Painting the Town Green

A mean, dry season up here.

Some years ago there was a sociologist in Israel who studied droughts. He discovered that towns under water stress all unravel in predictable patterns. Something about the deprivation of water wears people down, and they grow suspicious of each other. Accusations of favoritism and water gluttony become common. Things turn ugly.

Of course, the Santa Barbara coast is not exactly the same as the kibbutzim of rural Israel. No one is bathing out of buckets yet in Montecito or Hope Ranch. But still, you can see the unraveling.

There is, for example, the elderly lady dressed in Irish tweeds and carrying a Bottega Venetta bag on Santa Barbara’s main street. She is wandering up and down the sidewalk picking cigarette butts out of planter boxes. The butts absorb water from the dirt, she says. Each butt is like a small, filthy sponge. They rob water from the flowers, which are dying anyway because the city has turned off the faucets.

She scoops the butts out of the dirt, a dozen at a time, and stuffs them into a plastic bag. With each scoop, a small cloud of dust lifts into the air.

Everything is so dry, she says.

And there’s the man who believes that tourists are at the root of Santa Barbara’s crisis. The City Council, he says in a letter to a newspaper, has forced residents to let their lawns and gardens die so the visiting hordes of summer can take long showers.

“Think about your dying fruit trees,” he says. “Then think about all the extra glasses of water consumed by people for whom spicy Mexican food is a novelty. Think about the tons of ice crushed in blenders for margaritas.”

And from time to time, the deprivation drives some to small misdemeanors. Out at Hope Ranch, there is an old woman with Alzheimer’s who doesn’t know from water. She’s very far gone, never leaves her $2-million house. Most important, she doesn’t guard her outside faucets.

Normally, this vulnerability would go unnoticed in Hope Ranch, where deprivation, historically speaking, has not been a condition of life. But this year it’s different. Life is more Darwinian. This year vulnerabilities are spotted quickly. So a garden hose has been quietly attached to the faucet at the Alzheimer’s lady’s house and run to a neighbor’s lawn, where it freshens the swimming pool. In Hope Ranch, these days, you use it or lose it.

But if you don’t happen to have an Alzheimer’s lady living next door, there is always the greywater man. The greywater man comes in a truck and will deliver any amount of water you want. At a price. It’s all very legal because this water is slightly used.

Just where it got used, the greywater man doesn’t know. It is regarded as indelicate to ask. Anyway, you don’t drink greywater, you don’t mix it with Scotch. But you can screw a hose to the greywater tank and, with an air of great profligacy, wash down your driveway. If the neighbors turn you in to the water cops, and they probably will because the authorities now encourage snitching, you can point to the source and laugh.

In one sense, you could argue that Santa Barbara has become a laboratory experiment for the rest of us. This is the first place in California where the water has started to run out. What happens here will happen to L.A. and Orange counties next year, or the year after, if the dry winters continue. You can watch Santa Barbara and see the future.

And the news is not all gloomy. The crisis has seen the emergence of Dr. Dirt in Santa Barbara, a man whose time has come. Dr. Dirt paints lawns green at $30 per thousand square feet and has offered his services to the city during the summer Fiesta period. For a modest fee, Dr. Dirt will guarantee that the sunken gardens around the downtown courthouse stay freshly green during the gala. The City Council is considering the plan.

And there is Wilson Hubbell, manager of the county’s Solid Waste Division, who believes he has found an unusual solution to an unusual problem. It seems that thousands of old, water-guzzler toilets are being tossed out by Santa Barbarans in favor of the mini-flush variety. This mountain of discarded toilets, Hubbell proposed recently, could be collected, stored, and mounted on a barge.

The barge would proceed out beyond the surf line and dump all those symbols of yesterday’s wasteful flushing into the drink, creating what Hubbell described as a “decent offshore reef.” The fish would love it.

You might clip and save this idea. One of these days, down in L.A., we may have our own reef to build.