Reservoirs, Railroads and Wings
Between the Pacific Ocean and the inland bay of San Francisco there is an artificial lake situated in a rift valley created by the San Andreas Fault. For my weekly commute in a high-wing bush plane, Crystal Springs serves as the identifying marker for my flights in and out of the Bay Area.
Few know that Crystal Springs it is actually man made. This reservoir was an ambitious engineering project designed to deliver snow melt from the Sierras to the back door of Stanford University. Like a tap on a supersized bottle of Evian, this pure water could be compared to the finest Japanese sake.
The engineers of Crystals Springs constructed a Roman-styled terminus to celebrate their mountain spring delivered to the Pacific’s edge. It flows like a Texas oil rig tapped into the Alps itself. And the whole project was the inspiration for the Hoover Dam.
It flows like liquified silver, and has traveled through a system of lifts, tunnels and flumes so complicated that it even has its own conspiracy theories on how it was built, like the pyramids or the first moon landing. No wonder: Crystal Springs required tunneling underneath the second largest bay on the Pacific coast of North America.
So as I fly over Crystal Springs in my little plane of cloth and carbon fiber, I marvel at the fact that the technology of this plane capable of landing on a sandbar and the technology of this beautifully pure reservoir have not advanced since the 1920s.
How did we build these enduring things?
The answer is that we built them because we had to. The right-of-ways that made these tunnels and pipelines possible are part of the same right-of-ways that we laid railroad tracks over. While Europe had the time and small size to bury its’ power lines, we had ground to cover, and fast. We built dams and strung power lines. America has always known how to build.
And yet now, when Facebook went to resurrect one of the old abandoned rail lines that ran through it’s campus to transport employees, city bureaucrats from San Mateo to San Francisco laid down in its planning tracks.
And it was only a train over some muddy marsh.
Fortunately, there are parts of our country that are still thinking in generational terms. This last few days, I met with nascent teams building all kinds of mind boggling things: suitcase-sized modular machine shops to make stuff in space, a company regrowing human tissue, a band of former SpaceX engineers using low-orbit mirrors to bring sunlight to the dark night sky.
Americans must keep building in space and in small and distributed ways that outrun our county’s bureaucracy — now 44% larger than pre-Covid times. I work at a venture firm that seeded SpaceX, Uber, Palantir, Airbnb. I’m the people guy and can’t really tell one P&L or business plan from another. But I know talent, and I’ll never bet against the individual. Optimist, American.
