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Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Fueds
River Impossible (Cont.)

THE BITTER END
TULELAKE, CALIFORNIA, is where the crisis hits bottom. Before the Bureau of Reclamation got its hands on it, this broad valley near the Klamath's headwaters was a mosaic of seasonal wetlands, permanent marshes, open lakes, and dry islands. Eighty-five to 90 percent of the wetlands have been lost—drained and pumped and plowed into some of the best farmland in America. On the road down from K-Falls, I pass hand-painted signs that read HONOR YOUR OATH/PEOPLE BEFORE FISH.

Farmers here are weary. "People are polarized," says Marshall Staunton, whose grandfather settled here in 1929. "Last year, the water was delivered to the project, and there was a fish kill two mountain ranges away. We got tagged. It was simple: water delivered, fish killed. All sides are looking at a horrible outcome. It was ag in 2001, fisheries in 2002. We'll be fighting for a hundred years." At the foot of Sheepy Ridge, a shard of Cascadian upthrust reaching out into the flat farmlands, I hook up with Staunton's neighbor Rob Crawford, a 46-year-old farmer in a camo hunting jacket. Mercifully, there's no PowerPoint display. Instead we pile into his huge Ford pickup and drive straight into the fields he leases, lumbering down the eroded dirt levee between 80-acre potato patches. Although the spring migration has barely begun, tens of thousands of geese and huge flocks of ducks are already here.

There are wetlands within sight—the polluted, stressed, water-starved national wildlife refuges—but as Crawford eagerly points out, more than 90 percent of the birds are thriving on agricultural land. Geese waddle over the flat ground, digging up the potatoes that were too small for the mechanized harvesters, pruning alfalfa stubble to the ground, ripping cast-off onion skins from the dirt.

Turning the basin into a giant bird feeder is hardly natural, but in the real world of the Klamath, holistic ecosystem management is still decades—and hundreds of millions of dollars—away. In the short term, agriculture effectively takes water from fish and gives it to birds. When the A Canal was closed in 2001, salmon benefited—but half the bald eagles moved away.

In the end, no single argument stands up to the confounding, backward Klamath. Everyone imagines some perfect solution, but, as with the large-scale problems on the Colorado and the Rio Grande, there is no short-term way out. All the PowerPoint lawyers and Washington task forces and well-meaning farmers and determined environmentalists and data-loving ichthyologists in America can't save this river—yet. Gale Norton can't save it, and won't.

Crawford drives up a set of switchbacks onto Sheepy Ridge itself. You can see it all from up here: the ancient lake bottom lifted up and sliced open to view, tens of thousands of years of rich organic matter compressed into strata. Croplands, marshes, national forest land, and even, off in the folds of the Siskiyou, a lovely snowcapped volcanic cone. Like most farmers, Crawford is less country than meets the eye, and we sit discussing New Zealand wines and pintail breeding strategies until it gets dark.

"Farms, wildlife refuges, and parkland," Crawford says, looking out. "I think it's a perfect mix." Like everybody along the Klamath, he's invested in his version of the future. The farmers see an ally in the White House, potato prices are stable, and there are snowstorms forecast for next week. His dream is that maybe things will somehow stay like they are at this very moment.

On the way down, we find a mule deer caught in a tall wire fence. Its back leg is broken, and the poor creature dangles half suspended, panicked and desperate. We both just sit there and watch for a minute, as though we don't know what to do.

"Got a gun?" I finally ask.

"No," Crawford says. We crawl through the barbed wire, grab the animal's broken leg, and, dodging the flailing of its remaining good hooves, gradually yank, twist, and lift until it comes loose.

You are free to make up a happy ending to this story. Maybe an eco-fable about restoring the deer back to health or an Indian tale of magic and rebirth. But what happens is that the deer collapses on the ground and simply lies there, panting and terrified. It won't survive the night.

"There's a lot of coyotes here," Crawford says, quietly. He vows to come back later, with a rifle, and spare it that cruel end. For now, we just wipe the blood on our jeans and drive on.

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