth of Hardy’s Colorado. When the surveyors struck the Gila, they assumed it was the river they wanted it to be; anyway, it did not matter; it was ‘bad land,’ where even the Indians were thinning, where only scorpions and rattlers could flourish. The line was drawn there, and California lost all that area of desert land. However, a lady got her silk gown!”