Oscar said to Kevin and Doris, “You’ll have to remember that if we lose this case.”
Doris shook her head irritably. “It’s not the same. We won’t be able to go back from a situation like ours.”
Tallhawk said, “You can never be sure of that. We’re working now on the final arrangements for the removal of the Hetch Hetchy dam, for instance. That was the biggest defeat ever for the environmental movement in California, right back at its start—a valley described as a second Yosemite, drowned so San Francisco could have a convenient water supply. John Muir himself couldn’t stop that one. But now we’re making them store the water in a couple of catchments downstream, and when that’s done they’ll drain Hetch Hetchy and bring that valley back out into the light of day, after a century and a half. The ecologists say the valley floor will recover in fifty to a hundred years, faster if they truck some of the mud out into the San Joaquin as fertilizer. So you see—some disasters can be reversed.”
“It would be better to avoid disaster in the first place,” Kevin said.
“Undoubtedly,” Tallhawk said. “I was just reminding you that there’s not too many things that are irrevocable, when you’re talking about the waterscape. Water flows forever, so there is a resilience there we can rely on.”
“Glen Canyon next, eh?” Oscar said.
“My God, yes!” Tallhawk cried, and laughed.
The sun disappeared. It got cold fast. The sky turned a dark velvet blue that seemed to crackle where it met the glowing white snow ridges. Steam rose from the pot on the stove, and they could smell the stew.
“But in El Modena…” Kevin said.
“In El Modena, I don’t know.”
Then the stew bubbled over, and it was declared ready. They spooned it into cups and ate. Tallhawk had brought a bottle of red wine along, and they drank it gratefully.
“Can’t we use water to stop Alfredo’s plan?” Kevin asked as he finished eating.
“Maybe.”
It was strange but true, she told them: Orange County had a lot of water. It was one of the best water districts in the state, in terms of groundwater conservation.
“What does that mean, exactly?” Kevin asked.
“Well, do you understand what groundwater is?”
“Water under the ground?”
“Yes, yes. But not in pools.”
She stood, waved her arms at the scene, talking as she pulled her down jacket from her pack. Walked in circles around them, looking at the peaks.
Soil is permeable, she said, and the rock below soil is also permeable, right down to solid bedrock, which forms the bottom of groundwater basins. Water fills all the available space in permeable rock, percolating everywhere it can go. And it flows downhill as it does on the surface, not as quickly, but just as definitely. “Imagine Owens Valley is a big trench between the ranges, which it is. Filled almost halfway up with rock and soil eroded out of the mountains. The San Joaquin Valley is the same way, only much bigger. These are immense reservoirs of water, then, only the water level lies below the soil level, at least in most places. Geologists and hydrologists have charted these groundwater basins everywhere, and there are some huge ones in California.
“Now some are self-contained, they don’t flow downstream. There’s enormous amounts of water in these, but they’re only replenished by rainfall, which is scarce out here. If you pump water you empty basins like those. The Ogdalilla basin under Oklahoma was one of those, and it was pumped dry like an oil field, which is why they’re so desperate for the Columbia’s water now.
“Anyway, you have to imagine this underground saturation, this underground movement.” She stretched her arms forward and reached with her fingers, in a sort of unconscious groundwater dance. “The shapes of the basin bottoms sometimes bring the water closer to the surface—if there’s an underground ridge of impermeable bedrock, and the groundwater is flowing downhill over this ridge, water gets pushed to the surface, in the very top of a giant slow-motion waterfall. That’s how you get artesian wells.”
Silence as she walked around the camp. Now it seemed they could hear the subterranean flow, murmuring beneath them, a deep bass to the wind’s tremolo.
“And El Modena?” Kevin said.
“Well, when a groundwater basin drains into the sea, there’s a strange situation; the water doesn’t really drain very much, because there’s water pressure on both sides. Fresh water forces itself out if there’s flow coming in from upstream, but if not… well, the only thing that keeps sea water from reversing the flow and pushing into the ground under the land is the pressure of the fresh water, pouring down.
“Now Orange County’s basin doesn’t have a whole lot of water coming into it any more. Riverside takes a lot before it reaches Orange County, as do all the other cities upstream. And agriculture in Orange County itself took a lot of water from the very start of settlement. They pumped more than was replenished, which was easy to do. But the pressure balance at the coastline was altered, and sea water began to leach inland. Wells near the coast turned salty. There’s no way to stop that kind of intrusion except to keep the basin full, so that the pressure outward is maintained. So the Orange County Water District was formed, and their job was to keep the groundwater basin healthy, so all their wells wouldn’t turn to salt. This was back in the 1920s. They were given the taxing and allocation powers necessary to do the job, and the right to sue cities upstream. And they went at it with a kind of religious fervor. They did it as well as any water district in California, despite all the stupidity going on above ground in that area. And so you have a healthy basin under you.”
They had finished eating. They cleaned up the cups and the pot; their hands got wet, and quickly they got cold. They scrambled to get into the down jackets and bunting pants that Tallhawk’s department had provided. Then they sat on their groundpads, sleeping bags bunched around them, making a circle around the stove, which served as their campfire. The great arc of peaks still glowed with some last remnant of light, under a dark sky. Sally pulled out a small bottle of brandy and passed it around, continued:
“It means that you live on an enormous pool of water, renewed all the time by OCWD. They buy water from us and from LA, and pour most of it right into the ground. Store it there. They keep the pressure regulated so very little of it is lost to the sea; there’s a balance of pressures at the coastline. So the artesian wells that gave Fountain Valley its name will never come back, and no one there would want them to! But you have the water you need. It’s strange, because it’s a desert coastline with hardly any rainfall. But the OCWD planned for a population increase that other forces balked—the population increase never occurred, and so there’s water to spare now. Strange but true.”
“So water won’t help us stop them?” Kevin said, disappointed.
“Not a pure scarcity. But Oscar says you have a resolution banning the further purchase of water from LA. You could try to stand on that.”
“Like Santa Barbara?”
“Santa Barbara slowed development by turning off the tap, yes. But they’re in a different situation—they stayed out of the California Water Project, and they don’t buy water from LA, and they don’t have much of a groundwater basin. So they’re really limited, and they’ve made a conscious decision not to change that. It works well if you have those initial conditions. But Orange County doesn’t. There’s a lot of water that was brought into the area before these issues were raised, and that water is still available.”