Brad Greene sat back in his saddle, pushing his legs down in the stirrups and wiping his forehead with the back of one hand. His body ached from the long ride along the San Basilone riverbed. It was mid October now, a time in California’s Northern San Joaquin Valley when the desert sun baked the land into a hard caked crust and bleached the sky white hot. Brad let out a long, low sigh. He could almost feel the sunbaking his skin into tough cowhide. The Sweat trickled down from his broad forehead into his eyes, stinging them like a powerful acid.
“Jesus!” he said out loud while he scanned the barren flat landscape. In the distance he could make out the jagged peaks of the Santa Sussana mountains, the border separating
California’s farm and range land from the Mojave Desert. On the western side of those slopes farmers and ranchers fought one another for years for the rights to draw water from the Sierras down into the parched