This is expected to be California’s hottest year on record. Towns in the north are running out of water; the south has been asked to conserve. In the Central Valley, farmwork has dried up with the water supply. Photographs by Matt Black in The New Yorker

Fall means hot mornings, thirsty fields, smoke in the air. There are days when, as John Muir wrote in 1894, the heat seems “to flow in tremulous waves from every southern slope.” This year, the dryness has a menacing, premonitory, permanent feel. Promised deluges turn into ten-minute mists, and a longed-for El Niño doesn’t come. The flies are bad. Lake beds, exposed, are full of old recliners and junked cars. Reservoirs have sunk to half capacity and are falling fast. In year three of a punishing drought, the terrible question arises: What if it just never rains again?