Are we simply going to keep using our water supplies until there’s none left?
As a fourth-generation Californian, I’ve learned that worrying over water is a generational inheritance. My great-grandmother, Ora Goodman, used to say: “There isn’t enough water for all these people.” This was her obsession. Over the decades, with more and more people inhabiting the state, I’ve picked up her mantle of worry — often thinking there won’t be enough water for all these people. Lake Mead’s dismal prospects do not help my anxiety.
The family story, and the origin of Ora’s water obsession, starts when my great-grandparents were homesteading a piece of land near Chittenden in Santa Cruz County. They’d come down from Modoc County around 1915. At the time they had two young boys, one being my grandfather. The land they were on didn’t have a well, so using two dray horses and a cart loaded with wooden barrels, Gramma Ora went to a local pump to get water.
I was lucky enough to know my great-grandparents through my mid-teens. By the 1960s, they had relocated the family to Santa Maria. Unlike in Chittenden, the house they moved to had actual plumbing. But Gramma Ora never gave up her frugal water habits. I have vivid memories of my mother and my aunts arguing with her because she refused to let dirty dishwater go down the drain. Often, she tried to wash several days of dishes in the same water.
Even so, growing up in California, water simultaneously felt bountiful. Swimming was an inexpensive distraction for my sister and me, one my beleaguered single mother frequently took advantage of. I’ve swum in Lakes Shasta and Tahoe, the San Joaquin, American and Sacramento rivers, plus the Kern and Merced. I even had an up close and personal experience with the Colorado River when I spent a week rafting through the Grand Canyon — a trip that ended in Lake Mead.
The rivers, lakes and ocean, not to mention our kitchen taps and garden hoses, may make it appear that water is always there. It can be easy to dismiss the urgency of our drought. But the reality is that our state is stuck with a feast-or-famine relationship with water. Replenishing rains also cause destructive floods. Wet winters can’t fully redeem our dry seasons. This was true even when Gramma Ora worried over water. A lot has changed since her days.
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