Entry 2:

Is Santa Fe auditioning to become the new Los Angeles? It's starting to seem like it, and maybe Joan Didion and Mike City of Quartz Davis should think about relocating and putting some green chile in their acts.

There are fires raging in the hills! (Because of the drought we're in, the government has closed the huge national forest that abuts the city; unfortunately, careful oversight hasn't stopped two dangerous blazes from sparking to life so far this spring.) There are moody, slouching celebrities all over town! (I've personally seen Gene Hackman, Shirley MacLaine, and Whosis the Brunette from Three's Company.) And more and more, there are rumors of a Chinatown-like conspiracy involving the place that everybody loves to hate: Las Campanas, the golf course and residential development that is using way more than its share of H₂O as Santa Fe heads into a summer of unparalleled water restrictions on homeowners and businesses.

Recently, hoping to work up a head of steam about the loathed luxury resort, I went out to Las Campanas and took the standard prospective-buyer tour with a real-estate rep who showed me an $899,000 home, the development's gargantuan indoor riding arena, its lavish indoor pool, the snazzy clubhouse, gym, and restaurants, and the beautiful and (in this context) terrifyingly green golf courses.

I'm not a knee-jerk golf hater—I grew up playing the game on a parched, probably-shouldn't-have-been-there course in Western Kansas—but this scene did seem rather appalling. Las Campanas is set amidst the harsh, rolling desert hills that stretch between our two local mountains ranges, the Sangre de Cristos and the Jemez. It's the kind of natural setting that even lizards and cacti consider hardship duty; but here sits 160 acres of pampered greensward. More insanely, the courses use a cool-weather turf called bentgrass that has about as much business in northern New Mexico as it does on planet Mercury.

Las Campanas employees have obviously been taught to "take charge." As the real-estate salesperson drove me around, she explained the water situation, saying that Las Campanas has its own water rights (true) and that it's a distortion to talk about the development "using" all the water it takes from city pipes every week. Because? "Because what people don't understand," she said, "is that a lot of that water is not being used. It's being storedin lakes." Hmmm.

After my tour I spoke with Las Campanas's president, Bill Deihl, who made his case clearly and without apology: The development was duly approved years ago by Santa Fe County; it has legal water rights; it provides many jobs; it's doing what it can to conserve (a relative concept, I'll admit); and it has offered to pay $100,000 to help build an emergency pipeline to bring in city-supplied waste water, to ease its intake of the fresh stuff. Beyond that, he said, they'll do what they have to do. And that won't include watering just once a week—which is what I'll have to do under the looming Stage 4 restrictions.

"We are not going to approach the golf course that way," Deihl said, "because this is a business."

You're naughty, Bill, but you've got a point. So for now I'll hope the city figures out a way to sue your plaid pants off—which may happen because the people of Santa Fe are really starting to blow their tops about this. Last Thursday night the City Council convened an emergency meeting to debate and take public comment on Las Campanas' pipeline proposal. The mood was running about 90/10 against Las Campanas, though it was hard to keep an exact tally because a couple of speakers were coming from … somewhere else. One guy, the owner of a local spa and hot tub company, pulled a set of magnets out of a bag and explained that it's possible to place a positive charge on water as it courses through pipes and that the mesmo-charged result "increases plant yields 250 percent, with half the water."

Most of the citizens were amazingly cogent and informed, and there were two quite interesting moments. One man said that if Las Campanas didn't straighten up, it could expect "extra-legal" actions by outraged citizens. (In the hallway later, I asked him to elaborate—he said a serious band of people are considering a clandestine protest attack on the development's water system.) Another had dug up old language from County Commission proceedings held when Las Campanas was going through its approval process. In a 1992 meeting, Las Campanas attorney Jene Gallagos was asked if the development would consider itself subject to county and city water ordinances during a drought. He replied, "… we agree to subject ourself to broader control in a water shortage situation."

Asked about this at the meeting by a city councilor, who wanted to know if Las Campanas would submit to watering only once a week, the current lawyer for the company lamely replied, "That's a hypothetical." Maybe it won't be for long.