THE BROTHERHOOD: Bill Jennings, standing near a bridge in the Stockton… (Robert Durell / Los Angeles…)
BYRON, CALIF. — Here is where the straws tap into the common pool of California water, where consequence begins. Here, on the backside of the Diablo Mountains, amid a landscape of bleached-out pastures, wind farms and transmission lines, the two-lane Byron Highway crosses the concrete headwaters of two canals.
The first is the California Aqueduct, main artery of the State Water Project, which propels delta water on a 444-mile beeline to Southern California. Two miles down the road the Delta-Mendota Canal also has its fountainhead, feeding the federal Central Valley Project -- an audacious rewrite of nature designed, as the boosters sang, to "make a desert bloom."
They're easy to miss from the road, announced only by minimal signage, tangles of barbed wire and posted warnings, in English and Spanish, "Stay Out: You May Drown" and "Danger: Swift Current." Yet these are critical pieces of connective tissue, binding together the watery north with an arid south.
Not that everyone's sanguine about the arrangement. Grumblings about plugging Sierra rivers to fill Los Angeles swimming pools and supplying farmers subsidized water to grow subsidized cotton have been staples of the state's political rhetoric for decades.
Of more pressing concern at present is the environmental cost -- an escalating collapse of the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the West Coast's largest estuary. It is a crisis marked by creeping saltwater, toxins and, most visibly, the disappearance of fish.
"It all looks pretty innocuous, doesn't it?" said Bill Jennings, peering down into the rippling aqueduct at a point south of the pump house. "Just looking at it, you wouldn't know what this is doing to the delta, would you?"
Jennings is a water person, a member of that insular society of experts and activists sometimes described as the Hydraulic Brotherhood. He happens to be an environmentalist.
There are many other classifications of water people -- engineers, irrigators, biologists, bureaucrats, lobbyists and lawyers, many, many lawyers. If California water litigation were rainfall, we'd all be building arks.
Their ceaseless wrangling has gone on for decades, since the Gold Rush really, but typically without much notice. Only in dry years do Californians on the faucet end of the plumbing begin to pay attention. Only in dry years do low-flow toilets and San Joaquin Valley crop patterns and delta fish counts become part of the public discourse.
This has been a dry year, the second in a row. It has not been, at least not yet, bleached-bones-in-the-lake-bed dry -- "a marginal call," is how one veteran hydrologist politely described Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision last month to declare a drought.
Still, it's been dry enough to infuse the water debate with a jolt of heightened urgency and to generate interest beyond the ranks of its perpetual participants. In this particular form of trench warfare, dry spells present an ideal climate for advancement. Whether the objective is to build more dams or provide more cool, fresh water for salmon runs, it's better to push during a dry time than in a season of downpours.
More than 15 years have passed since California last sweated out a drought. That arid epoch gave rise to a raft of measures: legislation to protect fisheries, conservation initiatives, water banks and water trading, collaborative processes to forge consensus among competing "stakeholders."
Somewhere along the way, though, that happy train careened off the rails. Today, in federal courtrooms and before blue ribbon commissions, in farm-town coffee shops and newspaper opinion pages, the brotherhood is slugging it out, same as ever. Farm versus fish. North versus South. Concrete versus conservation. Once again, farmers on the valley's west side are grousing loudly about water cutbacks. Once again, environmentalists are fighting in court to keep fish from being driven toward extinction.
"Sometimes I wonder," mused Thomas Graff, an environmental lawyer and longtime key water person, "if we all just disappeared, would anything be all that different?"
To make the deja vu complete, there even have been fresh calls to resurrect the Peripheral Canal, the 42-mile waterway that Californians rejected with vigor in 1982. Instead of pumping from the delta -- a practice that contributes to the demise of fish and that has caught the stern attention of a federal judge -- river water would be shuttled around the estuary.
This end run would ensure a more reliable flow of water for Southern California's Metropolitan Water District and several San Francisco Bay Area cities, and also for San Joaquin Valley farmers hooked into the federal waterworks. What it would do for, or to, the delta -- well, that will be quite a discussion.
