The Keeper of the Flume : Reservoir’s ‘Captain Conduit’ Retiring

After an early-morning earthquake shook Southern California last month, most San Diego County residents assessed the damage by checking the contents of their china cabinets.

Jim Harer went looking for cracks of a more ominous kind. The San Diego city reservoir keeper headed for Barrett Dam, scanning its face for new fissures and measuring existing fractures to see if they had grown. This time, he was relieved to find, they hadn’t.

“But whenever there’s an earthquake, you have to go down and check the dam, day or night,” said Harer, 56, who long ago became accustomed to letting nature set his working hours.

For 17 years, Harer has risen each day at 5 a.m. to keep watch over Barrett Reservoir. Perched in his mountaintop home at the end of a narrow dirt road, he has been the front line of defense against the inevitable leaks and failures of the 80-year-old water-delivery system that connects Barrett to Otay Reservoir and, ultimately, to San Diegans’ taps.

To his colleagues, Harer, a grizzled, pipe-smoking handyman in overalls and steel-toed boots, is the granddaddy of the city’s eight reservoir keepers.

Sometimes called “Captain Conduit” for the miles of concrete and wooden channels over which he presides, Harer is known for being able to fix almost anything, from fences to flumes, tunnels to towers. And, his colleagues say, he probably knows more about Barrett Reservoir than anyone alive.

After 30 years in the city’s employ, however, Harer is getting ready to bid the reservoir goodby. He plans to retire in January, when he and his wife, Joy, hope to move to Minnesota.

“The way I look at it, 30 years is long enough,” said Harer, who was born in Lakeside and, save for a stint overseas with the Marine Corps, has lived in San Diego County all his life. “I just want to do something else.”

Some things will be easy to leave behind. The two locked gates that block public access to the Harers’ 5 1/2-mile driveway, for example, will not be missed. (“I wish I had a dollar for every gate I’ve opened and closed,” Harer said recently, swinging out of his pickup truck to pop one of the locks. “I’d be a millionaire.”)

Harer also expects not to miss the driveway itself, which takes half an hour to travel. When their two children were small, the Harers navigated it each morning to meet the school bus at the bottom of the hill. Then one winter, heavy rains washed out the road for six days. Ever since, they’ve kept a month’s worth of food and drinking water on hand, just in case.

“You’ve heard of the end of the road?” said one of Harer’s supervisors, Mark Stone. “This is it.”

But in exchange for their remote, rugged lifestyle, Harer’s family has enjoyed an idyllic view and unparalleled quiet. Barrett Reservoir is not open for recreational use, so on summer evenings, when Harer and his wife row away from shore in search of a cool breeze, theirs is the only boat on the water.

Just before dark, they often see bobcats, deer and coyotes sipping at the water’s edge. At night, when they look out from their front yard, the moon and stars are the only visible lights.

Those are a few of the reasons that Harer, who makes about $27,000 a year, once passed up a promotion and a raise in order to stay close to the lake. Now, Harer admits those same reasons will make it difficult to retire.

The son of a truck driver, Harer began working for the city in 1961, after seven years in the Marine Corps. He started as a laborer in the backcountry, fixing boat docks and toilets--whatever needed doing. For a while, he was an assistant keeper at Otay Reservoir. Then in 1974, he moved his family to the small, three-bedroom house that is the Barrett Reservoir keeper’s quarters.

“I just like the outdoors and the work,” he said, recalling the reasons he chose his unconventional career. “And you don’t see your bosses all that often.”

For years, before adequate roads were cut into the mountain, Harer walked the 9 1/2-mile route of conduits and flumes that lead from Barrett Reservoir to Dulzura Creek. Now he drives most of the way. But there’s still some climbing involved. And when such a hike reveals a leak, it is up to Harer and his assistant keeper, Garry Norris, to patch it.

“You’ve got to be able to work by yourself,” Harer said. “You see something that needs to be done, you’ve got to do it. You can’t wait until somebody comes and tells you.”

You also can’t be afraid of heights, snakes, tight spaces or the dark. Frequently, Harer’s job has taken him down into 200-foot reservoir towers and inside narrow-walled dams. Regularly, he crawls into the system’s five tunnels--a favorite shady hiding place for snakes.

