An Unheard Voice in the Water Debate

Farm towns on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are not real pretty. They tend to be long on grit and short on graceful architecture. To an outsider’s eye, they can seem little more than overgrown labor camps, lacking tall trees and any history beyond the last harvest. They can be rough. One not far from here is known as Knife City.

Interestingly, these communities receive little attention in the warring over California water. It is easy to argue, as many people do, that it’s absurd to devote so much water to a few cotton baronies. It is easy to advocate that this public water might be better employed restoring wetlands--or growing Los Angeles. The arguments become trickier, however, when farm towns enter the equation: It’s one thing to suggest the west side be returned to the jack rabbits; it’s another to allow whole towns to wither and die.

Better, then, to pretend that places like Firebaugh, Huron and Tranquillity don’t exist--or don’t count as much as, say, some picturesque Iowa farm town, where roots run deep and people who look like Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange roam the village green. “What’s the big deal?” a water negotiator I know recalls telling someone who was worried that a new water proposal could kill Firebaugh. “Can’t they just move the coffee shop to Fresno?”

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Of course, the story is different here. Here it is possible to find residents living in the same house they were born in 68 years ago, to hear talk of old days when Firebaugh was an outpost of the Miller-Lux cattle empire, and cotton and cantaloupe harvests would swell the population into the tens of thousands. Here it is possible to find people who believe Firebaugh might have a future yet--if the farming doesn’t dry up.

“I have a fondness for this little town,” said Bob Wood, who has farmed here for nearly 50 years. “I would say in some ways it’s exceptional. It’s a close-knit little community. We don’t have social status getting in the way here. There are events where people of all walks of life get together. Does the town have beauty? I would say no. But it is picturesque.”

Firebaugh sits on the west bank of what’s left of the San Joaquin River. It’s named for a man who operated a ferry here in the 1850s. Downtown isn’t much: a couple of discount clothing stores, a few beauty parlors and bars, a video outlet and so on. Most of the 4,000 residents are Latino. The tallest structure is a faded blue water tower.

California’s water projects opened the west side to intensive farming half a century ago, and everybody here thought they at last had it knocked. They didn’t. Scandals, urban growth and environmental concerns gradually eroded support for the west side irrigation. When drought hit seven years ago, farmers had few allies. Water allotments were cut way back, forcing them to fallow land and lay off workers. Today, new reform laws make it less than certain that full allocations ever will be restored.

All of this has rippled through town. It shows itself in the men who sit idly on their porches at midday, in vacant storefronts, empty restaurants and overstocked equipment yards. Last week, a liquidation auction was held at what once was Firebaugh’s biggest agriculture concern.

“This was a booming town here until six or seven years ago,” said Paul Municha, a retired farmer. “Everybody had jobs. Now they have nothing.”

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For all its troubles, the consensus seems to be that Firebaugh won’t die soon. It is understood, though, that the town’s future remains entwined with the farmers. Which leads back to water. Although some people here support efforts to better protect wetlands and river systems, they are less sanguine about losing water to Los Angeles. There’s bitter talk about becoming the next Owens Valley.

“Los Angeles,” said Municha, “wants these farmers to go broke.”

Mayor Marcia Sablan, a doctor who moved here 11 years ago, said that townsfolk here and in neighboring communities finally realized that they need to enter the water debate--to demonstrate that, when the smart talk turns to drying up the west side, there’s more at issue than a few rich farmers. “We need to put a face on what the problem is,” she said. “We need to have our voices heard, too.”

Some people, I am sure, will dismiss any campaign by west side towns as one more ploy by farmers: Unable to save themselves, they dispatch minimum-wage workers from the company town to fight for water. It would be easier, certainly, to believe this. Just as it would be easier to ignore what the hardware store owner told me when asked who lived in Firebaugh these days.

“The people here,” Dewey Belli said, “are just like everybody, kid. They are people. Remember that.” It’s no small point.