Water: A Prayer

Considerations from Sarah, Autumn Equinox 2023

I keep trying to write about water. About what it means to farm in California, about how it feels to pump water from a three-hundred foot well and release it onto our crops. About the constant question turning over and over in my mind: is this okay?

How much water is enough? How much is too much?

A year ago I wrote another essay about water. It was a much hotter summer after a much drier winter, and I wrote with a tone of desperation, so desperate that I didn’t send it out. I had under-watered our first season, unused to the warmer summers here after moving from the Mendocino coast. Our yields were low on our storage crops, so I had spent the summer forcing myself to water a little more. The potato yield tripled; the fields were lush and abundant. We were able to sell onions and potatoes to other CSA farms and to FEED Sonoma, our local food hub, which was a huge help on our budget, as well as offering them every week in the CSA. I’m interested in feeding people and I’m especially interested in growing food that actually fills our stomachs. Last year’s crop was a success, and it took water. It all takes water.

But, I have a small existential crisis every time I turn the irrigation on.

“Water is important to people who do not have it,” Joan Didion wrote in her essay “Holy Water” in 1977, “and the same is true of control.”  It’s true that I want the things that controllable water gives me: even germination, workable soil, generous yields. The ability to control where it goes, to dry down crops as needed, to keep the freshly planted areas moist as chocolate cake but the roadways dry. That’s why, despite its aridity, California is the source of so much of the country’s produce. We get to have control, at least the illusion of it, at least in summer. But with it comes a kind of desperation.

That first essay I wrote about water was mostly a list of questions: “How many gallons landed and how many blew away? Rates of evaporation. Field capacity. Avoiding the heat of midday, avoiding the winds in the afternoon. In a wetland, the water table is a few feet beneath my feet. Does the water go right back? Maybe it just goes right back, those gallons of water. Maybe they return home where they started. 

Maybe we haven't lost anything at all.”

I wrote that, a year ago: maybe we haven’t lost anything at all. A delusion, or a prayer.

These questions only become more naive. The New York TImes recently published this report on groundwater in America. A spoiler title: America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow.

In California, an agricultural giant,...the aquifers in at least 76 basins last year were being pumped out faster than they could be replenished by precipitation, a condition known as “overdraft”’ according to state numbers.

Unfortunately this year’s unusually wet winter in California, which led to widespread flooding, did only so much to refill those aquifers. That’s because much of the torrent surged through rivers and into the ocean.

We tapped into our neighbor’s well to irrigate for our first two seasons here. All it took was easy plumbing and the kindness of a fellow farmer trying to help us out, and our five acre field, former chicken pasture, became a farm. In summer, the fields were bright green with squash and potato foliage. 

Abundance, is what I felt. 

“Holy Water” is about Didion’s visit to the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project. She watches huge amounts of water get moved all around the state, and loves it. She is a little easy to impress, the way many people are by scale. She says that “my own reverence for water has always taken the form of…an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale.” 

Of course, the only way the control of water can be anything but political is if the sources are infinite and the distribution equitable.

But it was 1977. I suppose everything felt more infinite then. A memo called ““Release of Fossil CO2 and the Possibility of a Catastrophic Climate Change,” had arrived on Jimmy Carter’s desk. He had read it. But it was still a “possibility.” 

We hadn’t lost so much yet. 

“‘There is no way to get that back,’ Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, said of disappearing groundwater,” reports the Times, “‘There’s almost no way to convey how important it is.’”

At the Control Center, Joan Didion learns about a reservoir called “Quail” with a gross capacity of 1,636,018,000 gallons. Someone writes: “LET'S START DRAINING QUAL AT 12:00” and someone else writes “OK.” “I knew at that moment,” Didion wrote, “that I had missed the only vocation for which I had any instinctive affinity: I wanted to drain Quail myself.”

I love the transparency of Didion’s lust at the same time as I hate the abandon of it, like it is a game for our amusement. But had I been there in 1977, I probably also would have wanted to drain Quail. The difference between farmers and gardeners is a love of scale, isn’t it? I wanted to turn our field into a farm. I wanted, and want, to grow not a sweet little garden, but a lot of food. Tons of food, enough to pack our shipping container to the brim: fifteen thousand pounds of potatoes, last year. Three thousand pounds of onions. Twenty-six hundred winter squash, an estimated thirteen thousand pounds. I also like big numbers, it seems. 

