Right now, I am entirely happy.

I can’t even tell you all the ways I had such a great day. In October the light gets clearer, so all the colors were stronger today. I was in rice fields near the Sutter Buttes, and I love the Sutter Buttes because they are the smallest mountain range in the world. They are so close and self-contained, and I know they must be beautiful, but no one can go in them, so I just look at them and think they are perfect. They’re harvesting rice now; all is golden straw under a very pure blue sky. Tractor treads weave patterns in the rice checks; egrets watch from nearly every berm. I saw huge old walnut trees and John Deere tractors and pheasants and dirt roads and clear cold water running in canals.

I was with a district manager and a senior engineer. We went to dozens of structures and turnouts and they never once got tired of my questions. They wanted to talk about moving water as much as I wanted to hear about it, and that never happens. They explained how each thing worked, were never condescending or impatient when I asked them to please say the explanation again. But! There were more times when the first explanation confirmed my silent understanding than there were times that I couldn’t follow an explanation. I am getting there.

We finished early, and I figured I would never have a better opportunity to fulfill a dream I’ve had for probably ten years. On the district manager’s advice, I drove over to a rice mill. I’ve driven past these for years; they’re ornate factory-looking places, surrounded by fields and nothing. From the road they stand out for miles; every time I’ve driven past one, I’ve wondered how they worked. So I walked in, wearing my CalPoly shirt, which is the secret handshake that gets you into every last place in the Central Valley, and I asked nicely, and I got an hourlong tour of a wild rice mill. Today I saw where your bag of Trader Joe’s wild rice was born. I love bored foremen.

He explained every machine to me, every sorter and dryer and sifter and grader. He showed me the instrumentation and control panels, and I already knew how they worked because water districts stole the ideas for SCADA systems from factory control systems. The neatest things?

They can sell every single byproduct from milling, including the dust they sweep off the floor. (It goes to bulk composters to make your potting soil.)

Farmers fire so much buckshot at redwing blackbirds that rice mills have a special machine, explicitly for getting buckshot out of harvested rice. I saw five gallon buckets, full of chaff and buckshot.

And! Their final sort, after drying and hulling and sifting, once the rice is almost uniform? They run the rice up a conveyor, where an optical scan identifies individual grains of rice that aren’t exactly the hue the machine is set for. In a moving stream of rice, the machine can blow exactly one off-color grain away with a puff of air, so that your bag of long-grain black rice looks flawless.

The world is truly magic.