Since
I was a little girl, I have loved the phrase “God willing and the creeks don’t
rise.” I love its use as a preface to
some intention, such as “God willing and the creeks don’t rise, I’ll clean out those
gutters today.” The phrase warns that
something important is coming while recognizing that not everything is in our
control.
I love its use as punctuation to a
vow: “I’ll be there Saturday, God
willing and the creeks don’t rise.” I
love the tag-team match of God and the weather.
I love its friendliness to colloquial speech. But I think I love most its hydrologic understanding
of creeks.
I love creeks. I love their scale, from headwater trickles
to churning, muddy uncrossable floods. I
love their responsiveness to rain, the way we can see the connection between
what falls and what runs off. The fact
that Yokohl Creek is running right now excites many people to go watch. For me, seeing humble Lewis Creek come to
life feels like Grace.
This watershed we live in, once known
simply as the Four Creeks Region, is unique in its form. In part due to the geologic uplift pressing
Mineral King ever skyward, the mountain flows of the Kaweah River split into
four main fingers when it hits the valley floor, spreading horizontally rather
than cutting deep, and dropping the heavy load of sediments, which becomes our
precious soil. The smaller, more
manageable scale of the Four Creeks is what made new white settlers in the
1850’s choose this area first. They
thought they could cut channels into the creek banks and divert the water for
irrigation without losing their headgates to flooding every year when the
creeks did rise. Some years they were
right.
I attended the Tulare County
Historical Society annual meeting last Sunday, where Richard Zack presented
some of the interesting stories he uncovered while writing the history of the
Tulare Irrigation District. I started
writing that history more than a decade ago, but was grateful when Richard, the
son of Dave Zack who managed the Tulare Irrigation District most of his life
and was responsible for major water rights decisions on the division of flows
upon construction of Lake Kaweah, was able to take over the project. As engineers, both Richard and Dave had a
different perspective on TID’s history than I did, and theirs matched TID’s
purpose of having that history written far better than what mine would have
produced.
Listening to Richard Zack’s
presentation, however, I was reminded of what the engineering perspective
leaves out. In telling the story of how
a downstream group of landowners gained legal and physical control over the
inconstant flows of a river and converted that into a semi-reliable supply of
water for irrigation, reliable enough to build farming enterprises solid enough
to support a town, the stories of the upstream losers in that contest for water
were slighted. The natural history of
the watershed was invisible. So were the
future consequences of TID’s management
on our experience of this place as a part of the Four Creeks region.
Sitting in Tulare, looking from
TID’s perspective, the issues of the twenty-year lawsuit with
Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District and the more recent fight to prevent
lining the creek channels with concrete would be seen as an annoyance, an
inconvenience, a waste of time and resources by anyone, I’m sure. But LSID’s plan in the 1930’s to pump
groundwater from the Kaweah fan and export it to farmlands around Lindsay
through the Highline Canal is an early (and small-scale) precedent of the
interbasin transfers that would follow, from the Friant-Kern Canal (carrying
San Joaquin River water to points far south of its watershed) to the State
Water Project, which takes water from multiple rivers in the Sacramento Valley
to slake the thirst of westside owners of sagebrush land and the huge coastal
metropolises of Los Angeles and San Diego. Lining the channels to increase TID
deliveries would have robbed the groundwater table for those east of Visalia
and made the effects of this drought far worse than it was. TID’s current efforts to “bury” the channels
wherever development takes over from farming will amount to another loss to
groundwater, not to mention the beauty of the landscape.
Where, and to whom, does water
belong? Is there any other right to
water besides the right to its use? Does
the landscape or the region hold any title to the waters that give them their
identity? Do the people who live there
have a right to experience this primary fact of nature?
Those are not engineers’ questions,
but I think they should be ours. They
crop up continuously in the research reports and essays, short stories and poems
I’ve collected for this long-overdue book on California agriculture and the
common good now coming to completion.
God willing, after the book’s publication, these questions will crop up
more in our public discussions about appropriate uses of water and more
equitable distribution of this essential natural resource. After its publication, God willing, the
creeks will still rise in some places.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy
Wischemann is a western Washingtonian born with webs between her toes. You can send your favorite flood stories to
her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a
comment there.
No comments:
Post a Comment