ILLUSTRATION BY DON BUTTON



If you’re opposed to the peripheral canal and want to know what you can do, Restore the Delta has an informative Web site at For more information on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the State Water Project, the Department of Water Resources has an excellent Web site at www.water.ca.gov If you’re opposed to the peripheral canal and want to know what you can do, Restore the Delta has an informative Web site at www.restorethedelta.org Advertisement



We were skimming along at a brisk clip through Fisherman’s Cut, in the heart of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, when we saw it: a fishing trawler scuttled on the levee bank, bleached white by the wind and the sun, like a skeleton beached on the boulders that shape this narrow, man-made channel connecting the False and San Joaquin rivers.

The tugboat that had been pushing the trawler hadn’t fared well, either. Too small for the job, it kept chugging till the end, right into the levee bank, where it now rests behind the larger vessel like a sunken dingy, the little engine that couldn’t.

“They should’ve got a bigger boat,” quipped Chris, my brother, imitating Roy Scheider’s character in Jaws.

My brother, I should point out, is a salvage nut. We were riding in his bass boat, and he already had his eyes on the rusty, cast-iron windlass still bolted to the trawler’s deck. He cut the engine and pulled up next to the derelict.

We crawled over the starboard gunwale and up the canted deck one at a time, the fragile bones of the wreck creaking beneath our weight. The windlass was too heavy to bring back on the boat, and Chris headed aft in search of other potential booty. I crawled up to the bow and peered over the port gunwale, where the wayward vessel’s name was still visible on the hull.

The Dream.

The name couldn’t be more fitting, because it is here, in the heart of the Delta, that the dreams for California’s future economic growth threaten to pile up on the rocks.

Two-thirds of the state’s population, 25 million people, depends on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for at least some of their water supply. Water from the Delta irrigates 3 million agricultural acres. California’s economic growth depends upon its ability to provide water for future population growth. But the Delta’s levees and ecosystem are rapidly deteriorating, threatening to completely cut off the Bay Area and Southern California’s water supply, crashing the economy and potentially endangering millions of people.

Right this minute, legislators are working feverishly to address the crisis before the end of the session. One proposed solution: a peripheral canal bypassing the Delta.

Yes, one of California’s longest-simmering water feuds has once again attained full boil. For more than a half century, skirmishes over the peripheral canal have pitted Northern Californians against Southern Californians, farmers against developers, environmentalists against politicians.

The divisions go further than that; internecine politics and unlikely bedfellows have always played a role in California’s water wars. The debate can get ugly, and has even been known to divide father and son.

Trust me on that one. I know from personal experience.

According to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force, approximately one-third of the Delta’s inflows are siphoned off by upstream, downstream and in-Delta water users. From Redding to Los Angeles, everyone’s got a straw in this thing.

PHOTO BY R.V. SCHEIDE



It’s one big suck.

But the task force says we need even more water from the Delta if California’s economy is to continue to grow. That’s problematic because we’ve turned the largest estuary on the West Coast into our own personal toilet.

“The Delta is in an ecological tailspin,” the task force reports. “Invasive species, water pumping facilities, urban growth and urban and agricultural pollution are degrading water quality and threatening multiple fish species with extinction.”

Throw in global warming, sea-level rise, increasingly brackish water, crumbling levees, frequent droughts and the occasional earthquake, and it’s not so hard to understand the panel’s sense of urgency.

The proposed canal would draw water directly from the Sacramento River near Freeport and “convey” it 50 miles south, around the eastern edge of the battered ecosystem to the massive state and federal pumping stations near Tracy.

Think of it as open heart surgery, only on a grander scale.

That’s kind of the way engineers look at it. But opponents of the long-sought-after peripheral canal see things differently. To them, it’s a knife that stabs deep into the heart of the Delta.

I grew up on dams and water projects. My father is a retired power-plant operator. Dad got out of the Navy when I was 9, and we moved to Idaho, my mom’s home state. He quickly gained a job with Idaho Power in American Falls, where for the next several years we lived right next to the power plant downstream from the dam that backs the Snake River into the 30-mile-long American Falls Reservoir.

