The Water Right My Grandmother Left Me

Chapter 3

The big outfit upstream had been the Ferris ranch for sixty years. Old Walt Ferris and Carl used to argue about the water the way neighbors do, loud and friendly, and it never came to anything because Walt knew the rules.

The rules in this country are older than any of us. First in time, first in right. The oldest water right on the creek gets its full share before the next oldest gets a drop. It does not matter how big you are or how much money you have. It matters who was there first.

Walt knew my family was there first. He never took more than his share, even in the dry years, because he knew that if it ever came to a fight, the paper said the Dunmore place came first.

I had known Walt all my life. He came to my wedding. He was a pallbearer at my father’s funeral and he would have been one at Carl’s if he had still been living. The last real conversation he and Carl had, on our porch the fall before Walt died, Walt said that his kids did not want the ranch and that it frightened him what would happen to the creek when strangers got it.

“A creek only works,” Walt said that night, “as long as everybody on it knows everybody else. The day it’s all numbers in a city office, somebody’s going to try to take it all, and the law’s going to be the only thing left standing between a man and a dry ditch.”

I did not think much about it at the time. It stayed with Carl, though. He repeated it to me more than once that winter. I think some part of my husband knew what was coming, the same way my grandmother had known.

Then Walt’s kids sold out. A land company bought the Ferris ground, two thousand acres and the water rights that came with it, and they had plans.

They leveled four big circles of new hay ground that spring. Alfalfa, under pivot sprinklers, the kind of operation that drinks water like it is going out of style. And to feed those pivots, they dammed Spring Creek in June and ran it into a new ditch, and they did not leave enough behind to wet a dog’s feet.

I do not think they knew about my grandmother’s 1921 right. I came to understand later that the company had bought the Ferris water records, which showed a 1954 priority date, and they thought that made them senior on the creek.

They did not know there was an older piece of paper. They did not know a woman named Effie Dunmore had walked into the county courthouse in June of 1921 and filed first.

But I am ahead of myself.

That August, I did not yet have the paper in my hand. I had a memory of it. I had my father’s voice telling me, when I was a girl, that our water was the oldest on the creek and that his mother had made sure of it, and that as long as that was true, nobody upstream could ever dry us out.

I had cattle dying while I tried to remember exactly what he had said.

I knew the word for it, even if I could not yet find the paper. Priority. In this country, water is not shared out fair and even when it gets short. It is shared out by date. The oldest right takes its full decreed amount first, and only what is left over goes to the next, and the next, down to the newest right, which in a dry year gets nothing at all.

It is a hard system and it is the only one that has ever worked in dry country, because without it the biggest and the richest would simply take it all, every time. The date is the great equalizer. A poor widow with an old date beats a rich company with a new one. That was the whole bet my grandmother made in 1921, and she made it on purpose.

The thing a loss like that does to you, you cannot explain to a person who has not stood at a fence and watched an animal you raised die of thirst while a creek runs full a mile up the valley. It is not just money, although it is money. Every cow was four years of work. Every calf was next year’s taxes and next winter’s hay.

It was also my grandmother’s creek. It was the ditch she dug with her hands. It was the one thing in my life that connected a straight line from her to my father to Carl to me, and a man in a clean white truck was pulling it out from under all of them at once.

Garrett Vance thought he was watching a widow run out of options.

He was watching me remember where my grandmother had hidden the only thing that could save us.