Country life and water
10/12/2008

October 12, 2008

Country life and water

Water is one of the things people are willing to fight over in rural Washington.   (They actually fight about it all over the world, but most of us are removed from the fray.)   It’s tricky to fight over something as vital as water—to your life and to your livelihood—with your nearest neighbors, with whom you’d like to keep peace.

We were having problems with a neighbor who wanted to make repairs to our water diversion box (this is farm irrigation talk; just follow along), which we weren’t convinced would work.  It was our diversion box and we were rather incensed that he presumed to make modifications to it without even checking with us first.  Our neighbor pointed out,  smiling genially, that it was his water our diversion box was interfering with, and he was going to make changes to it whether we liked it or not.  Sputtering, my husband begged to differ.  Our neighbor, still smiling but not backing off an inch, said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to butt heads on this one.”  This meant, “No harm to the ongoing relationship, you understand; these water wars have been going on for decades, if not centuries, and you can’t take them personally.  Why, men have been jailed for taking shovels to each other’s heads in these matters, and still lived to play pinochle together the following winter.”

Our tenant farmer, Murphy, is the one who would be most directly affected by any problems caused by modifications to our water diversion box, as he is the one who irrigates the alfalfa fields.  He advised us not to get too worked up about the conflict.  “If his repairs don’t work,” Murphy informed us, “I’ll just rip them out.”

Aggressive as this may sound, Murphy is about as peacable a cowboy you’re likely to meet.  He could, if he had time, give workshops in the Tao, the water course way.  He goes with the flow.  He doesn’t argue, do battle, or even return troubling phone calls.  He doesn’t have the time.  He works from dawn ‘til long after sundown—and in the summer, sundown isn’t til 9:00 or later.  He’s a smalltime cattle rancher, which is a contemporary way of saying he tilts at windmills.  His chosen career path (he went to college for this) is so unlikely to be lucrative that it almost hurts me to think about it, and my next meal isn’t dependent on it; his is.  So Murphy doesn’t have time or energy to engage in conflict.  He follows the path of least resistance.  If our neighbor’s plan to modify our diversion box harms Murphy’s ability to irrigate his/our alfalfa field, he won’t argue about it.  He’ll remove it.

Nothing personal.