"She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesn’t trust it. The family takes showers in it, and she washes their laundry in it, and if she runs the water long enough, she will use it to wash her vegetables and cook her rice and potatoes. But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. 'It comes out like pee,' says her 11-year-old daughter.
The water is filtered for arsenic, boron, and other salts, and the monthly tests show no violation of state or federal standards. This hasn’t convinced the people of Lost Hills, however. Lupe says no one in her family, and none of her friends living in the trailer park or on the other side of town, drinks the water that comes out of the pipe.
In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. These are donations from other farmworker families, but they’re not for her and Manuel and the kids. Her brother-in-law was killed recently in a car crash along Highway 46. He was headed to the fields at the same time that another farmworker, drunk on beer, was coming home from the fields. The sober man died. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water?"
~ Mark Arax
A Kingdom from Dust — The California Sunday Magazine
https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust
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