Torino. If you were to decide to measure the coastline of California, it would be of little use simply to lay a ruler across a page of an atlas and then determine the length of the roughly ten degrees of longitude it spanned. But it would be of even less value to walk the length of the coastline with a one-inch stick, taking into account every open tide pool and shoe-size peninsula; if you measured too finely, in fact, your answer could approach infinity. Every little pool, if you measured finely enough, had a virtually infinite coastline. You had to approach such things differently. You had to back off just far enough. (Location 1467)
car and driving away, very fast, north. Fifty miles south of that, at Lake Havasu City, the river flowed high around the massive pilings of London Bridge, the same arching granite structure that until twenty years ago had straddled the Thames. The river’s border was green, but the desert was close beyond the bright new hotels and restaurants, and because of the clarity of the air the desiccated mountains seemed nearer than they actually were. A white-bearded (Location 2627)
As he went to the closet to select a shirt, he reflected that old Ozzie was right—a good breakfast was important. Maybe there was a Denny’s nearby. He could buy a newspaper and sit at the counter and maybe get into a conversation with somebody. (Location 3970)
“No, you haven’t. Don’t you read the papers? They’re having a water war in Nevada these days. Las vegas is Spanish for ‘the meadows,’ it’s in an artesian basin, but even in the forties the wells had begun to run dry, sink-holes started to appear, as the water table dropped. It was only in eighty-two that the city got access to Lake Mead water, and now that’s not enough, and they’re after the water in central Nevada—Railroad Valley, Ely, Pioche. Las Vegas is supposed to take no more from those places than rainfall puts back, but the city has applied for the right to take more, what they call mining the aquifers. (Location 4775)
