SPLISH SPLASH : A Dispatch From Santa Barbara After a Year of Living Thirstily

I CAN’T BE ABSOLUTELY SURE WHY he set his automatic sprinklers to pop on at 4:30 every morning. It’s possible he did this as a wise gardener, watering in the cool hours of the least evaporation. On the other hand, he may have done it because he didn’t want his neighbors to know what he was up to in the middle of Stage Three, the darkest, driest moment in Santa Barbara’s water crisis. I leaned toward the second explanation.

SHSSPT , the sound would explode, just outside my window, across the gulch that separated our two houses. Then, the incongruously merry sound of a sprinkler spritzing on at 4:30. Then a few more sputters and finally the familiar, steady Rain Bird rhythm, dit dit dit . This would continue for 15 minutes and then suddenly stop, and after a few seconds of dead silence, a couple of early birds would decide, what the hell, and announce the beginning of the new day, although it was still pitch-black outside.

By then I would be awake, with nothing to do but plot my revenge. I didn’t like the man anyway--we’d had other problems--and now I had him on illicit watering, which was bad enough on its own but even worse when you considered he woke me up to do it.

Each morning wake-up, each dit dit dit , I got closer to a decision that made me uncomfortable: I’d rat on the crumb. I’d denounce him to the water police (officially “drought patrol officers”). They sounded like a joke, some Manhattan-hatched bit of California satire, but they existed. They were out there cruising the clean, dry Santa Barbara streets in white prowl cars, looking for water waste and water wasters. Yet, giving a guy over for watering his own back yard? Had it really come to this?

In Santa Barbara, it had, and again, it hadn’t. There was something vague, something a little soft and ambiguous about this water crisis. First, there had been Stage One, and then Stage Two, both calling for voluntary cutbacks, and then came the far more sobering Stage Three. In March of last year, in the middle of the fifth drought year in a row, with Santa Barbara reservoirs as much as two-thirds below normal levels and not a scrap of moisture promised from the clear blue sky, the city initiated “mandatory reduction in usage,” which would be backed by warnings, followed by fines and, possibly, the loss of city water altogether. The citizens responded with admirable good will and self-denial, cutting residential use by nearly 50% almost immediately. But in terms of actual law, all we really knew was that it was suddenly illegal to water a lawn or wash a car or hose down a sidewalk. Beyond that, it was up to individual conscience and individual pocketbooks: At the top of the scale, water rates were up ninefold.

Soon enough it was downright competitive. Do you turn the water off when you brush your teeth? Do you catch the warm-up shower water in a bucket for the garden? Do you carry to your grateful houseplants the water in which you bathe the baby? How often do you flush your toilet?

Discussions of the water situation became subtle explorations of moral weakness in others. Here was the major test: Did you (as the best people did) stand soapy and miserable in the shower between brief Spartan blasts of hot water? In other words, did you have what it took to expose yourself to the cold morning air like some throwback aborigine in the bush of a dark and pre-civilized place? Could you, for what you perceived to be the common good, take such a step backward? Those low-flow shower heads were OK as far as they went, but they did not go far enough. No, to score major points in the self-denial competition, the only thing to do was reach out and turn the handle to “off.” A simple enough motion, and everyone claimed to be doing it. Yet one wondered, one doubted, one speculated.

I was a quick-in-and-outer myself, to be truthful, feeling that sacrifices of every American’s birthright--long, dreamy morning showers--was sacrifice enough. (I had no idea how much I missed long showers until I took a trip to Boston and New York, where I discovered people were not concerned with water in the least. In New York, I was told they had too much of it, a surplus. I ecstatically parboiled myself in half-hour showers. That alone was almost worth the price of the plane ticket.)

Back home, the 4:30 a.m. SHSSPT from next door, the surreptitious sputter, the dit dit dit sounded as arrogant as ever. Across the playing fields and yards of Santa Barbara, a bleak yellowish-brown had crept, a color so demoralizing that a few nostalgics went so far as to paint their dead grass green. My neighbor’s hidden garden, meanwhile, bloomed grotesquely, the feverish jungle green of an antisocial water pig.

Our two houses were a true odd couple, side by side in the back corner of a little canyon. His, a gleaming, two-story redwood-and-glass palace; mine, a remnant from the neighborhood’s funky past, a cabin really, with its back porch opening onto a hillside of unclassifiable no-care tropical growth that thrived on no watering at all. I had a couple of chickens that I was fond of, and sometimes I’d see them wander close to the unfenced property line. I’d imagine them disappearing into the different dimension next door (chickens and dichondra seem mutually exclusive, as incompatible as my neighbor and I were), and I’d get my chicken-herding Aussie shepherd, Bess, to turn the chickens back before they crossed the line and vanished.

