About a year ago, after another too-dry California winter, I decided to purchase an extremely large amount of water, acres of it, all for me. I don’t run a farm, nor do I have a big pond in my backyard. In fact, I don’t have a backyard. I don’t own any land at all. Still, I could, in theory, purchase water in bulk on the water market.

In the American west, the way water ownership works is different from how it works east of the Mississippi, where water is abundant. In the east, the easiest path to owning a whole lot of water is to own some land, which will almost certainly have water on or underneath it. Out west, things are a little more confusing.

Back when the land was still being settled and claimed, a right to an amount of water for a specific use – a farm, a ranch or a mine – would earn the settler a water right, to insure greedy neighbors upstream wouldn’t take all the water for themselves.

Today, although there is a water market where individuals (retiring farmers, say) can sell their water rights, it isn’t centralized. There’s no website to go to, or trading floor to see.

Instead, I turned to investors. They were easy to find, because water is a hot commodity right now. Investing in “wet assets”, as the pros say, used to be seen as weird and niche, but isn’t anymore.

Dead almond trees are seen near Bakersfield, California. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Michael Burry, one of the real-life heroes of The Big Short (he is played by Christian Bale in the movie version), saw the housing bubble coming years before almost everyone. He now invests in nothing but water. Generally, water is a good investment, because we need it to grow everything we eat and there really isn’t that much of it: just 2.5% of the water on earth is freshwater and of that, far less than 1% is easy to get to. It’s also extremely expensive to move water any other way than by gravity.

Investing in water can also be investing in the land to grow food. Last month, the largest dairy farm in Saudi Arabia purchased many thousands of acres of alfalfa fields in the desert east of San Diego, as well as the water rights for them. The reasons for such investments are pretty simple: alfalfa is easier to ship halfway around the world than the water it takes to grow it. Plus, feeding your dairy cows alfalfa grown in a distant desert that’s supplied with water siphoned off from the Colorado river is less expensive than finding a lot more water in the Middle East.

I am not Michael Burry, and I am not Saudi Arabia; I am a simple man of middling income who had $500 to throw as much in the way of annual rights to water as the market would allow.



I called several hedge funds specializing in wet assets and asked if they might put me in touch with a water broker – who is like a real estate broker, only possibly more shady, and definitely harder to find.

The folks at the hedge funds could not help me find a broker. But maybe they could help me with a deal directly? Nope. The problem was, I am not rich enough. A typical buy-in usually begins in the high six figures, and could easily cost several million dollars or more.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to familiarize myself with the water market, I registered for a webinar that promised to outline all the basics of water market entry. During the webinar, I learned the phrase “buy and dry” – which meant removing water from agricultural use – and its related trend, “ag to urban”.

As I listened and watched the PowerPoint slides, I was overcome with a kind of low dread I’ve come to associate with thinking about the future of water in California.

Most of the time, it’s quite easy not to think about it. The tap runs, the toilet flushes, water is there when I need it to be. But start thinking about how it arrives – via hundreds of miles of aqueducts and dams, from distant mountains and across state lines, only to be bought and sold unseen – and it gets a bit eerie.

The webinar was hosted by a firm called WestWater Research, based in Idaho and run by a fellow named Clay Landry, whom I called after the webinar ended, fully expecting him to confirm what the folks at the hedge funds had told me: someone such as myself had no business entering the water market.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Landry said. “Anyone can buy a water right – you just have to have a use for it.” The use was the most important part, for a water right only guarantees a specific amount of water for a specific amount of time (usually a growing season), and if I didn’t use it, I’d lose it. Investors get around this by leasing the water, sitting on the right itself as the value of water increases.

Landry immediately ruined my water baron fantasies: I wouldn’t be able to buy, but he could probably find something for me, maybe an acre-foot or so. It seemed like plenty. An acre-foot of water, the standard unit, is what it sounds like: a foot of water, spread out over an acre, which is approximately the size of a football field.

Boat docks sit on dry land in Folsom Lake reservoir, near Sacramento, during the severe 2015 drought. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

Weeks passed, then a month. Finally, Landry called to say he had found a seller, maybe. It was tricky.

The seller was the Shoshone-Bannock tribe on the Fort Hall reservation in southern Idaho. They were interested, they had water, but they were also wary. Landry asked that I write a letter to the tribe, outlining just why I was interested in their water, and they’d discuss matters during their next tribal council meeting.

I wrote to them to say was interested in their water both as a journalist and as someone who had conflicting thoughts about the very idea of a water market. I explained my sense of dread during the webinar, and wrote that I imagined they felt something similar, but probably a lot more complex, with a lot more history to it, and I’d like to hear about that.

Again I waited. A few months passed. Then an invitation: perhaps they would sell me some water, yes, but first we had to meet.

