Mark Twain probably deserves credit for the quip, “Water’s made for fighting, whiskey’s for drinking,” though no one truly knows who coined the phase. Dietrich Stroeh, the general manager of the Marin Municipal Water District during the drought of 1976 and 1977, knows volumes about water, fighting and whiskey. In Michael McCarthy’s book about him, The Man Who Made it Rain, Stroeh is a hard-drinking hydrologist and spin master who quelled the fears of citizens. With the help of Congressman John Burton, he also brought water to Marin by pipeline across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. If any one person saved Marin during the drought of the 1970s, it was Stroeh.
“Droughts come and go,” he told me. “They’re part of the way we live, though now we also have global climate change, along with extreme weather.”
McCarthy says there are two hydrological truths today: “Water is the new oil” and “When water becomes a commodity, wars start.” Wars haven’t broken out recently in Marin, but skirmishes have. This summer, sheriff’s deputies raided commercial pot farms in Nicasio where growers purloined water from adjacent farms and diverted it from streams and springs to irrigate their crops. “The two grows in Nicasio had about 500 plants each, and they were anemic,” deputy sheriff Matthew Larson said. “Weed in Marin comes and goes in waves, some bigger, some smaller.”
Several years ago, residents of Marshall fumed when Hog Island Oyster Company wanted to dig a new well on the uplands across from Highway 1. Fortunately, cooler heads and careful negotiations prevailed. So far, everyone in Marshall seems to have all the water that’s needed, though tourists who rent weekend cottages for as much as $900 a night have been known to complain that there’s not nearly enough for their vacation needs.
Amanda Eichstaedt, co-owner of Bear Valley Inn and KWMR’s station manager and executive director, said she and her husband Ken installed low-flow showerheads. They recycle rainwater and graywater. They shrunk their garden. “In the rooms we rent, we have signs about conserving water, and most folks get it,” Eichstaedt said. “Some visitors on vacation don’t know we’re in a drought…They might wash a car or hose down a driveway.” Tourists are gently informed of the situation. In most restaurants, water doesn’t arrive at a table unless it’s requested.
Whether there’s a war or not, the story of West Marin might be told as a story of water in different guises—rain, lakes, reservoirs, wells, springs, aquifers, and creeks and fog, though this summer has been largely fog-less, according to Richard Kirschman who put up a fog net hoping to measure levels of moisture. “There has been almost no ground level fog,” he wrote in an email. “If this continues, we will relocate the net to the ridge which seems foggier.”
The Marin water story is fragmented, changing from town to town. “West Marin is made up of very distinct communities that have had to carve out their own unique water systems,” said historian Dewey Livingston.
Yet perhaps one thing is the same; water scarcity can keep growth in check. Bolinas has a set number of water meters because of limited sources, a creek and two reservoirs.
Livingston, of Inverness, monitors Alder Creek in his backyard, and he said it has flowed with less volume this summer than usual. And as usual, some people in Marshall and Nicasio enlist companies in Petaluma to truck water to them.
North Marin Water District, which provides water to Point Reyes, Olema, Silver Hills, Paradise Ranch Estates, the headquarters of the Point Reyes National Seashore and Novato, sources West Marin’s water from a series of local wells. One 20-year board member, contractor and lifelong West Marin resident Dennis Rodoni, said that the drought serves as a reminder to stop wasting water.
Rodoni, who watched salmon splashing in local creeks as a boy, espouses a sense of civic pride and gratitude for the governor’s leadership. “It’s in large part due to the efforts of the governor that there’s not a person in the state who doesn’t know that we’re in a drought and that we have to conserve,” Rodoni said.
Most people in West Marin say that cooperation is the most effective way to survive this drought. But some on the margins sound a disgruntled note. Sanford Krones and Leslie Haddock—both street musicians who perform in Point Reyes Station—fault government and corporations. “I think we have plenty of water but improper distribution of it,” Krones said. Haddock added that grapes counted more than veggies in the big scheme of things. “We have to educate people,” she said.
