It's Why We Live Here

(This week we try to describe how water, an essential building block, gets from the ground to our faucets.  And what we do when it doesn’t.)

"'It's why we live here,' Terry said.”  That’s how the poem begins that Ric Masten wrote about the day the pipes broke somewhere in our neighborhood water system.  We framed it and it hangs right outside the bathroom.

We live in a rural area far from town, so we don't have "city water."  Rather we are part of a 20 family, shared system, the Brandon Creek Mutual Water Company.

Key words are "Mutual" and "Brandon Creek."  Here in California, where we are entering the fifth year of a historic drought, "creek" and "mutual" are words that make you nervous.  Is there any water left in the creek (river, lake, reservoir, snowpack, sky)?   And, if I conserve, will it really make any difference on water for the rest of the state? 

Mercifully, so far, the answer to both questions is "Yes."  There is still water in the creek and we actually are being good responsible neighbors and cutting back on our usage. So, SO FAR, the pump is bringing up water from the well and the cistern is full.

 “Mutual” also means that we share in various duties which a big city anonymous water company would hire staff to do, the cost then increasing the bill.  Heidi walks around the dirt roads once a month to check meters, Jon sends out the bills, and Norman fills out the forms for the state, which nominally oversee our little systems and requires testing for e-coli and such.  

So that's why last week I spent a morning digging a small ditch beside a remote (even for our area) road, laying wire down in it and covering it up.  The old wire from the creek pump up the hill to the reservoir is tired and broken in a few spots, probably because it is just laid over rock and poison oak.  New plan - lay it alongside the road, bring it up regularly to a transfer box so in the future we can more easily find the broken spot.

We actually have two sources of water.  Originally it was Brandon Creek site, where decades ago the first primitive water system was just a plastic pipe laid in the relatively clear little pool of the small stream amid the redwoods.  The first neighbors rigged a little pump and the pipe snaked up the hill to the holding tank, basically a covered swimming pool.  When that system became unreliable, we had a neighborhood meeting, voted an assessment and hired a well drilling company.  Great drama and decision-making as they dug and dug and found no water.  Should they keep going?  It would mean another assessment.  Of our 20 families some could write the check, others had no reserves. 

Thankfully we did keep digging and a found a strong source of water.  So now we drink well water, with the creek as a back up.  And now it is mostly fine strong buried steel pipe, with cut off valves for emergencies.  But at the time of this poem there was still some funkier white plastic pipe just laid on the ground, often through poison oak.  Hence the occasional break.  And a break would drain the whole system, thanks to the miracle of gravity. Hence the desperate and happy middle aged men.

 “Mutual” also means we have to get together and decide these things.   One reason many of us live in this sort of remote canyon is that we don’t especially like to cooperate with “the system.”  I sometimes joke that folks chose to live here rather than in town because we don’t have the greatest social skills, but it’s true.  So some neighbors just want their old plastic pipe, or refuse to pay more assessments.  Does the volunteer board just vote to cut off their water?  Especially when these sort of outlaw neighbors could retaliate by turning us into the building department for the illegal addition we put on our house, because we too are sort of outlaws?   It’s a little frontier justice here….. We have to know when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, when to walk away, when to run.

If as Thoreau said, firewood warms you twice, once when you cut it up, later when you burn it, so the water system makes you thirsty twice, once when you dig ditches, and later when - no actually, later it does its job and quenches your thirst - well you get the idea.  By the end of the morning of ditch digging I was hot and thirsty, but I knew our water system was becoming more reliable.

Maybe if all of California had to dig ditches for their water they would more readily conserve - water doesn't just appear, it takes work to get it out of the ground, to go against the laws of gravity, to avoid animal poop and broken pipes and just get it to the reservoir, let alone down the hill to my sink.

In some California communities there is now “lawn shaming,” neighbors pressuring and mocking neighbors who flaunt their excess water use.  We have no lawns here in the redwoods, but we do have neighbors with large gardens, and some, I think, growing marijuana, a thirsty crop.  I foresee some difficult neighborhood meetings if the state requires little companies like ours to obey the governor’s order that we all cut back 25% .

Our friends way up the hill, far from our system, the Williamses, have their own well, and last summer, one day, nothing happened when they turned on the faucets, it had just ran dry.  They had to buy water, drive it up their steep dirt road, and this winter collect as much rain water as they could.  Which wasn’t much. 

It’s why we live here, now.  But, for how long?

Copyright © 2915 Deborah Streeter