I admit it, I was deeply prejudiced. Somehow the man next door managed to encompass virtually every aspect of Yuppiedom that had given that immense fraternity its bad press. I hated the way he used his poor child, the toddler prince, for display at social gatherings. I hated the way his flashy car slithered each night into his automatically opened garage, like a snake into its hole. I even hated the bland, color-coordinated art I could see through his big windows. And there was something even worse about him: He’d bought the property where I lived. He was my landlord.

Take my word for it, the guy was a real noodle, and inevitably, soon enough, he and I were headed for court. I’d been fool enough to accept his oral assurance in lieu of a lease, and when he gave me my notice I decided to fight him. I had an investment in my property, having converted, at considerable expense, a garage into an office. I knew I’d lose, but I wasn’t going without a scrap.

I also knew that turning him in for his watering was ethically confused. I would be using it to get back at him for our battle over the lease. On the other hand, he deserved it. He was laughing at the noble community effort at water conservation. Why shouldn’t I make the call--anonymously, my voice low and conspiratorial: I have this neighbor, Mr. X, who . . .

It was, I imagined, happening all over town--the water police arriving, dressed in spotless, virtuous white, banging on doors (Did they wear boots? Did they kick the door?): “Water police, we know you’re in there. We’ve seen the green in your back yard. We’ve come for your hose.”

But then, happily, it was taken out of my hands. One morning on the way to the mailbox, I ran into a neighbor who shared our long driveway. She stopped me and said in a sort of ominous whisper: “I think he’s got his automatic sprinklers coming on in the early morning.” She pointed at the redwood castle. “You’re right,” I agreed.

This good woman had been in her house 30 years at least and had her own case against the man who built the nasty redwood castle on a hillside that was open and free and self-sustaining before. “I turned him in,” she said after a significant pause. “They’ll be out soon.”

But it didn’t work out as we’d hoped. The enforcers did come, but it turned out that they were mice in the face of my neighbor’s monetary clout. It developed that he had found a loophole in the law, something to do with the fact that his property was on a hillside. “If he wants to pay the tab, he can use the water,” a man at the Water Conservation Hot Line told me when I checked into it. The water police had come and gone, and still each morning at 4:30 there was the same SHSSPT , the same assured dit dit dit .

It more or less came down to that everywhere in Santa Barbara. If you wanted to pay for the water, it was yours. The most notorious scofflaw in the area, in fact (Texas oil billionaire Harold Simmons, the man who had been otherwise occupied attempting to take over Lockheed), paid a $25,000 fine to keep the grounds of his 23-acre Montecito weekend retreat--which he seldom visited--green.

It was not, in other words, so much a moral issue as an economic one. And when the fact gradually began to percolate that residential water use accounted for only 10% of all the water used in California, it made standing soapy and cold in the shower seem a little beside the point. The cause started losing its shine; a sort of demoralizing ambiguity crept in. It was about then that the war in the Persian Gulf started, bringing a clarity of purpose that was a tonic to our parched souls.

I was gone from my house by then, no longer tortured by the 4:30 a.m. SHSSPT , the dreaded dit dit dit . But not long before I left, my significant other and I were whacked with a mysterious $500 water bill that no one was able to explain. Our bill showed us up from seven units to 90, despite the fact that we had been reasonably vigilant. The next month it came in at 70 units, before settling back nonchalantly to five units, like a maniac who had enjoyed his spree and now was his old self again.

Visits to city hall were not helpful. “We’ll look into it,” said the man, and they did after we protested another 10 or 15 times. Someone looked at our meter, at all those weird little dials, and said the measurement was correct. No leaks were found. “You’ll have to pay the bill,” the man at city hall said.

Some months later, I was fascinated to read in the Santa Barbara News-Press that a number of people had been hit with bizarrely unreasonable bills, much like ours. The victims had appealed their way tortuously up the water department chain of command, and some had been granted grudging relief. What had caused the bills to skyrocket? Maybe, one official speculated, theft was involved: Perhaps a few people had started rustling their neighbor’s water.

I’d paid about half my bill when we moved, leaving the balance with my neighbor-landlord. My minor success in the mother-in-law of all water wars.

Soon enough, the spring rains began, and a familiar amnesia set it. The drought hadn’t gone away--we knew that--but we took to sneaking longer showers and dreaming of other things.