Hornswoggled Little Guy Finally Wins One

Cancel sunrise. Repeal the law of gravity.

Water has flowed uphill. It has climbed the foothills of politics and ascended the mountain slopes of bureaucracy. For the first time since women’s swimsuits covered more skin than men’s, the bed of Owens Lake is wet.

How it came to pass that water from the Owens River, at the hem of the Sierra, wound up 233 miles south, filling the hot tubs of Los Angeles instead of staying in the Owens Valley--that’s as neat a bit of civic shenanigans as has ever been conducted.

The shorthand version is this: About a hundred years ago, rich and powerful Angelenos who stood to get a lot richer and more powerful if L.A. grew decided the city couldn’t grow much bigger without more water. To get it, they went north, some 250 miles, to Inyo County, where the Owens River made farms fertile, and where Owens Lake, though salty, was a patch of blue water where steamboats had once chuffed, bearing silver troves from the Inyo Mountains.

There, in 1903, a fellow from the federal government turned up, talking up a big reclamation project and gathering up the water rights from the eager farmers. Another man, a former mayor of Los Angeles, soon bought up land along the river, evidently for the same purpose.

Then, surprise, the federal project came to naught. And all those rights to land and water fell to Los Angeles, which set about building a marvel of engineering: a 233-mile-long, gravity-driven aqueduct from the Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley (which the rich and powerful men had also bought, and tacked onto their city).

So L.A. stuck its ingenious aqueduct into the Owens Valley like a soda straw and sucked it dry. Will Rogers, who famously said he never met a man he didn’t like, wrote grimly in later years that “the federal government . . . held Owens Valley while Los Angeles raped it.”

The Owens Valley became a dust bowl before the Dust Bowl. Farmers, feeling hoodwinked and going belly-up, dynamited dams and ditches, and their children danced with joy at the man-made thunder. Once, near Lone Pine, farmers shut down the aqueduct, and for four days, L.A. went thirsty. As late as 1963, in the dark of a February morning, a homemade bomb blew up at Los Feliz Boulevard and Riverside Drive, scarring a memorial plaque honoring the aqueduct’s builder, William Mulholland.

The water war moved to the courthouses, and only now--after decades when Owens Dry Lake sent up dust clouds poisonous with arsenic and cadmium, in alkali storms reminiscent of those that ravage Mars--only this week, by law, has Los Angeles put water back into Owens Lake.

It’s only enough to dampen down the nation’s worst toxic dust. A bit more will flow every year, just until the whole lake bed is covered.

But that news is almost as remarkable as the news from Nov. 5, 1913, a day fabled in L.A., notorious in the Owens Valley. That day, as the inaugural waters gushed spectacularly down the final spillway of the aqueduct he built, Mulholland the engineer made the shortest, most memorable speech in California history: “There it is. Take it.”

This week, L.A. says, in essence, grudgingly, “There it is. Take it back.”

I drove out to “the Cascades,” where Owens Valley’s purloined water gushed so miraculously into L.A., and the crowd of 30,000 rushed to taste it like desert people in the Old Testament.

Today it is a dull staircase of concrete down a canyon-corrugated hillside, above the spot where a stub of Balboa Boulevard meets a thoroughfare delightfully called the Old Road.

Instead of the roar of water, there is the cacophony of traffic from the knot of the 5 and 14 freeways. Only a billboard--”The Cascades, Championship Golf Club”--hints at the waters the aqueduct brought, so much water that dry old L.A. could irrigate itself 18 holes at a time.

But I saw something else, and it made me laugh. Someone with a wicked sense of humor--or no humor at all--must have put it there: a big modern building, the office of the L.A. County tax assessor.

If you own property hereabout, that’s where you’ll be sending your property tax check, due on Dec. 10. Had Owens River water not flowed down that hillside 88 years ago, you and I might not be paying those taxes, might not be living here now. That water made neighborhoods and subdivisions grow, made L.A. the big, broad Eden-gone-awry that it is, made it a verb of what other places in California, in the Owens Valley itself, don’t want to be. As they like to say elsewhere in the state: “Don’t Los-Angelize Our City.”

And even old Bill Mulholland could laugh at the irony of that.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com