So here I am: 

We debated for a year before we dug a new well. Three hundred feet down, eight-inch pipe. The machines that came to dig it were bigger than I even thought they'd be, and for three days the rig was running from seven until four. It hurt to watch. The men—all men, of course—-didn’t make eye contact as they drilled. Bentonite poured into the field; they were using it as a drilling fluid, flushing the equipment with it. “It's what you use on your face,” they told Anna and me. Anna seemed to know what they meant.

When they finished, they told us the yield: five hundred gallons a minute, conservatively. An unfathomable number, essentially infinite. Until private wells are regulated, it’s up to us how much of that to pump.

Water, like everything, is about power. And it’s about wanting: wanting abundance, wanting beauty, wanting all our desires fulfilled. “I wanted to stay the day,” Didion writes to close her piece. “I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile. I want it still.”

Farming in a wetland in drought-stricken California is strange. There is both so much water, and so little. When we dug our fenceposts, we hit water just a few feet down. It does seem infinite, as it has to so many farmers who are now facing stark new realities. “‘We overpumped it,’ said Farrin Watt, who has been farming in Wichita County for 23 years,” to the Times, “‘We didn’t know it was going to run out.’”

A year ago I got a letter from the Santa Rosa Plain Groundwater Sustainability Agency. “Dear Groundwater User,” it began. “California state law requires that communities protect their groundwater to make sure it’s available to all users today and in the future.” The letter notified me of the fee program that had recently passed, “to prevent declines in groundwater levels and to avoid other problems related to over pumping, including land subsidence, losses in groundwater storage, declining water quality, the impacts on surface water.” The fee is forty dollars per acre foot of groundwater pumped annually. 

The fee for our property for the year was twenty-nine dollars.

They had underestimated our use, based I suppose on an estimation applied to rural residents. No one estimated our water use as a farm and there’s no requirement to meter or even track irrigation use. I track our irrigation use carefully only because I got in the habit when we were using our neighbor’s well. An accurate fee would be about $120 this year. This still feels like essentially nothing. But still there has been pushback on the program, especially for farmers. Farmers are worried it will hurt their profits, and County Supervisor David Rabbit, in the Press Democrat’s coverage of the program, “questioned the fees applied to farm operators, saying ‘if you want to kill agriculture this is a great way to do it.’”

Of course, if you want to kill agriculture, draining the groundwater is also a great way to do it.

This year, as of September 1, we’ve used 62% of the water we used last year. We started irrigating in March last year and in late April this year; it’s been markedly cooler this summer, requiring less irrigation. And, I under-watered again. We tried using drip irrigation on our potatoes, and I didn’t manage the water consistently enough. Maybe I got complacent after last year’s crop, took it for granted. I also just didn’t like turning the water on. It was our biggest field. The result is a lower potato yield, which will affect our projected income and make our margins much trickier. 

So water and water use does have a direct impact on a farm business, but not from an annual fee that doesn’t come close to comparing to any of the other costs of farming: labor, equipment, compost and amendments, seeds, fuel, taxes, insurance, and on and on.

David Noren, a member of the Santa Rosa Groundwater Sustainability Agency Advisory Board, was also interviewed by the Press Democrat. “We’re talking about a shared common resource,” he said. “It’s not your groundwater, it’s our groundwater. We’re all drinking out of the same milkshake.”

Noren is a neighbor of ours who monitors levels on wells on our street specifically and has been incredibly helpful in understanding our groundwater. The levels down here near the Laguna have been good, historically. But historically isn’t any guarantee. Noren “considers the proposed fees entirely reasonable” and noted that “nobody’s going to come out and put a meter on your well.” Though I think they should, honestly. I know farmers who are scared of that prospect, but I suppose I want limits just as much as I want scale. It would feel like help, not restriction.

