More NYT coverage of rural, this time from central and far northern California

I'm feeling like a broken record recently, but I want to highlight two more stories out of rural America--specifically "rural" California.  

The first is out of Weed, in Siskiyou County, which borders Oregon.  Thomas Fuller reports under the headline, "No Longer the ‘Devil’s Lettuce’: How the Town of Weed Embraced Weed."  The subhead is "For decades, a rural California city winced at the puns. Now it’s cashing in."   Weed's population is 2967, and Siskiyou County's population is 44,900.   

Another recent post out of Weed is here, and the last time Weed was in the New York Times is here, about water wars. 

"Water wars" is a good segue to the second story, which is about how parts of the Central Valley are literally sinking.  The headline for today's story by Lois Henry is "The Central California Town that Keeps Sinking."  Here's an excerpt: 

Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a two-story house and to at times make Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey.

Subsidence is the technical term for the phenomenon — the slow-motion deflation of land that occurs when large amounts of water are withdrawn from deep underground, causing underlying sediments to fall in on themselves.

Corcoran's population is 24,813.  It is in the far eastern part of Kings County, population 152,892.  This story was co-published in High Country News. 

P.S.  Another big NYT water story out of the west, this one dateline Klamath Falls, California, is here.  It is reported by Mike Baker and published on June 1, 2021.  Here's the lede:  

Through the marshlands along the Oregon-California border, the federal government a century ago carved a whole new landscape, draining lakes and channeling rivers to build a farming economy that now supplies alfalfa for dairy cows and potatoes for Frito-Lay chips.

The drawdowns needed to cover the croplands and the impacts on local fish nearing extinction have long been a point of conflict at the Klamath Project, but this year’s historic drought has heightened the stakes, with salmon dying en masse and Oregon’s largest lake draining below critical thresholds for managing fish survival. Hoping to limit the carnage, federal officials have shut the gates that feed the project’s sprawling irrigation system, telling farmers the water that has flowed every year since 1907 will not be available.

Some farmers, furious about water rights and fearing financial ruin, are already organizing a resistance. “Tell Pharaoh let our water feed the Earth,” said a sign erected near the nearly dry irrigation canal that would usually be flowing with water from Upper Klamath Lake in southern Oregon.