And not a drop to drink

“The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undimmed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry.”

That’s Joan Didion writing in 1979 about her lifelong obsession for water, beginning in her girlhood in Sacramento. I thought of her today when I saw that Gov. Schwarzenegger has declared a drought in the Golden State after an unusually dry spring. He told the New York Times, “Water is like our gold, and we have to treat it like that.” I would say California’s relationship with water has always been a queer balance of denial and fixation. We spend much of the time taking for granted that water comes out of our faucets, ignoring the incredible machinations that got it there, or the fact that we are constantly pushing the limits of the one resource civilization needs most. On the other hand, water is the focus of the fiercest political fights, involving endless wrangling over whose water is whose, how it is allocated, and how to ensure we have enough. NorCal resents SoCal for “taking our water,” and we all together are at the mercy of the clouds.

My childhood in the Sierra foothills coincided with one of the longest droughts in California history. I was fascinated to watch the level of our local reservoir, New Melones, fall so far that it regained the appearance of the original Stanislaus River before it was dammed. It got so low that people could raft its whitewater again, and that from the high new bridge arcing over what should have been a lake you could watch the emergence of the old bridge over the river that had been flooded years before.

Our house was lucky enough to have a well, so we were exempt from water rationing. But I remember my relatives in the Valley watching their lawns dry up because they were only allowed to water on certain days, and letting their cars accumulate grime because washing them was banned. These are, of course, minor inconveniences, and who knows what might happen if a warmer climate results in permanent dry conditions. Perhaps the scariest consequence of a drought is the increased risk of wildfires, arguably the most destructive and feared type of natural disaster in California.

So as we kick off this long, dry summer, let’s revisit a poem by Karl Shapiro that Joan Didion loved so much she kept a stanza pinned to her kitchen wall until it crumbled to dust:

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.

Photo of New Melones Lake and Parrott’s Ferry Bridge in high-water days. By Kelzo Klesko on Flickr.

Photo of California Aqueduct © Ron Chapple/Corbis.

Neato links:

See the whole Joan Didion essay, “Holy Water.”

Previous droughts in California

Interesting information about the history and construction of New Melones Dam. Apparently in the last years of the 1987-1992 drought, Melones fell to “dead storage levels” which is defined as the volume of a reservoir below the level of the lowest outlet. Dead storage water then is water that cannot be drained by gravity flow through outlets. Wow!


New water conservation billboard in Long Beach.