When Armen graduated, he took his biochemistry degree and got an unrelated job at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park. Soon after he started there, he discovered tha the water there was pure mountain water from the Sierra. Just then he realized that the water he was drinking was from O’Shaugnessy Dam, that project conceived in the wake of the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906 and infamous for having broken the heart of John Muir. He began drinking coke and bottled water. Coworkers would sometimes ask, “why do you drink bottled water when you can drink mountain water from the tap?” Armen didn’t care to sound righteous about it, so he’d say “because I know people who crap in Hetch Hetchy for that very reason,” which was not actually a fact so far as he knew, but he also figured he couldn’t have been the only one to think of such a monkey-wrench prank.
Armen had seen the great pipes of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct many times. He sometimes made a point of visiting them, if only to stand there watching them, as if they might speak.
Armen grew restless, living among the sophisticated astroturf liberals of the West Bay. He began to have nightmares about living with vampires. He could have rented a place in Palo Alto to avoid Hetch Hetchy water, but that was all that was different about Palo Alto. He could hardly hide from the vampires there, so he began to look for work elsewhere, and “elsewhere,” in Armen’s heart, would have to be closer to the Range.