Mark Twain probably deserves credit for the quip, “Water’s made for fighting, whiskey’s for drinking,” though no one, not even Twain experts, will swear that he actually said those precise words. Still, the uncertainty hasn’t stopped Californians from quoting the phrase and attributing it to the famed author. Dietrich Stroeh, who served as the General Manager of the Marin Municipal Water District during the drought of 1976-1977, knows volumes about water, fighting and whiskey and drinking. In a book about him by ex-Marinite Michael McCarthy, fancifully entitled The Man Who Made it Rain, Stroeh appears as a hard-drinking hydrologist and master of PR who quelled the fears of citizens, and, with the help of Congressman John Burton, brought water to parched Marin by pipeline across the Richmond/ San Rafael Bridge. If any one person saved Marin during the drought of the 1970s it was Dietrich Stroeh. He’s still in the water business, this time around at CSW, Stuber-Stroeh Engineering Group where he specializes in the construction of small dams and the disposal of wastewater.
“Droughts come and go,” Stroeh tells me on a hot dusty August afternoon. “They’re part of the way we live, though now we also have global climate change, along with extremes such as floods and droughts.” Michael McCarthy, the author of the Man Who Made it Rain, and Stroeh’s biggest fan, argues that there are two obvious truths about hydrology today: “water is the new oil”; and “when water becomes a commodity, wars start.” Wars haven’t broken out yet in Marin but skirmishes have. This summer deputies from the Marin County Sheriff’s office raided commercial pot farms in Nicasio where growers purloined water from adjacent farms and diverted it from streams and springs to irrigate their crops. Then, too, several years ago, residents of Marshall nearly came to blows when Hog Island wanted to dig a new well on the uplands across from highway one.
Fortunately cooler heads at Cypress Grove prevailed. Now everyone seems to have all the water that’s needed, though tourists have been known to complain there’s not nearly enough.
Dietrich Stroeh and Michael McCarthy both know that the story of west Marin, like the story of most every ecological niche in California, might be told as a story of rain, fog, floods, lakes, reservoirs, wells, springs, aquifers, and creeks, that usually run all year long, or others that dry up most summers. It’s also a story of bottled water — the Palace Market sells more now than ever before in larger containers — trucked water from Petaluma — there’s more of that around, too — and piped water that flows invisibly, underground to homes in hills and valleys. The Marin water story is both complicated and fractured. It’s not the same story in Novato as it is in Olema or on the Point, and in Marshall and Nicasio it’s something else again.
Marin historian par excellence and long-time Olema resident Dewey Livingston keeps an eye on Alder Creek in his own backyard that has flowed with less volume this summer than in previous summers. “West Marin is made up of very distinct communities that have all had to carve out their own unique water systems,” Livingston says. “Some places have water. Other places don’t. I find it ironical that people who live in Nicasio Valley close to the reservoir don’t get water from the reservoir and often have to have it delivered by truck.” Ironies abound on the Point, where “F” ranch has lots of water, but “C” and “B” have little if any and so the National Park Service transports it from place to place. Nearly everyday, 365 days a year, West Marin moves water, scrounges for water, and prays for water, even when it rains.
All across dry dust fields, irrigated farms and in backyards and in kitchens there’s a general uneasiness about water as a resource and commodity, though farmers, ranchers and consumers feel they’re in better shape than farmers, ranchers and consumers in the Central Valley. Dennis Rodoni, a west Marin resident, has served for twenty years on the Board of Directors for the North Marin Water District that boosted rates this summer and that provides water not only to Novato, but also to the headquarters of the National Park Service. “This drought reminds us that we’re dependent on the Russian River and that we’ve been wasting a lot of it,” Rodoni says. “Even if it rains this year it won’t solve all our problems.”
Born in Point Reyes Station in 1952, Rodoni speaks as a native who grew up in west Marin, and who observed, in his own boyhood, salmon splashing in beautiful creeks such as Lagunitas. He also speaks, as one would expect a water board member to speak, with facts about conservation, along with a sense of civic responsibility and gratitude for the leadership that Jerry Brown has provided. “It’s in large part due to the efforts of the Governor that there’s not a person in the state who doesn’t know that we’re in a drought and that we have to conserve,” Rodoni says.
Water conservation plays a key role at the Straus Family Dairy and Creamery in Marshall. Albert Straus has 280 milking cows and tons of organic milk, though not a drop to spare. The cows graze on pasture for four months of the year. They drink all the fresh water they need from a well his father and mother, Bill and Ellen, dug at the end of the drought of 1976-77 after ten unsuccessful attempts. Bill and Ellen even hired a water-witcher. The old well is still producing nicely and Straus is grateful. On a hot day, a big cow might consumer as much as fifty gallons.
Milk is nearly 90% water. Straus recycles almost all of the water that’s used on the dairy. He has also cut way back on the total amount of water, though barns have to be flushed and machines washed. “In this drought we’re doing our share,” he tells me on a windy afternoon. “Water is a scarce resource. We’re in a crisis. More than ever before we need to preserve natural resources and change how we make products.”
This summer, there’s barely a hint of green in Straus’ pastures on the east shore of Tomales Bay. The price of organic alfalfa, which the cows eat when the pasture goes brown, has been rising because of the drought.
