HOLTVILLE, CALIF. — Daybreak in the Carrot Capital of the World and the horizon is streaked with lilac clouds, the air thick with the smell of manure. Jose Romo climbs into a pickup with a steaming cup of coffee to ward off the chill and begins his daily race with water.
He speeds along dirt roads between fields of lettuce and onions that would be a desert if not for the 1,600 miles of man-made canals and ditches that crisscross the Imperial Valley, among the largest irrigation systems in the nation.
He stops and studies the water level in his canal. It's rising but still below a stain on the canal's concrete wall, a measuring point that Romo trusts implicitly through experience. In a few minutes, the water reaches the stain, meaning there is sufficient pressure for Romo to crank a rusty metal jack that opens a wooden gate.
"Can lose a finger if you're not careful," he said. With a loud swooosh, a wall of water moves down his canal. For the next several hours, Romo will repeat this ritual again and again, harnessing gravity to shepherd the day's water through his corner of the valley.
Romo is a zanjero -- pronounced sahn-HAIR-o -- Spanish for overseer of the mother ditch. His job is to deliver prescribed amounts of Colorado River water to farmers served by the Imperial Irrigation District in southeastern California. It's a job rich in tradition, one that mirrors the settlement of the West and its complicated relationship with water.
The zanjero was once the most powerful man in any community, entrusted with overseeing its most valuable resource. In early Los Angeles, he was paid more than the mayor. Long before he engineered the city's future, William Mulholland learned the nuances of water working as a zanjero.
"He is the yea and nay of the arid land, the arbiter of fate, the dispenser of good and evil, to be blessed by turns and cursed by turns, and to receive both with the utter unconcern of a small god," said the Century Magazine in New York, describing the job in 1902.
Today, the zanjero is an endangered species, his craft too imprecise, his tools too crude to look after water in a region ravaged by drought.
The Imperial Irrigation District, which provides water to nearly 500,000 acres of farmland in the valley hard against the Mexican border, is among the last to employ zanjeros working the traditional way. More than 100 men labor around the clock controlling the flow of more than a trillion gallons of water a year, largely by hand.
