Rebecca Lawton grew up exploring rivers and deserts throughout the American West. Her work on water, climate, and wild and human nature has been honored with a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, the Ellen Meloy Award for Desert Writers, the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, a WILLA for original softcover fiction, Pushcart Prize nominations in prose and poetry, and residencies at Hedgebrook, PLAYA, and The Island Institute. She lives with guitarist Paul Christopulos in their creekside home in Sonoma Valley, California.

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Water Fix
Chapter 2: Seventeen Palms
Chapter 3: A Storage Problem
Chapter 4: True North
Chapter 5: The Fire This Time
Chapter 6: Water, Water Everywhere
Chapter 7: The Sentinels
Chapter 8: A Proliferation of Green
Chapter 9: Breaking the Rules
Chapter 10: A Failure of Will
Chapter 11: Us or Them
Chapter 12: Why They Call it Mourning
Chapter 13: One Pipeline to Rule Them All
Chapter 14: Everybody Was So Nice
Chapter 15: The Oasis This Time
Notes
Acknowledgments