Demand for organic alfalfa exceeds supply. Still, over the last few years, the number of organic dairies in west Marin has grown steadily. Consumers want more organic milk than every before and the price of organic milk has steadily increased in no small part because of the drought. Nearly all day long, Albert Straus has water, milk and more on his mind.
He’s a dairyman with a cause. “Our mission is to revitalize the farming community and to make it more sustainable,” he says. Indeed, he’s made the Straus Family Dairy and Creamery into a model for the industry and in the process he’s built a network of like-mind dairymen and women committed to organic rather than conventional farming. Straus buys milk from farms in Marin and Sonoma – Mendoza on the Point and Spoletta near the Cheese Factory, along with families with names like Brazil, Correla, Mazzetta, Hughes, Sillacci and Tresch. In Petaluma, where Straus buys 18 to 20,000 gallons of water a day from the city, he makes organic yogurt, butter, whipping cream, and ice cream that comes in all sorts of flavors. Milk is the big seller.
“All of west Marin is water deficient,” Straus says as he gazes at his herd. “That’s been a kind of blessing in disguise. It has meant that this area has remained open and undeveloped, though the lack of a water table here means that families who live on Tomales Bay often have to pay to have it hauled to their homes.”
The drought of 2011-2015 has prompted Kevin Lunny to rethink long-held ideas about water, water conservation, and the role that hydrology has played not only in west Marin but all across the American West. “Growing up in the world of ag I always thought that we had to have more dams and bigger dams, too, but I’ve read recently that dams ought to be torn down and that the Bureau of Reclamation ought to be abolished,” he says at dinner at Osteria Stellina where he’s drinking beer and his wife Nancy is drinking wine. “Here’s to water,” she says. Kevin adds, “California is usually on the cutting edge of environmental issues, but not when it comes to water. As far as groundwater monitoring and regulation goes California is unfriendly.” In the twentieth century, the Lunny cattle ranch along Sir Frances Drake Boulevard had yearly water problems. Then in 1964, his father and grandfather had the bright idea to build a dam where water came out of the ground. They haven’t had a water problem since then. Still, there’s nothing like a drought to change the landscape, stir up new ideas and alter habits and heads. Liam Plunkett who works at Building Supply in Point Reyes Station takes shorter showers than ever before.
Behind the counter during business hours, he sells a lot of water timers, pipe seals to prevent leaks, and compost can help soil retain moisture.
Down the street, at the Palace Market, Carlos Castellanos, the grocery manager, conserves every drop of water he can, though in the kitchen where food is prepared, it’s impossible not to use any water.
In Bolinas, Althea Patton — an architect for human habitats, and for gardens and landscapes — and Lea Earnheart — a native plant specialist who tends the wild — created together a water ritual at the summer solstice.
They invited friends and members of the community to join them at the headwaters of Arroyo Hondo, the creek that supplies families and homeowners with much of the drinking and bathing water that they use all year round. It was the second water ritual in Bolinas in the past eight years. “That first time we did a ritual, I thought we ought to bless the creek and give it our gratitude,” Earnheart says. Twenty-five or so people showed up join with her.
At this year’s solstice, there was a crowd of fifty or more. At the start of the ritual, the water pilgrims, if one can call them that, formed a circle. Each person talked about water and what it meant to him or her.
They all joined voices to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and then they enacted a silent walking meditation down the steep side of the chasm. One at a time, the pilgrims filled across the bridge that spans the creek.
Each person stopped mid-way, said a prayer and dropped a handful of native herbs into the creek. Then they climbed the ridge on the other side of the creek and gathered around, Sky, a Miwok musician who led the group in a blessing for the Earth. At the end of the ritual they returned to Mesa Road.
“For me it was deeply meaningful and very spiritual to see where our water comes from and how small a creek it is,” Patton tells me. Earnheart says, “The drought has woken all of us up. Some are more awake than others.
Maybe the crisis will help show people that water is not a commodity, that it’s the most astonishing entity on the planet. Maybe human beings will realize that what is sacred is what we cannot live without. Maybe we will want to honor and revere water.” In the rush and roar of facts and figures about rainfall, conservation and the capacity of reservoirs, west Marinites — and Californians all across the state — have often lost sight of what author Joan Didion called “Holy Water.”
Armando Quintero doesn’t describe water as holy, but he adapts a healthy holistic approach to hydrology. Indeed, he sees the connections between the local and the global, the ancient and the modern, and the single drop of water and the mighty stream. All too familiar with the crisis of Mayan civilization that was brought on by severe drought and climate change, he’s also learned from the experience of Australia during their historic drought and urges caution when it comes to desalinization. The 2014 President of the Marin Municipal Water District, a resident of San Rafael and a Governor Brown appointee to the California Water Commission, Quintero worked as a park ranger in Point Reyes National Seashore for seven years. To the politics, economics and science of water, he brings many of the lessons he learned on the ground in west Marin. “We need to have integrated water plans on the regional level,” he tells me. “We need to combine all of our resources and technologies, from dams and reservoirs to surface water and ground water, and we need to address multiple issues. Above all else, we can’t let our neighbors go belly up. We’re all in this together.”
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