Come High Water

Published Feb. 22, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Storm warnings, high wind advisories, flood watches, evacuation orders pending – what a week.  For some, this week’s weather is foreboding and dreary, perhaps even a sign.  But for me there’s something holy, even righteous about it.  It’s been a long time since I felt this at-home in California. 

     At first, when it was just the prospect of full reservoirs for the first time this decade, the water watchdogs warned not to get too hopeful that our five-year drought is over.  “There’s still the groundwater table in overdraft,” they chided, reminding us that the big boys’ long straws have been oversucking from it so long there might be no replenishment possible.

     Then the reservoirs had to start releasing water just to keep the bounty from breaking the dams and to maintain some semblance of flood control.  Oroville, one of the newer dams in California’s massive water development system, reminded us that facilities age and that infrastructure must be maintained to be of true value.  Then levees broke in the Alpaugh Irrigation District as the flood flows of multiple creeks in the Tule and Kern River watersheds accumulated and ended up where they belong, in the old bed of Tulare Lake, which they do every once in a while, come hell or high water (literally.)

     To the north of us, levees along the length of the mighty San Joaquin are promising a similar replenishment.  Old valley communities like Vernalis, Stevinson and Tranquility are likely not so tranquil right now, as the attempt to keep flood flows off the farmland threatens to drown out the farmworker communities.  It’s a trade-off we still haven’t found a way to make correctly.

  "It’s too bad,” a friend who grows olives told me Sunday, “all this water going to waste.  LSID cut us off completely the last two years, and yet now, here’s all this water….”  His voice trailed off into the mystery of the moment.  “It’s not going to waste,” I wanted to cry, though I kept my protest to myself since I don’t farm.  In fact, when it spills out onto the land, it brings life to the soil as well as improving the groundwater supplies.  In fact, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do in God’s holy hydrologic cycle.  Here all this time we’ve been praying for rain, and now we’re going to complain about where He puts it?

     Down in Alpaugh, when the levees broke this time, the big boys hired helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags on the break, stemming the flow for now.  But it’s kinda like working on old cars:  installing a new part often puts pressure somewhere else, causing another part to break.  The history of farming the Tulare Lake bed is full of stories about heroic flood prevention efforts by the large landowners causing storm water to take out some small guys’ operations.  At least that water’s not wasting to the ocean, right?

     This drought-flood pattern is part of California’s natural cycle, at least so far.  I’m comforted by the return of the wet half of our true nature, glad we haven’t yet reached the point where the rains are always meager, the snowfall non-existent, where the floods never come.  We would do well to plan for this pattern, to accommodate the extremes, not the averages, and then try everything in our power to keep from altering it.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who once wanted to be a hydrologist.  You can send her your favorite high water stories c/o P.O Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

God Willing

Published February 8, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

   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.

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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.