BEFORE THE DAM
Words and Music By Jim Robbins
We trudged on the cliff down the trail into the canyon,
the jewels in the grass gleaming all around us.
We brushed lips as dippers rose and fell,
diving and submerging. A shadow flowed
through brilliant leaves and merged
on bare arms. We sprawled, half-dressed,
in a shallow house pit, near a pounding stone
with deep mortars--like eyeless sockets
gazing up at the sky before a shadow
submerged the canyon. The last
eagles glided over and spiraled high,
roots pulling tribes up from the soil,
high into branches, to flow in an ocean
of breath, as night flooded the gorge.
BEFORE THE DAM
The Dumna and Kechayi Native Americans once occupied the San Joaquin River Gorge and surrounding lands. The Pa'san Ridge Trail loops around the west side of the river--the word pa'san is derived from their language and means “pine nuts,” a food source that exists in abundance on the hillsides. In spring the ridge trail provides an opportunity to experience a breathtaking array of flowering trees and plants: redbuds, lupine, poppies, fiesta flowers, goldfields, owl’s clover, fiddleneck and popcorn. At one point the ridge trail forks south, dipping down to the edge of the inundation zone of Millerton Lake, where rotting flotation devices, driftwood and trash are strewn upon or near Native American pounding stones. In spring, baby blue eyes blanket the grass between the river and the trail near indentations, the size of house pits, in the ground. The small piece of level land at the bottom of the gorge is the only place where the Native Americans could have set up their huts and buried their dead. Across the river, rocks left over from the construction of a small hydro project rise on the slope like a barricade.
Sometimes under water, sometimes exposed, the ancient Native American site remains in a water-logged limbo where pristine public land transitions into wasteland.
San Joaquin River Gorge
The conflicts related to water in California have often been described as a war—other than a dam, only a war could have created a no-man’s land of similar proportions. The denuded slopes of the gorge reveal the high water mark of Millerton Lake, the reservoir created by Friant Dam. Only a crop of cockle-burrs flourishes there. Reservoir water has destroyed the root systems of the native plants and trees, leaving unstable rocks and soil. Unlike a war zone, however, this no man’s land will not renew itself as long as Friant Dam stands.
The Hydraulic Brotherhood has proposed another dam above Friant Dam in an area known as Temperance Flat. The main problem with the proposal for another new dam: It would not develop more water. The State Water Resources Control Board has determined that no more water rights are available on the San Joaquin River. Moreover, according to a recent study, the water from the river has been over-allocated by a whopping 861%. Very little new water would be created because other dams already capture and divert almost all of the river’s flows. The trickle of new water that would be created by the dam would be diverted to landowners and corporations with the water rights. So, in another twisted form of socialism for the wealthy, the public would pay billions of dollars to destroy a magnificent public park for landowners and corporations who own the water rights.
After I found out about the dam proposal, I soon discovered that I had no job security at all as an adjunct instructor at a community college. I wrote an op-ed piece in opposition to the dam, and a few days later I experienced an unscheduled evaluation at the small, rural community college where I was teaching. This was highly unusual—in fact, it had never happened to me before. The administrator who evaluated me begrudgingly marked "excellent" in every category but refused to hold a post-evaluation meeting with me. I was not rehired the next semester—after twelve years of working every semester, with a rating of excellent in every category on every evaluation. (I had worked at that campus longer than any other employee....)
After I lost the job, my wife lost interest in the issue and stopped going to the gorge with me. Losing a job because of a position on an environmental issue to her was not a heroic sacrifice but an unforgivable mistake. The family always had to come first. She was right, of course.
I continued to oppose the dam, however. The foolish members of the precariat class who strive to protect what is of value to the community must risk losing a job or being blackballed or threatened whenever speaking truth to power in the San Joaquin Valley, where a cabal of wealthy farmers and corporations and lobbyists and politicians have already killed almost 100% of the rivers and wetlands.
My one consolation: The proposal for a dam at Temperance Flat was eventually rejected. But I can almost guarantee, if past is prologue, that the Hydraulic Brother will be back at some point with another proposal for a dam on public land, at Temperance Flat or elsewhere.
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