California Water and the Lack Thereof

I’m relatively new to the enormous body of work covering the history, politics, and geography of water in California. Given the severe drought gripping most of the state (great 8-second animation here), and the oft-repeated cliché that water is the oil of the 21st century, it seems like a good time to start paying closer attention! I decided, after some research, to go and have a look, taking the opportunity that most of us fog-bound San Franciscans do to escape to the searing heat of the Central Valley at least once during the cool, windy summer we get here on the coast (though to be honest, this year has been relatively warm and sunny until the last few days). Adriana and I borrowed a car and rode along levees from the mouth of the Sacramento River at the edge of the once-enormous Delta, all the way to Sacramento (only pausing there to visit “Old Sacramento” which I had somehow never done), and then back on to the levees north toward our first night’s destination of Marysville at the conjunction of the Feather and Yuba Rivers.

I’ve been giving myself a crash course during the summer, in preparation for teaching a new class at the SF Art Institute called “Dredge.” One of the unusual finds I made was the Dutra Museum of Dredging in Rio Vista, at the edge of the Montezuma Hills, a old geologic formation that forces the Sacramento River around it south in its path through the Delta to the Bay. The folks behind the museum are an old family-run California dredging company, and they’ve published a beautiful book “The Tule Breakers,” which is an exhaustive history of their industry, and includes a general overview of the terrain and conditions in which their business has been conducted.

I also read Battling the Inland Sea by Robert Kelley, a fascinating account of the politics of water and rivers in California in the 19th century. Kelley goes through the saga chronologically to show how the Democrats who dominated state politics after the Civil War were the standard-bearers of laissez-faire individualism. They were opposed by the Republicans, who carried on the politics of the defunct Whig Party in favor of a more centralizing and coordinating role for government. In a nutshell, the two parties in the 19th century held reversed positions compared to today. The Republicans were the party in favor of publicly funded infrastructure which would improve conditions broadly for “everyone.” Read in a more class conscious way, we would say they were the party of Capital in its broadest interests, while the Democrats tended to defend the interests of individual property owners against encroachment by the state, seeing the individual owners as the logical descendants of a Jeffersonian agrarian democracy and the state as beholden to the interests of the monied interests and large corporations that were emerging in the late 19th century. The Democrats were also more brazenly the party of white supremacy, although it must be admitted that racist ideology was the norm across the political spectrum until well into the 20th century.

The domination of laissez-faire inspired localism led to a decades-long failure to assess California’s hydrological reality in systemic terms. Instead of looking at the interlocking river system as a whole, and seeing the entire Sacramento Valley (the northern part of the Central Valley) as an integrated watershed draining a dozen rivers eventually into the Delta and Bay, each individual farmer and landowner was encouraged to take individual responsibility for building levees to protect their property. This led to a kind of “arms race” as one would build levees to a certain height, forcing the landowner across the river to build a bit higher, that would in turn force the original owner to build his even higher, and so on. It was exacerbated by the fact that county lines often ran down the middle of rivers (e.g. the split between Marysville in Yuba County and across the Feather River sat Yuba City in Sutter County), so property owners would also have different local governments from which to seek legal remedy or support. The first legal entities formed in California beyond the elected legislature and local governments were “reclamation districts” who gained the right to tax property and even seize it under eminent domain if needed to execute plans for water channeling and farmland protection. These entities were dominated by land speculators who often used their political power, not surprisingly, to direct Reclamation Districts to projects benefiting their landholdings.

In one example, during the late 1860s various speculators began to buy swamplands along the Sacramento River and hired Chinese labor to build dikes and levees to drain the fields to grow wheat, leading to a very profitable period of years in which hyper-abundant California wheat dominated world markets. The newly productive fields were designated islands (such as Sherman Island) and tracts (such as Holland Tract) and are still present today, though the agricultural fields now are more often used for vineyards and fruit orchards, and the land itself has subsided dozens of feet to lie below sea level, surrounded by massive levees to hold back the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and the many sloughs, canals, and other rivers that all converge on the Delta area.

