the golden land, after water
This is a kind of abridged version of my feature for Longreads about water in California, written for an event at Booksmith on June 24.
I’m only here because of a drought. I don’t mean this drought, or the one before that. My grandparents migrated to California to escape the Dust Bowl. That is still the biggest migration in US history. We think of California as a product of the Gold Rush, but it’s just as much if not more a product of that disaster.
The Dust Bowl wasn’t just a result of natural drought, but also of short-sighted farming practices that led to totally unnatural land erosion. But when the dirt drove all those thousands of people West -- many of them farmers -- they took up again in California like it was a promised land.
There’s this funny thing in the West. Some might call it pioneer spirit, others might call it delusion. There’s an appetite for self-sufficiency, but also an often self-defeating ability to see everything as new. Joan Didion summed it up well, she wrote: “The future always looks good in the golden land, for no one remembers the past.”
I mostly write about California. I’ve lived in the state most of my life and I think it’s just a profoundly fascinating and stupid place. We’re always in some state of crisis here, but when it comes to water, much of that crisis is actually normal. We have this kind of binge and purge ecosystem that cycles between wet and dry naturally. In some ways, that crisis is constant.
What’s not normal are all the things we’ve done to California, and all we’ve come to expect from it. We spent decades reengineering the state to meet the demands of a modern nation: draining lakes until they were craters, moving rivers of water until all the fish died, drilling out the aquifers until the land sank. It’s made us very rich -- California produces upwards of a third of the nation’s produce. But most of that infrastructure was developed in the interest of industry, not community.
East Porterville is surrounded on three sides by farmland, and more than a third of town works in agriculture. It’s consistently ranked as one of the most polluted places in the country. There are particulates in the air from all the trucks traveling up and down the state, transporting all that food, and there are nitrates in the ground from the fertilizer farmers use to grow all that food. Almost everyone here has a private well, and almost all of those wells are contaminated.
Nonprofits like the Community Water Center were first developed to address this kind of industrial pollution. They push for clean up and abatement programs, and help poor communities to build and control their own clean water infrastructure. But now they’re dealing with some communities that have no water at all.
We often refer to this drought as something that has happened to us, for which we bear no responsibility and have no recourse. But the fall-out from deciding to turn a semi-arid state into the nation’s salad bowl isn’t going to look like letting the lawn go brown or taking shorter showers. What’s happening in East Porterville could soon happen in many other communities across California.
Infrastructure has failed these people, or it was just never there for them in the first place. After Donna Johnson’s well started sending up more sand than water last summer, she went door to door, asking neighbors if their wells had gone dry, too. She’s still finding new people -- her list is now more than 1000 households. Donna is 70 years old, and spends almost every day driving around East Porterville handing out water and supplies to her neighbors.
The Porterville city water main runs down the street in front of Roman Hernandez’s church, which made it a convenient spot for these emergency showers the county set up in their parking lot. The church’s well has been running on and off for years. They’re maybe 50 feet from the city water line, the one that’s hooked up to those showers, but they aren’t allowed to use it.
Like many small rural communities, East Porterville is an unincorporated town. It’s still a bit of that Western frontier, and that comes with a lot of freedom. People can run subsistence farms and avoid building codes, and undocumented immigrants feel safer from scrutiny. Porterville, on the other hand, is a city, with a government and a water system and not a lot of help to give outside their borders. Monte Reyes is their newest and most empathic politician, but even he says they have no water to spare.
Porterville gets its water from a well, too, it’s just much deeper than the shallow ones in the East. But they all draw from the same large aquifer, the Tulare Basin, which has been drained more quickly and aggressively than any other aquifer in the state. This wasn’t the drought, this was farmers exercising their land rights, which in California still come with rights to groundwater. Why buy from a state water board when you could water your fields with the stuff you pump up on your own property?
Tulare County issues more drilling permits than any other county in the state, and that number has doubled since 2011. Last year California officially became the last state to adopt groundwater management regulations, essentially curbing the Wild West finders keepers land rights that had dictated policy here since the state was founded. Those regulations won’t actually go into effect for several more years, and regulators like Denise will be the ones in charge of enforcing them. Denise told me she doesn’t want to do that. If she doesn’t, then this will really be a disaster.
It seems sometimes like people in the Central Valley are in the deepest denial about the reality of this crisis. This region that’s supporting a huge part of our contemporary globalized food system is also one that’s holding very tightly to an old way of pioneer life.
Not everyone is that way. Roman is still trying to hook into the city system, and they’re still telling him no.
Monte thinks most of the East will come around like Roman, and the city will annex them bit by bit as they build out more infrastructure over time.
The water line runs down Angelica’s street, too, but she’d rather give her daughters sponge baths than be forced to follow city rules and lose what she thinks of as her independence.
We often think of that pioneer spirit as a desire for liberty, but it’s also a resiliency that comes from neighbors that rely on one another. East Porterville has survived this long not because of government but because of people like Donna Johnson. Community is what really stands between us and crisis. And this is certainly not the end of crisis.
What’s happening in East Porterville is sometimes hard for people to believe. We think of government and infrastructure as pretty ubiquitous, if often incompetent and crumbling. That we could’ve quite literally dug ourselves into such a deep hole without any accounting for the risk seems objectively absurd. But this is California, and this is what we do.
About 40 years after she escaped the Dust Bowl for Porterville and then later moved to Santa Barbara, my grandmother’s house burned to the ground in a wildfire. The house was in a canyon packed with natural, quick-burning chaparel and eucalyptus trees that were first planted by stupid, greedy pioneers looking to grow a quick lumber source to build new cities. It’s impossible to know just how wild that fire was, and how much it was a product of our insistence on taming an untamable ecosystem. A frontierswoman if there ever was one, my grandmother rebuilt in the same spot with no help from government aid. And a few years ago, that new house almost burned down again, in a firestorm that moved in almost the exact same pattern as the one decades prior. My dad still won’t move. He tells me it’s because he loves that place, it’s beautiful and secluded. It’s his home. I tell him, The future always looks good in the golden land, for no one remembers the past.