For my two younger brothers and me, growing up in small rural town had its advantages. Idaho was relatively unspoiled in the late 1960s; fishing and hunting were popular pastimes that began at an early age. As a young teenager, I spent summers moving heavy irrigation pipe by hand, mucking about alfalfa, wheat and potato fields in rubber boots for 6 cents a section. By the time school started in the fall, my wrists were thick with calluses, I’d earned enough money to pitch in with Dad on a dirt bike and the reservoir had been pumped near dry.

There’s a certain cache in having a father who makes electricity for a living. My brothers and I were always welcome visitors down at the power plant, where we learned firsthand how water spins the turbine that spins the shaft that spins the generator that makes the juice. The vertical shafts were 3 feet in diameter but spun at low rpm, so we could reach out and touch them. We weren’t the wealthiest family in town, but if Dad had ever gone on strike and the electricity had stopped flowing, everybody else would have been screwed, even the rich people.

This paternal prestige grew further after Dad was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and we moved to Grand Coulee Dam, which spans the Columbia River in eastern Washington.

Once the largest dam in the world, Grand Coulee is one of the crowning achievements in the massive federal makeover of the American West that began in the Great Depression. Hoover Dam came first and may surpass it aesthetically, but Grand Coulee Dam makes up for it in sheer bulk.

PHOTO COURTESY OF HTTP://GRANDCOULEEDAM.INFO “Water? We got water!” So says the Grand Coulee Dam Area Chamber of Commerce in its latest advertising campaign. This photo of the dam was taken from Crown Point, where many a native teenager have lost their virginity.



The dam’s construction created thousands of much-needed jobs. As it neared completion in 1941, folk singer Woody Guthrie, then under contract with the federal Works Progress Administration, paid homage to the achievement in “Grand Coulee Dam”:

Well, the world has seven wonders that the trav’lers always tell,

Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well,

But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam’s fair land,

It’s the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam.

Believe me, you learn all of this stuff immediately upon your arrival at “The Dam.” The 10,000 or so people remaining in the three small towns in Grand Coulee’s vicinity since Woody and the workmen pulled up stakes have no other history to cling to. So they brag about the dam.

Not that there isn’t plenty to brag about. The dam is more than a mile across. Electricity generated by the project was used by Seattle-based Boeing Company to build the aircraft that helped the United States prevail in World War II. Its 33 generators produced more energy than any power plant in the nation. Plus, my dad worked there.

Reinforced by a daily high-school bus ride that every morning provided me with a panoramic view of the concrete monolith’s 550-foot-tall edifice, I started thinking about the dam in mythical proportions. It had always been there, immutable, inscrutable, immovable, and it would remain long after I was gone. Above all, I was thoroughly convinced that the Bureau’s efforts to tame the rivers of the arid American West were a righteous endeavor.

That all changed after I moved to California.

Like Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, construction on the Bureau’s Central Valley Project began during the Great Depression. The CVP consists of a series of rivers, dams, canals and pipelines stretching 500 miles north to south, from Redding to the San Joaquin Valley. Shasta Dam, near Redding, is the cornerstone of the project. In 1978, Dad transferred from Grand Coulee to Shasta, and the family moved to Redding.

Although a massive structure in its own right, Shasta is match for neither Grand Coulee’s majesty nor its electrical output. In fact, generating electricity was never Shasta Dam’s primary purpose, used only to justify the structure’s cost. All those summers slogging through muddy spud fields, watching the reservoir run dry, and it had never really dawned on me.

It’s not about the electricity. It’s about the water.

The state was near the end of a long drought, people were putting bricks in their toilet tanks and Dad’s role took on a new prominence. In arid California, water is even more important than electricity, and he now had his hands on the levers controlling half of the state’s water supply.

The audacious complexity and scope of the CVP’s 20 reservoirs, 11 power plants and 500 miles of canals blows my mind to this day. It seems incredible to me that anyone could even think it up, let alone build it.