Cadillac Desert (91 page)

One consequence of this policy (or lack of a policy) was that carryover storage in Shasta Lake dropped so low that, in February of 1991, the Bureau predicted that the reservoir—by far the largest in California—would be the world’s biggest mudflat by fall of that year, down to 2 or 3 percent of its capacity of 4,500,000 acre-feet. The Bureau was rescued, barely, by another late spell of wet weather in March, but had those storms not come through there would have been no CVP water for anyone—fish, fowl, humans, or crops—by summer’s end.

From the fisheries point of view, though, the most devastating consequence was that most of the runoff that reached the California Delta in those years never reached the Bay; it was immediately diverted across the Delta by the projects’ huge batteries of pumps. In fact, from 1987 through 1989, Delta exports
increased
every year as river flows and reservoir storage dropped abysmally. In those three years, runoff to the Delta averaged nine or ten million acre-feet, while Delta diversions climbed from 5.2 million acre-feet in 1987 to 6.1 million acre-feet in 1989—a level barely surpassed in the wettest years.

On the other hand, the four runs of salmon, whose young rode out to sea on twenty to thirty million acre-feet of runoff before the great projects were built, had had
their
water supply reduced by almost 90 percent. Young salmon tend to go where most of the water flows, and most of it was now flowing into the deadly maws of the south Delta pumps.

No one could even guess how many tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, of juvenile salmon perished at the pumps’ vast graveyard during the first several years of the drought. But the perverse irony was that, as the
future
California salmon fishery was being decimated as never before, the fishermen in 1988 hauled in the biggest harvest since 1945. As Zeke Grader had predicted two years earlier, the numbers of returning salmon that year—mostly fall run from the 1986 class that zoomed out to sea on the February flood tide—were greater than all but the oldest commercial fishermen could remember. The offshore catch that year totalled 1,400,000 fish, weighing more than fifteen million pounds—a bonanza worth about a hundred and fifty million dollars. Sport fishermen hauled in hundreds of thousands more, and another couple of hundred thousand spawners—about as many as the depleted rivers could handle—swam to upriver redds. As newspapers published photographs of salmon boats listing into port with huge piles of salmon on board, Zeke Grader was devoting whole issues of
Fridays
to a new, antithetical prognosis: that the salmon industry would suffer catastrophically in the years ahead. It’s possible his own constituency wasn’t listening by then.

But he was right.

In the 1960s, about a hundred and thirty thousand winter-run salmon returned to the Sacramento River to spawn—the remnants of a run that probably numbered in the half-million range before the state and federal projects were built. By the early seventies, the winter run was down to about twenty thousand fish. By 1987, it was down to two thousand. By 1991, the biologists counting the fish may have come close to outnumbering the fish; 191 spawners made it to the Red Bluff Diversion Dam. The spring run, much harder to count, was probably down to two thousand survivors—mainly due to depleted rivers, which were partly the fault of the drought, and unnatural Delta flows, which were not. By then, the fall (hatchery) run, which made up most of the huge 1988 catch, had crashed too. In 1992, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council imposed the most stringent quotas in history on the commercial fleet, and they applied, to varying degrees, from central California to the Canadian border because California salmon tend to head north once at sea. The offshore California harvest in 1992 was about 150,000 fish. A lot of boats never bothered to go out; if they had, the whole season would have yielded a few dozen fish per boat, worth less than the fuel required to catch them. But even boats in Washington State were forced to languish at dockside for weeks because farmers in California, twelve hundred miles away, were granted normal deliveries of subsidized water during the first several years of the worst drought in that state’s history.

As it turned out, however, the hand of justice could be as perverse as the kiss of irony. In 1991 and again in 1992, the CVP and SWP water contractors finally experienced the same sort of water rationing—and worse—that salmon and fishermen had endured since the drought’s first week. The State Water Project made no deliveries to agriculture in 1991—none. Most of the Bureau’s customers saw their water supply reduced by 75 percent. In 1992, an election year, they got a little more water through the direct intervention of someone who had received millions of dollars in San Joaquin Valley PAC money, the president of the United States. Many growers shifted from surface water to groundwater, but they paid a price (groundwater can be several times more expensive); meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of acres were taken out of production. Tens of thousands of people—mostly farm-workers—lost their jobs, welfare caseloads rose astronomically, and in some agricultural counties unemployment rates brushed 30 percent.