What it looks like to have no limits, and an unbounded desire for control, is something like what’s described in a followup interview to the Times report, The Daily podcast reported on the town of Buckeye, Arizona, where “They’ve already been told at the start of this year that there isn’t enough groundwater beneath Buckeye to support new development…but it doesn’t seem to be having any drag on optimism in the town.” They’ve hatched a plan Didion would love, to desalinate water via “a giant pipeline to bring ocean water off of Mexico all the way up to Arizona like this huge river flowing backwards. Instead of water flowing hundreds of miles to the sea, this would be ocean water flowing hundreds of miles inland.”

So in the short-term, if this pipeline is built, it means that the water will flow, growth will continue despite the costs — environmental and otherwise — and if you can afford it, you can come, right? So again, a huge water infrastructure project is moving the goalposts of what’s possible and forestalling, really, an existential reckoning about whether more and more people should continue coming to live in a desert.

This is where we are. What it takes to grow a few acres of vegetables in a California wetland is not the same thing it takes to continue uninterrupted development in a desert state. I know this. But it all falls somewhere along the line of what we are willing to take from the planet to keep surviving, and who can afford to take it. It’s all an existential reckoning, and there is no forestalling it.

How to end an essay about water in California is part of what caught me up last time I tried. Last year, it rained two inches in September, and so I wrote about that, ended on a high note, a drenching note. A sense that, for the moment, it’s ok again. That is how the first touches of fall usually feel to me: an easing. This week we started closing our greenhouse at night, and the cool days have meant significantly less irrigation for the fields we have planted to kale and chard, lettuce and chicories, broccoli and cauliflower. There will be a moment, soon enough, when I turn the irrigation completely off for the season, except for infrequent watering in the hoop houses. It will become too wet to weed, too wet to control much at all. 

I don’t have two inches of rain yet to convince me it’s all going to be okay. It isn’t. We’ve already destroyed so much, irretrievably much. But autumn remains, for me, a season of hope. The harvests start to come in, the larders start to fill, CSA members return to the farm to gather their goods. I get a reminder of what all the work is for, what it yields, what I might do differently next year. Not the blind optimism of Buckeye, Arizona, but what Rebecca Solnit describes in an interview with Krista Tippett, both of them interested in hope that is not a wish but a muscle:

This is what hope is about for me. It’s not saying, “Oh, we can pretend that everything’s going to be fine, and we’ll fix it all, and it’ll be as though it never happened.” It’s really saying, the difference between the best-case scenario, and the worst case-scenario is where these people in the Philippines survive, where these people in the Arctic are able to keep something of their way of life. And we’re going to do everything we can to fight for the best case rather than the worst case. Without illusions, without thinking that we’re going to make it all magically OK and like it never happened.

Summer for farms may always feel like an existential struggle. But then comes the rain. And an extra hour of darkness in the evenings that offers a little moment to consider: what are we trying to grow, and grow toward? What is the state of the places we live? How full are our aquifers, and how full is full enough? Maybe we need to be our own regulators, or maybe we need to advocate for assistance in learning the limits we need. These are perhaps the questions that can, as Solnit says, help us in “coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen and that there’s maybe room for us to intervene.”

This is not easy. The difference between the best-case and worst-case scenarios are vast. I often feel so bad about the amount of water we use that I want a different job. I want to be able to worry about the length of my showers instead of underground leaks, or forgetting to turn an irrigation line off and letting thousands of gallons gush away. Of course, I would continue to eat food and that food would come from somewhere and that farmer would be no more regulated than I am. So I have to do my best. I have to grow food as conscientiously as I know how. I have to embed myself in the places I live, depend on its soil and community and be dependable in return. I have to live within its means.

This is all to say: I think it’s okay for irrigating to feel existential. It is. Water is the absolute foundation of our existence, truly holy in ways both political and not. When I lived at a Tibetan Buddhist center, we made daily water offerings to the Buddhas. Every morning I filled a pitcher with clean cold water, and poured seven bronze bowls as full as they could be without overflowing. It was the holiest offering that was possible to make, and the most available. And every evening, I would pour each bowl back into the pitcher, and find a plant nearby, letting the water seep into the soil, another kind of prayer.