One Westerner, One Lake, and the Drought
Today, there is a small miracle happening outside— it is raining.
Standing at the window, I stare, listening to the steady drips pouring down from the sky — every cell of my body seems to stand at attention and sing.
Rain.
La!
It isn’t snow, one part of my mind adds, can’t help but add, but the rain is glorious enough for today.
After all these years of living in the western half of the U.S., most of my adult life, my mind finally thinks like a westerner.
Westerners think about water.
Snowpack.
Watersheds.
Groundwater.
Wildfire.
The news is finally coming out fast and furiously in the national media.
The western half of the country, California especially, is experiencing historic drought conditions.
This past mild winter marks the fourth year of low winter snowpack — winter snowpack being the West’s summer water.
It’s not usual for it to rain in the summer very often, out west.
Dry, heat lightning storms are more common, often with hundreds of strikes per storm over acres and acres of dry tinder… er… dry, overcrowded forests.
In my life, the visual face of the drought has been charted over the years at our local lake where my husband and I love to hike and canoe — the lake water irrigates farm/ranch lands — although last summer there wasn’t any water for canoeing.
or irrigating.
We often took our walks on the dry lake bed, instead.
I don’t live in California, but one state north, in Oregon — voted Top Destination State to move to last year by Forbes.com.
Cars with California plates cruise by homes for sale in our town every weekend.
New vineyards pop up every year, making our area seem more and more like Napa North.
Governor Brown’s new water restrictions for California feel a bit ‘too little, too late’ for those of us who’ve lived out here for awhile and heard the stories of rampant water waste: farmers flooding fields for days to irrigate, southern Californians watering pristine lawns and washing pristine cars daily while central valley towns run out of water altogether.
Of course, there’s the crops.
Water hungry crops.
California is the top dairy producer in the country as well as producing up to half our country’s fruit, vegetables, and nuts.
Raising cattle for meat uses a *lot* of water, too, much more than the almonds brought up in the news as being water greedy.
The water restrictions will take years to fully implement.
(We really don’t have that kind of time, as far as I can tell.)
Nowhere do I see any change in people’s behavior as regards to water conservation, though — it’s as if we Oregonians are in denial and the migration desires of those further south only involve leaving California for greener pastures, literally.
It seems to me as if the water is being used up just as quickly and wastefully in the fourth year of extreme to exceptional drought out here in the West — only the trend is moving further north — with water-greedy humans using the exact same practices in their new locations as they left behind….in the rapidly-becoming-desert of certain parts of California.
Further north of here, in Washington, tribes, ranchers, and vineyard owners also vie, above-board or not, for water rights — a central theme in the deeply evocative novel, The Winemaker’s Daughter, by Timothy Egan, also set in Washington state.
Meanwhile, corporations jumped in and have been fighting to gain control of springs and headlands in northern California for years now, the most famous fight occurring in McCloud, California:
Nestle corporation wanted to put a water bottling plant that originally would have pulled over *five hundred million gallons* a year from the far northern Ca. small town’s watershed, bottling in plastic and trucking the water (at up to three hundred truck trips per day) as far south as L.A. for thirsty people on the go down there.
After a six year fight, the town of McCloud declared victory.
Good thing, as the water is also badly needed - locally.
Nestle merely opened a (smaller) plant in Sacramento, instead, where opposition to taking much needed water was not so vehement.
(By the way, did you know that nationally, *eight out of ten* plastic water bottles are tossed in the trash rather than recycled, according to 2009 figures??)
More recently in nearby Mt Shasta, Ca., a bitter fight with Crystal Geyser erupted in early 2014 among citizens as well as the Shasta tribe over local mineral waters Crystal Geyser would now like to control.
May 2015 update: The town of Mt. Shasta did sell their water, now a planned water bottling plant will be opened, with plans to pull 365,000 gallons of water per day from the groundwater in this drought-stricken area.
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Meanwhile in our area, we keep walking out at the lake.
Or as it was last summer, the lake bed.
Currently, April 2015, there is water back in the lake after winter rains — but I’ve recently learned water in this lake comes at the expense of two smaller, high country lakes that will drain so the levels at this reservoir are viable for irrigating this year. Those who use those mountain lakes face those low water levels or empty lake beds.
But still…. some part of me is glad:
There’s water in the lake again!
For now — before the steady drain of summer heat, evaporation, and irrigation cycles around again.
The water birds do look happier than they did when they only had their secret grotto.
( ….I wonder where the fish went when the lake went dry last summer.)
One more thought about water…
Our three year-old granddaughter came out to the lake with us last week for the first time.
She was mesmerized.
She threw rocks in the water, laughed at the geese honking as they flew overhead, and tromped all over the shore, looking for ‘skippers’ — little flat rocks for Grampa to skip across the water’s surface.
She clapped every time a rock skipped.
“Let’s come back again!” she shouted, “I love the lake!”
Me too, little one, me too.
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~ Thanks to Kona the Wonder Dog for gracing us with her presence in above photos, granddaughter, of course — as well as the couple in love by the lake on Valentine’s Day ~
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For photo essays/more on this lake, see:
Lake Day ~ February (from a non-drought year!)
