The fading roar of the jet skis was soon replaced with the
drone of a generator, over which floated a most ironic tune from a boom
box. My daughter Laurel and sons Tyler and Riley and I had progressed well
beyond annoyance and anger, and now could only lay there laughing at the
absurdity.
We were canoe-camped on a sandy ledge just one sinuous bend
above Glen Canyon’s Cathedral in the Desert. Thanks to the again-rising waters
of Lake Foul, our houseboater neighbors were able to
drop their anchor and their empty beer bottles at the Cathedral’s door. The
towering sandstone walls, which earlier in the day echoed the splash of
waterfalls, now amplified every downstream obscenity, belch and gunshot. But
the climax was hearing Disney’s Little Mermaid ask “What would I give if I
could live out of these waters? What would I pay to spend a day warm on the
sand?”
Lake Foul (okay, Powell) is a place of mighty extremes. Even
in June the heat was intense, the water refreshingly cold. And the water… wide
and long, snaking miles back into canyon after barren canyon. So much water.
You could easily think, as I'm sure many visitors do, that man has created a
miracle, bringing so much water to the desert. Gun the engines with joy! But
that’s a mistake. As Laurel is fond of saying, Lake Powell wastes water,
it doesn’t make it. In addition to trapping all that rich “color-red-o” silt
(which will eventually choke the power turbines of Glen Canyon dam), the
reservoir invisibly loses enough water to the porous sandstone and arid sky to
supply the million acre-feet used annually by City of LA.
The Colorado River tragedy/travesty is most visible where it
literally trickles – in a good year – into its desiccated delta at the Sea of
Cortez. You see, when the Colorado’s annual flow was divvied up among the
thirsty farms and cities, years ago as part of the Colorado River Compact, they
based it on an atypically wet 20 year period. Now there are too many straws in
the bottle, some are starting to suck air. But Las Vegas wants more hotels and
homes, swamp-loving rice is still planted in the desert, and the Interior
Department is cutting southern California’s allocation.
It’s a good thing we Petalumans
get our water locally… don’t we? Not really. Close to 100% of our water is
purchased from the Sonoma County Water Agency, imported from the Russian River
(which for 3 years in the late 1990’s made the American Rivers list of most
endangered rivers.) And a substantial volume of the Russian’s flow is stolen
from the Eel River via the Potter Valley Project (PVP) in Mendocino County. The
PVP has nearly extinguished the Eel’s magnificent and economically vital salmonid fishery. Facing Federally-mandated restoration of
the Eel habitat on top of infrastructure safety improvements, the PVP is an
economic as well ecological liability time bomb.
A wise person might conclude that the PVP should be shut
down. Yet the SCWA is circulating a new agreement among its local government
contractors (including Petaluma) that has the agency *buying* the PVP. The
irony is that we don’t need the Eel water, even if we could afford to secure it.
Conservation can free up enough water to accommodate planned population growth,
as it has for decades in the East Bay and southern California (even the SCWA has
said the PVR water is not needed for growth.) Both North Marin and the City of
Sonoma recently refused to sign this agreement. It’s coming before our City
Council in October. At the very least, we should insist our City be duly
diligent in examining the full, long term costs of this proposal.
During my Glen Canyon trip I read Frank Herbert’s sci-fi
classic Dune, about a planet so dry its water-wise inhabitants wear special
suits to capture and recycle their moisture. Now that’s a *bit* extreme
for Petaluma, but as we enter an era of increasing water scarcity and conflict,
we would benefit by making water-wisdom a top priority for our community… including
getting our straw out of the Eel River.