Something to Read on a Rainy Day

The best description of the engineering feat was given by a workman on the Shasta Dam. Asked what he was doing, he looked up from his pneumatic drill and answered, “Mister, I’m moving the rain!”

--A passage from “The Central Valley Project,” a history produced by the WPA Writers Program.

The book was found in a friend’s garage. A thin volume, bound in a plain green cover, it was published half a century ago, the product of a Depression-era program to create work for writers. The book is a primer on the Central Valley Project, then under construction, now the centerpiece in an intense war over California water policy.

In Washington, rules that govern the system are undergoing congressional overhaul. In Sacramento, the governor is attempting a state takeover of the federal waterworks. Cities want a bigger share of the CVP’s subsidized water. Environmentalists want irrigators to atone for damage to wetlands and river systems. And in many quarters, the CVP has become the butt of a bad national joke, a monument to a misguided policy of rerouting rivers to water deserts.

Such runs on the CVP tend to come in cycles. The cycles, not surprisingly, tend to correspond with drought. When it rains, water recedes into the public policy background. When it doesn’t, everyone wants a piece of the action. Since this is one of those times, the WPA history lends a bit of perspective to the clamor.

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Most striking is its tone. The CVP is said to represent victory over nature, a knitting together of California, employment for thousands of workers, atonement for the past environmental sins of gold miners and well-diggers, agricultural salvation, an economic fountainhead. This isn’t propaganda as much as an echo of the pride, hope--and arrogance--of an earlier time. A typical passage: Man can repair his mistakes of the past. He can even improve on nature--and so the Central Valley Project will d e monstrate to those now living and to generations to come.

The WPA writers also make distinctions sometimes ignored today. They spell out that the Central Valley is in fact two river valleys, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. In the north, the threat was flood; in the south, drought. “Misplaced rain!” conclude the writers. And so, The rain which falls in the wet, wooded Siskiyou and Cascade mountains of the far north will be moved all the way to the parched plains of the San Joaquin Valley in the south. And here water will again transform thirsty, dried up fields into green acres and blooming orchards.

Building the CVP was part of a national push to rebound from the Depression, and the book dwells on the “thousands of men . . . gathered here to put across the biggest job in California history.” The cost is set at about $228 million. This is cast as a bargain compared to the toll of floods and the value of California crops. Moreover, the writers proclaim, the whole project will be paid off by 1970. Here they missed the mark a wee bit. The CVP’s capital cost today is estimated at $3 billion--$2 billion of which is still outstanding. The debt is to be settled by about 2030.

There also is discussion of a potential problem with salmon runs below Shasta Dam. Several remedies are listed. “Whatever plan is finally adopted,” the writers assure, “the salmon run will be protected if man’s ingenuity can protect it.” Salmon depletion, of course, remains high on the list of the CVP’s environmental crimes.

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Nowhere do the writers envision corporate farmers skirting acreage rules to build cotton kingdoms with taxpayer water, or the poisonous effect of irrigation on desert land. They miss, too, the growth and growing thirst of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the overtaking of then-dominant agriculture by other California industries.

No, it is simply a different California today, and the book’s central presumption that water captured by the CVP always would be there for farmers is now contested. This debate over where to move the rain won’t end anytime soon. Myself, I’d rather see a California covered in farms than subdivisions, but that’s not important here. The point I want to make has to do with misguided arrogance.

The book’s cocksure tone--correcting nature’s “mistakes”--resounds today among city politicians who demand CVP water to lubricate urban growth and jobs, among farmers who defend their take of a taxpayer gift as divine right, among environmentalists who proclaim they will, through water reform, reorder the state to their liking. They sound to me sometimes like that worker with the drill. Moving the rain is easy enough. Making it is a different matter. As seven dry years have proved, when it comes to California water, nature and no one else holds the trump cards.