I’ve never met anyone with eyes like Kathy Bancroft’s. They’re deep, dark and sparkling –surrounded by the lines of a million smiles.
Even when she talks of the great sadness and injustice her people, the Paiute-Shoshone tribe, have endured, she does so with a kindness that’s disarming.
But here, on the edge of what used to be a lake, on a 42 °C day in August 2016, the light has disappeared from those amazing eyes. As she inspects my camera monitor to make sure the shot gives no clues about our location, Kathy is deadly serious. No identifying factors other than desert dust and struggling plant life are allowed – the preservation of Kathy’s culture depends on it.
Ancient Native American burial grounds are sought by many for the wrong reasons. One person’s sacred site is another’s trinket-hunting ground.
Kathy has already told me about the running battle she’s having with a prominent doctor from further up the valley, who has a penchant – even a fetish – for the possessions and bodily remains of her ancestors. This man has since faced federal court for his indiscretions and there are plenty more like him – Kathy doesn’t want to give them any clues. She also wants me to see the extent of the land’s dehydration. Two hundred years ago, these bodies were six feet underground.
The Owens Valley, where Kathy is from and where we’re meeting, sits beneath the Sierra Nevada mountains in Southern California. Its fortunes are directly and inversely aligned with a thirsty and prosperous city 300 kilometres to the south; Los Angeles. When Kathy’s grandmother was a girl, the Owens Valley was home to a big, beautiful lake of almost 200 square kilometres. But thanks to the engineering skills of William Mulholland, one of LA’s founding fathers, a giant aqueduct was built to divert Owens Valley to Los Angeles, which led to the lake running dry.
It was the beginning of this area’s complicated relationship with the City of Angels, and it’s a prime example of the water management issues many in California complain about.
For Kathy, her community’s land is being compromised by a lack of access to water – much of which is being sent to the city.
In theory, California should have enough water for everyone. But political strong-arming and corporate needs seem to have created a state of haves and have-nots.
East Porterville is a town that falls in the have-nots basket.
Driving from Owens Valley to the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the approach to East Porterville feels like Eden. This is the Central Valley, California’s fruit bowl. Here, its famous oranges (which require 52 litres of water per orange), broccoli (20 litres per head) and almonds (4 litres per nut) are grown. But these aren’t ‘mom and pop’ farms. They’re massive corporate operations that help make California the sixth largest economy in the world.
Inside East Porterville many of the farm workers live without running water in their houses. When I was there in 2016 it was the sixth summer of the California drought and the water table was so low that domestic wells started pumping sand.
In a highly American solution, the county is spending half a million dollars per month hauling water by truck to affected homes. The water is drinkable when it’s extracted – but by the time it’s hauled, pumped and stored you can’t even brush your teeth with it. Of course digging deeper wells would be cheaper, but that would be gifting to homeowners. Instead, the trucks keep running, pumping from other needy areas.
Meanwhile the mountains of plastic bottles around town keep rising, along with the anger.
Making the Dateline film ‘California’s Water Wars’, caused me to question the values and priorities of this great state. But a funny thing also happened during the production of the film – the drought broke.
A huge amount of snow sits in the Sierra Nevada mountains, waiting to melt and deluge the surrounding landscape. Local authorities are so worried that a state of emergency has been declared. Talk about feast or famine. Kathy excitedly tells me over the phone that the lake might even fill up again, for the first time in her life.
I’ve been to Owens Valley five times in the past 15 months – but the approach this July was different.
It’s not Eden – but it’s definitely green. Life is sprouting. Creeks and streams are running, and there’s even a bit more water on the lake. I meet up with Kathy again, sit and talk to her, and get lost in those endless eyes. She’s smiling again, but the news is all bad. She won’t get her lake back.
The excess water is being diverted to Los Angeles. City reservoirs are filling up, and some of it’s even going out to sea. The dream of the lake, and the birds and rain that come with it, is dashed again.
We follow a picturesque stream to its terminus – a concrete funnel, a fence, and a sign that reads ‘Property of the City of Los Angeles’.
