THE SKY WAS a felted underbelly. The air was full of lithium.
Back about a million years ago, give or take ten or twenty thousand years, there was plentiful water and runoff down past lakes in the Great Basin. Here beaches receded and land popped up, and the thin white line of the beach border still lies on the ancient falling valley rocks, and down from later-named Owens River water flowed to later-named Owens Lake, which was a beauty.
Here, the first white man came in 1843. Joseph Walker walked and took a wagon train through Owens Lake, and for fifteen years until the California Gold Rush, Owens Lake and this part of the Northern Mojave was quiet and lonely and wet. There was time yet for water to live.
But there was a faraway town on the west coast, far from Owens Lake, a small settl