Because the reservoirs had been so drastically depleted during the first four years of the drought, the Department of Water Resources and the Bureau had no choice but to cut the growers off. In 1991 and again in 1992, the CVP had just over five million acre-feet in storage in May (when most runoff has entered the reservoirs), and the growers—irrigating millions of acres—could have used it all up by July. But now there was an entirely new reason why they couldn’t let much of the water go. By 1992, the winter-run chinook was listed as a threatened species by the federal government and as an endangered species by the state of California. The spring-run salmon was not yet listed because, as part of the recovery plan, almost all salmon fishing off California and Oregon might have had to be banned. (By the fall of 1992, however, the spring run, now represented by fewer than a thousand survivors, looked as if it might be listed too.) The late-fall-run chinook was regarded by fisheries biologists as a species of special concern, which meant that it might have to be listed too. It was not inconceivable, if the drought went on, that almost every salmon in California might eventually join the endangered species list.

The San Joaquin Valley growers, of course, were inclined to blame the whole situation on everything and everyone but themselves: if not exclusively on nature’s drought, then on high-seas drift-net fishing, on ocean warming, on overfishing by the West Coast salmon fleet (the most drastically policed fishing fleet in the world), on dredge spoils dumped into San Francisco Bay, on seals and sea lions, on logging in the watersheds, on polluted runoff from abandoned mines—on any cause with a quarter-gram of plausibility. All of these horrors resulted in the loss of some fish; all of them combined are less responsible than the combination of empty rivers, intolerably warm rivers, and rivers flowing in reverse toward power and wealth.

So the fate of California agriculture is now helplessly entwined—because of its insatiable thirst for water—with the fate of the California salmon fisheries. In October of 1992, Congressman George Miller of California, the new chairman of the House Interior Committee, and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey saw their Central Valley Project Reform Act blown through the House and Senate and onto the president’s desk. Members of Congress from the Northwest voted for the bill in order to protect their own salmon fleets; members from urban California voted for the bill because their constituents had endured severe water rationing while agriculture had not; members from nearly every other state voted for the bill because, in their opinion, agribusiness in California has gotten everything it wanted for far too long, often at the expense of farmers in their own states. Among other things, the Miller-Bradley legislation takes 800,000 acre-feet of water from agriculture and dedicates it to wetlands and fisheries—the first such reallocation since the Central Valley Project Act was passed in 1933. The only question is whether it isn’t already too late. In the fall of 1992, more than 300 of the 350-odd salmon boats that comprise the fleet at Fort Bragg, California, were for sale, and winter-run salmon from the class of 1991, tatters of evolution, were being reared for tanks at San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium, like the condors at the San Diego Zoo.

“You can replant an orchard and have it back in ten years,” Zeke Grader told me one morning in the summer of 1992. “You lose a salmon that took twenty thousand years to evolve and you never get it back. The fishermen know that closing the season is their only choice. They know it’s their only
hope
—if they have to starve for a year, or two, or a decade, it’s the only way to save their industry. We’re chucking a whole heritage. Fishing is the oldest industry in California. You have to go up the coast to appreciate the despair. Even then you really can’t. You just can’t. Everyone’s broke. Everyone’s living off relatives or on welfare. This was pure plunder. It’s basically like the bison and the Indians: The settlers and the hide hunters killed all the buffalo, so they didn’t have to kill the Indians. The Indians couldn’t survive without the buffalo. Now the cotton and alfalfa farmers killed most of the salmon, with some help from everyone else. I don’t know if they consciously wanted to get us out of the way. As long as we have salmon, we’ll have fishermen, and as long there’re fishermen they’re going to be a pain in the ass. But a destitute fishing industry isn’t a lobby. It’s no one’s constituency—it’s just a sentimentality. All we have now, besides Miller-Bradley, is the Endangered Species Act. I don’t know how long it’s going to last. If the growers had the political power to get all the water they wanted when California was drying up and blowing away, they might have figured that overturning the act—or seeing that it didn’t affect
their
water supply—would be a piece of cake.”

