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learned information, and he wanted to share it.
    “We get almost half our water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct. It’s a hundredyears old now. It brings water from way up north in the Owens Valley and Mono Lake. It’s downhill all the way.”
    “No it’s not,” Addison said. “There are mountains between here and there.”
    “The water is siphoned over them,” he told her. “There are no pumps needed. Doesn’t cost much to run it. Not that the people of the Owens Valley have ever been happy about it. They were bamboozled by William Mulholland back in 1905. Without that water, Los Angeles could never have developed the way it did.”
    “Didn’t we see a movie about that?” Karen asked.
    “
Chinatown
was based on the water wars. The thing is, the people way up there in the Sierras have never really forgiven L.A. for it, and in fact, the way they figure it, we’re
still
stealing their water. And we keep wanting more. I was just thinking, if they ever got angry enough, it would be easy to sabotage that big pipe. You know how many people the Los Angeles metro area could support without the water we bring in?”
    Karen didn’t even look up, already bored with the subject.
    “How many, Daddy?”
    “Nineteen out of twenty people who live here would have to go somewhere else.”
    Neither of them had anything to say about that. Dave figured he might as well give them the rest of the story. It’s not as if conversation had sparkled around the Marshall dinner table lately.
    “Most of the rest of our water comes from the Colorado and California Aqueducts. That water has to be pumped.” And pumps need electricity or fuel to operate. But he didn’t add that. “Only about 10 percent of our water comes out of the ground.”
    “That’s fascinating, Daddy.”
    He could tell she didn’t really think so, but Addison had always been tactful. He smiled at her.
    “So, would you like to hear about our power supply?”
    Neither of them did.
    In trying to answer that basic question—what would Los Angeles be like with little or no petroleum fuel?—he had found some interesting and alarming facts.
    He was surprised to learn that L.A. got about half its electricity from coal-firedplants, some of them in the city, some in the neighboring states. Another quarter came from burning natural gas, 10 percent from nuclear plants, and around 5 percent from hydropower, mostly from Hoover Dam. But all the coal for the plants in Arizona and Utah was brought in by trains that ran on diesel fuel.
    How would Los Angeles, perhaps the most gasoline-dependent city in the world, react to a severe shortage?
    He had an idea that it wouldn’t be pretty.
    The next day after taking Addison to school Dave dropped Karen off at the Burbank airport for a flight to San Francisco. She was attending a conference there. He wasn’t sure what it was about. He felt guilty about that, but he had a hard time keeping up with her causes at the best of times, and this was far from the best. He couldn’t stop thinking about Colonel Warner and the burning oil wells.
    He decided to go on a shopping spree. But first he decided to make a list. What would he need to survive with limited or no gasoline? He went down to the basement to see what he had.
    It was under the guesthouse/office, and reachable only by an outside stairway going down the hill, almost overgrown with vines. The door was sturdy steel with a strong padlock. He hadn’t been in there in ages.
    His earthquake supplies were good for only the recommended three days, and it was all years old. The first-aid kit was a joke.
    Against the east wall was a hodgepodge of stuff that most people accumulate.
    When Addison was six and joined the Girl Scouts, Dave thought it would be fun if the family camped out together. So he bought a tent, a camp stove, a giant cooler, cots, air mattresses, all top-of-the-line, and they set out like pioneers on the Oregon Trail for the wilds of Lake Tahoe—where you have to make