And that’s just the beginning. Every morning, Harer takes the readings at the Barrett Reservoir weather station. Until an automatic seismograph was installed, he also had to change the paper each day.

Just last week, he and Norris shooed away two poachers--just a few of dozens he’s caught trying to set their fishing lines in unpestered waters.

Harer does not consider himself an environmentalist. He thinks it’s silly that the proposal to build Pamo Dam was derailed because of environmental concerns.

“I can see conserving places for people to go to enjoy nature,” he said. “But when man’s life may depend on the water, that’s another story.”

But when he sees a series of arrows spray-painted on the rocks along one of his favorite paths, he is disdainful.

“I’d get lost before I’d paint an arrow,” he says.

Once an avid deer hunter, he says his job has led him to give up the sport.

“After being out here so many years and seeing the animals run loose, I just don’t do it anymore,” he said. “I’d rather see the animals come down and get a drink of water, and watch ‘em.”

As keeper, he has been witness to many natural events, and he likes to tell those stories best. One day, he was scrambling down a canyon to take a water-level reading when a mountain lion called out menacingly from above. He looked up to see the cat crouched over its dinner, a newly killed deer.

“I just quietly went my way,” he recalled.

Another day, he came upon a king snake killing a rattlesnake. First, it bit the rattler in the back of the neck. Then, it coiled itself tight and stretched, breaking the poisonous snake’s vertebrae. And then, slowly, the king snake began to eat.

“I still owe the city a couple of hours on that one, because I sat down and watched,” Harer remembers.

After several deer drowned in the conduits, he and a crew installed six “deer ramps” to help the animals get out of the deep channels once they’ve fallen in.

Not everyone appreciates Harer’s work as much. In recent years, when city water officials decided to drain some of Lake Morena’s water into Barrett Reservoir, Harer and Norris were the people who actually turned the valves, angering many local residents. One man told Norris he should start wearing a bulletproof vest.

“And he wasn’t smiling,” Norris recalled.

Even now, their San Diego City Water Utilities truck draws silent stares. Last week, when they stopped to buy a soda in Lake Morena Village, a man pulled up beside them.

“You’re not letting any more water out of the dam are you?” he asked angrily.

That kind of exchange will be easy to forget once Harer retires. But the rest of his job seems to have inspired in Harer an almost spiritual regard for his unusual workplace.

“This is a job that’s so interesting, you never get tired of it,” he said. “No matter how many times you walk a trail, you see something different. Some kind of formation. The trees. . . .

“It takes a different breed of person. . . . A lot of people have to be down there with their sidewalks and street lights,” he said. “A lot of people are afraid of the dark or don’t like to get out and open gates. I can see why they wouldn’t want to live out here.”

But not Harer. For 20 years, he’s even worked weekends. As a result, he hasn’t attended church.

“But don’t get me wrong,” he said as he looked out over the red rock mountain and the blue, blue sky. “As far as I’m concerned, you can’t look at this and tell me man made it. All them pretty colors. . . .”

His voice faded away as he aimed his truck down the steep road. In a few moments, he came upon a junk heap left behind, he said, by a man who used to sink septic tanks for a living.

“See?” he asked. “Man made that. “

He acknowledges that he is slowing down. This week, he stopped to rest as he scaled the side of a jagged canyon--the same path he once ran down and up.

“The uphill is where I stop to smell the roses,” he said. “If you can do the same thing you did 20 years ago, you weren’t doing nothing 20 years ago.”

Even still, he can’t quite imagine retirement.

“I’ve never been one to just lay around. It’s going to be weird,” he said. Not that he plans to stop working. After buying a mobile home and seeing some of America, he plans to start a second career in the small town of Pine City, Minn., where his wife’s father owns a small engine repair shop.

He and his wife have left the reservoir before, for vacations and weekend getaways.

“We’ll take off every once in a while and stay in a hotel, just to get off the mountain,” he said. “But all the sirens and police cars and the noise--(we’re) real glad to get back home.”

Already, he seems to be bracing for the day that Barrett Reservoir is no longer his home. Once, he said last week, he asked his predecessor what it was like to leave. When Harer recalled the answer, there was sadness in his voice.

“It was like one morning you’re getting up and seeing the lake,” Harer said. “And then you’re not. . . . He said it took a long time.”