I flew to Salt Lake City and drove a few hours north, towards the Tetons. Somewhere up there, the Snake river meandered, glistening in the sun. Maybe my water was there, waiting for me.

At the Shoshone-Bannock hotel and event center, I met Brett Bovee, an associate of Landry’s who was willing to take me around and help iron out the deal. First, I wanted to know why he and Landry had found a willing seller here, on the rez, of all places.

“I would, ah, avoid the word ‘seller’,” Bovee said. “Also the word ‘buy’.”

He explained that when the government signed treaties with Native American tribes in the mid- and late-1800s, they reserved land for the tribes to live on as a trust, with the government acting as a trustee. The treaties had firm boundaries, but did not talk about what water would be used to live on the land. A supreme court case in 1908, Winters v United States, had set up a powerful idea that wouldn’t fully take hold until nearly a century later: that implicit in the government’s reservation of land for the tribes was a reservation of water, meaning the tribes were legally entitled to a water right that pre-dated nearly everyone’s. This meant, in drought times, that they were among the first in line for water.

In other words: their right to water was more valuable than almost everyone’s. Only they’d had to fight for it, in court, for decades. This was all to say that they weren’t outright parting with any piece of it, but I could rent a substantial amount, for a growing season, at an extremely competitive price. Maybe. If they agreed.

A section of Lake Oroville is seen nearly dry in August 2014 in Oroville, California. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

We drove to meet Elise Teton, the tribe’s water manager. Up to that point, the tribe had engaged in precisely two other water deals. I would be the third – if I was found acceptable.

After lunch, Teton drove me to my most important meeting of the day, with the chairman of the reservation, Blaine Edmo. “Blaine can be tricky,” Teton said. “He will tell you what he thinks, that’s for sure.” As she led me to Edmo’s office, Teton whispered, “Remember, you’re renting, not buying. Don’t mention buying.”

Edmo sat quietly behind a large desk and stared at me for a minute until I cracked and started rambling about why I’d come, what I’d learned, and, finally, what did he think of me and my interest in buying water?

“I thought you were a crackpot,” he said. “Either that or you were trying to set us up, make the tribe look like total mercenaries, selling resources. Also”, he added, “we don’t sell water, we lease it.”

He said the image of Indians as sellers of water was in conflict with the public’s image “of the Indian standing next to the pile of junk with a tear in his eye, like that commercial. It’s either that, or we’re a bunch of damn drunks, living off the government. I think the idea about water marketing is an Anglo concept that’s totally foreign to the tribes”.

Water, he said, was intangible, a sacred thing, not just for life but for carrying prayers. The best use of my rental, Edmo said, was to keep it in the river. It was hard to disagree, and not just because of the prayers – moving it out of the stream would be expensive.

My last meeting, before I would maybe see a contract, was with Lee Juan Tyler. Tyler had been uncomfortable with each water transaction from the beginning, and he was deeply uncomfortable with this one, too. After I walked in but before I’d sat down, Tyler gestured to a small styrofoam cup sitting on the edge of his desk. “I have some water here,” he said, then took my hand and Teton’s and began to say a prayer in Shoshone over it.

“How water is in everything, just as our prayers,” he said, “just as this land was chosen because of the water, the springs where the trout come up and the sun dances and the whole Shoshone nation – the salmon eaters and the trout eaters and the gun eaters and the buffalo bands – everyone understands the water, the significance of it, but then people come thinking water is never going to end but you are here, and you understand it’s desperate times, there’s lack of rain and snow and you wait for it to be replenished but maybe not, maybe it won’t fix itself …”

Tyler went on speaking and did not stop for more than an hour – long stories about his family and his land that spread out through time and space but always, always circled back to water. When he finished he stood up and shook my hand and said he hoped he’d answered my question.

Shortly afterward, Bovee pulled out a Tribal Water Rental Agreement for 500 acre-feet of leased water at the Palisades reservoir on the Snake river.

We drove there, Bovee and I, right up to the dam while he calculated the flow and depths and number of seconds I’d have to count to estimate how much of the water was mine, temporarily, as it passed. Bovee said that that he was hopeful that we westerners were finally identifying inefficiencies and wastes. “At least there are starting to be more people out there like you,” he said. I asked him if he meant “interested in investing in water”, and he chuckled and said, “I mean, just, aware.”

It took a minute. That’s how long it took to watch my 500 acre-feet of water flow past. We stood there, silent, watching the cool black water as a stiff breeze blew down from the dam and sent ripples across the surface. I tried to imagine, all through that time and for a long time after, that the water flowing past was mine, that I had some ownership, some power over it.

But I couldn’t and still can’t, which is probably as it should be.