Across dry dust fields, irrigated farms and in backyards and kitchens, there’s a general uneasiness about water as a resource and commodity, though West Marin received 32 inches of rain this year. Yet farmers, ranchers and consumers feel they’re in better shape than their counterparts in the Central Valley.
Water conservation plays a major role at the Straus Family Dairy and Creamery in Marshall, where 280 milking cows graze on pasture four months of the year and drink fresh water all year round sourced from a productive well that Albert Straus’ father and mother, Bill and Ellen, dug in 1977 after ten unsuccessful attempts. (At one point, they hired a water-witcher.) On a hot day, a large cow might consume 50 gallons. Straus recycles almost all of the water used on the dairy. He has also cut back, though barns have to be flushed and machines washed.
The price of organic alfalfa, which the cows eat when the fields turn brown, has been rising sharply because of the California drought. Demand for organic alfalfa exceeds supply. Still, over the last few years, the number of organic dairies in West Marin has grown steadily. Consumers want more organic milk than ever before, even as its price has steadily increased, in part because of the drought.
This summer, there’s barely a hint of green on Straus’ pastures on the east shore of Tomales Bay. “All of West Marin is water deficient,” Straus says as he gazes at his herd. “That’s been a kind of blessing in disguise. It has meant that this area has remained open and undeveloped, though the lack of a water table means that families on Tomales Bay often have to pay to have it hauled to their homes.”
In the seashore’s pastoral zone, water inequities abound. Indeed, F Ranch has water to spare, but C and B have little if any water. In the first part of the 20th century, G Ranch had yearly water problems. Then in 1964, the Lunny family built a dam where water spurted from the ground. They haven’t had a water problem since.
That’s part of the mystery of hydrology. (To address that inequity, the National Park Service stores water in two large underground reservoirs that are tapped as needed by ranchers.)
There’s nothing like a drought to change the landscape, stir up ideas and alter habits. Liam Plunkett, who works at Building Supply, sells a lot of water timers, pipe seals to prevent leaks, and compost that helps soil retain moisture. He himself takes shorter showers. Down the street, at the Palace Market, grocer Carlos Castellanos conserves every drop he can, though in the kitchen, it’s impossible not to use.
In Bolinas, two women, Althea Patton and Lea Earnheart, invented a water ritual at the summer solstice. This year’s was the second in the past eight years.
The 50 or so water pilgrims formed a circle in a parking lot off Mesa Road. Each person said what water meant to him or her. Someone played the flute. Another smudged the others. They sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and then walked in silence through lush Fern Canyon. One at a time, the pilgrims filed across the bridge that spans the small creek that supplies local families with water. Below them, the creek gurgled, splashed and sputtered. “The energy of the place lends itself to a deep sense of the sacred,” Earnheart said. Each person stopped mid-way on the bridge, said a prayer and scattered a handful of native herbs. Then they climbed the ridge and gathered around Sky, a Coast Miwok musician who sang Miwok songs.
“Maybe the crisis we’re in will help show people that water is the most astonishing entity on the planet,” Earnheart said. “If the sacred is that with which we cannot live without, then water is definitely sacred.”
Armando Quintero, the current president of M.M.W.D. and appointee to the California Water Commission, doesn’t talk about the holiness of H2O, but he has adopted a holistic approach to hydrology. Quintero worked for seven years as a park ranger in the seashore, and he brings many of the lessons he learned in West Marin to the politics, economics and science of water. Moreover, he grasps the lessons of water history. Mayan civilization declined, he points out, because it couldn’t adapt to severe drought and climate change.
Quintero himself has changed the way he lives: no lawn, only native plants and no more wasted water, not even in the shower. “In a lot of ways, abnormal is the new normal,” he said. “As we go into the future, we have to be resilient and we have to look out for our neighbors. We can’t let anyone go belly up.”
Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California, and an occasional contributor to The Point Reyes Light. He lives in Santa Rosa.