agricultural county much closer than ever imagined.”12
In November 2005, I stood 282 feet below sea level, looking out across the salt flats of Death Valley, thinking about Frank Norris’s McTeague handcuffed to a dead body. The moment expressed all I knew about deserts: hot, dry, deadly. Out on the flats, people appeared and disappeared in heat waves; I ventured not so far, studying what surprised me, the presence of water, as bad as it is, in Badwater Basin. Native to a humid place, I missed the sight of a good spring; I had no working category for knowing arid land. But then again, I was a tourist there, so I concentrated on the awful beauty: distant mountains, sharp rocks, sandstone colors. And I had a bottle of water, the van—not far—had air conditioning, and the paved roads in and out had signs. Glancing back at Badwater, I could imagine staying awhile, a day maybe. What I couldn’t imagine was living there.
West of Badwater, between the Sierra and Inyo mountains, stretches the Owens Valley, home for a time to Mary Hunter Austin; here she wrote The Land of Little Rain, essays about Death Valley and the Mojave, Lone Pine and Independence, land she named the Country of Lost Borders. A transplant from the Midwest, Austin kept her senses alert, for years, as she slowly came to know the country; only after she had “summer[ed] and winter[ed] with the land and wait[ed] its occasions” did she begin writing. As she wrote, she thought a lot about water, which keeps that arid land alive, no matter how “dry the air and villainous the soil.”13
Reading her essays in well-watered Pennsylvania reminds me of what I and many of my neighbors have for too long taken for granted: our access, so far, to good, clean, abundant water. With water at its heart, The Land of Little Rain pays careful attention to “precise place-based knowledge,” because getting right the details matters as much for one’s survival as for one’s aesthetics.14 As Austin points out, “Not the law, but the land sets the limit” (3). Accustomed to where they are, for example, western cattle “drink morning and evening,” and protect themselves by lying at night on “exposed fronts of westward facing hills.” At home in a water-starved world, they so closely resemble less domesticated animals that in “these half wild spotted steers the habits of an earlier lineage persist” (15).
Water drives desert dwellers: if you can’t find a sip, you’re dead. As Austin matter-of-factly points out, “To underestimate one’s thirst, to pass a given landmark to the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running water—there is no help for any of these things” (5).15 People cannot depend on springs, “for when found they are often brackish and unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil” (4). For a human to get around, she insists, requires a sophisticated awareness of weather and wind, plants and animals, elevations and the position of the sun. If you don’t know the country, well, it might kill you. This is land that “forces new habits on its dwellers,” not the least of which is where to find water (7).
Close reading can help. Animal tracks lead to springs, which are few and far between, and cattle die with their noses pointed toward water holes.16 These are not the only signs of water, however: Austin describes a circle of stone with an arrow pointing toward a spring, a mark Shoshone made “near where the immemorial foot trail goes up from Saline Flat toward Black Mountain” (17). Another arrow sign, of an “older, forgotten people,” built closer to the spring, instructs the thirsty: “In this direction... is a spring of sweet water; look for it” (18).
People war over scarce water. In the Country of Lost Borders, upstream farmers defend irrigation ditches in dry years, holding water for themselves before it flows on to others, assuming any remains (86). Austin recounts that at the end of one summer, Amos Judson, for example, shot up Jesus Montaña, who dared contest Judson’s right to all the water in Tule Creek (87). A dozen or so years later, however, Mrs. Diedrick, Judson’s latest downstream neighbor, held Judson off with a long-handled shovel. These incidents lead Austin to point out, prophetically, that “some of the water-right difficulties are more squalid than this, some more tragic” (87).
Not a few years later, a more squalid and tragic difficulty afflicted Owens Valley when Los Angeles started stealing the heart of the country, siphoning its water to expand into what the city has become, a place where streams have gone underground, springs have been built over, and water trees run in concrete sluices. Grown beyond its place, Los Angeles stands at the end of a more than two hundred mile ditch that drains water “east away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa” (3). For otherwise arid Los Angeles, it’s not land that sets limits; it’s law. The lesson: if a large number of people want what’s at your feet, they’ll take it, one way or another, whether it’s water, coal, or natural gas.17
Ditches keep no one for long.
A ditch bisects the farm. Well-meaning, I’m sure, the Soil Conservation Service engineered the gash in 1973 to catch runoff from the sidehill and divert it from racing down the driveway or coursing through the pasture behind the house to the Flat, where it had already carved a shallow channel. Steering the flow from one side of the farm to the other, the Ditch dumped water into the woods, out of sight. Before the bulldozer raised the bank, no one, I bet, walked among the hemlock and beech to find where the water would go, how it would get there, or what it would do as it found its way to Johnson Creek. Maybe the site supervisor assumed that trees and rocks would disperse the force of the water, or maybe he assumed eroding a woodlot a lesser sin than eroding the pasture, an old apple orchard. Or maybe no one thought about it. So now in the woods, the flow cuts deep gullies, in some places a dozen feet down through Lordstown stony loams. And no grass has reclaimed the gullies, which would blunt the loss, as grass had in the water’s former course. Between ditch and creek, a handful of hemlocks have lost their footing, and heavy rains plug the sluice pipe under the road near my brother’s house. The Ditch didn’t solve an erosion problem; it moved it, and maybe made it worse.
From Honesdale to the state line, a ditch once cut a path parallel to the Lackawaxen River. Prior to 1849, the Delaware and Hudson Canal ended at the edge of the Delaware only to begin again on the other side, but after the construction of the Roebling aqueducts, Lackawaxen water went on to empty into a second river, the Hudson, eighty-four miles to the east.18 One hundred and eight total miles, the Delaware and Hudson Canal measured in 1851 six feet deep, forty-eight to fifty feet wide at the top, and thirty-two feet at the bottom.19 To float boats, canal tenders had to maintain its depth; to save its sides from erosion, canal traffic and water flow had to maintain walking speed. Opened in October 1828, the D & H, a symptom of the early nineteenth-century canal fever, carried for seventy years Lackawanna Valley coal to New York City markets. For seventy years, water from the farm, located along Johnson Creek between Hankins Pond and Miller Pond, fed four rivers that supplied industrial America: the Lackawaxen, the D & H, the Delaware, and the Hudson.
Water worries determined where the canal began. Fearing that local landowner Jason Torrey, who operated a sawmill on the river, “would not guarantee an adequate supply of water for the canal,” the D & H cut him from their plans to create a canal head. In August 1827, Torrey had contracted with the D & H to donate to the company half his land at the forks of the Dyberry for the canal terminus; in return he expected his remaining land to jump in value with the rise of the town that would support the canal’s operation. In September, however, D & H founder Maurice Wurts crossed the Dyberry and swindled Torrey’s neighbor, Samuel Kimble, convincing him that his land was worth little because the canal would begin on Torrey’s property. As historian Vernon Leslie notes dryly, “The brothers Wurts were not known for their generosity or integrity in regard to land deals.”20 Early-day land men, I imagine.
Water supply was a serious and chronic issue for the new river. Constructed “during a season of unusual drought” in 1826, the sides of the canal had to be watered and allowed to settle before the basin could be filled. Hacked through sections of “porous, stony soil,” the waterway sometimes leaked, which meant lining the bottom with clay. Operating only from May to December, the ditch had to be refilled every spring, which meant that engineers put to work springs, creeks, rivers, and swamps.21 Despite raising reservoirs all along the route, including Belmont Lake, Hankins Pond, and Miller Pond, the company couldn’t keep boats afloat in 1851, 1854, 1870, 1883, and 1895.22