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Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Fueds
River Impossible (Cont.)

CHARGE OF THE BUCKET BRIGADE
IRON GATE DAM, the southernmost of five small irrigation impoundments below Klamath Falls, marks the end of the Lower Klamath. Here, 190 miles upstream from Requa, rain and river guides give way to cowboy hats, drought, and tension. The Bureau of Reclamation's grand scheme only really flourished financially between the 1950s and 1970s, when crop prices were high and the American market was shielded from imports. Now NAFTA and global warming are undermining the entire premise of using snowmelt to nurture alfalfa at 4,000 feet, in a growing season that rarely lasts 120 days.

Tough times have shaped K-Falls, as the lakeside town of 17,000 people is known. Main Street is half empty, and half angry. On a windy Friday night, I drive past the Leatherneck Club, where locals nurse draft beers, and park near the town courthouse to meet Bill Ransom, a stout, semiretired storekeeper of 62 who acts as a spokesman for the area's loudest anti-environmental group. The bucket brigade of 2001 has become the Bucket Brigade, a full-fledged nonprofit with an office and its own line of attractive caps and lapel pins. "I think you need to look at some real facts and figures," Ransom begins. "I put together a PowerPoint presentation." Before I can stop him, we're off: bar charts on water flows in 1918 and today, gratuitous swipes at "known radicals" in the environmental movement, month-by-month comparisons of dam releases. There are pamphlets denouncing the Nature Conservancy and the United Nations, and a list of the top 24 "misrepresentations and lies" foisted on the world by environmentalists, like the idea that recycling sun-warmed irrigation water into the Klamath makes the river too warm for salmon. Upper Klamath Lake, Ransom explains, has always been too warm for coho and chinook.

Um, didn't salmon pass through the lake for thousands of years without a problem? Ransom barely misses a beat. "I think there must have been something different then," he says, and hits the next slide.

The Bucket Brigade's hard turn to the right has been equal parts comedy and tragedy. Supported by property-rights groups, wise-use veterans, and even off-road-vehicle users, it hooked up with the Jarbridge Shovel Brigade, a posse of "county sovereignty" creeps from Nevada, and then with the so-called Sawgrass Rebellion, a group of Everglades farmers opposed to restoration programs. Just days after the Klamath fish kill, responding to an invitation from the Dade County Farm Bureau, Ransom led a cross-country caravan of nine pickup trucks to offer solidarity to the Floridians, towing a giant silver bucket behind one vehicle.

But in late October 2002, when the Bucketeers arrived in Tallahassee, the Farm Bureau folks stopped returning their calls. ("Jeb Bush was under pressure," Ransom says, but he won't go into detail.) They hung around a few days, and then they drove home. It was an 8,800-mile round-trip but, Ransom insists, definitely not a failure. To prove it, he unleashes a second PowerPoint segment, called "Was the Florida Caravan a Failure?"

It's rare to hear a dissenting voice in K-Falls, but the next day I run into a shopkeeper who rails bitterly about how farmers are milking the water crisis even as they denounce it. Some got up to $2,500 an acre for lost water rights in 2001, he says, plus payments for emergency wells and crop losses, a total of more than $4 million in federal and state relief. This year, 400 farmers—almost a third of the project—signed up for a new Interior-run water bank that pays them to forgo water during dry years. Over time, it would be cheaper to buy out the farmers, but the shopkeeper blames an "irrigation elite"—chemical suppliers, crop dusters, and the tractor dealers out on South Sixth Street—for blocking proposed buyouts.

"Of course," the man finally tells me, "you can't use my name. If I said any of this publicly, every window in this store would be shot out tomorrow. Every one."

He's exaggerating, but only a little. Environmentalists have been threatened, and last year three white duck hunters from nearby Bonanza drove through Chiloquin, the heart of the Klamath Indian community, shooting up an outhouse and then roughing up members of a junior varsity basketball team. The men were arrested, but distrust continues.

"A lot of the people in the basin still view it as cowboys versus Indians," says Elwood Miller, 49, the Klamath Tribes' natural-resources director.

The Klamath, sadly, are used to shoddy treatment. They don't even have a reservation. In the McCarthyite fifties, the federal government decided to combat "socialism" by buying out the 1,700-square-mile communal reservation for a one-time payment and having the tribe "terminated," or legally disbanded. Decades later, the Klamath, 3,400 strong, have recovered their official status and are quietly negotiating with Interior for a partial return of their lands, which are rich with ponderosa pine. In the meantime, they depend on federal payments and gross about $400,000 a year—a third of the tribal budget—from a small casino outside K-Falls, a place that some whites boycott to protest Indian lawsuits.

The farmers' resentment is directly proportional to the looming reality that they may end up losing. The courts continue to put tribal water rights and endangered species over Bureau of Reclamation projects, a precedent that may echo to other western rivers. Norton's task force is hoping to implement changes to the Upper Basin: increased conservation, greater storage capacity, ecosystem restoration, and help for the tribes. But in the end, after being litigated forever, the bottom line can't stray far from strict adherence to a priority list: endangered species, Indians, farmers, and wildlife refuges. In that order.

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