Only yesterday I was musing, that is to say blogging, heavily over this matter of the canyon behind my birthplace. Regretting that I never hiked up there. And having always wondered what it was like to be up there. The latter is the sort of musing that can propel a life. Take my word for it.

A road led northwest from the town of Banning and, in a single switchback, climbed to the top of the San Gorgonio River Canyon cliffs and kept going. It ended a couple of miles beyond, giving an overlook to the mysterious canyon. At that point, the canyon curved out of sight and up into the steep mountain range. At the bend where it disappeared from view, an enormous pine appeared tantalizingly. This big water-loving tree, likely a Western yellow pine, marked the beginning of forest. And to a kid this was a wonderful thing, the start of a land more friendly to life, the end of the arid desert zero-scape.

I never got beyond that point. I just saw the tree in the distance, imagined what it was like going up into the steep forested world above. Climbing and climbing toward water, from the parched mineral flatlands of the upper Sonoran desert. Which raises other questions. Like what it is like to scale those mountains, how hikers somehow find their way.

Today, satellite images reveal remarkable aerial detail everywhere. I can’t tell if the road that now parallels the canyon way up into the San Bernardino Mountains is actually a road or more of a jeep track. Or even a trail. Still, this inspires tantalizing thoughts. That maybe if I could find someone with a four-wheel-drive vehicle, some knowledge of the mountains and some nerve…I could actually get up there.

In any case, I would discover something quite different. The mountains are parched. What Banning used to refer to as its “water canyon,” has become something else. Battles have erupted over water rights. Online documents suggest that an emergency pipeline was put in a few years ago. Climate change.

Growing out of a changing human climate, of course. The mammoth floods that hit Southern California in 1939 happened to coincide with something fortuitous. That year the federal government had funded a national program of water-control measures. Which gave me a new understanding of the storm drains that were such a feature in our little town.

Actually, they were rather beautiful. In several places, deep V-shaped ditches ran through the town, draining storm water from the higher northern areas. They were constructed of stones, symmetrically and beautifully arranged to form the proper V-shape, cemented into the landscape. Concrete held the rocks together, but the stones themselves predominated. Some federal money had given the town a measure of security. Who knows, but they may even have been built by the WPA, one of many Roosevelt-era efforts that had a lasting and positive effect on the country. The people who went to work for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s built roads, bridges, campgrounds and, yes, ditches. Not to mention murals, several of which are alive and well in San Francisco.

And there’s a lesson in all this musing about mountains and dry rivers and ditches…and that is, keep gazing upward.