On May 20, 1979, an enormously tall, charismatic, and obsessed young man named Mark Dubois hiked into the canyon of the Stanislaus River, concealed himself near the river’s edge, threw a length of chain around an undercut boulder, padlocked the ends of the chain together, tossed the key into the river, and leaned back against the boulder, waiting to drown.

The flood that was going to submerge Mark Dubois within a day or two wasn’t moving downriver from the thick snowfields melting rapidly in the Sierra Nevada. This was a flood moving in reverse, up the river. A few months earlier, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had closed the gates of New Melones Dam, its most recent snub of nature, a mammoth rockpile wedged in Iron Canyon a few miles downriver. The reservoir had already submerged the older, much smaller Melones Dam and its reservoir, and now its tentacles of turbid water were creeping up the side creeks and the main river itself. Dubois had concealed himself somewhere in Camp Nine Gorge, nine miles of superlative Class Three whitewater that could have been conceived by Disneyworld engineers on amphetamines; after the Youghgighenny River in Pennsylvania, it was the most popular rafting and kayaking run in the United States. Dubois, an expert boater and evangelical environmentalist, was the sort of fixture on this river that old Harry Truman was on the slopes of Mount St. Helens before it buried him in volcanic ash—you could hardly think of the Stanislaus River without thinking of Mark Dubois. He had invested ten years of his life battling New Melones Dam, and for a while it almost looked as if he might win. But in the Seventies, in a contest with the Corps, the Bureau of Reclamation, and California’s unquenchable irrigation lobby, he and his minions really had no chance. They were the cavalry; he was the Sioux; the chain and padlock were his Wounded Knee.

By then the Corps’s regional hierarchy knew Dubois almost intimately and chose not to undervalue his inhuman will. If he said he was prepared to die, he probably was. Within thirty hours, the spill gates of the dam were opened, and a posse of searchers combed the river canyon on foot, by helicopter, and in rafts, trying to find his hiding spot. Even though some of them must have passed within a few yards of it, they did not. Meanwhile, the whole story had blown around the world—Dubois was being compared to the monks who incinerated themselves in Vietnam—and reporters and people from all over the place were roaring toward the Stanislaus to see what the fuss was all about.

I was one of the first of them, and, probably for the only time in my life, I saw a river born again. A short distance below the old Parrott’s Ferry Bridge, where eighty thousand boaters had hauled out in the river’s final year, was a small bouncy rapids, an effervescence of frothy, jumping haystack waves. On the morning of May 21, the reservoir was beginning to eat through them. I sat on the bank and watched. One after another, the big waves flattened out, their booming stilled, their splashing stopped ... then they disappeared under gurgling little whirlpools, and where there had been rapids minutes earlier the river went dead calm. Late that day, however, the Corps began spilling the reservoir, and as it receded, the rapids began to reappear. First there was still water, then the water began to move, then it grew riffly and agitated, and then the rapid waves began rising up, gaining height, gaining force, splashing and spraying and churning as they had for thousands of years—suddenly, from one minute to the next, there was a river again.

But not for long.

Jerry Brown, who was governor at the time, decided to intercede personally with Mark Dubois, promising to try to hold the reservoir below the Parrot’s Ferry Bridge, and Dubois, who had told a single emissary where he was and given him a padlock key, walked out of his hiding place. Between its clenched teeth, the Corps mumbled something about respecting the will of the governor of a sovereign state, which was its way of saying it would just wait everyone out. During 1982, the heavy rains and snows of the late 1970s returned. The Corps’s and the Bureau’s constituency—mostly conservative farmers and Republican towns with a God-given right to subsidized water and power and free flood control—staged demonstrations in Sacramento after releases from New Melones Dam overtopped the river levees and began flooding their fields. Jerry Brown, possessing one of the shortest attention spans of any politician who ever lived, soon lost interest in the whole mess. The Bureau of Reclamation, which was supposed to market the water in the reservoir the Corps got to build, complained about all the waste—even though it hadn’t signed a single contract to sell any of the water and had no means of getting it to any of the growers who allegedly wanted it. But this only meant that, if the reservoir was filled, southern California, by default, had a new water supply. What did a bunch of
rafters
matter, stacked against this? New Melones Lake had filled all of Camp Nine Gorge by the following spring. Another river that had flowed wild for hundreds of thousands of years was a memory.