 

 

It was also in Locke where we first ran into this “Stop the Tunnels” sign and picked up the information from the local bookstore:

The technology of river control evolved with the politics. Originally the peat that dominated the lands along the banks of natural levees was dug up and used to build up the height of the levees, but it was soon learned that the peat cracked and dried and also absorbed a lot of water, both qualities making it a poor material for controlling rushing water. Learning that river bottom mud was a much stronger material, the technology of dredging soon took off. With the strong metallurgy and machinist industries of San Francisco already churning out hydrological tools for washing away the mountains in pursuit of gold, it wasn’t hard to get the technical skills directed toward building the equipment needed to mechanize the construction of channels, levees, sloughs, bridges, etc.

Dredging kept getting better, making bigger and bigger machines that could move larger amounts of mud and debris (the rivers being choked with the debris washed down from the watery assault on the gold high above the rivers in the Sierra granite). But the politics of hydrology didn’t keep up until the arrival of the progressive regime of Republican Hiram Johnson in 1911, which also brought in a Republican majority in the state legislature, allowing for a new, centralized approach to California rivers. Arguments over building dams upriver revolved around the purposes such dams should serve—water storage, flood control, power generation, recreation, etc. It was Johnson who responded to the clamor of Sacramento Valley farmers to finally establish a State Board of Reclamation (that odd misnomer that refers to “making land” from wetlands, swamps, and shorelines, by diking and draining them). With this new state regulatory authority, a planning process began that in the decades that followed led to the massive, federally sponsored Central Valley Project in 1933, and a generation later in 1960 the California State Water Project.

And that’s just speaking about the projects that were dedicated to managing the enormous outpouring of waters from the mountains into the Sacramento River valley, controlling flood waters by deepening river channels, raising and widening levees, and designating bypasses, basins, and sinks as permanent flood plains. Upriver on most tributaries dams were built, in some cases to hold back mining debris, but in most to serve the multiple purposes mentioned above. Once captured, the annual rain and snowfall that would rush out of the mountains could be diverted to agricultural irrigation, as well as to water the flourishing suburbanization of California in the last half of the 20th century. There are more famous municipal projects, too, such as the Los Angeles Aqueduct that brought Owens Valley water to LA, or the Hetch Hetchy system bringing water from the Tuolomne river in Yosemite to San Francisco. Massive diversion of Colorado River water to the Imperial Valley for agriculture and to the LA basin for agriculture and suburbanization (and in lesser amounts to Phoenix and Las Vegas), add to the sprawling mega-machine of water capture and delivery that California depends on today.

We turned around and went back to Hwy 84 which took us straight north into the center of Sacramento by way of an old bridge:

 

We didn’t linger too long in Sacramento, and headed north, with Marysville our evening end point. To get there we had to take Interstate-5 to get over the American River confluence with the Sacramento River, but quickly exited to ride the levees northward along the Garden Highway.

 

 

We made it to Marysville at dusk, having a bite at the old Silver Dollar Saloon. Before that we climbed the levee and joined some camping people who were about to set up for the evening in the broad, dusty flood plain of the Yuba River. The Yuba is running really low too, like most rivers now. The next day I took photos of the abandoned and boarded-up Hotel Marysville (just waiting for artists to come and start the gentrification of Marysville!), and the arches that grace their D Street, very reminiscent of the arches that once stood over intersections along Fillmore during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, but were torn down in 1943 to be used for bomb-making materiel.

The next morning I was determined to make a side trip to Wheatland, site of the 1913 IWW Hop Riot, which led to several deaths and actually spurred IWW organizing throughout California as they gained some serious notoriety from it. Wheatland is quite a depressed community today, but it still straddles the old Southern Pacific tracks, and its tiny center has an old combo Grange Hall/Odd Fellows Building, next to which sits what I guess might have been City Hall once upon a time. (Apparently Wheatland is in some kind of negotiation—or perhaps it’s been settled—to take millions of cubic tons of San Francisco garbage for its landfill.)

 

 

 

 

We arrived at our friends’ home in Chico, an old ranch house amidst walnut and almond orchards. They are having some locals use their land to grow food for a local CSA. Jesse showed me his old pump (80 feet) and his new one (200 feet), and we dropped a pebble into the old one, but heard no water.

 

This great map is borrowed from the excellent Atlas of California by my pal Dick Walker and Suresh K. Lodha.