by Peter T Leonard
Published in edible Santa Fe
Summer 2014 issue
This year I got to clean the tree section of the Los Lovatos acequia in Taos. I was accompanied by two neighbors, Lee and Rob, as well as an energetic pair from the Ashram, Dan and Philip, as we attacked the leaves which had accumulated over the winter. Raking the leaves isn’t the problem – it’s getting them out of the 2 foot wide ditch. After 298 cleanings, the banks have grown up to 5 feet high, and the leaves have to be lifted and thrown over the top. It took the five of us almost four hours to clean a quarter mile.
This is my sixth time cleaning – my neighbor Michael Medina has been doing it for 45 years, starting as a teenager helping his dad to get water for their corn. It is in his blood, a necessary task to be done to insure life-giving water for the land. For me, it’s a celebration of spring filled with joyful anticipation of the first good soaking for my 33 fruit trees and 1⁄4 acre garden. For the Ashram, it means food for the summer from their two acre garden. No acequia, no garden, no food.
As I worked, I thought of the many people who have done this work over the last 300 years. I thought of the men who dug the ditch back in 1715. They did it with picks and shovels – no backhoes then! Of course there were no trees when they started, probably just sagebrush which turned into lush pastures when they got water on the land. The trees came much later, along with more recent housing occupying the former pastures. I wondered if they ever imagined that people would be using their ditch 300 years later. I certainly can’t picture the ditch being used 300 years from now – I can’t even picture humans surviving that long.
We voted to have our mother ditch cleaning a week earlier this year to get a head start on irrigating, as it seems spring is coming earlier every year. This year is no exception; the snowpack is low again, and it’s melting already. Last year, the water ran out at the end of May – the earliest the old timers can ever remember. The two years before, it ran out mid-June. As Michael remembers, the water used to last through the summer, like it did my first year here six years ago. But even with the small runoff, we’re still lucky, because our acequia originates on the Rio Pueblo, which drains one of the higher watersheds in the area. Pity those on the Rio Fernando or Rio Chiquito, they hardly got any water last year.
Michael, who is also a Parciente (shareholder) on the Rio Chiquito, hasn’t been able to get water for his agricultural land for more than three years, and now will have to pay a higher property tax because it’s no longer deemed agricultural land. It is a growing catch-22 for many traditional farming families.
The primary reason for our worsening winter/spring droughts is the strengthening and expanding of the Gulf of Alaska high pressure dome, which sends the jet stream further to the north into Alaska and further to the east as the stream descends into the western US. The cause of the larger, stronger high is a warmer ocean, ultimately caused by our burning of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the way we are continuing to burn those fuels, the winter/spring droughts won’t get any better, and most likely will become a lot worse. No snow, no runoff, no irrigation, no recharge of the aquifer, our wells run dry… who will be able to live here?
Of course there’s always hope. Hope that the extra moisture in the monsoons (again caused by global warming) will make up for the lack of precipitation during the winter/spring drought; hope that with warming oceans there will be more frequent El Ninos, which historically bring snow to the mountains, and a remote hope that we will all come to our senses and stop burning so much fossil fuel. If not, in a hundred years acequias will be remembered only in a museum, that is if there’s anyone around to remember.
VOICES 