In Northern California, though we certainly have our dry spells, generally our water is abundant; lakes are brimming and the rivers run full and fast. In the Southwest, water is scarce and rivers running full and fast are very rare.
This is a wonderful story from Land & People, Spring 2006, about the Santa Fe River.
Here is an excerpt.
A Once and Future River
01/11/06
By William Poole
From time to time, Land&People tells the story of a conservation effort through the voices of participants and community members. The characters in this story come from the historic community of Agua Fria, on the outskirts of Santa Fe, where TPL recently helped enlarge the San Ysidro River Park as part of a larger effort to acquire open space along the Santa Fe River.
Maria Albina's Grandaughter
Melinda Romero Pike remembers when the new parkland was a verdant meadow along the Santa Fe River. Slender, vivacious, and elegant, with a coiffed cap of snowy hair, Pike does not willingly confess her age. It is enough to know that this memory comes from before the 1930s, when the one-room Agua Fria School stood across the street from the meadow, and the teacher would take Pike and the other students to play in it.
"A big meadow was there," she says, "and years ago when I was a child-like five or six-there was some gentleman who had herds of goats. And he had long white whiskers to here. And that man would come with his goats and he would graze them there, but they didn't make a dent in it. It was just like you'd planted a lawn, but it was natural."
Pike traces her family line in Agua Fria back to the early 17th century, and her adobe home down the street from the San Ysidro River Park is named Casa Maria Albina after her grandmother, who lived here. The village priest once boarded in this home. Her great-grandfather donated the land for the local church, built in 1835 and named for San Ysidro, the patron saint of farmers. And during the Depression what is now Pike's living room served as a community store.
Even for a part of the country that measures its age in centuries, Agua Fria is venerable, thanks in large part to the Santa Fe River and flat fertile ground it once watered. (Agua fria means "cool water" in Spanish.) Pueblo ruins dating from before the conquistadores have been discovered along the river. And at least some current Hispanic residents trace their lineage back to officers in the Spanish army who were rewarded for their service with rich agricultural lands. The main road along the river, Agua Fria Street, is part of a prehistoric trail system that in colonial times became known El Camino Real. The route ran from Mexico to the colonial capital of Santa Fe, only five miles upriver from Agua Fria.
In her comfortable kitchen, Pike unrolls an undated map that shows the town at its productive peak. The map shows slivers of land as little as 50 or 100 feet wide where they intersect the river but stretching back from there up to several miles-giving everyone access to water as the land was divided within families over generations. Other water for planting came from acequias, irrigation ditches off the river, and from springs and shallow wells.
Map details suggest the fecundity of Agua Fria in the decades before World War II. Plots of land are labeled as alfalfa, row crops, corn, orchard, and plowed ground. Along the meandering stream ran a bosque-a riverside forest of cottonwoods and willows, Pike recalls. "On the high side of the bank my brother would lasso the tree branch and we would swing, and down below we would climb the trees."
Then, pretty much overnight, Agua Fria all but dried up. The cause of this calamity was the damming of the river to slake the thirst of a growing Santa Fe. Instead of running in all but the driest weeks of summer, in most years the river ran only in the wettest winter weeks. With the water gone, gravel miners quarried the river's banks to make concrete for the growing city. The water table dropped so that wells had to be dug deeper and deeper. The bosque and other vegetation dried up, and without the vegetation to slow it, the river, when it did flow, ran like an express train, straightening the channel, undercutting the banks.
“There was no river left," Pike says. "It was the memory of a river." Today there is very little agriculture in Agua Fria. Horses graze in dusty pastures, and houses look out on weedy fields or drooping barbed-wire fences. Along Agua Fria Street, many homes are compact and modestly prosperous. Farther back from the road, house trailers march along old family plots where crops were once planted and acequias once ran. There is no store, and the closest thing to a community center is the elementary school. It is a place that some might consider "underutilized," a series of cul-de-sac subdivisions waiting to happen-an option most residents definitely do not embrace.
As for the former meadow across from where the old school had stood, it has dried to gravelly desert, enlivened by the shrubby yellow bloom of rabbitbrush and purple asters. Despite this, the land's protection as part of a larger effort to preserve open space, build new parks, and create a trail system along the river has been widely celebrated in Agua Fria and greater Santa Fe. Some folks simply welcome the recreational values the project would bring. But for Melinda Romero Pike and others it symbolizes the possible recovery of a community from the insults that began with the damming, the possible revival of a river nearly given up for dead, and the chance to make the river a focus for community life once again.
